Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 21, 1995                   TAG: 9504210102
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

EARTH A HEALTHIER PLACE NOW, BUT TOUGH WORK REMAINS

The environmental movement marks its 25th birthday celebrating ``tremendous progress'' but worried that past victories may have been relatively easy compared to the challenges ahead.

``The real question is what happens now?'' says Denis Hayes, who organized the first Earth Day rallies in 1970.

Marking the silver anniversary of Earth Day on Saturday, environmental scholars applaud the progress over the last quarter-century.

The air is cleaner, the water clearer and industry is spewing out fewer toxic chemicals. The erosion of wetlands has been slowed and the American bald eagle, once thought to be nearly extinct, is making a comeback.

``We've made tremendous progress ... and should take a moment to celebrate,'' Carol Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, agreed in an interview.

No longer does the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland catch fire because of pollution, nor does a yellow haze descend on the nation's industrial heartland. No longer do children in playgrounds routinely breathe lead from exhausts of passing automobiles.

There is 40 percent less smog even though the number of cars has tripled. Industry has cut toxic wastes nearly in half and has recognized that controlling pollution can pay on the bottom line. With unusual ease, nations are phasing out chemicals that damage the Earth's protective ozone shield.

Nevertheless, says Browner, ``the environmental problems of today and challenges of tomorrow are in many ways more difficult to resolve. We've done the easy things.'' She ticks off some gloomy statistics:

Two of every five Americans still live in areas where the air is too polluted to continually meet federal health standards.

Forty percent of the nation's waterways still are too dirty for fishing or swimming.

One in four people lives within four miles of a toxic-waste dump.

It is easier to stop cities from dumping raw sewage in a lake than it is to overcome decades of widespread pesticide and fertilizer use and try to curb agricultural runoffs that are contaminating and destroying waterways, says Browner.

And it's easier to control acid-producing chemicals from power plant smokestacks than to wean the world's energy economy away from fossil fuels.

Environmentalists aren't resting on their laurels.

Lester Brown, president of Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research group, says there is no clearer example of the folly of inaction than the collapse of the world's fisheries. The warning signs were there, but not heeded, he says. And, on the global environmental scale, says Brown, ``all the trends are headed in the wrong direction and we've not succeeded in turning any of them around.

``Tree-cover forests are shrinking and deserts are expanding, topsoil continues to erode, the number of plants and animals species are diminishing, the concentration of greenhouse gases continues to rise and we're still adding 90 million people a year,'' he says.