Whales, Human Rights, Rain Forests And The Heady Smell Of Profits

It's a sweltering Sunday afternoon, but the group packed into a conference room at Georgetown University to mark Amnesty International's 30th anniversary numbers nearly a thousand. Clad mostly in rumpled cottons, the youthful crowd has concluded a hand-holding round of We Shall Overcome and applauds as a guest speaker moves to the podium. Her name is Anita Roddick, and with a colorful kerchief gathering her mane of dark, curly hair, she seems cut from the same cloth as the people gathered below.

At 48, Roddick may have 20 years on her average listener, but her delivery is as fiery as any young radical's. The Persian Gulf war was a disaster, the fault of "governments that have no backbone." The International Monetary Fund is staffed by tired bureaucrats. Tossing off aphorisms from Mahatma Gandhi and Ralph Waldo Emerson, she rails at institutions of all stripes. But the Englishwoman saves her sharpest barbs for the cosmetics business. "We loathe the cosmetic industry with a passion," she tells the audience. "It's run by men who create needs that don't exist."