A Day In The Life Of Mother Earth : Good Intentions Alone Won’t Save the Planet : To strike a balance amid conflicting interests, environmental solutions must make political and economic sense.

Draw the problem of the environment in sweeping strokes, and the solution bursts forth with simplicity.

A heedless human race, the most powerful of more than 5 million species on Earth, has the strength, drive and appetite to crash down the quality of life around us and to transform this planet into a prospect as barren and lifeless as the moon.

Surely, if this is true, a less heedless and more aware human race must have as much strength, drive and appetite to change course and save the environment from its seemingly relentless descent to destruction.

But sweeping strokes confuse the issues. The problem of the environment cannot be solved with such generalizations. Ignorance, cant and greed stand in the way. Interests--some petty, some far from petty--enervate mankind’s spirit and clog its mind.

Americans may rail against carbon dioxide spewing into the sky, but they do not want to pay $5 for a gallon of gasoline in the name of environmental protection. Third World governments may subscribe to the theory of sustainable development, but their peoples destroy forests, fisheries and pasture to feed themselves--and to earn enough foreign exchange to pay immense foreign debts. Industrialists everywhere insist that onerous environmental rules and regulations make it impossible for them to compete in a free, but cruel, market.

Yet, somehow, the descent to destruction must be stopped. Today, as thousands upon thousands of government delegates and private environmentalists prepare to arrive in Rio de Janeiro for next week’s opening of the Earth Summit--the second U.N. conference on the environment--it is obvious to them that somehow all the interests must be mollified or balanced or traded or, if necessary, squashed.

Science and good sense may be on the side of the environmentalists, but they know that is not enough. Environmental protection must be good economics and good politics as well. This will surely prove a nettlesome and slow task.

In the weeks leading up to the conference, White House image crafters and spin doctors are setting the stage with their usual deftness and aplomb. They assemble 200 guests, almost all businessmen, in the Rose Garden on a sunlit day. A genial President Bush steps out of his home to make the announcement.

He is extending for another four months his moratorium on those pesky, ubiquitous, sometimes nonsensical government regulations that drive businessmen mad and strangle profits. He says his action will stimulate the sluggish economy and save every family in America an average of $225 a year. The businessmen applaud with fervor. The President is basking among friends. Environment is not on his mind.

When the ceremony ends, presidential aides lead a couple of handpicked businessmen to “the stakeout.” That is the array of television cameras and microphones set up every day in front of the White House to catch all newsworthy guests as they leave. But, before the businessmen reach the stakeout, another guest steps into it.

He is Fred Krupp, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund, a member of Bush’s Commission on Environmental Quality, one of the few environmentalists whom the Administration regards as a “friendly.” The commission is meeting at the White House on other matters, and presidential aides, without thinking much about it, have invited its members to the ceremony.

Krupp is obviously upset. Bush has extended the moratorium without consulting any environmentalist, without even consulting his own environmental commission. Yet many of the regulations suspended by the President protect the environment and public health.

For 20 minutes before cameras and microphones, Krupp berates Bush’s action. He calls the extension “a wholesale handout to the American business community” that holds the environment “hostage to politics.” “I don’t think the freeze will help the economy,” he says. “And it certainly won’t help the environment.”

Presidential aides are furious. “Outrageous, outrageous,” sputters Michael J. Boskin, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. “Who let him in?”

Boskin tells reporters that Krupp’s comments represent “old-style thinking,” the kind of thinking that favors “a command and control economy,” the kind of thinking that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Although Boskin seems ready to draw McCarthyite, Cold War lessons out of the incident, others see a different message: Despite all their deftness and aplomb, White House aides have failed, in their planning for the moratorium and the ceremony, to take the power of environmental politics into account. That is an abject and foolish failure.

It is especially abject and foolish in these weeks leading to the Earth Summit--an event that in itself demonstrates the power of environmental politics.

That power is not yet great enough to leash the forces that are depleting the resources and fouling the life of the planet. In fact, 20 years after the first U.N. Conference on the Environment in Stockholm, environmentalists feel frustrated and troubled.

U.N. reports show that the environment has worsened in the two decades. Pre-Rio negotiators have come forth with milquetoast treaties. Politicians still find it easier to satisfy the demands of greedy consumers than the needs of unborn grandchildren. Many people are losing hope that the conference in Rio will really be that “defining moment” for the world environment that its U.N. sponsors claim.

Yet, despite all these doubts and frustrations, despite all the hypocrisy of political rhetoric, it is also clear that most politicians in the world, from China to the United States, from Mexico to Ukraine, now know that they ignore environmental politics only at their peril.

There are, today, tens of thousands of private organizations throughout the world devoted to the environment, powerful interest groups growing in strength. At least 13 million Americans belong to them. Greenpeace has 3.3 million members in 20 countries, the World Wildlife Fund 3 million members in 23 countries.

In Stockholm in 1972, protection of the environment was an idea. Now it is a force.

That is obvious almost anywhere you look. In Paris, Prime Minister Pierre Beregovoy announces the suspension of French nuclear tests in the South Pacific for the rest of the year. He does so with a lot of highfalutin talk about France serving as a model for the world. But the cynics suspect that he and his weary Socialist Party are angling for the 13% of the national vote captured by the two environmental parties in recent elections.

In Tokyo, Noboru Takeshita, disgraced and forced to resign as prime minister in a scandal two years ago, blazons a new motto these days: “Let’s bring environment into the mainstream of politics.” Other Japanese politicians can come up with only one explanation for this newfound interest: He is trying to ride back to office on the excitement of environment.

In Brussels, Carlo Ripa di Meana was once demeaned as a wealthy Italian playboy who did little as commissioner for cultural affairs of the European Community. But now he is commissioner of the environment. Sporting green glasses and green shirts, the 62-year-old Socialist has become a hero to the “green” movement. He feels so powerful that he is not afraid to let European governments know what he thinks of their failure to stand up to the Bush Administration on the global warming treaty. “It’s a sellout,” he cries.

