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What Pete calls important is not his successful career but his determination to clean up America's waterways. And the performer has made it his business to tackle first the overwhelming job of restoring purity to the badly polluted Hudson River.

Seeger devotes most of his time to just that effort. He's one of the original promoters of the Clearwater, a 76-foot Hudson River sloop replica that sails up and down the Hudson, focusing public attention on the need for that river to run clean again.

''I'm just one of 5,000 volunteers who help keep Clearwater afloat," is his modest comment.

Right now the folk singer is hard at work in a Maryland boatyard, helping to build a 32-foot ferro-cement version of the Clearwater. The new boat belongs to the Hudson River Sloop Club of Beacon, New York, which will use the vessel to encourage local interest in clean water. When he's not performing, Pete volunteers most of his time to the sloop project, following the same 10-hours-a-day schedule kept by the paid boat-builders working alongside him.

The new craft will use an experimental composting toilet that combines human waste with dry earth and peat moss. The whole mass of organic matter is then dehydrated by means of air ducts that vent atop the hollow mast. The result-after a mellowing period of some six to twelve months—will be an excellent fertilizer.

It's going to take more than composting toilets, though, to clean up our waterways. The question is: Can a band of ecology-minded sailors help turn the tide so that environmental safeguards will be enforced and better legislation enacted?

Pete Seeger thinks so, even though many of the experts in the field fear that it's already too late. "I tell those scientists that I'm not as pessimistic as they are," he says. "I've seen people turn their heads around in an hour, and I do believe the human race can do something to save itself.

"As an old English general once said, 'We rarely see the handwriting on the wall until our backs are against it.' " According to Pete, our backs are already against the wall ... and the handwriting is plain for all to see.?John Kabler.

Are you up on the latest doings of someone (such as any of those innovative pioneers featured in MOTHER'S Plowboy Interviews) who's achieved recognition in a field regularly covered by this magazine? If so, send us a tightly written 200-word report on that person (along with a clear, snappy black-and-white photograph), and providing your report is used in NEWS WORTHIES?we'll gladly send you a flat $50 ($25 without that photograph). Send your contributions to NEWSWORTHIES EDITOR, THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS' P.O. Box 70, Hendersonville, N.C. 28739.

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