Environmentalists

Citing a lack of cash, two environmental groups scrambled for contributions Thursday to meet a $250,000 bond required before a judge will block harvest of unprotected timber surrounded by the Headwaters Forest sanctuary. Lawyers with the Sierra Club and the Environmental Protection Information Center also asked Judge Quentin Kopp to consider giving them more time to raise the money or eliminate the bond completely. Kopp set a hearing for today to consider the extension.

Vowing to force people to rethink their attitude toward the consumption of forest products, radical environmentalists from Earth First! on Monday interrupted logging across the West by lodging themselves in treetops. The action coincided with the start of public hearings on plans by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the rare northern spotted owl from timber harvesting, but Earth First! member Darryl Cherney in California said that the two events are not directly related. Earth First!

California environmentalists complained Thursday that a plan by the Deukmejian Administration to capture more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta would spell disaster for the estuaries it feeds and the fish and wildlife that inhabit them. The environmentalists said a draft proposal by the Department of Water Resources for water development in the South Delta was actually the first step "in an overall plan to divert more water from Northern to Southern California."

Bashing of environmentalists has become a popular pastime. A case in point is Byron de Arakal's diatribe ("Environmentalists Again Show Initiative," July 9) against the $1.9-billion California Parks and Wildlife initiative. Mr. De Arakal's distress about "strapping California taxpayers with an additional $2 billion in debt for acquisition and preservation of Orange County's remaining wilderness" appears in the same issue as a story that estimates the taxpayer cost of the savings and loan bailout at $500 billion and the taxpayer cost of cleaning up federal lands at $150 billion.

The role of Japanese foreign aid in a controversial Indian dam project is under fire from environmentalists and local opponents, who accused the Tokyo government Thursday of failing to evaluate the program's social and environmental impact. At issue is the Narmada Dam Project, a massive irrigation and power generation scheme backed by the World Bank.

Kathy King doesn't want to sound negative, but she can't shake the sinking feeling that she and her environmental compatriots in Orange have been had. Savvy as she is about the art of political strategizing, King even grudgingly has to take her hat off to the people who she is convinced have lured the open-space advocates into a brier patch.

Just as the South Coast Air Quality Management District kicked off three days of public hearings Monday on the latest revisions to its regional clean air plan, five environmental groups charged at a press conference that the new proposals are too weak to be legal. The suggested changes are "a giant step backward" from the 1989 AQMD plan, which was rejected by federal authorities, said Tim Little, executive director of the Coalition for Clean Air.

California's congressional delegation received high ratings on an environmental issue "score card" released by a coalition of conservation groups, but vice presidential nominees Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen both earned low scores for their Senate votes on the environment.

Exxon Corp. elected a well-regarded marine scientist to its board Wednesday--fulfilling a promise that it would add a director with an environmental background--but the appointment drew mixed reviews from environmental groups who had favored a stronger advocate. John H. Steele, 62, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and president of its governing body, was elected to a one-year stint on Exxon's board, bringing its total membership to 15.

Environmental groups are gearing up for a proposed statewide ballot initiative to provide money to buy and save a mountain lion corridor in Coal Canyon. The groups hope the initiative, dubbed CALPAW 94, will prevent development such as that proposed by developer Saba A. Saba, who owns the corridor property.