Word: bigs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...course, singing about ecology is chic these days. Superstars from Sting to Madonna have joined the crusade to save the rain forests. But these big names are Johnny-come-latelies. Following the tradition of conservation-minded singers like Woody Guthrie, Oliver, 41, and Waldeck, 32, have been spreading their message on the concert trail for more than a decade -- all through the Reagan years, when environmentalism was on the defensive and Interior Secretary James Watt seemed to be trying to stamp out the movement single- handed...
...shirts and sneakers, they mix humor with their anger, and fun with their activism. In one number, Waldeck strolls around the stage under an umbrella. The lyric: "I walk the shores of Lake Champlain/ in the placid acid rain." In another tune, Waldeck dreams of being reincarnated as a "big, wrecking ball" so he can "crack down on condos." But fast-food executives would not find the show especially funny. "Lay down your Whopper and your fries," one song goes. "Save a rain forest, baby, before the rain forest dies." That lyric is a pointed reference to the fact that...
...such wilderness outposts as Talkeetna and Girdwood. Preaching preservation in a state where many settlers came only to plunder the resources, they found themselves singing about the evils of mining and trapping to audiences that included miners and trappers. That made for some uncomfortable moments. One night a big, burly Alaskan came up after the show and said, "There's plenty of wilderness here. It's endless. Go home. You don't know what you're talking about...
...relics of Uganda's bloody past are everywhere. Tanks rust along the roads, and shell holes pockmark buildings. In the villages north of Kampala, the capital, big plastic bags bulge with bright white human skulls, femurs and tibias, the grisly remains of some of the estimated 1 million victims of two decades of government atrocity, tribal conflict and civil war. Now the nearly four-year-old regime of President Yoweri Museveni is talking about preserving these bones, perhaps in a museum, as a memorial to a time that everyone in Uganda hopes is over...
Wolves roam through our racial memory, howling beyond the firelight, scaring the hell out of us. But they no longer roam in Yellowstone National Park, except as rare transients, prowling south from Canada. The last resident wolves in the big park were exterminated by Government hunters by the late 1920s. That was a time when animals were thought to be good (elk and bison, for instance) or bad. Wolves had been pursued in the West as if they were not merely bad, but evil. Cattlemen lost entire herds to harsh winters, then spent enormous, irrationally large sums of money taking...