By DAVID LIEBHOLD Jakarta

To hear Emmy Hafild describe it, her childhood was a kind of Jungle Book experience. Raised in rural Sumatra, the daughter of a plantation executive, she played in an abandoned rubber tract grown wild again. "You could still see tigers, elephants, panthers," she recalls. "I was an outdoor child."

But in 1968, when Hafild was 10, the enchanting forest was plowed into a golf course--a trauma that eventually turned her into one of Asia's gutsiest environmentalists. She has taken on an American mining giant and the regime of former President Suharto. Mindful of the risks, she made arrangements for friends abroad to care for her young daughter in the event of her arrest. All this to help Indonesia from going the way of her former playground. "Even now," says Hafild, 40, "I still miss that forest."

After earning a degree in agronomy from Bogor Agricultural University in 1982, Hafild joined the Green Indonesia Foundation and by 1985 had become active in the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (known by its Indonesian acronym WALHI), a fledgling environmental group that has since mushroomed into a coordinating center for 368 nongovernmental organizations. Hafild now runs it. A three-year master's degree course in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin gave her new contacts around the world and exposure to the U.S. political system. "That period made me more political," she says, "and I was more outspoken in criticizing Suharto." Indeed, when WALHI led a court action against Suharto in 1994 for transferring $183 million in reforestation funds to an airplane project headed by current President B.J. Habibie, Hafild was one of the few people acting publicly against the regime. "Suharto couldn't do anything to us because we did it through the courts," she recalls, adjusting her steel-rimmed glasses. "But he was very angry." Two years later, Suharto transferred another $102 million of reforestation funds to a pulp and paper company owned by one of his associates. WALHI filed another lawsuit. In that same year Hafild's group was blamed for the riots and kidnappings in the Irian Jaya mining concession of the U.S. firm Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. Hafild was expecting the military to toss her into jail but, she says, the generals backed down when she threatened to go public with embarrassing revelations of their intelligence operations in the area.

With Suharto gone and Hafild nursing a newborn second child, she should feel triumphant. The opposite is true: to her, Indonesia's current political and economic chaos is more environmentally threatening. "Natural resources are all we have now," she says. "Palm oil is big. There will be big new plantations." In the Indonesian context, that presages huge forest fires to clear the land, a cloud of smoke across Asia, wholesale environmental degradation. "I am very pessimistic," she says, "but we have to do something. We have to stop the destruction." As Suharto learned, stopping Hafild is no easy task.

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