Earth Day--a Time to Preach, Plant, Protest

In Santa Monica, Tammy the Recycling Eagle stopped by a preschool Wednesday to preach the Three R’s of ecology--reduce, reuse and recycle.

And in Palisades Park, city employees replanted the Children’s Tree of Life--the fifth time the ever-growing tree has been replanted.

Tammy’s visit and the tree’s replanting were part of Earth Day activities in Los Angeles, the 22nd observance of the day whose aim is to focus public attention on reclaiming the purity of the air, water and living environment.

In downtown Los Angeles, scores of demonstrators at the Arco Plaza protested the oil company’s development in the Amazon rain forest. The demonstrators, who were joined by Amazon Indians from Ecuador, said their protest came on the 11th day of a march by more than 5,000 Indians from their forest communities to Quito, Ecuador’s capital.

The demonstration, sponsored by the Rainforest Action Network, an environmental group based in San Francisco, assembled at Arco Plaza and marched to the Ecuadorean Consulate on Spring Street.

A spokesman for Arco said the company has “one of the more environmentally sensitive programs” in the rain forest. He said Arco, which has developed no wells yet in Ecuador, went to the country “recognizing the sensitivity of the rain forest. We set out to develop as good a model as any company doing forest exploration has done. As we continue, we will improve what we have done.”