Environment: Submerging The Spirit

Once the holiday is past, the traditional fate of a Christmas tree is an unceremonious rendezvous with the trashman. But in the New Orleans area, environmentalists have come up with a fir-tile scheme to recycle holiday greenery. State officials will plunge as many as 7,000 Christmas trees into the marshes along Lake Pontchartrain, forming an underwater dike to slow erosion, which has been eating away some 50 sq. mi. of Louisiana coastline annually. The innovative program began a year ago, when 1,000 evergreens were consigned to a watery grave. With plans afoot to make this mass burial an annual event, it may soon become that much easier -- and that much more gratifying -- to drown the Christmas spirit.