Unearthed

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.

"Help, there’s a skunk in my garage!" says the voice on the other end of the phone. She’s terrified of the little creature, and has just learned that local trappers want $75.00 to remove it.

Shaded by hemlocks 80 feet tall, East Rock Park is a cool summer refuge for New Have, Connecticut residents who prefer quiet woods to mobbed beaches. In winter, the trees lend the city a touch of green, a reminder that spring will eventually come. But like Eastern hemlocks throughout the region, the ones here are dying, turning from green to yellow to brown. In the summer, East Rock could eventually become a sweltering, impenetrable thicket if the cool shade provided by the hemlocks disappears. In winter it could take on the same dull gray as the rest of New Haven.

Animal rights activists around the country say they are under the microscope of federal grand juries and law enforcement agencies. Officials say they are simply trying to solve six break-ins at universities doing animal research during which laboratory animals were removed and research equipment destroyed. But, "The investigative tactics are represive and go beyond the scope of routine investigations," says Cres Bellucci of the Activists Legal Defense Project (ALDP). "It seems federal authorities want to pressure activists into abandoning their cause."

A visit to most modern hair salons would have anyone believing that the road to beauty is paved with noxious chemicals. But two West Coast hairdressers, Jennifer Archbold and Kristin Kilian, are leading their profession down a more ecological path. In 1991 they set up shop in Albany, California and launched Elemental, one of the nation’s first "environmentally concerned" hair salons.

Ninety-four year old Hazel Wolf of Seattle, Washington, one of the planet’s oldest environmentalists, has some theories about why she’s been blessed with an extended life and exuberant energy. "I once told a television interviewer, ‘I’ve lived so long because I don’t have a television.’ I dared him to put it on the air, and he did." A former smoker, she now eats steamed vegetables, lives simply and stays relaxed. " I only run to catch buses. I tell the bus driver, ‘If I’d kept going, I would have beat you downtown,’" she says. "I even outlived my car."

A mere 28 pounds of metal and rubber, it’s been called "the most elegantly simple machine ever invented." It’s cheap, clean, quiet and healthy, too. But, next to the fondue pot, the bicycle may be the most underutilized piece of equipment we own, quietly biodegrading in our garage or closet, as we wait for next spring. Spring then turns to summer–and "it’s too hot to ride, takes too long, is too dangerous, rumples my clothes, the air’s too dirty, I’m not in good enough shape…"

For 5,000 years, nomadic Cree natives have wandered along Canada’s Great Whale River, a subarctic land of rolling hills, peat bogs and spruce the call "The Garden." Although they have more recently settled in a village on James Bay, th Cree still subsist largely on game animals. The construction of Hydro-Quebec’s proposed Phase II dam in the Great Whale River would wipe out not only their food sources, but their lifestyles, history and ancestral home. "As long as the land is intact our culture is intact…When we say the land is our life, the developers don’t understand this," explains former chief Robbie Dick.