In June of this year, the International Red Cross reported that more than 25 million people were driven from their homes in 1998 as a consequence of flood, drought, deforestation or other environmental problems. For the first time, according to the World Disasters Report, environmental refugees outnumbered those displaced by wars and other social conflicts. Last year's series of natural disasters was the worst on record, and during the past six years, the number of people needing relief from hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and other natural events jumped from 500,000 to more than 5.5 million.

The survey attributed the increasing number of victims of nature's fury to two factors. First, that the number of natural disasters were increasing, driven most likely by climactic changes. Secondly, more and more people, many of them poor and living in substandard housing, were living in areas vulnerable to natural catastrophe. The report concluded that without an abatement of the current trends, it was just a matter of time before the world began experiencing "a new scale of catastrophe," dubbed the "super-disaster."

Coincidentally, the year 1998 was the hottest year of the century, if not of the entire millennium.

The Politics of Weather

In the Spring of 1998-as Mexico sweltered through its worst drought in more than 70 years and raging wildfires burned from Brazil to Florida-the American Petroleum Institute drafted an ambitious plan to spend more than $5 million to convince the American public that there was no scientific basis for believing that global warming was under way, or, failing that, that the petroleum industry had anything to do with it. In particular the plan sought to create a favorable media climate that would complement the industry's well-financed political efforts to kill the Kyoto Protocol, which would place restrictions on the burning of fossil fuels.

The institute sought to recruit a "cadre of scientists" and would train them in public relations. As many as 20 "respected climate scientists" would "inject credible science and scientific accountability into the global climate debate, thereby raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom.'" A team of five "independent scientists" would be identified, recruited and trained to participate in media outreach-that is, radio and television talk shows-and $600,000 was earmarked for science writers, editors and journalists. All, in the words of the institute, geared to "maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media and other key audiences." Among those corporations actively involved in drafting this plan were Exxon, Chevron and the Southern Co.

The new plan was necessary because the mainstream scientific view had largely come to the conclusion that global warming was an imminent and serious threat, and that the energy companies bore a high degree of responsibility for it-and because the industry's own "hired guns" were losing their credibility.

Ten years before, during the warm summer of 1988, the energy industry, along with such large energy consumers as the automobile, aluminum, steel, and chemical industries, began to take notice of global warming-in particular, of the potential effects that preventing it would have on their businesses. That year, James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, brought up the specter of global warming before then-Senator Al Gore's committee on Science, Technology, and Space. Although Hansen did not at that time directly attribute the abrupt warming pattern that had taken hold of the Earth since the late 1970s to increases in man-made greenhouse gases, industry leaders could see the writing on the wall. In 1989 they founded the Global Climate Coalition (GCC).

The GCC is known as the "leading voice for business and industry in the climate change debate." In addition to individual corporate members, the GCC includes powerful industry groups such as the American Petroleum Institute, the American Iron and Steel Institute, the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, the American Forest and Paper Association, the Air Transport Association, the Association of American Railroads, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Mining Association, the Society of the Plastics Industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In short, a Who's Who of American heavy industry. Its philosophy has been to insist, first, that "science-not emotional or political reactions-must serve as the foundation for global climate policy decisions," and second, that "policy decisions must consider the economic and social impacts of alternative policy choices." Any solution must be equitable for all countries, and "technology transfer" and free trade offer the best fixes, assuming that fixes are required. Although the mission of the GCC seems reasonable on its face, it barely masks its essential agenda, which is to prevent any attempt to regulate its members or hold them responsible for global warming and its effects. Although the GCC purportedly believes that science should rule the debate on climate change, like all of the industry-sponsored media initiatives, it has vigorously attacked any science that links global warming to greenhouse gases, and promotes any view that casts doubt upon global warming.

In addition to the formation of the GCC, industry began to move to counter the vast media attention devoted to the "Earth Summit," the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. In the years leading up to the UN conference, global warming had become an important issue for environmental groups, and in Rio the first international accords on regulating greenhouse gases were drafted. Before the conference, the energy and related industries organized a massive campaign to downplay the dangers associated with climate change. In 1991, the Western Fuels Association, a coal producer, spent $250,000 to produce a video called the Greening of Planet Earth. The video extolled the benefits of higher levels of greenhouse gases, promising a future of agricultural abundance that warmer climates would bring.

