Pictured on the cover of National Geographic (August 1991), Michael Bailey
and Rick Thorpe of Earthtrust assessing environmental damage
in the oil fields of Kuwait shortly after the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
In 1991, during the Gulf War, Earthtrust was the first conservation
organization to field personnel into the war zone on behalf of
the environment; teams were in Bahrain before the Scud missiles
stopped falling, and inside Kuwait while shots were still being
fired. Responding to urgent requests by a representative of Kuwait's
royal family and by the few Kuwaiti authorities still in the country,
Earthtrust created an environmental nerve center in the lobby
of the Kuwait Hilton. From this coordinating office, subsequently
named the Kuwait Environmental Information Center, Earthtrust
worked to assess damage to the environment and protect the environment
when possible. Earthrust campaign workers--including Randy Thomas,
Michael Bailey, Rick Thorpe, Jim Logan, Jim Deckard, Art van Remundt,
Kerry Plowright and many others from around the world--braved
toxic smoke conditions and live mine fields to deploy oil barriers
to protect wetlands; and provided a steady flow of information
to the royal family and Kuwait authorities. This aided the efforts
to open the oilwell fire-fighting efforts to international teams,
rather than only to U.S. teams, resulting in the fires being extinguished
an order of magnitude more quickly. Earthtrust prepared the first
environmental impact assessment on postwar Kuwait for members
of the Kuwait cabinet and Royal Family. Representatives of the
Kuwait government and royal family had promised repayment of any
necessary expenditures made by Earthtrust in doing this work,
but reneged on this promise (roughly US$200,000 in 1991 dollars).
The fighting of the oilwell fires was memorialized in the internationally
broadcast Earthtrust documentary Hell on Earth, produced
by Jim Deckard. Exclusive, Earthtrust-sponsored video footage
also appeared throughout a five-part Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
mini-series; as well as the award-winning documentary titled Eco
War. Although news coverage of the war's environmental aftermath
was actively discouraged, Thomas filed regular reports with the
Environment News Service using Kuwait's only two-way fax line;
other stories exposing the biggest environmental disaster in modern
times were subsequently narrated by Earthtrust staff. Earthtrust's
dramatic campaign is the subject of an upcoming internationally-televised
video documentary scheduled for airing in early 2005.
