Environment: Earth Day Greening From the Roots Up

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Bette Midler will play Mother Earth, and Madonna will shimmy for the rain forest. Tennesseans will ring bells across their state; Oregonians will bang drums. Elephants will crush aluminum cans at Washington's National Zoo in a jungle version of recycling. Manhattan will display the world's largest energy-efficient light bulb. And the Walt Disney Co. will distribute a video about water pollution, starring the Little Mermaid.

Earth Day 1990 is destined to follow the new tradition of Live Aid, Sport Aid and Band Aid: it will appeal to the abbreviated American attention span $ with a huge 24-hour dose of stunts, palaver and celebrity hoo-ha. But the environmental movement will be able to survive its commercial mugging, dust itself off and plod forward toward its goal of a cleaner planet. For Earth Day is merely marginal, a loud fashion statement for a quiet revolution in American life. From East Los Angeles to Taylor, N.Y., the morning after Earth Day will find millions of ordinary environmentalists returning to their self- appointed tasks in one of the boldest and most tenacious political movements of the 20th century.

Unlike America's first environmental awakening 20 years ago, touched off in 1970 by the vast bucolic gambol of the first Earth Day, this one is not defined by young idealists in ponytails and Birkenstocks. Nor is the movement focused primarily on developing a body of national environmental laws. Earth Day 1990 is driven from below by a wide assortment of Americans -- from housewives to chemical-plant workers and fishermen -- whose impatience with their fouled neighborhoods has forced cities and states to become legislative trendsetters and pass laws far stricter than the Federal Government's. "The environmental movement of the '60s was relatively elite and focused on national lawmaking," says former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt. "Today the power is being regenerated through the grass roots. Just as the civil rights movement began at the neighborhood lunch counter, this new environmental movement is beginning at the neighborhood pond."

There, and near national parks, nuclear power plants, dumps and even freshly fertilized lawns, Americans with nothing in common but an urge to protect their habitat have formed groups with names like Wyoming's Pollution Posse or acronyms such as SAVE, RESCUE and PANIC. The proliferation of environmental vigilantes took off in the mid-1980s at an astonishing rate. In 1984, 250 names were on the list of community groups regularly in contact with the National Toxics Campaign, a Boston-based organization that offers technical assistance to homegrown environmentalists. That list now has 1,200 names. The Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes, in Arlington, Va., which four years ago was helping 1,700 local groups fight contamination problems, is now in touch with about 7,000.