Unearthed

Twenty years ago, people drank water straight from the Catskill Mountain brooks of upstate New York. Today no one dares. Catskill water is laced with pathogens that cause illness.

For years, the United Way of America has limited its financial support to charities that provide traditional health care or human services. But with heightened pressure from donors and environmental groups, many local United Ways are broadening their definition of health and human services to include organizations fighting air and water pollution.

"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."

If it is true, as John Wesley preached, that "cleanliness is next to Godliness," the heavenly prospects of us well-laundered Americans should look as bright as our shirt collars–or our gym socks, gardening pants, or any of the earthly garb we toss into our state-of-the-art washing machines and douse with high-powered detergents, chlorine bleaches and rub-on laundry boosters. Indeed, our devotion to cleanliness has bolstered what is now a $4-billion-a-year business in laundry detergent alone.

The drab white linoleum hallways of the US. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters hardly prepare you for the penthouse suite of offices that is administrator Carol Browner’s world. The walls have imitation Audubon bird prints, the picture windows overlook the grassy banks along the Potomac River, and a small crew of secretaries sound like air traffic controllers trying to land appointments far down Browner’s schedule. As I’m ushered into her office, which seems like a living room with its white couch and elegant wooden bookcases, a photographer adjusts his white light umbrella and Browner greets me warmly. She began the day at a White House ceremony, where President Clinton unveiled his Northwest Forest Plan, and after our visit she must huddle with her aides about a crisis over the North American Free Trade Agreement. But for 20 minutes, her time is ours. She looks radiant in a short dusky blue dress and big golden earrings that shine under her short brunette haircut. Unlike press photos in which she seems tight-lipped and stiff-shouldered, she’s very animated in person–smiling, waving her hands, checking the tape recorder, tackling questions before i finish asking them.

Greenpeace’s Nuclear Free Seas campaign heated up last July at a 10,000 Maniacs concert in Groton, Connecticut–a military industry area that, like many across the country, has been hard hit by both peace and the economy. Greenpeace has been touring with the band, setting up information booths and distributing literature at each stop. The Groton concert, however, turned out to be on a U.S. submarine base, where Navy officials wouldn’t allow Greenpeace to set up its booth, not even just to answer questions.

When Idaho educator Dean Paschall decided to teach his high school science students about the environment, he discovered "a real void of environmental curricula at the secondary level." Taking matters into his own hands, he created Earth Time, a curriculum designed to inspire students to take responsibility for the health of their surrounding environment and to provide them with hands-on tools for change.

Like ancient China, Russia once had a wall to protect itself against invaders–but this wall was green. From the 14th to the 18th century, Russia’s czars kept a thick belt of forest uncut along their southern border to block attacks by Tatar nomads roaming the sparsley forested plains of Central Asia. Within the belt, the Russians dug trenches and felled trees to make the forest impassible to the nomads’ cavalry and wagons. Most of the "Green Wall of Russia" still stands today, ranging from one to 10 kilometers thick. Originally some 375 miles long, 84 percent still remains preserved, centuries after much of the surrounding land has been cleared for farmland.