
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 11, 1992                   TAG: 9203110284
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MICHELLE RILEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

EX-EARTH FIRST! CHIEF GIVES RALLY

The 150 students, adults and children who nearly filled Babcock auditorium at Hollins College may have come to hear suggestions to solve the Earth's environmental problems, but they didn't get any.

Instead they heard speaker Dave Foreman give an hour-long speech filled with questions.

"What do we have to lose? If we don't do anything we'll lose it all," said Foreman, one of the co-founders of the militant environmental group Earth First!

"I don't have the answers," Foreman said. "What I want to work on is to be a cheerleader for the movement."

Foreman is no longer involved with Earth First!, which gained notoriety because its members chained themselves to bulldozers and drove spikes into trees, causing injuries to loggers who cut down the trees.

Foreman's speech looked at times like a pep rally as he jumped from one side of the stage to the other to illustrate his points.

"When I die, I want the weasels to eat my liver and the vultures to pluck my eyeballs out," he said. "I want to be recycled and rejoin this Earth and not be afraid of death."

Foreman said that human fear of being hurt is the main reason why there is so much destruction of the environment. "We've walled ourselves off from life. We don't want to get attached to a patch of land or a spring because a bulldozer might destroy it and we'd be hurt," he said.

And the only way to save the ecosystem, he said, is for people to find their inner love for nature.

"I think our whole socialization drives the love for wild things out of us. . . . We have to let it seep back in."

Many of those in the audience came to the speech, sponsored by the Hollins Environmental Awareness Lobby and the General Speakers Fund, because of Foreman's reputation as an environmentalist.

"I just wanted to see what he's got to say," said Tonda Fuller, a senior philosophy major who said she has been involved with Earth First! since she was 14.

Bowen Gibson, a senior sociology major and leader of the awareness lobby, said the group had chosen Foreman in hopes of motivating the campus.

by CNB