Groups such as Amsterdam-based Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco can claim recent victories in their quest to save forests, including Brazil's two-year suspension in the issuing of new licenses to harvest mahogany, an agreement by Chiquita Brands to stop turning virgin Latin American woodland into banana plantations and the sale by Japan's Mitsubishi of its majority interest in a British Columbia logging operation that was chewing up forest for disposable chopsticks. For every forest-saving decision, however, many trouble spots remain.

WOUNDED WOODS
Charles Darwin once waxed eloquent about the "primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man" that he encountered in his travels. The latest report on the condition of European forests, published in 1996 by the European Commission and the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe, would set Darwin to weeping. Of some 117,000 trees examined in 30 European countries in 1995, one-quarter were found to be losing their leaves, while 10% suffered from significant leaf discoloration. The commission's overall conclusion: every fourth tree in Europe's 1.6 million sq km of forest is sick or dying.

Among the chief culprits in the death of Europe's forests are pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from car exhaust and industrial emissions, which create acid rain. In western Europe many countries have met or are on the way to meeting new pollution standards set by the U.N. and the European Union, but so far that has made little difference. In the case of autos, says Hans Kopp, a forestry and environment expert at the Technical College in Gottingen, Germany, "although we've cut down on the emission quantity per car, the number of cars itself has grown. That's why the overall output of nitrogen oxides has increased too." Europe's many borders make consistent enforcement of environment rules difficult. While Germany, for example, has drastically reduced its release of sulfur dioxide, not all of its neighbors have followed suit. "The Czech Republic does nothing to stop the emission sources," complains Bernd Krebs, secretary of the Association for the Protection of the German Forest in Bonn. Some Europeans take heart from studies showing that forest cover has slightly increased in recent years. But that has just meant bigger forests of sick trees.

TROPICAL TRAGEDY
When the 1992 Earth Summit convened in Rio de Janeiro, the single most uplifting bit of news shared by the 12,000 participants was that the levelling of the Amazon had slowed. Satellite photos showed that the amount of Brazilian rain forest burned or cut every year dropped from an average of 21,000 sq km in the 1978-89 period to 11,130 sq km in 1990-91. Today those who would save the forest realize that the 1990-91 downturn was merely a pause. Analysts say that the decline in forest cutting was just a symptom of Brazil's hyperinflation malaise and that once the economy picked up, so did the rate of burning and chopping. From 1992 to 1994, the pace of deforestation in the Amazon increased 25%, to an average of 14,896 sq km a year, and scientists expect more recent photos, now being studied, to show the situation worsening.

In 1996 Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso responded boldly to the alarming numbers. Besides placing a moratorium on new licenses to cut highly endangered mahogany, Cardoso's environment agency, ibama, reduced export quotas on all types of timber by 50%, limited to 20% the proportion of his property an Amazon landowner could clear and prohibited further cutting on already degraded forest land.

Environmental groups have greeted Brazil's efforts with cautious optimism. "We're seeing an investment from the Brazilian government in environmental enforcement that we haven't seen before," says Steve Schwartzman, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington. "It could be some of the best news out of the Amazon in recent years."