High school junior Mary Andrews found her first camping trip both frightening and exhilarating. "It was my first time away from home," she recalled. "I was two miles into the mountains and the closest phone was about three miles away." But somehow, Andrews adjusted quickly to life without television, radio or a microwave.
The next time you’re about to bite into that sizzling mesquite-grilled burger or blackened bluefish, think twice. That smoky, outdoorsy flavor has an unpleasant history.
When Alaska governor Walter J. Hinkel announced last November that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) would resume the airborne hunting of wolves, killing up to 400 wolves in Alaska during 1993, the public outcry was loud and swift, and the proposed hunt was halted in its tracks.
In 1988, the old fishing pier along the banks of the Hudson River was rotting, but underneath it lay an ipso facto nursery for striped bass. A sandy stretch of land off Liberty State Park in Jersey City, environmentalists called it the last tidal flat in the Hudson Estuary. City officials wanted to sell is for industrial use. Local activist Audrey Zapp wanted the bass to keep laying eggs there. She proceeded to ask every environmental group in New Jersey to write letters urging the stat to save the tidal flat.
A slight, chocolate-brown seabird that darts through the forests of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest at speeds topping 50 miles per hour, the marbled murrelet bewildered long-ago orinthologists. They wondered why they saw murrelets in forests 40 miles inland, but couldn’t find any when they honed their binoculars on the sea.
Six weeks after her wedding, 20-year-old Nean Pok was gathering firewood at the edge of a forest near the Cambodian village of Phrum Prey Kpors when she stepped on a land mine. nean was more fortunate than some of her fellow villagers. Her husband, who heard the explosion, was nearby. He quckly tied a tourniquet around Nean’s lower left leg.
"What’s the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?" Thoreau once asked. His quote adorns the brochure for EcoVillage–a planned community coming to life in Ithaca, New York. At their forum last fall, 60 earthy people slogged through sodden paths and armpit-high brambles on the 176-acre site–recently purchased for $400,000–that many hope to someday call home. They drew smeary-inked circles and arrows on map handouts. They debated whether the site proposed for the village center would be better suited for a water tank, and whether to plant the asparagus patch over the proposed playing field. "The land will let us know what goes where," reassured architect Steve Blais, one of the many professionals donating their services to the nonprofit project.
In the 1970s, Jan Lundberg was a rising star in the oil industry, lunching at yacht clubs and crusing California freeways in a Mercedes. For 14 years, he built his family’s business, Lundberg Survey, Inc., into the highly respected publisher of the Lundberg Letter, a newsletter which forecasts oil industry trends. In 1986, Lundberg left the family business and went through a transformation–selling his car, fouding the non profit Fossil Fuels Policy Action Institute (FFPAI) and joining forces with environmentalists in Washington, DC. Today, in his work to end our society’s petroleum dependency, not only does Lundberg no longer drive a Mercedes, he no longer drives a car at all.
When Robert Laporte and his family moved from a log cabin in rural Canada to a house in Iowa, they soon noticed a marked downturn in their health. They traced their symptoms to the toxic chemicals routinely used in construction materials.
Tall sea grasses reach the surface of Chincoteague Bay, filling the water like a sunken forest. To many boaters, these beds of grass would be a nuisance. But to Bill Denison, they are a marvel. "You’re looking at one of the most productive areas in the world," he said, as his boat skims the stops of the grasses which provide important food and habitat for waterfowl, fish and shellfish.
