But Englezos has been told by Australian army officials he will be granted special access to the excavation site only once during the five-month project.

A team of 32 archaeologists will begin excavating the bodies on May 5 amid tight security around the grave site.

They want access to the site limited so as to prevent any contamination of DNA samples they plan to collect from the soldiers' remains in the hope that some of them can be identified.

Veterans' Affairs Minister Alan Griffin, who is in France for an Anzac Day dawn service on Saturday, visited the Fromelles site on Wednesday and said he hoped Englezos would be able to play a role in the recovery of the diggers' bodies.

Now a funerary archaeologist from Harvard's Peabody Museum is working find out who is buried there and to tell their stories.

Today, the public is free to walk through the church, but few are allowed to see what's underneath the sanctuary.

Rousseau has been studying the condition of the tombs as well as old church records to learn more about the people who are buried there. Through her work, she has discovered that the basement is the final resting place to all classes of Bostonians -- from those at society's lowest rungs to leaders of the American Revolution.

One's location in the crypt was mostly determined by social status.

For instance, there's a single crypt marked for "strangers."

While there are no plans to open the vaults, Pignone said a study is underway to look at the possibility of opening the basement to public tours.

It's widely debated how exactly it started, but the roots of the modern environmental movement trace back to the 1960s. Early in the decade, Rachel Carson published her nonfiction work"Silent Spring" as a wake-up call to current and impending environmental concerns. Several years later, U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson (of Wisconsin), one of the government's first eco warriors, sought to harvest general awareness and turn it into a movement. He hit on the idea of an event, modeled after the anti-Vietnam war teach-ins of the day, to raise eco consciousness nationwide. The event that turned into the first"Earth Day" took place on April 22, 1970, and became the catalyst for a series of nature-based legislation and eventually the emergence of a mainstream environmental movement.

Back then, the issues were only broadly understood. There was some talk about extinctions of wildlife, scarce groundwater supplies and a niche-but-growing theory about something called climate change (Was the Earth, NEWSWEEK wondered in the 1970s, getting colder—or was it getting warmer?). Still, there was an emerging consensus that our planet's resources are not infinite, and if the exploitation of them remained unaddressed, bigger problems awaited. The takeaway for the 20 million people who participated that first Earth Day in 1970 was simple: we all live on the same rock; let's not foul our nest.

The first Earth Day was like the sounding of a bullhorn for the people to unite and get moving, which worked. But this year, 39 years later, the original intent has long eroded. The one-day demonstration that started a movement lost most of its luster decades ago. Yet we still have it—and that has alarming implications for our environmental progress. What was originally intended as the sounding of an alarm has been reproduced each year in the exact same way. The problem is, it's hard to be motivated by a screeching alarm when you've been hitting the snooze button for the last four decades. Even worse, maintaining an old solution to a problem that changes by the minute seems to compartmentalize a movement that, by now, should be much broader, more frequent and much more inclusive....