"All politics is local," Tip O'Neill famously declared. But for a long time, the environmental movement often seemed to skirt that principle. Not many years ago, most Americans had come to think of environmentalism as synonymous with large, quasi-corporate national organizations featuring a top-heavy headquarters staff, a hefty bankroll, and a far-flung mailing list. If a species needed protecting, a member of Congress needed prodding, a sullied river needed resurrecting, it seemed that — local efforts notwithstanding — folks expected green initiatives to either blossom or wither in the marble halls of Washington rather than in the coffee shops of Main Street.

That appears to be changing. Conservation remains comfortably high on most citizens' list of concerns. But few expect the federal government to ride to the rescue when the threat is a new subdivision encroaching on wildlife habitat on the fringes of their town or an incinerator rising up next to an inner-city neighborhood. So more groups are honing in on their own backyard, as it were, whether that means the greater Yellowstone ecosystem or Alabama's Bankhead National Forest.

"I think a lot of people used to view grassroots groups as sort of an ineffectual nuisance," says Florence Williams, who helped assemble this month's examination of the state of the green movement, and who has covered environmental stories for Outside, as well as the New Republic and High Country News, for nearly a decade. "But local has become quite potent. At the same time that more land-use decisions are devolving out of Washington and going to state and local governments, the smaller groups have grown more sophisticated and more compelling." Our look at this still-emerging trend features Williams's detailed evaluations of some of the more noteworthy groups, as well as correspondent John Skow's look at the scorched-earth tactics of one especially volatile — and effective — outfit, the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity.

David Guterson is certainly the only guy we know who's been named both one of the 20 top young American writers (by Granta) and one of the world's 50 most beautiful people (by People). His 1994 novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, won the PEN/Faulkner Award; a film adaptation will hit theaters this fall. An excerpt from his new novel, East of the Mountains, to be published this month by Harcourt Brace, is featured in this month's issue.

During his first visit to Alaska, former senior editor Mike Grudowski went native to report on the rather odd living conditions in the town of Whittier, temporarily moving into the 14-story concrete high-rise that most of the townspeople call home. "It's definitely an eccentric place," Grudowski says. "It's small, it's remote, and the weather is just horrendous. But a lot of people there made it clear they wouldn't want to live anywhere else."

The online magazine Salon hailed Ken Kalfus's first book, Thirst, as one of 1998's best works of fiction. Many of its short stories, Kalfus says, fed off his experiences overseas: He and his wife have lived in Dublin, Paris, Belgrade, and Moscow. "When you live abroad," he says, "you see everything in a fresh way. Even going food shopping is a small adventure." Kalfus's Field Notes column on his stint as a crash-test dummy at a wilderness-medicine seminar is his first piece for Outside.

Contributing editor Craig Vetter ("Terminal Velocity," page 84) has profiled rock climbers, cave divers, and round-the-world solo sailors. But he found that "free-falling" — a daredevil undertaking pioneered by a young Californian named Dan Osman in which rope-tethered thrill-seekers leap off cliffs and other daunting heights — went beyond the bounds of other high-risk sports. "Most risk athletes make mistakes and survive them," Vetter says. "The difference between what Osman did and what even, say, cave divers do is that ordinarily they have some sort of backup that comes into play if they make a mistake. Osman had absolutely zero. If something went wrong, there was nothing to be done about it." The odds finally turned on Osman late last year with his death in Yosemite National Park.

Rob Howard, who shot both this issue's cover and the fashion images that begin on page 136, experienced a breakthrough of sorts in December. "I finally learned to roll a sea kayak properly," he says. "In the Sea of Cortez off Baja. For an athletic dilettante like me, that's a minor milestone." Based in Manhattan, Howard has traveled the globe on assignment for National Geographic and other magazines and has photographed lemurs in Madagascar and trekked in Zimbabwe for Outside, but he especially enjoyed shooting fashion spreads in New Mexico. "I didn't have to fly 25 hours to get there," he says. "It was nice."