Earth Day HQ: Study in Raw Energy : Environment: Staff in Palo Alto struggles with last-minute crush of problems for the global teach-in.

Casually dressed volunteers hustled purposefully around the room, running an obstacle course of second-hand office furniture and barking orders over a hubbub of jangling phones and whirring copy machines.

Dozens of opened boxes of office supplies and printed material littered the patchwork carpet. Handmade posters and colorful maps--lots of maps, including many media-savvy maps showing every TV market in America--haphazardly covered whitewashed walls.

“This is the international headquarters?” asked an incredulous volunteer, skeptically eyeing the anarchic jumble that had been shoehorned into a donated storefront off University Avenue near Stanford University for the last year.

What it lacked in polish, the central office of Earth Day 1990 made up in raw energy and a palpable sense of purpose last week as organizers behind the global event began shifting their focus from preparation to execution.

Earth Day itself still is a week away, but a series of “issue days” begins Monday with a day devoted to discussing energy followed by days spent on recycling, water, transit, toxics and open space.

The massive organization behind the global teach-in--events are planned in 136 nations around the globe from the United States to Yap--has given Earth Day 1990 a slicker image than the original Earth Day 20 years ago.

But while the new version employs multimillion-dollar budgets and satellite technologies that activists could only dream of in 1970, the last-minute crush of problems implied that it was still more of a grass-roots movement than a mainstream operation.

“It’s getting crazy here, all right,” said Pat De Temple, a former lawyer and labor organizer who works as Earth Day’s national field coordinator, “but it’s even crazier in the field offices now.

“People out there are working until 3 or 3:30 a.m. . . . Tampa’s in crisis; there are crises all over. But good crises. Tampa has too many people coming to their event, and they can’t get enough public transportation. Boston is swamped; they’re phone-banking 50,000 calls.”

De Temple, one of about 40 paid members on the national Earth Day staff, is constantly interrupted. Washington is on one line. Carl Pope, political director of the Sierra Club, is on another.

On the other side of the office, Teresa McGlashan, one of two international coordinators, raced to answer the questions of everyone from foreign ministers to a lone American expatriate on the South Pacific island of Yap. So many such queries pour into Palo Alto day and night that a special fax machine was added to handle the flow.

McGlashan and her staff often labor well into the night answering questioners, “calling farther and farther away as the sun moves across the globe.”

“The time lag in just getting all of this material out is a killer,” said the former congressional aide and El Salvador refugee camp worker. “There has been considerable frenzy, considerable stress. But it’s worth it, for this.”

Usually, the materials McGlashan sends out are information packets, lists of events in neighboring nations or nearby villages, and logos for use on flags and shirts. Occasionally, she sends cash. The Rockefeller Foundation and UNESCO made available a total of $5,000 for 10 environmental projects in developing countries--including water-pollution control in a rural Peruvian hamlet, for example.

Ironically, for a project with global aspirations, the focus of many people at the Palo Alto headquarters was on relatively small tasks. As McGlashan told of $500 grants, others sorted boxes of grass-roots contributions--$5 from Sand Springs, Okla.; $15 from Columbia, Md., and $20 from Costa Mesa, Calif.--small donations which make up 35% of the $2.5-million central office budget.

(Half of that $2.5 million, which does not include money that will be spent by local activists on local activities, came from charitable foundations, said financial officer Janet Allem. The other 15% came from corporate sponsors.)

Clusters of volunteers stooped over tables to assemble information packets for all types of targeted groups, from Third World reporters to Mississippi ministers. Some prepared the mountains of boxes waiting to be express-mailed all over the world. Others answered the ever-jingling telephones.

“We are answering 65 media calls an hour,” said PR manager Diana Aldridge, on leave from her regular job at the Hill & Knowlton public relations office in Washington. “And that doesn’t include everyone else (who calls).

“We’re exhausted. We really are. I wish we had three months (to go before the event) again. Of course, when we had three months, I wished we had six.”

Scores of boxes sat unopened in her private office, one of only four in the building. The boxes, she knew, contained unsolicited suggestions for official Earth Day songs or posters, poems or photos. There was not enough time even to open them, they arrived so fast. Regrets would have to wait.

“Diana! St. Louis Sunrise coordinator on the phone!” someone yelled, and Aldridge was back at work.