The GCC was able to muster the political clout necessary to block environmental regulations concerning global warming, but they found steering public opinion was a different story. Opinion was influenced primarily by the science surrounding the issue, which was coming to a consensus that global warming was a fact. The emerging evidence of global warming was in turn hyped incessantly by the environmental groups. Ultimately, the campaign against the Rio and Kyoto accords would require an attack on the scientific studies that were at the core of the global warming issue. This attack, however, could not be launched by industry associations-only by other scientists.

The Dissenting Group is Created

One of the main vehicles for attacks on climate change initiatives during the Rio Conference was a campaign known as the Information Council on the Environment "ICE," funded by energy companies-in particular, Edison Electric Institute, the Southern Company, and the Western Fuels Association. Like the more recent initiative by the American Petroleum Institute, the ICE campaign, launched in 1991, was designed to put scientists in front of the media to portray global warming as "theory rather than fact," and plant stories that would minimize the seriousness of the threat. The ICE campaign introduced the country to three major scientific critics, who became known as skeptics of the global warming process: Drs. Patrick J. Michaels, Robert C. Balling Jr. and Sherwood Idso.

Of the three, Michaels, a climatologist from the University of Virginia, has been the most visible and his testimony and writings have been cited frequently by anti-regulatory critics of global warming accords. Michaels came to the attention of Western Fuels Association, a leading backer of ICE, in 1989, with an article he wrote in the Washington Post entitled "The Greenhouse Climate of Fear." In it he expressed his opposition to what he calls "apocalyptic environmentalism," which he describes as "the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism." Michaels considers the issue of global warming to be driven by "very powerful special interests" that exploit people's fears.

Michaels casts skepticism on the computer models used to forecast potential rates of global warming and their effects. The models, which attempt to analyze the complex interactions between the Earth, the oceans, the atmosphere and their various components, are known to be incomplete, have been revised continuously in the past decade, and are therefore easy targets for those-like the energy industry-who require "scientific certainty" before acting. Michaels also argues that although the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may have fluctuated in the past, changes in greenhouse gas concentrations followed changes in temperature, rather than preceded them. In 1992, Michaels became associated with coal producers, who have a direct interest in the outcome of his research. Unperturbed by the association, he went to work for Western Fuels Association, editing their new journal, World Climate Review. In addition, Michaels eventually received funding from the German Coal Mining Association, the Edison Electric Institute and Cyprus Minerals, one of the leading backers of the anti-environmental Wise Use Movement.

Although Michaels has received more than $165,000 in research grants from the energy industry, his funding pales in comparison to Balling, who by his own account has taken in more than $700,000 from energy interests. The Director of the Office of Climatology for Arizona State University, Balling is the author of The Heated Debate, Greenhouse Predictions Versus Climate Reality. The Heated Debate was published in 1992 by the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, a group that advocates a "free economy, private initiative and limited government," as well as anti-environmentalism. Like Michaels, Balling's main argument has been that the computer models are wrong, and the warming that they have predicted has not materialized. Balling argues that the manner in which climate data has been collected over the past century is inaccurate, and that the various methods used to collect this data would only give different results anyway. In particular, Balling argued that temperature gauges, many of them located at the airports, were affected by the increasing urbanization around them, which raises temperatures locally. Like Michaels, Balling concedes a slight warming effect, and along with Michaels argues that the net effects of global warming will be minor and even beneficial. Unlike Michaels, who appears belligerent in the media while rarely authoring a scientific treatise on the subject, Balling is more soft-spoken and publishes regularly.

