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CNN Student News

Aired April 22, 2002 - 04:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANNOUNCER: You're watching CNN STUDENT NEWS seen in schools around the world because learning never stops and neither does the news.

SHELLEY WALCOTT, CO-HOST: A new week on CNN STUDENT NEWS begins with news on the French election. Then, news from Mother Earth. Find out how her forests are faring. And get the lowdown on the Asiatic cheetah. Later, we go hunting for gators in our "Student Bureau Report."

Welcome to CNN STUDENT NEWS. I'm Shelley Walcott.

A major shakeup in French politics tops our show. The first round of France's presidential election yielded an unexpected outcome. Controversial far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen nudged out Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Now that puts Le Pen in line to face incumbent President Jacques Chirac in the May 5 runoff. The exit poll numbers shocked voters who thought Jospin and Chirac had a lock on the runoff election. Less than three-quarters of eligible voters turned out.

Now in a minute, Hala Gorani will explain why many young people neglected the polls. But first, we go to Jim Bittermann.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JIM BITTERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was an election that changed the French political landscape, an electoral earthquake and aftershocks which are still being analyzed. Voters handed Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme right national front candidate, a chance to become the next president. Le Pen, the pugnacious ex- paratrooper who once called the Holocaust a detail of history, immediately made a triumphant speech saying that France belonged to the French and that very veiled reference to his long held views against immigrants.

The aftershocks began immediately. Supporters of the man all believed would be in the presidential runoff, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, were reduced to tears. Jospin himself who had urged the French to get out and vote and not to throw their votes away on extreme left wing candidates accepted responsibility for his defeat.

LIONEL JOSPIN, FRENCH PRIME MINISTER (through translator): I have drawn the conclusions and now will withdrawal from political life after the runoff round of the elections.

BITTERMANN: Jospin also urged his stunned supporters to vote in the runoff election for his bitter opponent President Jacques Chirac in order to deny Le Pen any possibility of becoming the president.

While that should have cheered Chirac supporters, it did not. In a crowd in front of his headquarters, there were shouts of fascist each time Le Pen appeared on TV, and one young man showed up with a sign reading I cry, I am ashamed to be French.

PIERRE LELOUGHE (ph), CHIRAC SUPPORTER: I'm happy for my own candidate Chirac who is ahead and is probably going to win. I am extremely angry to see that the contender is from the extreme right.

BITTERMANN: Chirac himself appeared on television three hours after the polls closed, avoiding a direct attack on his new opponent but appealing to voters to act responsibly.

JACQUES CHIRAC, FRENCH PRESIDENT (through translator): France needs you, I need you. I wish that in coming days everyone will prove their own responsibility, their tolerance and their respects for the nation.

BITTERMANN: Even as Chirac was speaking though, in other parts of Paris some were showing disrespect for his extreme right win opponent. One of the president's immediate decisions now will be whether to accept a challenge from Le Pen to square off with him in a public debate.

(on camera): One analyst said after the votes came in that it can no longer be claimed the governing class represents the opinion of the French public. Politically, he added, the country is in a very, very fragile state.

Jim Bittermann, CNN, Paris.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HALA GORANI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Trying to appeal to France's youth, Socialist presidential candidate Lionel Jospin took to the airwaves on a radio talk show.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): We're not used to having politicians here. Their style is out of sync with our style here. The way they talk, it doesn't fit. It's a bit of a culture shock.

GORANI: For his part, right wing candidate French President Jacques Chirac tried to pull in the youth vote by using Daft Punk's music in his campaign commercials. He was turned down by the trendy music duo.

(on camera): But despite all their efforts, politicians don't seem to be able to spark interest among young voters. They think candidates only talk about youth concerns during the election and forget about them after the campaign.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm little disappointed because I think it's more like a show.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Well the candidates are not very young and it's not clear what they have to offer.

GORANI (voice-over): Recent polls echo those feelings with 18 to 25 year olds saying they're bored with politics. Only about a third of eligible voters in that age group are expected to cast ballots in the first round and almost half of those voting were still undecided two days before polling. Some politicians blame recent corruption scandals.

JACK LANG, EDUCATION MINISTER: When you are 18 or 20, yet (ph) all -- you have a fresh vision of the society and they are -- they hope to have a pure political candidate.

GORANI: On a crisp Friday night in the heart of Paris, hundreds of young Parisians take to the streets on rollerblades. With elections less than 48 hours away, who the next president of France will be is not foremost on their minds.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have more important things to do.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Many people but only two winner at the end, and we already know who that will be.

GORANI: But studies show disinterest in politics does not mean French youth have stopped caring about the world they live in, more under-25s are becoming members of associations and NGOs. And even though they vote less, a recent Numone Poll (ph) says they participate in more street demonstrations than a few years ago, perhaps signaling that the very nature of political activism is shifting.

