Earth Day Defenders of the Planet

Walks on the Wild Side

A long-distance walk for a worthy cause is hardly a new idea, but Kenyan Michael Werikhe has taken the concept to new lengths. Over the past eight years, Werikhe, 33, has trekked thousands of miles across Africa and Europe to raise money to save the black rhino, one of the world's most endangered species.

Elephant tusks, rhino horns and leopard skins confiscated from poachers were a common sight in the "ivory room" of the Kenyan Game Department's Mombasa office, where Werikhe used to work. But a pair of 50-kg (110-lb.) tusks brought in one day by a game warden induced him to start his one-man crusade. "Being an African, I see wildlife as part of my heritage," Werikhe says. "If wildlife goes, then part of me is dead. I wanted to campaign for wildlife in my own private way."

On his first wildlife walk, in 1982, Werikhe traveled 2,400 km (1,500 miles), from Kampala, Uganda, through Kenya to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and back to Mombasa, with only a pet python named Survival for company. Lecturing to villagers and schoolchildren, he raised about $30,000 for conservation groups. In 1988 Werikhe went to Europe, covering 2,900 km (1,800 miles) in 135 days, and collected almost $1 million for rhino sanctuaries. Partly as a result of Werikhe's efforts, Kenya's black rhino population -- once as low as 400 animals -- has been slowly increasing since 1988. When Werikhe is not on one of his journeys, he works as superintendent of security at an auto plant. He plans to walk across the U.S. later this year and hopes to eventually visit the Far East, where most rhino horn and elephant ivory are sold.

Blocking Bulldozers in Tasmania

Like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, Dr. Bob Brown had a sudden and irrevocable conversion. The Australian general practitioner had traveled for twelve days on the Franklin River, a beautifully remote waterway in western Tasmania, without sign of civilization. Suddenly, near the river's headwaters, he heard the racket of construction equipment -- jackhammers, drilling barges, bulldozers and helicopters. They were about to build a dam that would have destroyed everything Brown had just seen. "I decided on the spot that the preventive medicine I should be involved in was the conservation movement," says Brown, 45. He dropped his medical practice and joined the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, which had taken on the state power commission in what became Australia's biggest environmental battle.

"Saint Brown," as he is known by his opponents, became Australia's most notorious environmentalist. During the seven-year battle to save the river, he was robbed, shot at and set upon by thugs. The mailbox of his spartan weatherboard cottage was stuffed with animal entrails. But his soft-spoken message of peace and planetary conservation prevailed, and the dam was scuttled in 1983. Briefly jailed for barring the path of a bulldozer, Brown was elected to the Tasmanian parliament the day after his release -- one of five "green" M.P.s who hold the balance of power in Australia's smallest state. Today he speaks out regularly on such issues as nuclear disarmament and the dangers of a runaway greenhouse effect. "This is an intellectual and emotional revolution," says Brown. "If we don't have a future, then we haven't got a present."

Snorkeler Saves a Rare Reef

To marine biologists, the barrier reef that stretches 242 km (150 miles) along the coast of Belize is one of the seven underwater wonders of the world, a diver's paradise replete with about 45 kinds of coral and hundreds of species of fish. But by the mid-1980s, fishermen, shell collectors, tourists, construction and pollution were endangering the reef's fragile ecosystem. Today, thanks to a two-year-long campaign headed by Janet Patricia Gibson, 37, a Belizean botanist and zoologist, 13 sq. km (5 sq. mi.) of the reef have been set aside as the Hol Chan (Mayan for little channel) Marine Reserve.

Gibson, an avid snorkeler, first became interested in the reef's fate in 1985, when she was working as a volunteer for the Belize Audubon Society. After drawing up a plan to create the marine reserve, she gradually gained the support of local fishermen, developers, business owners and government officials and then obtained the necessary funding from the World Wildlife Fund and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The Hol Chan reserve -- the first of its kind in Central America -- includes beds of sea grass, which prevent silt from settling on the reef, and seven mangrove cays that serve as nursery areas for many of the species living there. "Reef, mangroves, sea grass -- they're all linked," Gibson notes. "If you touch one part, it affects the whole." The area appears to be sufficiently guarded against further damage: it is well patrolled, all regulations are being enforced, and fishing and collecting in the area have ceased. "We've seen an incredible rise in the diversity of fish life," Gibson says. "If you dive in a similar area that is not protected, you can see the difference."

