Dumps Oregon

They asked for it. And now they're getting it--1,400 tons a day of someone else's household garbage. The hamlet of Arlington, 137 miles up the Columbia River Gorge from Portland, and one of two towns of consequence in thinly populated Gilliam County, was the only community in Oregon foolish--or foresighted--enough to volunteer to host a new landfill for Portland's trash. Elsewhere in the country, people organize to keep landfills out.

They asked for it. And now they're getting it--1,400 tons a day of someone else's household garbage. The hamlet of Arlington, 137 miles up the Columbia River Gorge from Portland, and one of two towns of consequence in thinly populated Gilliam County, was the only community in Oregon foolish--or foresighted--enough to volunteer to host a new landfill for Portland's trash. Elsewhere in the country, people organize to keep landfills out.

More than 100,000 people marked the silver anniversary of Earth Day in the shadow of the Capitol on Saturday, protesting what they fear will be a broad rollback of environmental protection laws. "Today I can tell you what the largest threat to our environment is, and it's right behind me--the U.S. Congress," Robert Kennedy Jr., an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told a rally on the National Mall. "They're literally dismantling 25 years of environmental progress."