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CNN Live Saturday

Interview With Environmental Activist Julia Butterfly Hill

Aired April 20, 2002 - 18:15   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.
CATHERINE CALLAWAY, CNN ANCHOR: Well, as you know Earth Day is coming up Monday, and for 32 years, it's been a celebration of Mother Earth. Our next guest is a defender of all things green. In fact, in December 1997, Julia Butterfly Hill climbed inside the branches of a luna, which is an endangered California redwood, and she stayed there for two years. And we spoke with her back in 1998.

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JULIA BUTTERFLY HILL, ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST: I still feel like there's a little more for me to do in the informing and in the inspiring and in the helping people to connect. But when my feet do touch the ground again someday, this action is not over with for me. The rest of my life is dedicated to living in love and in service for all life.

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CALLAWAY: And indeed it has been. In fact, she wrote a best- selling book, "The Legacy of Luna," and she's joining us now, Julia Butterfly Hill. She's going to talk to us about some of the ways to protect trees, among other things, as part of the environment. Also, she has a new book out; it's called "One Makes the Difference." "One Makes The Difference." Thanks for being with us, Julia.

HILL: Thank you.

CALLAWAY: Amazing feat that you accomplished, staying in that tree for two years; it's just unbelievable to me. No regrets, then, right?

HILL: Absolutely not. I've learned a lot of lessons along the way, and I'm really thankful to be able to do this work that I believe in so very much.

CALLAWAY: And when you came down from Luna, you wrote the best- selling book, "The Legacy of Luna." You know, you write in that that you don't want to be seen as an environmental superwoman, do you?

HILL: I really don't. Because I want people to understand that, I'm just another person. I'm a human being who cares about our world and all beings on it, including people, and that I'm just doing what I know to do to make the world a better place. But there's something for all of us to do, every moment of every day. CALLAWAY: All right, let's talk about some of the things we you can do. I've got your book here, "One Makes the Difference." As we said, and we have our little notes of the things that we thought were amazing. You have some incredible tips in here about how the -- what a difference -- just one person can make. Let's take a look at the -- through the -- is it, Toxic Home Gardeners out there. The effects that they can have on the environment. They may be thinking that they're helping people, but here we go: the amount of -- no, this is another one, we'll get to that one in a moment -- the amount of wood and paper that we throw away every year is enough to heat 50 million homes for 20 years. Just wood and paper alone?

HILL: Absolutely. There was a study done that just in wood pellets, what we use to ship products on -- just in wood pellets, we're throwing away 4 million of them every year.

CALLAWAY: Julia, how did you come up with these statistics, this information?

HILL: We've gotten the statistics from a lot of different places. I worked with two incredible women on this book, one named Jessica Hurley, and one named Cavitha Rowen (ph) -- both of them were very involved in gathering the research from numerous groups and watchdog organizations that do things like track trends. Including the Environmental Protection Agency in looking at some of the research they have.

CALLAWAY: Let's take a look at another one of your facts in this book. If we all recycled our Sunday newspaper, we could save more than half a million trees every week.

HILL: That's right. I think it's really important for people to realize that this quote/unquote "seemingly insignificant" actions really do make a difference. We feel that it's this 6 billion of us on the planet and growing. I might be conscious but no one else seems to be, so why should I care, why does it matter? And so these kind of statistics and facts are ways of really grounding it out in reality that yes, indeed, the seemingly small actions absolutely have an impact on the world.

CALLAWAY: Yeah, it can drive it home a bit because -- you know -- I don't know, I started out really well. And then, over the years I've gotten a little bit lazy, the more kids I've had, the more garbage I have, and it's a good thing to remember how you really can make a difference, just one person, in just your trash alone, right?

HILL: Absolutely. Well, I even talk about the things, how it is that we got into the point in our world where waste disposal and trash are even in our language, when we recognize that everything in our world comes from people and comes from the earth.

And what that means is that in our language now we're now calling the earth and each other disposable. And I don't believe our future generations -- their future is not disposable.

And we are not trash, and the earth is not waste, and I tell people that growing up, I was an accidental ecologist without knowing anything about ecology, but my family was very, very poor and even with five of us, at the end of a month, sometimes we'd only have a plastic the size of a grocery bag full of trash because we automatically did things like reduce, reuse, recycle not because of an ecological consciousness but because it's a way of survival.

CALLAWAY: And when you throw it out, just remember it's got to go somewhere. If not in your backyard, someone else's, right?

HILL: Right. And it also -- to think about where it comes from. I talk about things that -- we need to start looking at all the things that are disposable in our lives and realize if we're looking at a paper towel, it's not a paper towel, it's a tree that's been turned into a paper towel.

When we're walking down the street, in the middle of a hectic, hot day in the city, and we see a tree, do we walk by and go, Oh, nice paper towel. We don't do that. So we kind of have to bring that consciousness back into our minds, that we can do things that seem at first like, oh, hippie-dippy, as some people call me, or tree-hugging or granola-munching -- those kind of things...

CALLAWAY: No, do they really say that, Julia?

HILL: Of course they do, but I can say it first. But I figure people can't -- people can't make any better fun of myself than I can make -- but I really want to help people understand that. Something -- things like bringing your own cloth bags to the grocery store. Bringing your own cloth napkins to dry our hands on, to wipe our hands on. Bring our own containers when we go out to eat -- how many times do we go out to eat, take home food in a container that came from the earth somewhere, and then we throw it into a trash bag? And I tell people...

CALLAWAY: Julia? I know you could go -- you have so many good ideas in this, but we're just going to have to encourage people to go read it. "One Makes a Difference" is the book, and Julia Butterfly Hill, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us and inspiring us all on this -- as Earth Day arrives. Thank you so much.

HILL: Thank you.

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