July/August 1976
By the Mother Earth News editors
One of the world's most effective environmental groups is San Francisco-based FRIENDS OF THE EARTH. Although FOE publishes Not Man Apart —a monthly tabloid magazine packed with authenticated, hard-to-find facts that every concerned citizen needs—far too few of MOTHER's readers regularly see a copy of NMA. We are therefore quite pleased that FOE's staff has agreed to write a regular FRIENDS OF THE EARTH column for THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS®.
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VICTORY AT KAIPAROWITS
We won! Plans to construct the controversial Kaiparowits power plant—the huge pollution-belching coal-burner that we discussed in this column in MOTHER NO. 38—have been abandoned!
As you might recall, several southern California utility companies wanted to build the fume factory out in the middle of Utah's desert country. Why? To provide additional electrical energy to L.A. and San Diego while—at the same time—leaving the resulting air pollution (up to 300 tons per day!) "out where nobody lives".
Our objections to that proposal were twofold: First, of course, was the simple fact that this country is (or should be) trying to slow down energy growth, not speed it up. And the second was that eight national parks and three national recreation areas all happen to be located within 200 miles of the proposed site. Even the U.S. Park Service and the Environmental Protection Agency agreed that the facility would've gunked up the air over at least two of those parcels of public land.
Nevertheless, nobody expected the power companies to give up easily. Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric (the principal parties involved) had already invested a whopping ten million dollars in the project. And big businesses aren't known to be fond of watching that kind of money go down the drain.
As a result, Friends of the Earth anticipated a relatively long drawn-out battle, and hired a representative from Moab, Utah to work full time against the facility. Even Robert Redford got into the fray. Interviewed at length on the CBS television program Sixty Minutes , the actor (who makes an even better environmental activist) expressed his opposition to Kaiparowits in a very convincing and heartfelt manner.
And then came the shocker: Shortly after Redford's TV appearance, both SCE and SDG&E suddenly announced that they had put a halt to the Kaiparowits project. What a surprise!
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