November 29, 1995

Do you think Americans are as anti-environmental as Congress?
How can we reduce the potential damage of the salvage lumber bill?
Would you pay polluters not to pollute?
How do we get these guys to realize it's their environment too?
How do you see the fight for the environment playing out?
I want to be an environmental leader. How should I start?
How can I--a single, working student--assist in the effort?

I belong to Save The Endangered Wilderness. We are trying to get Americans to march on Washington on Earth Day 1996. I have read much about you, and value your opinion greatly. Hopefully I can continue in your big footsteps. I plan to dedicate my entire life to protecting the earth, even if that means losing it.

I have been e-mailing different grassroots environmental organizations and asking them to spread the word about a march, in hope that the Sierra Club or a big environmental organization would catch wind and act on it. How do you think I should go about getting people involved? I also plan to change my major to environmental studies, and public speaking, in an effort to become an environmental leader. I feel that the American people cannot focus on any one particular member of the environmental movement. I would like to dedicate my life to this cause. Do you have an suggestions that could help direct my concerns?

Take Care,
George H. Morris III
Riverside, California
zvkw12a@prodigy.com

David Brower: Well, keep writing letters to Outside and to other publications, to your local editor, and try to get some talk shows going on this question. Get the public involved. Right now the public is indentured. Well the public isn't, but the media are pretty much indentured to the big advertisers, and we've got to show the big advertisers and the big corporations and the big investors and the big consumers that what we've been doing won't work much longer and the sooner we reverse course and respect the earth, the better off we're going to be. And I think this in particular as a person who's now 83, my age-mates and I owe it to the young people who are going to have to live with our consequences to give them every help we can give them while we're still around.

Just whatever your best course of action is--whatever you know how to do best--do that and help get that movement that you're part of to understand what the earth needs. That's an oversimplified description, but there's no substitute for just keeping your creativity alive and thinking from day to day "Well, what else can I do?" We had to think that back in the days of combat in WWII and we're in a different kind of combat now. But the same thing is necessary: "What else can I do that I haven't thought of yet?"

And let's somehow make it not anguish, but fun, to do it right. Practice your one-liners.