Hala Gorani, CNN, Paris.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970.

WALCOTT: OK, well today is Earth Day, a time set aside to focus on the health and future of our environment. The 32nd annual event is pretty high profile. President Bush, no less, plans on marking the day by pitching his clean air message in New York. It's a pretty strategic move. Mr. Bush and other politicians have been sensitized to the Earth and its issues thanks to some hard working environmentalists.

Because of the industrialized age in which we live, the work of these conservationists has never been more challenging, never more complex. A far cry from the challenges faced a century ago by John Muir. Muir was the man who started the Sierra Club, one of America's most influential environmental groups.

Our Joel Hochmuth has this profile. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOEL HOCHMUTH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Dozens of protesters hit the streets of Washington, D.C. this weekend. Fueling the demonstrations in part was anger at globalization and the harm many say international corporations are doing to the environments around the world. Just a century ago, such demonstrations would have been unthinkable.

RON LIMBAUGH, HISTORIAN: The emphasis was on progress. Progress was material development, putting more, you know, machines together, building buildings, putting -- you know changing wilderness, cutting down the trees to make buildings and homes for Americans, that's what the instruments of progress really meant.

HOCHMUTH: But 100 years ago, one man helped change all that, his name, John Muir.

LIMBAUGH: Muir was not the father of the modern environmental movement, at least the grandfather. He was the earliest tree hugger there was in a sense, and to that generation, that made no sense at all. That was something as wild as advocating settlement on the moon today.

HOCHMUTH: Muir was a Scottish born naturalist and writer who settled in California in the 1860's. It was there he was introduced to the beauty of the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite Valley in particular.

(on camera): Can you tell me why Muir was so enchanted with this place?

LEE STETSON, ACTOR: Oh, well look about you. There is every reason to believe that Muir was in a personal search, I think, for validation on the -- on the part of the universe in many ways, and he found it here. This was his temple, his church.

HOCHMUTH (voice-over): Lee Stetson is an actor who portrays Muir in one-man shows. He spent years studying Muir and his countless trips to this natural wonder.

(on camera): What kind of emotions did it bring out in him?

STETSON: Enormous enthusiasm. The truth is that most people who actually traveled with Muir found him almost eccentrically enthused, that his dancing about celebrating the big trees is well recorded.

HOCHMUTH (voice-over): Muir was so enchanted with Yosemite he fought to have it preserved as a national park. His weapon was his pen. Through his published writings, he described to the world the wonder of this place and why it needed to be preserved.

STETSON: He gave reasons to go into the wilderness and truly engage it. And he said go because everybody needs to be kind at least to themselves and go because everybody needs beauty as well as bread and places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. LIMBAUGH: The eloquence of his language, the beauty of nature as he saw primarily through his magnificent language of words, evocative terms and phrases, climb the mountains and get their good tidings, nature's peace will flow into you like sunshine flows into trees. And Muir's goal was to bring people to the woods to show -- to show Americans what wilderness and wilderness values were about.

HOCHMUTH: Muir was alarmed by the growing threat to Yosemite and other wilderness lands by loggers who saw dollar signs when looking at the area's big trees. He was concerned, too, about the uncontrolled grazing destroying many alpine meadows. Unless preserved or protected, Muir would write, the whole region will sooner or later be devastated by lumbermen and sheepmen (ph) and so of course made unfit for use as a pleasure grounds.

STETSON: Few people have examined so much of the western wilderness as he did and few people understood just how quickly we were losing it.

HOCHMUTH: Muir had the ear of some of the most powerful in Washington, including President Teddy Roosevelt. Muir's arguments played a crucial role in creating Yosemite National Park in 1890 and later Sequoia, Mt. Rainier, Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon National parks.

(on camera): While Yosemite remains one of Muir's biggest victories, it's also the site of one of his biggest defeats. This is Hetch Hetchy Reservoir inside park boundaries. Now on the surface it might make for a pretty postcard, but if Muir were standing here, he wouldn't be taking any pictures.

(voice-over): In its natural state, the Hetch Hetchy Valley rivaled the beauty of Yosemite Valley to the south. But despite Muir's eight year battle to save it, it fell victim to San Francisco's need for a water supply.

STETSON: Certainly it was the remember the Alamo of the environmental movement. Muir had thought that once we had created the boundaries of Yosemite National Park that in fact it would be a saved environment. In fact, we know that boundaries mean very little in relation to the needs of other communities sometimes.

HOCHMUTH: Muir would not live to see this sight. He died at age 76, nearly a decade before the dam was actually completed in 1923. But because of the debate it generated, no destruction of a national park land on such a scale would ever occur again. Call it a moral victory.

STETSON: The great battle for the Hetch Hetchy Valley in particular was what galvanized American consciousness to a need to save wild places.