Idso's criticism of the mainstream scientific predictions of global warming is longstanding. An agriculturalist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Water Conservation Laboratory, Idso is the author of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change: Earth in Transition (IBR Press, 1989). He is a leading proponent of increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere as a positive attribute, contending that it would increase plant productivity. Idso argues that doubling carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would only translate into a minimal rise in the surface air atmosphere-only four-tenths of a degree Celsius. Rather than destabilizing the climate and increasing the likelihood of natural disasters, the increased concentrations of carbon dioxide would spawn a green planet with bigger trees, bigger harvests, and more life. Idso's wife was the producer of the Western Fuels Association video, Greening of the Earth, which featured Idso himself. His two sons, both formerly under contract with Western Fuels Association, currently head the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, which promotes higher carbon dioxide levels.

The three scientists recruited by ICE were aided in their efforts by two prominent climatologists, Drs. S. Fred Singer and Richard S. Lindzen. Singer, formerly the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, was retired and no longer producing original research. While the previously mentioned scientists, were funded by the coal companies, Singer was drafted by the oil industry, and served as a consultant to Exxon, Shell, Arco, and Unocal. As with Michaels and Balling, Singer was critical of the computer models, but unlike Balling, who actually conducted studies of temperature change, Singer fought against global warming largely on the strength of his reputation.

Of all of them, however, Lindzen was the most formidable. The Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lindzen was not only critical of the computer models' shortcomings in predicting temperature change from increased levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, Lindzen also offered an alternative model of how the atmosphere would react to these increased levels. In his view, the principal greenhouse gas, water vapor, would act as a "negative feedback" to the process of global warming. At best the increased levels of carbon dioxide would only raise the temperature of the Earth less than one half of one degree, not enough to do any damage. Lindzen's criticisms of the global warming advocates were grounded more in science, and less strident than the rest. He was good at punching holes in the arguments of environmental groups such as Greenpeace, whose notions of science were little better than those of the energy industry. Lindzen also managed to keep the energy industry at a safe distance, avoiding the big research grants that would have to be publicly acknowledged. Instead, he acted as a well-paid consultant to the affected corporations.

With the backing of the energy industry, these five scientists and their protégés began to undermine the work of more than 2,500 scientists working under the United Nations who were rapidly coming to the conclusion that global warming had the potential to become a global disaster.

The Battle Is Joined

The ICE campaign was not a success because the mainstream press exposed it almost before it began. However, the strength of the scientists was not so much their testimony before Congress, their frequent appearances on radio and television or their appearances in pro-business publications such as Forbes, Readers Digest, or the Washington Times. Their strength was to give some semblance of credibility to the forces seeking to develop global warming, including the fake grassroots organizations created by industry under the rubric of the "Wise Use Movement." In essence, if the industry scientists could neutralize the UN scientists, then the industry could outspend, out-hype, and out-hysteria the environmental groups.

At the Rio Conference, the energy industry had succeeded in requiring only voluntary controls on emissions, but the next few years found even naturally slow-moving government leaders considering mandatory controls. A coalition of island nations, who were threatened with actual disappearance due to global warming, and Europe, which was happy to shut down the inefficient and heavily polluting factories of the former East Bloc, brought pressure to do something concrete at Kyoto, Japan, in 1997.

Throughout the 1990s, the energy industry had spent millions every year to downplay the threat of global warming. The exact amount is hard to quantify, as it included everything from campaign contributions to research grants to funding Wise Use organizations to placing advertising in major media outlets. Major damage-control public relations specialists, such as Burson-Marsteller, who spun the Bhopal, Exxon Valdez and James Bay campaigns, were employed. Industry associations, such as the National Coal Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and others, made countering emission controls their number one agenda item. For years Mobil placed daily ads in the New York Times, prominently featuring the work of Balling and Singer as part of its claim that global warming was nothing to worry about. As the planning began in 1996 for the meeting in Kyoto, industry leaders began to consider a massive campaign that would expand upon the work they had done previously.

The Global Climate Coalition, under chairman William O'Keefe, an executive for the American Petroleum Institute, set up a network of organizations that spanned the entire spectrum of the Wise Use Movement to mobilize against any potential global warming treaties. The GCC set up meetings and conferences with groups such as People for the West, a mining front group, to the Environmental Conservation Organization, run by the extremist property-rights advocate Henry Lamb, to 21st Century Science Associates, a Lyndon LaRouche spin-off. The groups then began a widespread campaign, portraying potential global warming accords as everything from government overreach to a UN-spawned conspiracy to deprive Americans of their land, sovereignty and way of life.

