Environmentalists Keep Finding Reason to Celebrate

And to think that 10 years ago, when the Goldman Environmental Prize was first awarded, its San Francisco organizers fretted that they’d soon run out of the worthy to honor.

Now it seems there are hardly enough places on the prize list to accommodate all the activists deserving of the world’s richest grass-roots environmental award, begun in 1990 by an heir to the Levi-Strauss fortune.

The winners circle for the $125,000 honors announced this Earth Week includes:

* A Cameroon man whose labors to save Africa’s largest tropical rain forest extend to telling its residents how they can apply a law allowing them to manage lands coveted by foreign logging companies.

* Two Australian aboriginal women who have delayed mining in one of the world’s largest uranium deposits.

* A Burmese man who fled military rule there and whose interviews of more than 1,000 of his countrymen chronicle such environmental offenses as the hunting of tigers and elephants.

* A onetime Newfoundland fisherman who has called for fishing limits after seeing Canada’s east coast fisheries approach collapse from overfishing.

* A Honduran man trying to halt expanding shrimp farming that he says is gobbling up wetlands, dirtying fresh water and squeezing out traditional fishing.

* A Slovakian hydrologist who roused support to stop a dam that would have destroyed habitat and evacuated several seven-century-old villages.

*

Paper tigers It’s a different kind of newspaper war.

Phil Bronstein, executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner, and his wife, actress Sharon Stone, want the city Planning Commission to stop Candyce Martin, a great-granddaughter of the founder of the San Francisco Chronicle, from building a 1,300-square-foot addition to her home that would “forever obstruct important views . . . as well as seriously compromise the Bronsteins’ privacy,” as the Bronsteins’ architectural advisor put it.

Martin’s attorney’s response: “. . . when stripped of the rhetoric, this discretionary review is nothing more than the Bronsteins’ desire to preserve all of their views.”

Hearing is May 6, headlines May 7.

The Chronicle also took a rap with a wrap last Monday: News racks across the Bay Area sold thousands of copies of the “San Francisco Chomical” in an elaborate political stunt whose perpetrators hand-wrapped a four-page mock newspaper about the case of a Death Row inmate around the real Chronicle.

The anti-death penalty articles argued racial bias in the death penalty, particularly for condemned Pennsylvania prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of killing a police officer. Some readers mistook the nearly identical style and typeface as the real Chronicle and called to complain. No one has yet taken responsibility.

“We didn’t think of it,” said Jeff Mackler, director of San Francisco’s Mobilization to Free Mumia, “but we wish we had.”

*

Social notes Democratic Sylmar Assemblyman Tony Cardenas, the first Latino Assembly member from the San Fernando Valley, was the grand marshal in Pacoima’s Christmas parade last year, but politics can make for campaign Christmas the whole year round:

Invitations have gone out for the Democratic Caucus chairman’s 36th birthday bash next week at a Sacramento steakhouse. Prices begin at $1,000 for “guests” and go up to . . . $50,000 for “hosts.”

Tip not included.

*

One-offs Today is Jeans for Justice Day, when the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault urges residents to wear jeans to protest an Italian court overturning a rape conviction on the grounds that the victim wore jeans, and jeans cannot be removed without the wearer’s cooperation . . . Students at Antelope Crossing Middle School in Antelope raised more money for leukemia research--$14,600--than any other school in the nation this year . . . The 1999 Pocket Directory of the California Legislature shows that term limits require Assemblywoman Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara) to leave office in the year 3120.

EXIT LINE

“This is a rather large Hispanic man making an attempt at being a woman. I’m not sure it was working.”

--Santa Cruz County sheriff’s spokesman Kim Allyn, regarding a 240-pound Watsonville man wearing a dress and makeup when he was arrested on suspicion of possession of stolen property and three other charges; authorities are looking for perhaps three more cross-dressing suspects in a series of such incidents.

California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.

Tooth Loss in Seniors

California has the second-smallest percentage of people 65 and older who have lost all their natural teeth, according to a random survey of 27,736 people in 46 states by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Here are the states with the lowest and highest percentages of seniors with total tooth loss:

Lowest Percentage

*--*

State Total Tooth Loss 1. Hawaii 14% 2. California 16 3. Oregon 17 4. Arizona 19 5. Wisconsin 19

*--*

Highest Percentage

*--*

State Total Tooth Loss 42. Maine 38% 43. Arkansas 39 44. Louisiana 43 45. Kentucky 44 46. West Virginia 48

*--*

Researched by TRACY THOMAS/Los Angeles Times