BARABOO, WI--If you want to see the future of genuine environmental activism, visit the banks of the Baraboo River in central Wisconsin with Brent Haglund of the Sand County Foundation. There you can watch the results of the Sand County Foundation's latest initiative--removing 150-year-old dams from the river and restoring a free-flow to the Baraboo River for the first time since human settlement began.

Wait! This is not akin to what you hear from the deep greens of the Pacific Northwest, who are calling for dismantling the huge hydropower dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. The Baraboo is a small tributary of the upper Mississippi, and the old dams intermittently dotting its course are small, privately-owned barriers that were originally built to drive mill wheels. They are all obsolete, badly in need of repair, and even present safety hazards to the community. And they disrupt the habitat for native fish species along the river's course.

Rather than lobbying government regulators to do its bidding, the Sand County Foundation went to the owners of the dams on the Baraboo and bought them, and then made plans for their removal. But the purpose of removing dams along the Baraboo is not limited simply to restoring the river habitat; it has effects on the human habitat as well.

The town of Baraboo, located not far from where Aldo Leopold wrote his famous Sand County Almanac, has a charming town square that could serve as the platonic model for Main Street, USA. But its waterfront along the Baraboo River near the LaValle Dam has been stagnating for a long time. Restoring the free-flowing character of the river, Haglund explains, is going to be a catalyst for revitalizing the waterfront in Baraboo.

The point of all this is to reflect on the famous environmental proposition, "Think Globally, Act Locally." This slogan, which is attributed to the French thinker Rene Dubos, has been turned on its head over the years by orthodox environmentalism. In practice, it has become subsumed in the apocalyptic style of environmental thinking that makes it difficult to think sensibly about real problems in real places.

"Act Locally" has come to stand for largely symbolic acts ("50 Ways to Save the Planet," etc.) designed more to express our consciousness of the global crisis oppressing nature. It has come to mean, "local action is futile because of the global crisis," just as the civil rights movement denies that racial progress is possible because racism is supposedly pervasive in all aspects of American society.

The apocalyptic outlook of the environmental establishment makes it difficult for ordinary people to internalize environmental values as an aspect of citizenship. Yet there are emerging environmental issues (such as non-point source water pollution and habitat restoration) that bureaucratic command-and-control regulation cannot accomplish without tyranny.

The next wave of environmental improvement is going to take place on the local level through actions stemming from a sense of civic responsibility, in much the same manner as we have come to think about our obligations and opportunities to fight crime and improve our local schools. This won't be much fun for the crisis-mongers in Washington. But the environment will be the winner.

--By Steven Hayward (For more information on "civic environmentalism," see www.civicenvironmentalism.org.)