Saviors Of the Planet

"Think globally, act locally" has become environmentalists' motto. To reward individuals who take this principle to heart, the Goldman Environmental Foundation in San Francisco last year created a kind of Nobel Prize for the green movement. The $60,000 awards are given annually to representatives from six continents for "their grass-roots efforts to preserve and enhance the environment." The awards have already been put to good use. Harrison Ngau used his 1990 prize money to campaign for and win a more exalted platform for his efforts to save Malaysia's forests: a seat in that nation's Parliament.

Rain-Forest Caretaker

Everybody wants to save the exotic plants and animals of the Amazon. But until quite recently, nobody seemed to notice that the rain forest is also filled with people -- more than a million native Indians who have been hunting, fishing and gardening there for thousands of years.

That perception has started to change, thanks in large part to Evaristo Nugkuag, 41, a Peruvian who has emerged as the leading spokesman for the indigenous people of the Amazon. Born of the Aguaruna tribe and educated by missionaries, he watched firsthand the encroachment of loggers, miners and now drug traffickers on traditional Indian lands. Today, as president of a group representing 229 tribes, he argues persuasively that the best way to save the rain forest is to make the Indians its caretakers.

A Candid Cameraman of the High Seas

Environmentalists have traditionally used confrontation to call attention to their cause, but Sam LaBudde, a San Francisco biologist, chose a more subtle tactic: he became a spy. His mission was to document the indiscriminate slaughter of dolphins by fishermen using mile-long purse seines to catch tuna in the Pacific.

^ In October 1987, LaBudde, now 34, persuaded the owner of a Panamanian tuna boat to hire him as a deckhand. For the next five months he drove speedboats, cooked for the crew -- and surreptitiously filmed the hundreds of dolphins trapped and drowned in the Maria Luisa's nets. The resulting 11-minute video, aired on network news shows, not only triggered a nationwide boycott of tuna in 1988 but also forced canners to change their ways. Last year H.J. Heinz, Van Camp Seafood and Bumble Bee Seafoods announced that they would no longer buy tuna caught in the dolphin-killing nets.

Since his exploits on the Maria Luisa, LaBudde, under the auspices of the Earth Island Institute, has filmed Asian drift-net vessels catching dolphins, turtles and sea birds 2,415 km (1,500 miles) north of Hawaii; investigated the illegal sale of walrus ivory in Alaska; and documented the decline of river dolphins in China's Yangtze River. "At times, I feel like the coroner of the environment," says LaBudde, who hopes that one day a cadre of camera-toting environmental investigators will share his mission.

Babes for the Woods

Sweden's Roland Tiensuu, 12, thinks that preserving the earth is too important to be left to grownups. Three years ago, the boy learned from his teacher, Eha Kern (who shares the Goldman with him), about the relentless destruction of the rain forests in Latin America. Tiensuu was worried that by the time he and his classmates grew up, there would be no rain forests left to save. "I thought, 'There must be something we can do,' " he recalls. "I saw a television program where people planted trees to replace some of those that had been cut down. But, of course, we couldn't do that because we lived far away in Sweden. Then I thought that instead we could buy the rain forest."

Under Kern's energetic guidance, Tiensuu and the rest of the class organized a bake sale in their small village of Fagervik and raised enough money to buy four hectares (10 acres) of rain forest in Costa Rica's spectacular Monteverde Reserve. Their campaign gave birth to Barnens Regnskog, or the Children's Rain Forest, a nonprofit organization whose young supporters in several thousand Swedish schools have bought 7,000 hectares (17,300 acres) of jungle with the $1.5 million they have raised so far. Schoolchildren in Germany, Japan and the U.S. have followed suit. In appreciation, the Monteverde Conservation League, which maintains the reserve, has named part of the rain forest the Bosque Eterno de los Ninos, or Children's Eternal Forest.

Japan's Green Gadfly

Just a few years ago, Japan loomed as anenvironmentalist's nightmare. While the rest of the world was awakening to an unfolding ecological calamity, Japan was defiantly importing such environmentally sensitive items as ivory and tropical timbers without apparent regard for the consequences. More recently, however, Japan has begun to turn around. The nation imposed a moratorium on ivory imports, altered fishing practices that threaten sea life, and has begun to discuss reducing its consumption of tropical woods. Part of the credit for the change must go to Yoichi Kuroda, a Japanese environmental activist who exposed the mayhem wrought by Japan's hunger for timber.

Japan had only a tiny environmental movement when Kuroda founded the Japan Tropical Action Network in 1987. One of his first projects was to document Japan's huge role in the tropical-timber trade in a study published by the World Wildlife Fund. To make sure the message hit home, Kuroda staged a series of publicity stunts in Tokyo. In 1989, he marshaled the press in front of Marubeni, a timber importer, and presented bewildered officials with a giant cardboard chainsaw as a grand prize for rain-forest destruction.

Cheerful and cherubic, Kuroda still leads the life of an ascetic. A fellow environmentalist observed, "If the high-powered conservationists out of Washington had to live in his apartment with his income, they would quit in five minutes." Kuroda is pleased that his government has begun to respond to his campaign, but he shows no sign of quitting. "Japanese people have a responsibility for the destruction of Sarawak's forests," he says. "If they can understand that, the forests can be saved."

Planting Trees -- and Hope

As Kenya's leading environmentalist, Wangari Maathai has been honored as a hero and denounced as a subversive. Maathai, 51, is the founder and director of the Green Belt Movement, a 14-year-old tree-planting project staffed primarily by women. The internationally acclaimed movement, which has spread to a dozen African nations, has planted 10 million trees. The goal: to counter rampant tree clearing and the advance of the African desert, which contribute to poverty and hunger. To date, 50,000 Kenyan women have worked in 1,500 GBM nurseries, earning 4 cents for each tree they tend; funds come from benefactors on four continents.

Maathai, the first woman in Kenya to earn a Ph.D. (in anatomy) and to become a professor at the University of Nairobi, has at times crossed swords with the Kenyan government for questioning aspects of modernization. In 1989 she was thrown out of her state-owned offices when she opposed construction of a 62- story skyscraper -- the tallest on the continent -- in a public park in Nairobi. Maathai simply moved her headquarters into her home, and triumphed as investors withdrew their support from the project. Maathai is philosophical about such battles: "You cannot fight for the environment without eventually getting into conflict with politicians."

An Ardent Advocate for Antarctica

With a marine biologist mother, agricultural scientist father and relatives who variously helped create the British Labour Party and served in the French Resistance, how could Catherine Wallace of New Zealand turn out to be anything but an ecological crusader? She got the call to action 12 years ago, when she learned that a mining company had obtained exploration rights from the government for the forest lands on her family's sheep ranch on the North Island's rugged Coromandel peninsula and was about to excavate. "I thought this was outrageous and unjust," recalls Wallace, now 39 and a lecturer in resource economics at Victoria University in Wellington. "I began to protest strongly not only about people marching onto private property but possibly destroying it as well."

Wallace managed to halt the project, and has been battling other acts of "environmental vandalism" ever since. Her fiercest and most ambitious campaign is not quite so close to home: the preservation of Antarctica. She wants it declared a world park, with limited tourism and a ban on industry and mining. Otherwise, she fears, "people will behave like junkies, drilling and digging until there's nothing left." So far, a dozen countries, including Wallace's own, have endorsed a world park, but ecological gluttons, like the U.S. and Britain, have yet to sign on.