LIMBAUGH: He won some, he lost some, in a sense, but by and large, I think he would -- he would -- he would take some consolation in the fact that more and more Americans today are preservation oriented. They understand the values of wilderness. They see the importance of protecting the natural resources and wild America.

HOCHMUTH: In God's wildness lies the hope of the world, wrote Muir. The great fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness, the gulling harness of civilization drops off and the wounds heal ere (ph) we are aware.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WALCOTT: Well one of the most pressing environmental issues today is the future of our forests.

Gary Strieker reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARY STRIEKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The growing crisis facing forests on the planet is even more serious than scientists had believed.

JONATHAN LASH: They saw the rapid loss of the last remaining old growth forests in the world, the forest frontiers.

STRIEKER: Ten years after the Rio Earth Summit, 32 years since the first Earth Day, disturbing new findings from the World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch.

Extensive ground research, combined with digital and satellite mapping shows vast areas of the world's remaining old growth and primary forests are disappearing at an alarming rate.

LASH: These are places that are irreplaceable in terms of their value in conserving biodiversity, important cultures, and the services that those ecosystems provide for human kind.

STRIEKER: Among the findings, in only 50 years, Indonesia has lost almost half its forests, mostly by illegal logging, an area the size of Massachusetts deforested each year.

In Russia, the unbroken semi-arctic taiga is quickly disappearing. Only a quarter of its area remains undisturbed. One conclusion researchers draw from these findings, the idea of virgin forests inhabited only by wildlife and indigenous people is fast becoming a myth.

DIRK BRYANT: The future of forests tomorrow is really logging concessions, mining concessions, protected areas. How we manage those forests will determine the future of our forests tomorrow.

STRIEKER: They say some countries have enacted new laws to better protect and manage their forests, but in many places, those laws are not enforced. At the current rate of destruction, they say, 40 percent of the world's intact forests will disappear in ten to 20 years, and other researchers warn the damage to the Amazon and other tropical rain forests could be irreversible within a decade.

Experts are calling for the forest crisis to be given top priority at the summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg later this year. Another summit ten years from now might be too late.

Gary Strieker, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WALCOTT: Forests aren't the only part of our natural habitat being threatened today. Natalie Pawelski surveys the United States' most endangered rivers and tell us how they earn that distinction.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NATALIE PAWELSKI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): One of the nation's longest waterways, the Missouri, tops this year's list of endangered rivers.

REBECCA WODDER, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN RIVERS: Corps of Engineers has managed it for decades in a way that is just draining the life out of this river.

PAWELSKI: Of course the Corps in question, the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates dams on the river, disagrees.

LT. GEN. ROBERT FLOWERS, ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS: Missouri River is critical to the life of the people in the Midwest. And we work very hard to balance the competing interests of the river.

PAWELSKI: The Corps of Engineers is also blamed for threatening the No. 2 river on the list, the Big Sunflower in Mississippi. At issue, the proposed Yazoo Pumps Flood Control project.

WODDER: They would destroy 200,000 acres of wetlands in this one project.

FLOWERS: The Yazoo project will provide flood relief for those people in the delta.

PAWELSKI: Since it builds and operates dams and changes how rivers run, the Army Corps of Engineers is a long standing target for environment groups like American Rivers which compiles the annual endangered rivers lists. But there are other issues highlighted in this year's report too.

Take the No. 3 river, the Klamath. Farmers and wildlife advocates are battling over who gets water in times of drought. Agricultural pollution lands the Kansas River on the list. Another Army Corps of Engineer's proposal, an irrigation project, earns Arkansas' White River a spot. A natural gas drilling boom is at issue for Wyoming's Powder River. And growth and development may threaten Georgia's Altamaha.

WODDER: Between the kind of pollution that comes off of our streets and our fields and the kinds of demands that we're putting on our rivers for more and more water, for more and more power, I think the trend lines are not good.

PAWELSKI: Maine's Allagash may lose its designation as a wild and scenic river. In Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, drilling plans could affect the Canning River. Developers are trying to divert water from Texas' Guadalupe River. And for Florida's Apalachicola, yet another Army Corps of Engineers' dredging project is stirring debate.

Natalie Pawelski, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: Exploring our world, here now is CNN STUDENT NEWS "Perspectives."

WALCOTT: There are numerous animals at risk for extinction, including the wild cheetah. In Iran, authorities are taking new measures to protect that animal. A very small number of them still roam the mountains there.

Gary Strieker returns now with this report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STRIEKER (voice-over): In the last 20 years, the number of wild cheetahs on earth has dropped by more than half. In all of Africa, only about 12,000 survive. Outside Africa, cheetahs are even more critically endangered.

Scientists believe fewer than 60 Asiatic cheetahs are still hanging on in the foothills surrounding the Kavir Desert in Iran, though there are rumors they sometimes cross the border into Pakistan or Afghanistan. The cheetahs are threatened not only by poachers but also by overgrazing of vegetation by domestic livestock, reducing the food supply for gazelles and other prey animals that support the cheetahs.