New groups were created, such as the People for Vehicle Choice, and the "grassroots" campaign was waged largely in the pages of newsletters, automobile and travel magazines, farmers' journals, and other niche publications. First came articles that debunked the mainstream scientific vision of global warming, generally referring to one or more of the five scientists mentioned above. Then came letters and articles from "ordinary citizens" that would try to create a climate of fear by raising the specter of astronomical fuel prices and a sharp decline in the American standard of living. The GCC itself sponsored a group called the Global Climate Control Project, which spent more than $13 million in the months preceding the Kyoto Conference, mostly on advertising.

In the end, while the campaign seemed to do little to influence public opinion nationally, it was effective in Congress, which was bombarded by Wise Use groups. In July of 1997, six months before Kyoto, the Senate passed, by a 95-0 vote, a resolution declaring that any global warming treaty that exempted developing nations from world-wide emission cuts would not be ratified. Because the United Nations already had approved first-round exemptions for developing countries on the grounds of hardship, the resolution effectively said that any Kyoto treaty, no matter how limited, would never fly.

Behind the scenes was the work of Michaels, Balling, Idso, Singer, and Lindzen. From the testimony of Wise Use advocates in Congress to the articles written by the Global Climate Coalition for mainstream newspapers-most of which cited these five scientists-the industry had managed to cast enough doubt on the science of global warming to at least give Congress some semblance of an excuse to undermine the Kyoto Conference. The victory had not come without a cost, however, and by the time of the Kyoto Conference, the combined reputations of the five were largely in tatters.

The Second Generation

Of the five, Singer fell the hardest. Always a loose cannon, Singer also had campaigned against government attempts to control chlorofluorocarbons, a man-made chemical that causes ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere, endearing himself to the chemical industry but diminishing his reputation as a scientist. When in 1997 he resorted to deliberately falsifying and misinterpreting the work and statements of Dr. Bert Bolin, the chair of the UN's climate research team, Singer was finished as a climate authority. He was relegated to publishing his increasingly blatant defense of the energy industry through his own organization, the Science and Environmental Policy Project.

Michaels also did not fare well. By 1997, he was consigned mostly to writing op-ed pieces in the Washington Times and other right-wing venues. Even his scientific output was largely limited to writing rebuttal letters in Nature or Science. When he sought to discredit the work and integrity of Dr. B.D. Santer, one of the lead authors of a UN study released in 1995, Michaels, like Singer, lost what little scientific authority he once possessed.

Lindzen was unable to keep up the attacks on the computer models as the science continued to move forward. His theories regarding the negative feedback of water vapor were duly taken into account by his peers, and then they moved on. Balling continued to take temperature measurements at isolated sites around the world, and continued to report signs of a cooling, not a warming trend, but no one was taking him seriously. Although Idso restarted his "carbon dioxide is good" campaign by forming the Greening Earth Society with the support of the coal industry, Idso's visions of a green planet were being taken less seriously as well.

The group also was hurt by blatant attempts to mislead scientists into signing petitions or declarations that downplayed global warming scares. Singer himself did not help when he circulated the "Leipzig Declaration," a harsh critique of the Kyoto accords which he claimed was signed by a few prominent scientists and a host of unknowns, including amateur meteorologists. When the former president of the National Academy of Sciences, Frederick Seitz, attempted to peddle a petition critical of the treaty and included as background a paper that appeared to be an Academy-approved study-but was not-it sparked a harsh backlash from the scientific community.

Worse for all of them, their connections to the energy industry, in particular the large sums of money they had all received, were becoming public, and they were spending just as much of their time defending their integrity as they were challenging the global warming process. Fortunately for the energy industry, as their "hired guns" were fading, two new scientists had joined the fold.

