The Young Eco-Activists

In a recent interview, former Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall suggested that "young people may start picketing polluters and campaigning against ugliness." His prophecy has already come true. A new type of student activist is taking aim at the environment as well as the establishment. Though war and racism are still targets, pragmatic protesters are now firing at smog, waste and mindless developers.

The new ecoactivists include groups as straight-arrow as the Girl Scouts, who last week campaigned for clean air in places ranging from Hartford, Conn., to smog-threatened Fairfax, Va. Among other young ecoactivists are the Ashland (Wis.) High School juniors who recently demonstrated in support of Duluth's Pollution Enforcement Conference. Alarmed at the growing damage to Lake Superior's ecology, they plan to confront dumpers of industrial wastes that are slowly polluting the only Great Lake that can still be called clean.

Two years ago, a somewhat older group at the California Institute of Technology struck a blow for "relevant" education by organizing a useful research project geared to smog-ridden Los Angeles. Among their achievements to date is a car-pool plan for factory workers that helps to cut down auto exhaust fumes, the chief ingredient of smog. They have also discovered that the cost of smog damage to the average Los Angeles householder is closer to $125 a year than to the $65 estimated by local officials.

Thirty Years to So. At George Washington University, a group of law students recently confronted this classroom assignment: "Determine what legal actions might be brought by a local citizens' committee to stop air pollution caused by city buses." The students were only too familiar with the clouds of black smoke and particles emitted by D.C. Transit System buses, and when the assignment was finished, eight of them put their lessons to work by founding GASP (Greater Washington Alliance to Stop Pollution). Students at Western Washington State College are engaged in a long-range study aimed at keeping healthy lakes from being poisoned by increasing population, radioactive fallout and disturbances of currents, temperature and oxygen content. At Georgia Tech, 14 student architects have developed an award-winning design for urban amenities in the poverty area of a small Southern city. At M.I.T., students of chemical engineering are working on air-pollution abatements to "clean up the image of our profession"--and the air it so freely pollutes.

Even the War Resisters League and the Workshop in Nonviolence have joined the cause by devoting the August issue of their magazine, WIN, to ecological manifestos. One reason for youthful concern with environmental damage is simple: the young will have to live with it. "If these problems are not resolved in ten years," frets David Sachs, 24, president of the Stanford University Conservation Group, "we will wipe ourselves out in 30 years." Not quite--but Sachs has a point. Says Biologist Barry Commoner, chairman of the St. Louis Committee for Environmental Information: "We don't really know what the long-term effects of various types of environmental deterioration will be, and the kids are the guinea pigs."

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