Even as ecologists flex their political strength, the problems of the environment become more complex. In the last two decades, scientists have made the case that the most grievous threats to the Earth may come from global problems that cannot be attacked on the spot, like the smog of Los Angeles, but must be dealt with in international accords.

Two such issues--global warming and depletion of the ozone layer--have become touchstones for the environmental movement. Failure to deal with them now, according to many environmentalists, will assure catastrophe in the 21st Century.

Global issues have special qualities. The problems are not obvious. You cannot smell global warming the way you can smell the overpowering stench of the Schoenberg toxic waste dump in Germany. You cannot see ozone depletion the way you can see the foul, leaden smog that clamps down on Mexico City like a fearsome cage.

Another characteristic: The chief culprits are the rich, industrialized countries.

Worldwide surveys of environmental problems always tend to show poor countries of the Third World and the former Communist Bloc in the worst light. Strontium 90, the dangerous radioactive isotope, still dusts the woods and farms and homes near Chernobyl. Filipino divers, supplying home aquariums throughout the world, stun brilliant and wildly shaped tropical fish with cyanide and destroy the living coral reef.

But it is the industries of the rich countries that pollute the upper atmosphere. The United States is the worst offender, producing almost a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide.

Finally, global issues have a way of demeaning the place of the United States in the environmental movement. In 1972, when environmentalists worried most about local issues like smog and toxic waste, the United States was in the forefront of environmental protection. But that is not the image today.

The United States often seems more like a traitor to environmentalists than a savior. Bush finally decided to go to Rio. But he hemmed and hawed and hesitated for months. While his Administration has agreed to cut out ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, it also maneuvered international negotiators into producing a global warming treaty without any teeth.

Most Europeans pay four times as much for a gallon of gas as Americans and seem to have little trouble competing in the world market. Yet, the President and his advisers believe that a tax on gasoline--one of the most obvious ways to reduce carbon dioxide and combat global warming--would damage the American economy.

This attitude straps the United States into a new and uncherished role in environmental diplomacy--as perhaps the heaviest foot-dragger of all.

Another conflict embroils today’s world of environmental politics. Most countries on the planet are poor. Yet they feel overbearing pressure at international meetings like the upcoming Earth Summit to go along with policies that appeal to the rich. The public pressure at these meetings comes mainly from middle-class electorates in the industrialized nations. Resentment simmers.

The Third World feels blamed unfairly. All environmentalists bemoan the population growth in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. Too many people are using up too few resources in a profligate world. Critics look at Cairo, a fabled city of tree-shaded boulevards and grand villas, and pronounce it unlivable for most of its 14 million people. Yet, government officials insist, the masses of the Third World use up only a small share of the world’s energy and pollute the atmosphere far less than the meager populations of the rich countries.

Third World governments also feel pressured to make sacrifices that the United States and Europe never had to make.

Brazil rules over most of the Amazon rain forest, the world’s largest, 13 times the size of California. Outcries from environmentalists, many incensed by the 1988 murder of Chico Mendes, the best-known leader of the Amazon rubber tappers, have forced Brazil to slow down the clearing of forest for cattle pasture and farming. Yet, Brazilians often complain, no one ever stopped the United States from clearing its forests in the 19th Century.

Third World leaders wonder whether this “green” talk is another way to exploit them, a kind of “green imperialism.”

Most important, the Third World often looks on environmental protection as a luxury that it cannot afford. Rich governments understand this and agree that they must help the Third World bear the costs. But the United States and its allies want this handled by an existing environmental fund of the World Bank. The Third World, however, looks on the World Bank as an agent of the rich exploiters and wants a new Green Fund instead.

The confrontation between rich and poor, the North-South global split, should create the liveliest and perhaps most bitter moments of the Earth Summit.

There are no weaker players in the world of environmental politics than the tiny island states. Underpopulated, without wealth, resources or armies, they have little clout at summits or any other kind of international conference.

Yet they will suffer most if global warming sends seas swirling over their coasts until no one can live there and, as some environmentalists insist, also sets off cyclones to buffet them. If the seas swamp the coastal lowlands of the United States, Americans can move inland. But islanders have nowhere to flee.

Leaupepe Sanerivi feels frustrated during the final days of negotiating the global warming treaty in New York. The delegates are giving in to the Americans and accepting a treaty without mandatory limits on the emission of greenhouse gases.

Sanerivi, a graying, heavy-set, soft-spoken man wearing a black tie brightened by aquamarine patterns, is the attorney general of Western Samoa, a South Pacific island nation about the size of Rhode Island with 170,000 people. He tells reporters that Samoa has reeled under three fierce cyclones in the last four years, cyclones of the kind that used to devastate the islands no more than once a century. He is sure that global warming is to blame.

“While scientists are talking about possible effects,” he insists, “we have already suffered the effects of global warming.”

Sanerivi does not like the treaty very much, but he accepts it. He looks on it as a first step. Eventually, the peoples of the world will pressure their politicians to do more about global warming, he believes.

The Samoan attorney general is probably right. Eventually, environmentalists will probably win their case in the political arena. But is there enough time? As the leaders of the world converge on Rio, still guarding their parochial interests against the good of all; as we look at the immense environmental problems of the planet, from the incessant growth of the desert in Mali to the numbing pollution of the Vistula River in Poland, it is hard to shake aside that nagging question.

The dilemma is clearest through the eyes of those who must live each day at one of the Earth’s environmental hot spots--places where the consequences of mankind’s assaults on the air and the water and the land that sustain the planet are most severe.

Here the message is particularly insistent: Time hovers over the Earth.