Dr. Sallie Baliunas had strong credentials. Senior staff physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, she was also the deputy director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. The author of more than 200 scientific research articles, she was a former recipient of the prestigious Newton-Lacy-Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society. Baliunas argued that any observed global warming was the product of natural variations in the sun's thermal output. She had taken the normal 30-year cycle of sunspot activity, an indicator of the sun's output, and compared it to temperature readings on the Earth, and found a neat match. Those years that sunspot activity was highest were also those years that the Earth's temperature was warmest. Baliunas took her findings further and argued that the sun's activity was far more important to the global warming process than greenhouse gases, and therefore it was no use limiting the energy industries' emissions. The only problem with her findings was that although they worked well for the first three-quarters of the century, they did not account for the rapid global warming that surface measurements were finding increasingly prevalent after 1980.

At the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Dr. John Christy had the answer to that problem. A former Baptist minister in Kenya, Christy was a professor of atmospheric science at Alabama's Global Hydrology and Climate Center, where he tracked the data from U.S. weather satellites. For the past 20 years, the satellites, by measuring microwave radiation, had been keeping a record of the temperature of the Earth, and that record showed little, if any, warming. Most importantly, even if the surface temperature was warming slightly, the bulk of the atmosphere was not, apparently either giving credence to Balling's old argument that the surface temperature gauges were flawed, or helping Lindzen's view that feedback mechanisms would dampen any warming effect. Regardless, the mismatch between surface and satellite temperature data was seized by skeptics and used effectively to counter the idea that global warming was even possible, much less under way.

The Holy War

On Oct. 29, 1997, The Fraser Institute held a conference in Vancouver entitled "The Science and Politics of Global Warming." The keynote speaker was Steven West, Alberta's Minister of Energy, but the main speakers were Drs. Patrick Michaels, Robert Balling, Jr., Sallie Baliunas, and John Christy. Although Lindzen was not present, his colleague from the Cato Institute, Thomas Gale Moore, was. Moore, an economist from Stanford University, was known for his historical writings arguing that civilizations flourished when the climate was warmer, diminished when climates were cooler, and thus any global warming would be a boon to society.

This was by no means the first time these scientists had come together. Baliunas, Balling and Michaels serve as advisers to Sherwood Idso's Greening Earth Society and the four of them are advisers as well to the Wise Use Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). What was interesting about the Vancouver conference was that it gave a slight insight into the ties that bound these scientists together. The Fraser Institute, like its counterpart the Cato Institute in the United States and dozens of other similar institutions across the world, are the think tanks for competitive markets. It was not so much energy industry money, but their ideological belief in the free-market economy that had brought these men and women together, a belief so strong that it had become a part of their science.

Although Michaels had once argued that environmentalism was the most popular new religion since Marxism, what he did not state was that he was engaged in a religious war. This was a holy war against environmentalism, for environmentalism stands in the way of progress. As CFACT pronounces: "Already, we have the capability to greatly increase crop yields through agricultural chemicals, to harness the power of the atom for electricity, and to eliminate many life-threatening diseases through biotechnology. One can only wonder at the possibilities that lay ahead." In this view, it is science and scientists that create a brighter future for humanity, a future of prosperity, of plenty.

According to these global warming debunkers, environmentalists are in favor only of "slowing our economic growth and lowering our standards of living" in an attempt to solve the world's problems. For Michaels and the rest, the environmentalists don't understand that humans are a part of nature, and the most fundamental tenet of human nature is self-interest. For the Cato and Fraser Institutes and others like them, a free-market economy is the natural state of humans-it is perfect, it will create the perfect world, and it could not possibly cause a global "super-disaster."

It would be simplistic to assume that Michaels, Baliunas, Lindzen, and the rest were in it for the money, even though they may have accepted money from energy and free-market interests. In many ways they are engaged in a holy war against environmentalism, which they see as a religion, and which threatens their own.

In mid-1998 the American Petroleum Institute's plan to recruit a new cadre of scientists was exposed by the press and the plan was shelved. Later that year it was also determined that atmospheric drag had caused the U.S. weather satellites to dip closer to the Earth in their orbits, and thus skew their data collection. When the new orbits were integrated into the temperature analyses, they showed a definite warming trend, overturning Christy's work.

In June of 1999, the South Pacific islands of Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea in the nation of Vanuato disappeared beneath the ocean, the first victims of the global rise in sea levels.