(on camera): The Iranian government is now cooperating with international experts on its first conservation program for cheetahs starting with a survey to establish where they are and how many still survive.

(voice-over): After that, the experts will recommend measures the government should take to save the cheetahs.

GEORGE SCHALLER, WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY: Better protection from hunting, less livestock encroachment into the areas where the cheetahs live. In other words, establishing strict, very large reserve and very importantly, protecting their prey.

STRIEKER: In preparation for the survey, researchers are setting camera traps with motion detectors in remote areas and have already captured this rare image, the first known close-up photograph of a live Asiatic cheetah in the wild.

Gary Strieker, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE) WALCOTT: You know earlier in the show we mentioned that voter turnout in the French election was extremely low. Now we turn back the clocks to a time when numbers of people didn't go to the polls in the U.S. Now that's not because they didn't want to but because they weren't allowed. Civil rights movements like the Selma March worked to change all that.

Seema Mathur has this report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And this is Bloody Sunday.

SEEMA MATHUR, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A snapshot of history is what photographer Spider Martin captured.

HELEN JOHNSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM: What a brave little guy, to be white in Selma in '65 taking pictures.

MATHUR: These pictures on temporary exhibit at the Civil Rights Museum in Savannah, Georgia have special meaning to Helen Johnson.

JOHNSON: And that's very dear to me because this all happened in Selma. I was from a small place down the road from Selma called Thomasville, Alabama.

MATHUR: March 7, 1965, African-Americans wanted the right to vote. Their plan: for some 600 activists to march from this church in Selma, Alabama to the capital Montgomery. But they didn't make it past six blocks, stopped short at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

JOHNSON: Troopers with the billy sticks, the guns. And not only did they just knock them down but they stomped them, they kicked them. Here's a man standing with a loaded gun over a group of black people that only want to become registered voters. And I admire Spider so much because he said he was on a mission and that mission was to take as many pictures as he could to let the world know what was happening in Selma.

MATHUR: Media images began moving people to action. Martin Luther King Jr. got involved and the protesters won court protection for the right to march.

JOHNSON: This is the beginning of the Selma to Montgomery March for the right to vote.

MATHUR: This time, about 25,000 protesters made it to Montgomery, most walking 12 miles a day for five days.

JOHNSON: There were whites that was there with us also. There was Jews that was there with us also, and some of them got killed too. This man right here that we show him so much because with his one leg he walked that road from Selma to Montgomery. MATHUR: These images caught on camera and film made their way into the homes, hearts and conscience of the American people. One look at the images and there was no gray area in deciding what was right or wrong.

A few months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting rights Act of 1965.

Seema Mathur, CNN STUDENT NEWS, Savannah, Georgia.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WALCOTT: And now we venture again into the wild kingdom. This time, we head out on a swamp adventure in the Deep South. Get ready to get up close and personal with some gators.

CNN Student Bureau is our tour guide.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HANSON HORN, CNN STUDENT BUREAU (voice-over): Pitted in these south Mississippi marshes lurks a popular tourist attraction. An air boat ride is a safe way to see it. You never want to get too close to an alligator.

PHYLLIS CABLE, TOURIST: Well I just thought maybe that they weren't real, there was so many of them. They're laying all over the banks.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

CABLE: And we said could they be real because we had never seen so many alligators all at once.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, so big.

HORN (on camera): Tourists come from all over the world to see John Hudson's gators. Hudson has more than 1,000 gators swimming in these marshes. In over 30 years, he has been the victim of only one bite.

JOHN HUDSON, OWNER: And when he bit me, he had me on the end of his -- on the end of his nose, on the end of his mouth. And if I had been back in the back part of his mouth, then he would have bit my leg off.

HORN (voice-over): Hudson is fortunate. Alligators are scary creatures, but up to a hundred curious tourists trek through this gator farm every day in the summer. Like many businesses, Hudson has seen a slowdown since September.

JEREMY HUDSON (ph): About maybe 75 percent of all the people that come here are tourists, and usually the tourists come from Europe and places like that. I think they're just afraid to get on an airplane now. HORN: Hudson says the farm is still producing a profit. He sells some of these gators to the world famous Barnum & Bailey Circus and he sells alligator skin and meat.

It's the tourists, though, that have kept these waters stirring for the last decade.

Hanson Horn, CNN Student Bureau, Jackson County, Mississippi.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WALCOTT: Our wildlife adventures continue on the Web. Log on to CNNstudentnews.com to learn about the possibly ill-fated future of the world's rarest dolphin. And tune in tomorrow for stories on pollution and penguins.

That's it for us today. We'll catch you back here tomorrow. Bye-bye.

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