ORGANIZING FOR 1970

By ELIZABETH N. LAYNE

With environmental problems taking on increasing political importance, conservationists, quite naturally, are becoming increasingly political. This year saw the creation of two new groups radically different from existing conservation organizations.

Friends of the Earth is a militant political action group with a small but vocal membership composed in the main of youthful and strident Sierra Club people. Friends of the Earth will support and oppose candidates in next year’s congressional races, a marked departure for a national conservation organization. It is headed by the dynamic former director of the Sierra Club, David Brower, who led the small hiking club into national prominence and who in the opinion of many has himself all the markings of a promising political animal.

Florida’s Conservation 70’s is a unique combination of political and scientific expertise joined to grass-roots conservation zeal. It includes a fifty-man scientific task force to keep’both state legislators and the public informed of the environmental facts of life, and a second task force of politicians and concerned citizens who will hire a lobbyist in Tallahassee and submit their own package of proposals for the upcoming legislative session.

UTILITIES IN HOT WATER

By ELIZABETH N. LAYNE

“There are objections on some level to just about every plant we want to build, ” lamented Charles F. Luce, chairman of Consolidated Edison of New York. No company can make that claim with as much feeling as Con Ldison, whose pumped-storage project at Storm King Mountain has been delayed by conservatiomsts since 1962 and whose plans for a nuclear power plant in the Bronx had to be jettisoned—unless it is Pacific Gas and Electric of California, which has been chased by conservationists from two sites in the same period of lime. The United Illuminating Company in Connecticut had little Cockenoe Island, its proposed site for a nuclear power plant, snatched away from it by outraged citizens of exurban Westport; the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corporation was forced by the Vermont Water Resources Board to put two special cooling towers on its Vernon plant at a cost of 6.5 million dollars; and in Florida local conservationisls are determined that the Florida Power and Light Company must install cooling devices on its Biscayne Bay Turkey Point atomic power plant. Indeed, there, is scarcely a part of the country where a power utility is not in some sort of hot waler with conservatiomsts. That the United Slates faces an immensely serious problem of how and where to produce energy at the least cost to the environment is now abundantly clear, as is the fact that no one yet seems to have any workable solution.

YANKEE LOGIC

By ELIZABETH N. LAYNE

At a town meeting in Needham, Massachusetts, last March, a motion was made that called for the widening of a street by twenty feet. A resident of the street stood up to protest, saying his property had one of the last trees on the block and that he did not want it destroyed just to accommodate more traffic. He wanted, he said, to preserve grass against concrete, elms and oaks against parking meters. It was a direct, clear plea for environmental common sense. The meeting accepted his appeal: the street-widening scheme was killed. The hero who saved the street is Hugh Burns, Jr., fifteen vears old.

THE DREAM OF A LIFETIME …

By ELIZABETH N. LAYNE

Percival P. Baxter was twice governor of Maine, a bachelor, and an heir to a canned-goods fortune. When he died last June 12, at the age of ninety-two, he had left an extraordinary legacy: Baxter State Park, 200,000 acres of wilderness including Mount Katahdin “forever to be held in trust in its natural wild state for the benefit of the people and as a sanctuary for the wild beasts and birds.” As a youth Percy Baxter fell in love with the “grim, gray tower” rising abruptly from magnificent lake-dotted forests, and he later vowed to the people of Maine that no “great timberland or paper-making corporation” should deny them Katahdin, “either as a memorial of your past or as a heritage for your future.” When he failed to persuade the legislature to set aside the area as a public park, he himself bought it piece by piece over a period of thirty years. In 1962, on the hundredth anniversary of Thoreau’s death, he presented to the state the final tract of what Stewart Udall has described as “the most majestic state park in the nation.” Percy Baxter did not want anyone to know what he paid for his park. “It |the price] rests within my heart,” he said, “and there it will stay.”

… AND THE FACTS OF ENCROACHMENT

By ELIZABETH N. LAYNE

A new 6,500-foot jet strip is now part of Lake of the Ozarks State I’ark, thanks to federal funds and the diligence of Missouri’s Democratic governor, Warren E.Hearnes … Strip mining is going on in Maryland’s Savage River State Forest … A four-lane divided highway is slated to go through New Hampshire’s Franconia Notch …A sale of Palisades Interstate Park land to private developers by New Jersey county officials was stopped only by court action and pressure from Secretary of the Interior Halter J. Hickel.

THE PELICAN IN PERIL

By ELIZABETH N. LAYNE

A wonderful bird is the pelican,

His beak will hold more than his belican.

He can take in his beak

Food enough for a week,

But I’m damned if I see how the helican.

Now, however, one variety of the “wonderful bird,” the brown pelican, a strictly coastal species, is in serious trouble; for his beakful of marine fish also includes a good dose of DOT. The situation is sadlyfamiliar. Manmade pollutants—chiefly organochlorine insecticides—are passed along through the insect-to-fish-to-bird food cycle. And thus have such insecticides already brought the eagle, the osprey, and the peregrine falcon perilously near extinction. For all of them DDT has meant low reproductive rates, sterile eggs, eggs with shells too fragile to support the incubating bird, and for the eagle eggs with no shells at all. In California the pelican’s nesting season this year was a total failure—one thousand nests, no young. Scientists investigating a rookery on Anacapa Island in Santa Barbara Channel reported shells “spongy in texture … portions of the shells were flaking, exposing the membrane.” But at least the California scientists are aware of what is happening. It was only a few years ago that Louisiana suddenly discovered it could no longer call itself the Pelican State: not a single nesting bird was to be found where once a population of a hundred thousand had thrived. Similarly, Texas no longer has nesting pelicans; the South Carolina population has dropped to a fifth of the si/e it was ten years ago. For reasons not understood, Florida is the one area where the brown pelican seems to be holding his own, and this year Pelican Island, which was set aside by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 as the first national wildlife refuge, produced a healthy crop of young.