Alexander Ewen, Purepecha, is director of New York's Solidarity Foundation.

The rainforest used to be a most fashionable environmental cause in Hollywood, but movie stars, along with much of America, have limited attention spans, and lately, the rainforest has fallen from favor. The destruction of the rainforest is as real a dilemma as it was ten years ago, only fewer people discuss it.

The rainforest has real implications and consequences for all of us. Forest destruction, particularly in the tropics, and the still-open question of whether or not it can be slowed or stopped, very likely will be more important to the ecological condition of the planet our children and grandchildren will inherit than anything else happening in the world today. The destruction is worse than you think, and is likely to affect you and your children. But the chances to stop it are also much better, in large part because of what people in the forest-indigenous peoples-and their allies in the environmental movement are doing.

Is it Just a Case of too Many People? An area of forest bigger than Belgium, Holland and Austria put together, or about 40 percent of California, was cut down and burned every year between 1980 and 1995, some 62,000 square miles per year. NASA's Landsat satellite photographs show that more than 200,000 square miles, an area about the size of France, has been cleared and burned in Brazil alone. All of this has happened since the 1970s.

Clearly, old-growth forest, or forest that has remained virtually untouched by industrial development, has a very different value in a world of 6 billion people. It does not look inexhaustible anymore. But global aggregates alone cannot be blamed for the devastation of old-growth forests.

A very large part of forest destruction is driven by multinational corporate developments many times at the expense of poor people (such as Indians and other minorities).

Across the tropics, energy and infrastructure development (pipelines, oil and gas extraction, roads and dams) and mining have taken a heavy toll. Guyanese Amerindians, the Ogoni minority of Nigeria and New Guinea tribal peoples all can testify that multinational investment in the tropics often has featured the dismal combination of environmental damage, compromised health for local people and human rights abuses. Major players in the global development race have used public money and (with the partial exception of U.S. export credit agencies) have done so with minimal or no environmental, freedom-of-information or human rights policies.

American consumers are linked directly to tropical deforestation by tropical timber exports. Each piece of mahogany furniture and every strip of Indonesian plywood are a part of the devastation. Both commodities are key causes of opening up the most pristine rainforests in the world to depredation, fires and invasion of indigenous people's lands. Tropical timber is a small item in U.S. wood and wood product consumption, but it has environmental and human consequences drastically out of proportion to its economic value.

It is, however, important to understand that most tropical timber is consumed in tropical countries-Brazil exports only 14 percent of the timber extracted from the Amazon. U.S. consumption of tropical timber could cease altogether with little or no appreciable effect on deforestation in most of the tropics, unless consumption patterns in Asia and the developing countries also change.

Americans use 10 times more paper products than developing countries, but the consumption of wood and paper is growing much faster in the developing world than in the United States.

Some scientists estimate that there are only 5.2 million square miles of old-growth forest (not just tropical, but temperate and boreal as well) left in the world. That 62,000 square-mile-a-year deforestation figure could be off by 10,000 either way, but if it does not radically slow down-and soon-no old-growth will be left in just two human lifetimes.

Eradicating the old-growth forests of the world would change the course of evolution on the planet in ways that we cannot imagine. It could also make global warming happen much faster than it already is, and in ways that could seriously impair the planet's ability to sustain life at the levels it presently does. Ecosystems, as Native people and, more recently, ecologists have long warned, are interconnected like a Chinese puzzle-take one piece out, and it all starts to come apart.

Fire and Rain

Forests do things for us we continue to ignore and discount, to our increasing loss. These things are sometimes called "ecosystem services" and they are in ever-shorter supply. China, not a world leader in green consciousness, last year banned all logging in its few remaining natural forests after disastrous flooding wreaked havoc along heavily populated rivers. In so doing, China hoped to save remnants of forest cover on the upper headwaters. But so much forest is already gone that it may not make much difference.

