THE RHINO MAN AND OTHER UNCOMMON ENVIRONMENTALISTS...

THE RHINO MAN AND OTHER UNCOMMON ENVIRONMENTALISTS by Winthrop P. Carty and Elizabeth Lee (Seven Locks Press: $12.95, illustrated). The United Nations Environmental Program’s annual Global 500 Roll of Honor award was created in 1987 to recognize individuals and organizations for their efforts to protect and improve the Earth’s environment. These brief and often carelessly written biographies of some of the winners reveal the diverse forms environmental commitment can take. “Rhino Man” Michael Werikhe of Kenya has walked hundreds of miles in Africa and Europe to publicize the threat to the survival of the rhinoceros, while Robert Glenn Ketchum documents the U.S. government’s mismanagement of the national forests in his books of photographs. Chandi Prasat Bhatt founded the Chipko Andolan (“Movement to Hug a Tree”) in northern India to counteract the deforestation of the Himalayas; Chico Mendes lost his life defending the rubber trees of the Brazilian rain forest and the rights of the people who tap them. Significantly, neither soi-disant environmental President George Bush nor anyone on his staff has been named to the Roll of Honor, although former President Jimmy Carter has.