The scene: the Utah desert, 35 miles from Salt Lake City. Tons of nuclear waste could soon be rumbling toward the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, whose band of Goshutes is already beset by nearby nerve-gas storage and hazardous-waste incinerators. Enter James Cromwell, who played the U.S. president in the nuclear-weapons thriller The Sum of All Fears. In 2002, the actor addressed senators in Utah and traveled to Washington, D.C., to fight a proposed storage facility for 44,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste on Goshute land. “The hazardous materials will be transported on trains and trucks through highly populated areas,” he said at a press conference at the Capitol. “The storage land is on an earthquake fault line and subject to flooding. The whole process must be flawless-or there could be dire consequences.”

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Another Hollywood green group, Earth Communications Office, was founded in 1989 by entertainment attorney Bonnie Reiss, who discovered that many of the biggest stars were willing to bring some high gloss to the realm of the tree-hugger. Boasting a member roster that includes Cromwell, Pierce Brosnan, and Kevin Bacon, ECO made its mark with emotional public-service announcements shown before the main features in movie theatres all over the globe. Footage of pristine waters, roiling clouds, leaping dolphins, and time-lapsed sunsets with Willie Nelson singing “What a Wonderful World” as soundtrack encouraged viewers to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.”

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ECO’s current campaign addresses global warming and the steps we can take to change our fossil-fueling ways. Click on climatestar.org and up pops a muscular Kevin Bacon who pronounces, “Six degrees can make a world of difference. Not separation-temperature.” Bacon has played troubled kids and bad guys and commands big bucks for his work. But he and Joshua Jackson (TV’s Dawson’s Creek), Jacqueline Obradors (NYPD Blue), and Jorja Fox (CSI) have volunteered their names and faces to this Web site’s worthy cause, easing the transition to the site’s somewhat unglamorous “Climate Facts” and “Carbon Footprint Calculator.”

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