Endangered Earth Update the Ecokid Corps

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Kimberly Carr, 10, of Montgomery, Vt., recycles her garbage and is designing a board game in which the goal is to save the elephants. Elizabeth Bayley, 17, is active in a Seattle-based youth group that organizes tree plantings, stencils storm drains with dump no waste notices and monitors pollution in Puget Sound. Jeremiah Johnson, 10, from Brentwood, N.Y., puts his McDonald's detritus in recycling bins, tells his mother how long it takes each shopping bag to biodegrade and intervenes whenever his younger brother is about to commit an environmental outrage, like pulling the legs off a defenseless (and ecologically valuable) spider.

These determined do-gooders are just a few of the ecokids, the new generation of conservation-conscious, environmentally active schoolchildren. The Earth Day ardor of their parents may be cooling, but these pint-size crusaders have lost none of theirs. Bombarded with ecomessages in school, in the press, on TV and in pop-music lyrics, the youngsters have become convinced that they were put on the planet for the express purpose of saving it.

The trend is a natural, especially for the sons and daughters of thirty- and fortysomething parents raised during the activist 1960s. "Environmentalism is youthful now in the way that feminism was in the late '60s," writes Rosalind Coward in the British magazine New Statesman & Society. "It is the dominant political concern among the young, the main place where perceived discontents are articulated."

That is true in other countries as well. Swedish school kids have bought and preserved 65,000 hectares (160,000 acres) of virgin rain forest in Costa Rica with money earned collecting old newspapers and recycling aluminum cans. Japanese students have mounted a campaign to eliminate disposable wooden chopsticks and replace them with reusable plastic models. Children in one Soviet town were able to persuade the sluggish local government to hasten construction of a roundabout that would allow traffic to bypass the center of town and thus reduce pollution. In Brazil the number of nongovernment environmental groups has swelled from 500 three years ago to nearly 4,000; they include many children.

But nowhere is the kiddie movement stronger than in the U.S. Youngsters are picketing supermarkets, boycotting restaurants and writing Congressmen, sometimes on recycled paper they have painstakingly mixed, pressed and dried themselves. The White House reports that it receives hundreds of environmental entreaties every day from citizens too young to make their views known in the ballot box.

Their efforts can be surprisingly effective. Barbara Lewis' sixth-grade class at Jackson Elementary School in Salt Lake City not only pressured the Environmental Protection Agency into clearing a 50,000-bbl. hazardous waste dump but helped push through a reluctant state legislature a bill to pay for such cleanups. "Parents believe you can't beat city hall, and find reasons not to get involved," says Andrew Altman, a spokesman for Greenpeace. "Kids don't have that kind of cynicism. They just get things done."

The younger generation's feelings about the environment have not escaped the notice of corporate America. Many companies, including fossil fuel-burning utilities and the manufacturers of nonbiodegradable plastics, have begun looking for ways to present a better face to their future clientele. Recycle This, a professional theater production touring U.S. high schools and featuring rock-'n'-roll and rap songs about landfills and solid waste, is sponsored by Dow Chemical, a major producer of polystyrene.

Activists eager to mobilize children do not hesitate to use show biz, though some might call it propaganda. Turner Broadcasting is producing a half-hour syndicated cartoon show in which a superhero named Captain Planet and a youth corps called the Planeteers valiantly fight villainous polluters like Dr. & Blight. The back cover of one issue of P3 (for Earth, the third planet from the sun), a glitzy new environmental magazine for kids, shows a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shouting to readers, "Hey, dudes! Earth is a cowabunga planet! Let's keep it radical!"

The kids do not need much convincing. Like their parents, who remember the nuclear-blast drills of the 1950s and grew up fearing the Bomb, they have heard frightening stories of leaking waste drums, growing ozone holes and vanishing species. "I hope the earth is O.K. when I grow up," says young Kimberly Carr, speaking for many in her generation, "because I don't want to have to find another place to live."

With reporting by Janice M. Horowitz/New York, with other bureaus