The Battle For Planet Earth

During her two years in the redwood tree dubbed "Luna," Julia (Butterfly) Hill became a much-admired symbol as she sacrificed personal comfort to a higher cause. To protest the clear-cutting of ancient forests, she endured 90-mile-per-hour winds, El Nino downpours, almost constant damp and cold, and deprivation (she lived mostly on raw fruits and vegetables, and used a plastic-lined bucket for a toilet). But during her time in the 6-foot-by-8-foot plywood aerie in California's Humboldt County, which left her barely able to walk when she finally came to ground last December, the whine of the buzz saws never ceased. Pacific Lumber Corp. left the 1,000-foot-tall Luna standing, as well as 2.9 acres around it. But the rest of the company's redwoods, scattered across 10,000 acres, were fair game.

And so Hill has become a symbol of a different sort, one that has special resonance as the country approaches the 30th anniversary of Earth Day this weekend. Saving a tree only to lose a forest, her protest against logging forced activists to confront a disturbing possibility: that individual actions on behalf of the environment pale beside the actions of big business and big government.

"Well-meaning people frequently focus on personal responsibility, partly because they see it as a way of doing something, without looking at how effective it's going to be," says longtime environmentalist Barry Commoner of New York's Queens College. "It's an escape on their [environmental groups'] part." No matter how many of us switched from aerosols to roll-ons, the CFCs that powered spray cans continued destroying the ozone layer--until the manufacture and use of these chemicals began to be phased out worldwide by the 1987 international agreement known as the Montreal Protocol. Millions of us might walk to the mailbox rather than drive, but the effect on emissions of the greenhouse-gas carbon dioxide (which comes from burning coal, oil and natural gas) is minuscule compared with the effect of more than 68 million SUVs on American roads. A single decision by the chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell has a greater impact on the health of the planet than all the coffee-ground-composting, organic-cotton-wearing ecofreaks gathering in Washington, D.C., for Earth Day festivities this weekend. Obviously, if 1 billion people in the developed world stop driving, switch to solar energy and replace old appliances with superefficient ones, greenhouse emissions would plummet. The question is whether that mass action, or comparable steps by a few businesses and governments, is easier to bring about.

The message of the first Earth Day--April 22, 1970--had a certain innocence, imbued with a certain can-do-ism: individual actions would roll back the damage done to the planet. In that spirit, some 20 million people participated in Earth Day events, such as dumping five tons of roadside trash on the steps of a West Virginia courthouse to protest litter, or burying a car in San Jose, Calif., to protest the air pollution produced by a nation of drivers. The emphasis on the individual was picked up in best sellers like (notice the pronoun) "50 Things You Can Do to Save the Planet," as well as in public-service campaigns that hectored us to carpool, bicycle to work, recycle, boycott rain-forest wood, buy only "dolphin safe" tuna.

Earth Day 2000--April 22--reflects the new ethos. The theme of events that will be staged by more than 5,000 groups in the 185 participating countries is climate change and the threats--rising seas, shifting agricultural zones, more extreme weather--that a warmer world poses. The Earth Day 2000 slogan, "Clean Energy Now!," calls for replacing energy sources that produce heat-trapping greenhouse gases with energy sources (solar electricity, wind power) that do not. Although some of the most ecorighteous have unplugged their homes from the electric-utility grid in favor of solar panels on their roofs and fuel cells in their basements, at the rate that is happening there will be orange groves in Anchorage, Alaska, before the greenhouse effect is wrestled into submission.

If there was a single case that opened activists' eyes, it was one with a hamburger inside. Environmentalists had been protesting the use of McDonald's "clamshell" boxes because of the ozone-destroying CFCs used in their manufacture. Customers were exhorted to boycott the Golden Arches. But--surprise!--burger lust beat save-the-planet fervor hands down. The Environmental Defense Fund saw a better way, and began working with McDonald's to design a box that would keep the burger hot but not harm the ozone layer. In 1989 McD's phased out the Styrofoam clamshell in favor of paperboard.