Children Become the Vanguard of Crusade to Save the Environment : Ecology: The seeds of the movement among the young were planted on Earth Day two years ago. Dozens of organizations have sprouted up, pushing parents to help.

They’re turning off lights, pedaling their bikes instead of asking mom to drive them, pestering their parents to recycle, planting trees and cleaning streams.

They’re also criticizing President Bush, landing corporate support and distributing newsletters read by millions.

Fearful for their future--and unimpressed by their elders’ efforts--more and more of America’s children are putting their ideals into action, working to save the Earth by starting with their own neighborhoods.

The seeds of the children’s crusade were sown on April 22, 1990, in the media blitz that accompanied the 20th anniversary of Earth Day.

“It was sort of the youth equivalent of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas stuff. Something happens when you just get an issue in your face for a period of time,” said Denis Hayes, executive director of the celebration and now president of Earth Seal in Palo Alto, Calif.

In the two years since, dozens of children’s organizations have sprouted across the nation. Their names tell the tale--Kids for Saving Earth, Kids for a Clean Environment, Kids in Nature’s Defense.

“On certain rare occasions, a shift in thinking that takes over an entire country can be seen first among the young. We saw that in the communist countries. I think that the same thing is beginning to occur with the global environment,” said Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), who organized a special hearing this year for children to talk about global warming.

Perhaps the momentum can be traced to the fact that children are not overwhelmed by the huge task of trying to save the Earth, the way many adults are, said John Javna, author of “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth” and “Kid Heroes of the Environment.”

“Kids see their immediate environment as the whole world,” Javna said. “The street they walk on, the school they go to, is every bit as much the whole planet as our concept of different countries.”

From Saturday morning cartoons to classrooms, these children have been bombarded with warnings about rain forests being destroyed, global warming from the carbon dioxide released by cars and power plants, spotted owls pushed to the brink of extinction by too much logging, dolphins drowned by fishermen netting tuna.

And they have responded, in ways large and small.

Fifteen children’s environmental groups claiming a total of 1 million members have joined in The CO2 Challenge Kids Coalition, which is working to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 1 million tons a year.

In a suburb of Minneapolis, the parents of 11-year-old Clinton Hill, who died of a brain tumor, carry on his dream of a national organization. Kids for Saving Earth is the biggest of the children’s environmental groups. Its color newsletter is distributed around the nation by its main sponsor, Target stores.

“In a year and a half’s time, we have 13,000 clubs with 400,000 kids,” said Tessa Hill, Clinton’s mother and president of the group.

Clinton’s friend, 13-year-old John Hegstrand of Plymouth, Minn., handed 100,000 pledges for The CO2 Challenge to Gore after being turned away at the White House. “Kids have a lot of power,” John said. “We affect the way our parents think. The more that we know, the more that people become aware.”

Being ignored by the White House led 12-year-old Melissa Poe of Nashville, Tenn., to start Kids for a Clean Environment with her mother. With help from Wal-Mart stores, the group produces a newsletter with a readership of 2 million.

Melissa had written a letter to Bush asking him to help stop pollution. When she didn’t get a response, she arranged for her letter to be reproduced on billboards, first in her hometown, and later in Washington.

She said she is ashamed of Bush for not doing more after declaring himself the environmental President.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” she said. “The adults won’t have to live in this world and the kids will. We don’t want to grow up in a world where we can’t breathe and we can’t go outside and enjoy a nice day in the park.”

Self-appointed trend-spotter Faith Popcorn noted the power of children in her book, “The Popcorn Report.”

“It is our belief that children, through their Nintendos, will be able to organize all over the world and pressure the powers that be to save the environment,” Popcorn said. She found evidence of children flexing their economic muscle in the boycott that led many tuna canners to pledge to stop buying fish caught in nets that kill dolphins.

Children are not networking yet with their Nintendos, but they are linking up around the globe on computer bulletin boards with the help of adults such as Marshall Gilmore, a lawyer in Salem, Ore. With his family, he started the Earth Kids Organization.

There is a computer in his home office dedicated to the K-12 Network, allowing children to stay in touch with group chapters as far away as Ukraine. Children punch in their accomplishments, such as stenciling storm drains with warnings that dumping oil will hurt fish in nearby rivers.

“It’s not just kids doing something for window dressing,” Gilmore said. “These kids are pulling something off.”

For children, this isn’t business. It’s personal.

“They seem to realize without being shown that the Earth is their friend, the same way an animal or their best friend would be. We have a tremendous natural resource here, and that is the united passion of children,” said Michael Mish, who writes and records environmental songs for children in Ashland, Ore.

The message that “The power is yours!” booms though the super-hero cartoon “Captain Planet and the Planeteers,” the brainchild of broadcasting magnate Ted Turner. In only its second year, it has an audience of 2 million.

“If we can get people to care just a little bit, they will carry that through to their daily lives,” said Barbara Pyle, vice president for environmental affairs at Turner Broadcasting and executive producer of “Captain Planet.”

The message reverberates. Javna said a conversation with Pyle inspired him to write “Kid Heroes of the Environment,” 30 stories of children who do real things, such as recycling, saving sea turtles, raising money to protect rain forests and shutting down a hazardous waste dump.

“She said kids need heroes. That’s what this is all about,” Javna said.

When it comes to heroes, no one reaches more children than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and their message is bright green.

Since CBS started broadcasting the cartoon in 1990, environmental “Turtle Tips,” based on consultations with a UCLA professor, have been sandwiched between the show’s two segments so children will be sure to see them, said Judy Price, vice president for children’s programming at CBS.

“If the turtles are saying it, I think we are more effective in the message,” she said.

Children are taking the message back to their schools, where they demand their teachers do more, said Steve Manning, staff naturalist for the Nature Company, a retailer based in Berkeley, Calif.

“At the start of the school year, I heard from a lot of teachers,” Manning said. He told of teachers being confronted by children who wanted to know what they were going to do for Earth Day. “The teachers were taken aback. They called me up to find out what the heck they could do with these kids.”

In the same way that children nagged their parents to stop smoking and to wear their seat belts, they are teaching them to recycle and care about the environment.

Last fall, Paul D. Hart Research Associates of Washington conducted a survey for the World Wildlife Fund of 880 children around the country from ages 11 to 18.

“We clearly found that children not only care about the environment . . . but they are the ones who influence their parents and their households to be more considerate of the environment,” said analyst Debbie Klingender.

Sixty-three percent of the children surveyed, for example, said they try to get their parents to recycle and 52% said they try to get them to buy environmentally responsible products.

The children reported that they regularly recycle aluminum cans (67%), turn off lights to save energy (77%), recycle newspapers (57%), conserve water (59%) and recycle plastics (48%).

“There’s a very strong sense among many of these young people that they’ve inherited a world that’s falling apart, and they are deeply disturbed by that,” Klingender said. “They feel they have been left to clean up the mess.”