ENVIRONMENT
University Daily Kansan / Monday, April 20, 1992
9
EARTH DAY
1 $ \triangle $ 9 $ \triangle $ 9 $ \triangle $ 2
What makes a fur coat
Rain dampens Earth Day celebrations
Not everyone agrees on whether using animals for fur cuts is good or bad. This list shows how many animals are used to make a full-length coat.
species Skins per coat
Rabbit 30
Mink 30 - 35
Beaver 9
Raccoon 27
Fox 27
Opossum 30
Squirrel 100
Lynx 11 - 15
Badger 17
Ermine 125
Chinchilla 100
Muskrat 30
Sable 40
SOURCE: Detroit Free Press, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Knight-Ridder Tribune/HANK SZERLAG
Squishing paint between her fingers, Tamara Neuhause, right, 10, waits for her friend Pia Gruver, center, 11, to finish her painting of the Earth on
By Erik Bauer
Kansan staff writer
DerekNolen/KANSAN
"Earth Day, every day" was the啦啦
cry of Lawrence's Earth Day
1992 celebration Saturday, but Mother
Nature dampened the event with tor-
nential rain that started at about 3:30
p.m.
Until the rain became too heavy and the event had to be cut short, the Earth Day celebration went on as planned at South Park, 11th and Massachusetts streets. Earth Day is Wednesday.
More than 300 people attended Saturday's events, which began about 11:15 a.m. with a parade fromBuford M. Watson Park, Seventh and Kentucky streets, down Massachusetts Street to South Park.
Participants in the Downtown Easter Bonnet Parade joined the Earth Day marchers through downtown. No vehicles powered by fossil fuels were allowed in the parade.
The day consisted of performances by local musicians, writers and singers behind the park's recreation center. A play, written by the event's director, Joey Harris, entitled "Voices of the Prairie," also was performed.
Festivities for children included storytelling and mural painting. Children also could participate in a tree-planting ceremony. Those who attended the event covered around the park and looked at display tables of local businesses and organizations concerned with environmental matters.
The First Affirmative Financial Network, The Wakarusa River Greens, Kaw Valley Organic Gardening Service, Simple Goods and Pines, The Sierra Club and the KU chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws were among the organizations that handed out information and talked with interested people.
Harris said Earth Day was a day when people should take time out to get out in nature and think about the
Earth.
"It's not only a day when you think about all the pollution and the negative aspects of what's going on in the environment but also more spiritual things." Harris said. "We all play a role. We are all strands in the web of life."
She said she thought the rain was unfortunate, but most of the day's events already had taken place.
"Ithink we got through a good half of the day with good weather, and we needed the rain," Harris said. "The most important messages had already gotten to the people. I wish
Saturday. The canvas donated by the Lawrence Arts Center as part of Earth Day activities at South Park, 11th and Massachusetts streets.
Harris said that next year organizers might combine the Earth Day festivities and the Celebration of Cultures, a multicultural festival scheduled for Saturday at the Douglas County Fairgrounds.
more people would have gotten out,
but it was a busy weekend."
Laurel Winberg, a member of the KU chapter of NORMAL, said the organization did not have enough time to get more people involved in the parade.
Wimberg, Lansing freshman, said she would like to see more people involved in the parade next year.
USDA sends army of flies to battle pesky earworms
Crop critters cause $1.2 billion in damage each year
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Listen up, earworms. Your days may be numbered.
The Department of Agriculture says it is training big guns on the costly little pests. Corn earworms cause an estimated $1.2 billion in damage each year – not only to corn but also cotton, tomatoes and other crops.
The department is radiating males to sterilize them and mass producing parasitic flies, whose offspring feed on corn earworm larvae.
"A female Archytas marmoratus fly can lay up to 3,000 larvae-eating maggots in her 50- to 70-day life span," the department announced in a recent news release detailing its war against the corn earworm.
And corn earworm moths were reduced 50 to 75 percent in field tests by releasing males that had been partially sterilized by radiation in the laboratory, it said.
"Although chemical pesticides continue to provide acceptable control of the corn earworm in most sit-
nations, we continue to look for solutions that are more environmentally compatible," said Charlie Rogers of USDA's Agricultural Research Service lab in Tifton, Ga.
"We're optimistic about sterile earworm males and parasitic flies becoming alternatives to chemicals."
