Environment: Earth Week and Beyond

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Golden Fox. Environmental Action Inc., a group that last year helped organize Earth Day, is conducting an "ecotage" (for ecology and sabotage) contest. First prize for the best suggestion on how to tame polluters is a trip to Washington to receive a "Golden Fox" trophy. It is named for the famous "Fox" of Kane County, Ill. (TIME, Oct. 5), an anonymous ecoguerrilla who has conducted a colorful battle against polluters by blocking factory smokestacks and sewers and sloshing a corporate office with smelly piles of fish and river muck.

However amusing, such extremism is not a healthy way to combat pollution. Neither is the kind of choler displayed by Fortney Stark Jr., a California banker who delivered one of the country's angriest speeches. "Throw a few chairmen of the board in jail," Stark declared, "and you'll see pollution disappear quite rapidly. You'd also probably see some pretty drastic prison reforms." Earth Week, though, should be a time of regeneration, not recrimination. This year, on the whole, it seemed headed in the right direction.

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