Unearthed

The Yerington Anaconda Mine in northern Nevada was one of the world’s largest producers of copper from 1953 to 2000. Today, nearby residents complain the defunct site is a major polluter. The Yerington Paiute Tribe’s (YPT) Campbell Ranch Reservation is barely three miles north, downwind from the 3,500-acre mining property and squarely in the path of any contaminants that might leave the mine.

"The Bubble Man" on the television show <I>Nothern Exposure</I> brought to prime time the mysterious physical complaint known as "environmental illness," also called multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) or the 20th century allergy. Self-impounded in a sterile, very white environment, the Bubble Man confuses people who can’t understand why he carries a tank of oxygen and goes into sneezing fits at the tiniest whiff of perfume. The show’s Dr. Joel Fleischman even goes so far as to attribute the Bubble Man’s odd behavior to some deep-rooted psychosis.

In years to come, when 350,000 Generation X alumni return to the site of Woodstock ’94, what will they find? A county landfill? A performing arts center? Maybe both says the local chief of garbage, reigniting a debate that has raged since 1990. Winston Farm, the 800-acre site of the festival is at the center of Saugerties, with historic bluestone buildings, lush forests, meadows and wetlands providing habitat for several rare plant and animal species. For a few years, the Ulster County Resourse Recovery Agency (RRA) had hoped to pick off 100 acres to build a "state-of-the-art" landfill, but then the partymaster of the Woodstock nation rode his Land Rover into the fray. In asking Saugerities for permission to use Winston Farm, Michael Lang promised to try and build a permanent performing arts center on the site if Woodstock 94 succeeded.

The women load the wheelbarrow with bags of beefsteak and tomatoes the size of mutant softballs. They pick eggplants, twisting them off the vines as if unscrewing lightbulbs, and left the velvet leaves draped over a string fence looking for purple string beans. Then the times comes to enter the dark green rows of corn. "Yo, Priscilla, what’s the name of that movie where the plants eat you up?" says a woman who refuses to get lost in the maze of tall stalks. Cora Johnson, after warily skirting the corn patch, decides the venture in, saying farewell: "You tell my grandchildren I love them."

When "Phoenix" was brought into the Miami Seaquarium in 1993, things looked pretty grim for the manatee calf. A collision with a careless boater left a deep cash near her tail, making her survival doubtful. Luckily for Phoenix, however, she became a patient of Dr. Gregory Bossart, who runs a successful manatee rescue and rehabilitation program for the Miami Seaquarium. Like her mythical namesake, Phoenix rose and recovered, and today she swims with the other manatees housed at the Seaquarium.

Amid the endless plains of sagebrush and yellow stonecrop northwest of Taos, New Mexico, Solar Survival Architecture builds Earthships. They look like tilted wedges half stuck in the ground, or rooftops without floors, but they are designed to function more simply then conventional houses by using the natural insulation of the ground and the power of the sun. They also fulfull architect Michael Reynolds’ goal of a build-it-yourself, self-sufficient house that’s like a log cabin for a new kind of pioneer – people who want homes that tread more lightly on the Earth. "We are facing crises in energy, water, air, and food quality," he says. The ideal home must "heat and cool itself, produce its own power, catch its own water, deal with its own waste and grow on its own food." An Earthship might even be suited to fly into space.

The 60s have turned into the 90s. Ken Kesey’s magic bus sits up to its axles in an Oregon field, looking more like rusty graffitti than history. Communes have become Intentional Communities with their own trade association, the Federation of Egalltarian Communities.

In their determination to remove big, lucrative trees from impossibly steep slopes, logging companies have turned to helicopters. The chopper hovers while the ground personnel wrap its "long line" around a log, or bundle of logs, on the hillside. Then the chopper lifts the logs down the moutain to a yard, where a truck awaits.

The Arthur Kill estuary runs for 15 miles between Staten Island and New Jersey, a shipping lane kept busier than the Panama Canal by garbage barges destined for the Fresh Kills landfill, tugboats pushing white mustaches of surf and oil tankers that dock at the refineries that fill the skyline with odd smokestacks. Some flare like cigarette lighters, while others have frets on their side like flutes. "If you blindfolded me, I could still tell you where we are on the Kill by the smell," says Carl Alderson, a restoration ecologist for the New York City parks department, giving a tour in his Boston whaler.