In February, numerous people died and hundreds of millions of dollars in property was destroyed in massive floods that shut down the industrial capital of South America, São Pãolo. Paving over every patch of green that could have absorbed run-off is one major reason. Some 70 percent of Brazil's population lives in the coastal Atlantic forest region. Their water supply, flood control, soil conservation and regional climate all ultimately depend on this forest, which is more than 90 percent gone. Experts now expect a third of the world's population to face serious water shortages in the next 25 years-the most and worst where there are the least old-growth forests.

The Amazon is a good example of how trees and water connect-about half of the rain that falls on the forest is produced by the forest itself, which breathes out water through its multi-billions of capillaries. Cut the forest down and there are fewer plants to hold the rain and cycle it back. More water runs off, carrying more topsoil, leaving less to make rain. The Amazon has about a fifth of the fresh water in the world, so it is not drying up-yet. Fruits of the Forest

Tropical forests hold between 50 and 90 percent of the living species on the planet. This margin of uncertainty accounts for what biologists do not know about the plants and animals in tropical forests. No more than one-tenth of the species alive are known to science (and maybe only one-one hundredth). Tropical forests have given us rubber, chocolate, vanilla, quinine, d-tubocurarine (which, made from the arrow poison curare, revolutionized modern surgery) and vincristine (extracted from Madagascar periwinkle, which greatly increased survival rates for childhood leukemia). Scientists have recently reported a new generation of painkillers under development, much more powerful than heroin, but non-addictive-based on frog venom traditionally used by Amazon Natives for shamanic purposes.

Diminished forests will mean diminished biotic resources. Biologists have calculated that the greatest wave of extinction since the dinosaurs disappeared 60 million years ago is happening now because of tropical forest loss.

Where There is Smoke. . .

The grand master of ecological disasters is global warming. It covers everything. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, some 2,000 climate scientists strong, has concluded that the Earth is already warmer than it was a century ago, and could become between one degree and 3.5 degrees Celsius warmer on average over the next century, largely because of the carbon dioxide and other gases we are pouring into the atmosphere. How quickly and how much warming occurs could make a big difference. Scientists are already documenting rising sea levels and melting glaciers, and looking at shifting ecological zones, more rapid evaporation and more extreme weather patterns.

Scientists point to carbon dioxide as the primary suspect in this unfolding story of ecological cataclysm. Specifically, carbon dioxide from fossil fuels in industrialized countries-with the United States first and foremost. But the burning of tropical forests runs a strong second-tropical forest destruction has contributed some 20 percent of the carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. The burning of the Brazilian Amazon as measured in the Landsat pictures alone contributes about 5 percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. Furthermore, recent research suggests that forests may act as carbon "sinks"-which take up and store more carbon than they give off in photosynthesis, and absorb even more in an increasingly carbon-rich atmosphere. Forests could be the determinant between low-end temperature increase, slow enough to adapt to without major social disruptions, and high-end change, faster than current social arrangements will easily bear.

The recent wildfires in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States have triggered an alarm. More fires mean even more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But the truly hair-raising prospect is that climate change may be making the forests drier and more fire-prone, while more fires hasten the change, making bigger fires more likely. The Woods Hole Research Center has found that for every acre cleared and burned in the Amazon, at least another acre burns in ground fires under the forest canopy and/or is degraded by selective logging (not picked up by the satellites). The frequency and extent of these ground fires skyrocket in El Niño events, which can then cause drought in some tropical forests-and such fires are likely to increase in frequency and intensity with global warming.

The fire that burned out of control in the Amazon forest for two months last year may look like kindling the next time around. Runaway industrial energy consumption plays out in everyone else's atmosphere, and so do the fires in the Amazon. The carbon dioxide emissions of Amazon fires may be close to 10 percent of the world total.

What Can Be Done?

In order to change the way things are headed in tropical forests, people and organizations in the United States have to work with allies that are there, who can do something about it and who have a real interest in changing the status quo.

Indigenous peoples in the Amazon have made major gains over the last decade. Leaders such as Davi Yanomami, Ailton Krenak, Jose Adalberto Macuxi, Euclides Macuxi and many others have built the alliances needed to move the Brazilian government to recognize 20 percent of the Amazon-an area twice the size of California-as indigenous territory. This is the largest expanse of tropical forest protected anywhere. Indians in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador have also won substantial gains in recognition of their land rights. While many areas are invaded and leaders sell timber and strike deals with miners, protecting indigenous land in the Amazon objectively halts deforestation.

