Earth Day's biggest challenge yet

In the decade after the first Earth Day 34 years ago, people planted trees to fight smog, picketed toxic dumps, slogged through mud to clean up grungy river banks. Being Earth-friendly meant giving $25 to save the whales - or choosing unleaded gas at the pump.

But in the new millennium, using a trash can to "keep America beautiful" is not enough. One of the planet's most pressing problems - global warming - looks to be one of its most intractable. And that is proving frustrating to would-be activists.

Their challenge: How to get individuals to change their behavior for a problem that looms so large and is unlikely to be solved for generations.

"Environment took off as an issue in the 1970s because you could do something personal about recycling and pollution in neighborhoods," says Dale Jamieson, president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics. "One of the dangers of thinking about the global warming issue today is that it can be extremely impersonal, disempowering for people."

And yet, here and there, a hardy strain of personal action is taking root at the local level.

Ask Michael Charney about the clothesline across his living room or Seth Riney about his hybrid-car limo service or Melanie Aron about her congregation's solar panels. They all give the same explanation: "Global warming."

Dr. Charney, a psychiatrist turned environmental activist, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., has not owned a car since 1995 - the year he began pondering deeply the global warming issue. Instead he bikes, uses public transportation and last year joined "Zipcar," a car- sharing service that lets him grab a car on very short notice when he absolutely has to have one to go somewhere.

"I don't fly," Dr. Charney says, then recants: "I had to fly twice recently for family funerals. But otherwise I confine myself to ground transportation because jets are major contributor to global warming."

Charney was always an activist but only recently an environmentalist. While in medical school, he was a "Nader raider" in 1969, working on occupational health and safety issues. Later he joined the fight against big tobacco companies. But it was a professor's lecture at a 1988 reunion at Yale that shocked him: Global warming was coming, and it made all the other issues insignificant by comparison.

"I walked out of the lecture feeling so weak," he recalls. "It was overwhelming. Look at one smokestack and compare it to a cigarette. Then there was the exhaust coming out of cars and stoves and planes. It was everywhere.... I was overwhelmed. I couldn't touch it."

He spent seven years unable to grasp what he could possibly do about the problem, focusing on his psychiatry practice, playing cello, and a program to teach inner-city kids to play chess to counter violence. But global warming still lurked in the back of his mind, he says.

Then he quit everything and went to Alaska in 1994. Living in Bethel, a town of 5,000 in a sea of tundra the size of Ohio, he made ends meet working as a reporter for a local newspaper and interviewing native Alaskans.

"I became an environmentalist in Alaska," he says. "It re- awakened my concern about global warming. I still remember one native woman. She was complaining how hot it was that summer - 70 degrees."

A year later he was back in Boston with a mission. He began to educate himself by reading books on global warming. Though a neophyte in the environmental field, he began to realize a critical missing piece was public support - and he could contribute his skill at grass-roots organizing.

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