Special

By GLENN GARELIK

As George Bush prepared to attend Emperor Hirohito's funeral in February, a top aide alerted him to a problem that would once have been considered unworthy of presidential attention. Since Japanese furniture makers are eager for tropical hardwoods, officials in western Brazil hoped that Tokyo would finance the paving of a 500-mile road that would link the Amazon to a Peruvian highway, allowing lumberers to truck their timber directly to Pacific ports. But the plan, Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates cautioned the President, would subject the western Amazon to more of the slash-and-burn land clearing that has already devastated much of the rain forest's eastern regions. The torching releases into the air tons of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases that are responsible for the greenhouse effect, which may cause global warming.

During his meeting with Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita in Tokyo, Bush expressed concern about the project. Takeshita seemed prepared for the question. He stiffly denied involvement and assured Bush that his country would not fund the road. It was the first time that a U.S. President considered an ecological issue important enough to justify a tense moment in relations with the world's other economic superpower.

The incident was all the more significant because it is part of a trend. In March British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who in the mid-1980s denounced environmental activists as the "enemy within," convened an international meeting on the depletion of the atmosphere's ozone layer, which protects the earth from harmful solar radiation. That same month the Prime Ministers of Norway, France and the Netherlands chaired a conference that proposed creation of an international authority with the power to draft and enforce environmental regulations around the world.

At the economic summit in Paris in July, the leaders of the seven largest industrial democracies devoted a third of their final communique to an appeal for "decisive action" to "understand and protect the earth's ecological balance." Just a month earlier, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, representing the major economic powers, had called upon "all relevant national, regional and international organizations" of its 24 member states to take a "vigilant, serious and realistic" look at "balancing long- term environmental costs and benefits against near-term economic growth."

Nor is concern limited to the First World. A treaty signed in Basel, Switzerland, in March limits what poorer nations call toxic terrorism -- use of their lands by richer countries as dumping grounds for industrial waste. And on Sept. 7 more than 100 member states of the nonaligned movement dispensed with their past denunciations of the U.S. and instead called for "a productive dialogue with the developed world" on "protection of the environment." As if heeding that appeal, on Sept. 11, at an international environmental conference in Tokyo, Japan's new Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu affirmed a pledge that his country would offer $2.25 billion to tackle pollution in the Third World.

All this activity heralds the rise of environmentalism as a major factor in international relations. Concern for ecology, says William Nitze, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for environment, health and natural resources, "has entered the policy mainstream." Another sign of the times: his father, elder statesman Paul Nitze, 82, a veteran of the cold war who has devoted much of his life to worrying about Soviet nuclear warheads, this year has thrown himself into the cause of fighting acid rain, which showers poisons from smokestacks onto trees and lakes far downwind.

This new sense of urgency and common cause about the environment is leading to unprecedented cooperation in some areas. So it should. Ecological degradation in any nation almost inevitably impinges on the quality of life in others. For years, acid rain has been a major irritant in relations between the U.S. and Canada. Drought in Africa and deforestation in Haiti have resulted in waves of refugees, whose miseries and migrations generate tensions both within and between nations. From the Nile to the Rio Grande, conflicts flare over water rights. The teeming megacities of the Third World are time bombs of civil unrest. Sheer numbers of people overwhelm social services and natural resources. The government of the Maldives has pleaded with the industrialized nations to reduce their production of greenhouse gases, fearing the polar ice caps may melt and inundate the island nation.

Even the good tidings of economic progress in the Third World bring with them the bad news of environmental peril and its potential for international discord. China, which accounts for 21% of the world's population, has the world's third largest recoverable coal reserves. If Beijing's current "modernization" campaign succeeds, the boom will be fueled by that coal, to the detriment of the planet as a whole. Some experts estimate that the developing world, which today produces one-fourth of all greenhouse gas emissions, could be responsible for nearly two-thirds by the middle of the next century. Notes Richard Benedick, chief U.S. negotiator of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer: "Third World states have served notice that they are simply not prepared to slow down their own already limping economic growth in order to help compensate for decades of environmental depredations caused largely by the industrialized world."

Some developing countries may resist environmental action because they see a chance to improve their bargaining leverage with aid donors and international bankers. Notes a diplomat with the U.N. Environment Program: "Where before the poor never had a strategic advantage, now they have an ecological card. Ecologically, there's more parity than there ever was economically or militarily." Roald Sagdeyev, an influential Soviet scientist, is concerned that "in 20 or 25 years, the developed world could become an ecological hostage to the Third World."

Thomas Pickering, the U.S. Ambassador to the U. N., believes that just as the cold war between the East and the West seems to be winding down, "ecoconflicts" between the industrialized North and the developing South may, unless carefully managed, pose a comparable challenge to world peacemakers. At the U.N. last December, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev went so far as to compare the breakdown of the environment with the threat of nuclear war.