Rogers said it took longer for biological controls and other nonchemical weapons to mow down earworm populations. But he said these methods could be available to farmers within several years if additional field and lab tests were successful.
The corn earworm is a nationwide pest. It is believed to infest nearly 5 million acres of corn in the 12 southern states alone. Earworms produce a first generation of larvae that begin feeding on early-stage plants before corn ears appear. Moths that grow from these larvae then produce a second population of larvae that feed on the ears once they form.
FarmershaveuntilMay1itson up for 1992 annual commodity acreage-reduction programs administered by the USDA's Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service.
In other USDA news:
Secretary of Agriculture Edward Madigan announced recently that he was extending the sign-up period two weeks beyond the original deadline of April17.
"Farmers in a variety of special circumstances have told us it would be helpful to have a little more time for signup, 'Madigan said. "This extension is consistent with the president's instructions to accommodate our programs to producers' needs whenever possible."
The aid will pay for about 27,000 metric tons of feed grains, 15,500 tons of wheat and 5,500 tons of vegetable oil.
The United States will provide $ million in food assistance to Suriname under the Food for Peace program.
Number of salmon declining
Commercial fishing hit hard by environmental quotas
The Associated Press
BROOKINGS, Ore. — Tom Davis spent three years restoring a 1920s Monterey clipper so he could follow his father down to the sea to fish for salmon.
The little boat crashed again and again through a wall of water crossing the bar at the mouth of the mountainlined Chetco River because Davis had to get to the ocean in order to make a living.
But when the veteran fisherman ran up against a wall of government regulations that have shut down commercial salmon fishing in his home waters, he wanted to get on his motorcycle and ride.
"We're going to go out and risking our lives to make a buck," said Davis, 50. "That's not a problem. But this political baloney — that's something we're not used to dealing with."
A combination of factors, from a shortage of food in the ocean to drought, dams, real estate development and logging, led to a disastrous drop in populations of wild salmon from Canada to Mexico. The Pacific Fishery Management Council sharply cut back this year's salmon seasons.
There's no commercial fishing for boats docked in Brookings, a tiny port situated in the middle of a 450-mile strip of coast shut down to protect
dwindling stocks of wild chinook native to the Klamath River.
Elsewhere on the West Coast, a snarl of quotas, openings and closings have sharply cut back commercial and sport salmon fishing.
"It's too bad it has to come to this," said Ken Byturus, who owns a recreational-vehicle park in Brookings. "As human beings, that's the only way we learn; we wait until it's almost dead and gone."
Bytus has a bulletin board filled with snapshots of smiling customers struggling to hold up last summer's salmon. But since the fishery council cut the sport season to Mondays through Wednesdays, he's been getting cancellations from people who fishoff his park.
Fishermen curse the government for cutting back their seasons, protecting sea lions that strip their catch and allowing factory trawlers to scoop up thousands of salmon while hauling in huge nets of Pacific whiting.
To bring the salmon back will require state and federal agencies, fishermen, environmentalists and timber companies to pull together, said Jim Martin, chief of fisheries for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and a member of the fishery council.
*It's a distinct possibility we can find ourselves completely hidebound by overlapping endangered species
listings," Martin said. "And we have only ourselves to blame."
When the commercial salmon season opens next month, Davis and his wife, Carol, will motor in their 32-foot boat south to California waters, where they can work 15 hours a day on a pitching deck to make a living.
Five dozen boats will stay in port,
many of them with "For Sale" signs.
"I can't go down to Half Moon Bay. I beat," said Herman St. Clair, who has fished the last 20 of his 65 years. "I down there twice and almost died."
St. Clair, who quit logging 20 years ago to save his back, had planned to fish until he died, but now he will take his boat to sell his boat for half its worth.
He believes that loggers, like people who fish, are the ones paying the price for victories by environmentalists.
Although fishermen and environmentalists should be natural allies in fighting to save the salmon, Tom Hurd ensures the activists are just too radical.
"This is my 34th year fishing," Davis said. "My dad fished for 50 years. Fishing was basically between me and the fish."
"We never had to cope with the changing world. Now we're into this," he said. "I won't fight politically. I'll go off and ride my motorcycle and let the world fall down around me."
BOCO Board of Class Officers
When?
April 22
Where? Wescoe Hall
What?
Link hands across campus
Why?
to raise cultural awareness