Many around the world remember Chico Mendes, the rubber-tapper union leader from the Amazon who was murdered ten years ago. He led the movement of forest people who make a living collecting wild rubber latex against invading cattle ranchers. This was the first social movement to seek alliance with indigenous organizations in the region. Neither Indians nor rubber tappers look familiar to most people in North America, but they and their colleagues have made significant gains in the last ten years. This forest peoples movement and sectors aligned with it have elected two state governors in the Amazon-something almost no one believed possible a few years ago.

Chico Mendes was killed creating a reserve for rubber tappers to live in and manage sustainably-the first "extractive reserve." The idea for these reserves was drawn from indigenous reserves. The National Council of Rubber Tappers that he founded has created 21 of these reserves. A glance at the satellite images shows that Indian areas and extractive reserves actually stop deforestation on the Amazon frontier. The Council of Rubber Tappers is honoring the tenth anniversary of Mendes' assassination with a campaign for new extractive reserves-the council wants 10 percent of the Amazon as extractive reservesby 2002-and for policies to make these and the Indian lands sustainable and economically viable.

The rafost is not destroyed. It is shrinking but there is still time to do plenty about it. The Amazon is a forest almost half the size of the continental United States, well more than three-quarters intact. We have an historic opportunity to build strong constituencies for protection and sustainability before the natural ecosystem has been practically eliminated.

Sidebar--Accelerating Destruction

Probably the most significant new data on forests worldwide in the 1990s is the result of the work of the Woods Hole Research Institute team on fire in the Amazon (Nepstad et al. 1999). Woods Hole has demonstrated that more forest destruction and degradation is occurring in the Amazon than is seen by the satellite images.

For every acre of forest cleared and burned, at least another acre is either degraded by selective logging or damaged by runaway ground fires, or both. Current satellite images register clearing and burning, but not selective logging or ground fires. In El Niño years, this fire-induced damage is even greater. This research in fact predicted the unprecedented kind of fire that occurred in Roraima in 1998, when primary moist tropical forest burned as a result ofrunaway fire from deforestation. Previously, moist tropical forest has been fire-resistant, because of the ability of deep root systems to tap subsoil water reserves. The 1997?1998 El Niño, however, depleted the subsoil water enough so that the forest became flammable.

El Niño events may become more frequent as a result of global climate change (Nepstad et al. 1999). Exacerbating the problem, forest once burned ismuch more likely to burn again. As is the case with deforestation rates, the effects of logging and ground fires have been best studied in Brazil (even if much more research is needed there). But as massive fires in Indonesia and Mexico demonstrated, the phenomenon is far more widely distributed.

The prospect of climate change inducing drier conditions in tropical forests-leading to larger and more destructive fires, which in turn speeds climate change, provoking a vicious circle of drying, fires, more drying, greater conflagrations-all represents a qualitative change in the process of forest destruction. Previously, essentially all discussion of the issue has been grounded in the deforestation data-the area cleared and burned as registered in Landsat images. Fire itself, under conditions of climate change, may threaten much greater areas of forest much more quickly than deforestation per se.

In addition, local deforestation or burning reduces the leaf surface available for evapo-transpiration, or the cycling of rainwater through plants and trees back into the atmosphere. Since evapo-transpiration accounts for about half of the rain that falls on the Amazon forest, increasing deforestation could lead to reduced rainfall on a local level, further exacerbating a cycle of more drying and greater fires.

The most extensive exercise in analyzing the state of the world's forest cover is the world forest map compiled by the World Conservation Monitoring Center (WCMC 1997). By this analysis roughly half of the world's original primary forest is now gone-and a disproportionate share of this has been lost in the last three decades. The largest remaining areas of primary forest are expanses of boreal forest covering parts of Siberia and northern Canada, and the tropical forests of the Amazon and Guyana shield region. Most sourc ree that primary temperate forest has virtually disappeared (WCMC 1997; FAO 1997)

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