A Hungarian Green for a Blue Danube

When Janos Vargha took a job at the scientific journal Buvar in Budapest, one of his first assignments was to study a dam being built on the Danube near the Hungarian village of Nagymaros. Vargha's article, critical of the Czechoslovak-Hungarian project in those pre-glasnost days, was spiked. "That was my first experience with censorship," he says.

It was not his last. To find out why his article was killed, Vargha began a more thorough investigation. He immersed himself in subjects such as irrigation and geology and was named to a commission of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to assess the dam's impact. One area at risk: the Danube Bend, a graceful curve of the river near the historic residence of Hungarian kings. Though the government banned public debate on the project, Vargha persisted. He helped publish a newsletter about the dam and circulated a petition against it that drew 10,000 signatures -- an action that, at the time, was the largest public protest in Eastern Europe since 1981. Vargha was harassed by the secret police, censured for "green anarchism" and fired from his job.

But the tide of history was turning his way. The Nagymaros dam became a focal point for the budding political opposition, and when the government began loosening its policies, he published his original article -- in a much tougher version. Public protests against the dam intensified, and last year Hungary finally terminated the project. Vargha, meanwhile, has emerged as a powerful voice of political reform. A founder of the Alliance of Free Democrats, now the leading opposition party, he was offered an official post within the group. But Vargha, 40, declined. Says he: "I am first and foremost an environmentalist."

Fighter for Borneo's Hidden People

Harrison Ngau, a Kayan tribesman in Malaysian Borneo, has endured imprisonment, house arrest and government harassment over the past three years. His "crime": helping Borneo's indigenous people try to halt the rampant logging that is destroying their way of life and some of earth's most ancient tropical forests.

When timber interests first came to Ngau's area in the state of Sarawak in 1977, several thousand natives lived entirely off the forests. But logging and settlement plans have reduced that number to fewer than 500 Penan tribesmen, who still cling to nomadic ways. Even these remaining nomadic clans are threatened by a powerful alliance of Japanese trading companies, merchants and local politicians, who continue to push logging operations ever deeper into the interior.

Ngau, now 30, became concerned about logging in the late 1970s when its devastating effects began to become apparent. In 1982 he set up a branch of Friends of the Earth in Sarawak to help preserve the forests the Penans call "our bank and our shops." Ngau and his colleagues became investigators, exposing links between logging companies and politicians. Later, when the Penans found the courts stacked in favor of timber interests, they took the desperate step of blockading logging roads. Ngau and Friends of the Earth provided legal help and made the Penans' plight the focus of international protests. "It is our time to look after our place so that it will have a future," says Ngau, who spent 60 days in prison for his efforts to help the natives.

In the face of indomitable natives and pressure from foreign environmentalists, the Sarawak government has begun a dialogue with the Penans, and Malaysians have begun to respect those natives who choose to live in the forests. Thanks to Ngau and his colleagues, there is a sliver of hope that the grim sacking of Sarawak may be halted.

Love Canal's Feisty Muckraker

She was a storybook Niagara Falls housewife, baking homemade bread, keeping a spotless kitchen and raising her family in the neighborhood known locally as Love Canal. But in 1978 Lois Gibbs' life took an abrupt turn. That was when she became convinced that the toxic goo seeping from an abandoned chemical- waste dump three blocks from her home was making her children -- and those of her neighbors -- sick. Stymied by stonewalling corporate and government bureaucrats, she summoned strengths and talents she did not know she had. Over a period of two years, Gibbs knocked on doors, passed out petitions, gave speeches, hounded public officials, picketed, sat in, got arrested and, finally, took hostage a couple of EPA agents until the FBI ordered her to release them. That got President Carter's attention and ultimately forced the Government to evacuate the neighborhood.

The woman who transformed Love Canal into an international symbol of the dangers of toxic waste has become a role model for a generation of homemaking ecocrusaders. With part of the $30,000 that New York State paid for her home, she packed her children and her belongings into a U-Haul and headed for Washington and a career as a professional lobbyist. Today she runs the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, a consulting service based in Arlington, Va., for communities in Love Canal-like situations. "The only way to make change is to do it on the local level and move up," says Gibbs, 38. Two of her biggest battles at the moment: protecting some 250 members of the mining community of Kellogg, Idaho, where lead has been leaching from an old Gulf Resources smelter, and trying to help 400 families living near five toxic lagoons at the Mill Service dump site in Yukon, Pa.