President Bush, in his appearance before the General Assembly three weeks ago, called for "an international approach to urgent environmental issues," and earlier this year he persuaded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to hold its next session, in February, in Washington. There, some 50 nations will begin preparations for a worldwide convention to limit production of gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect.

At their September meeting in Wyoming, Secretary of State James Baker and U.S.S.R. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze promised U.S.-Soviet cooperation "to confront global environmental problems." There are predictions that the first Bush-Gorbachev summit, expected early next year, will be a "greener-than-thou" contest, with each leader trying to outdo the other in proclaiming his commitment to rescuing the planet.

For most statesmen, the political potency of environmental issues first became apparent at home. In the Soviet Union, regional protests against the fouling of Lake Baikal, the Volga River and the Baltic shoreline have spurred demands for restructuring the society to increase government accountability and local control. During last year's presidential race in the U.S., Baker, then Bush's campaign manager, predicted from polls that his candidate could win votes by proclaiming himself an environmentalist. Now that he is Secretary of State, Baker is finding ways to elevate the issue from domestic politics to foreign policy. Days after taking office in January, he said of the environment, "We face more than simply a scientific problem. It is also a diplomatic problem."

The State Department has established an Office of Global Change. Its functions include reporting to a newly formed interagency task force, which brings together diplomats from Foggy Bottom, officials from the White House, intelligence experts from the CIA and representatives of other major Government agencies. It is now working out options for next February's meeting of the IPCC.

During the Reagan Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Council on Environmental Quality were starved of both funds and presidential attention. That is changing. EPA head William Reilly, former director of the World Wildlife Fund and the Conservation Foundation, has more access to the Oval Office than any of his predecessors. The new chairman of the CEQ, Michael Deland, who was in charge of the EPA's Boston region, arrived at his desk across from the White House only two months ago, but his appointment has been widely hailed. Congress is expected to double the CEQ's funding for 1990, and the President has said he would like to see it doubled again by 1992.

Meanwhile, Congress has been playing its own role in the greening of geopolitics. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Republican Senator Bob Kasten of Wisconsin and Democratic Congressman David Obey of Wisconsin have promoted more foreign aid funding than ever before for environmental programs. In response to steady congressional pressure, the Treasury Department has adopted guidelines that require U.S. delegates to multilateral development banks to oppose funding for projects that would destroy tropical ecosystems.

Yet this increased attention to the environment as a foreign policy and national security issue, however welcome, is only a gesture in the direction of what will be necessary to avert insoluble problems in the future. "The ! most formidable obstacles to action," says Benedick, are "the entrenched economic and political interests" of the world's most advanced nations. It is in those countries, warns Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's Ambassador to the U.N., that "the pain of adjustment will be greatest."

If the U.S., for example, asks others not to cut their forests, then it will have to be more judicious about cutting its own. If Americans wish to stem the supply of hardwoods from the fragile jungle or furs from endangered species, then they will have to stem demand for fancy furniture and coats. If they wish to preserve wildernesses from the intrusions of the oil industry, then they will have to find alternative sources of energy and use all fuels more efficiently.

What all this requires is self-discipline on the part of the world's haves and increased assistance to the have-nots. Today a billion people live in a degree of squalor that forces them to deplete the environment without regard to its future. Similarly, their governments often are too crippled by international debt to afford the short-term costs of ecological prudence. Says Benedick: "Protecting the global environment is inextricably linked with eliminating poverty."

In addition to launching an emergency campaign of debt relief, the advanced nations of the North must make available to the desperate nations of the South efficient new technologies that spare the environment while encouraging economic growth. Fortunately, help for the South should not mean only sacrifice in the North. The need for energy-efficient and environmentally useful technologies could create an enormous untapped market -- one that several of the world's economic powers have already begun to explore. At the same time, there are ways for the South to clean up its own act. Some developing nations run up more than a third of their debt buying arms. Surely at least some of the $200 billion a year that poorer countries lavish on their military establishments could be better spent on saving the environment.

William Ruckelshaus, former administrator of the EPA and now chief executive officer of Browning-Ferris Industries, a major waste-management firm, believes a historical watershed is at hand. If the industrialized and developing countries did everything they should, he says, the resulting change would represent "a modification of society comparable in scale to the agricultural revolution of the late Neolithic age and to the Industrial Revolution of the + past two centuries."

Just as environmentalism began as a local movement, it must continue to grow at the grass roots even as it gathers force in the chanceries and parliaments of the world. Individuals and nations alike must learn to think on a far broader scale about themselves, their needs and their interests or a global catastrophe will force them to do so.