Of the 530,000 sq km of original Kalimantan woodland, just 300,000 remain. No fewer than 278 logging companies have concessions from the government to tear down the forest. An average of 8,630 sq km a year disappeared between 1982 and '93, walhi says, and the pace of cutting has only increased since then. President Suharto, who has ruled Indonesia with an iron hand since 1966, has been deaf to protests from both local and international ngos. Indeed, he personally abetted the forest's destruction in 1995 when he issued a presidential decree converting 14,000 sq km of Central Kalimantan into agricultural land. The scheme involves the relocation of 316,000 families to the area by 2002 as part of the government's controversial transmigration program.

MAKING A STAND
If Indonesia gives cause for ecological despair, on the Malaysian side of Borneo shines a ray of hope for rain-forest preservation. In the state of Sabah, whose disappearing forests once helped make Malaysia the world's premier exporter of tropical hardwoods, an experiment unique in Asia has begun.

Under the auspices of the government-run Sabah Foundation, once in charge of exploiting the trees, and the Dutch Electricity Generating Board, which is involved in forest regeneration around the world, large tracts of Sabah's woodlands are being replanted.

Since 1992 some 3,000 hectares have been seeded, and 85% of the saplings have survived. The current goal is to add 2,000 hectares by the end of this year. The replanted tracts adjoin one of only two conservation areas, totaling 828 sq km, left in Sabah. The Foundation and international environment groups are trying to find ways to preserve them. Their two answers: ecotourism, already in a preliminary stage of development, and a new technique called reduced-impact logging. Developed in Australia, ril is simply very careful logging, in which trees are harvested with a minimum of damage both to surrounding trees and to the rain forest's floor. It costs a good deal more and takes a third more time than conventional clear-cutting, but biologists expect areas where ril has taken place to return to a near-natural state in as little as 10 years, compared with 100 years for ordinary logging. NAMING NAMES In authoritarian countries, applying political pressure on behalf of the environment is generally a futile exercise. But in free-market democracies, both governments and companies have to worry about image, which is one reason activists convened from June through August in the forests of British Columbia. "If you can't turn around a country like Canada," says Christopher Hatch, a program director for the Rainforest Action Network, "how can you save the Amazon?"

Besides staging stunts like chaining themselves to a barge full of red cedar logs, as six protesters did in June, activists from ran, Greenpeace and other groups have kept up a constant barrage of press conferences, petitions and boycotts designed to embarrass logging companies and hurt their profits. Among the corporations singled out: Mitsubishi, Georgia-Pacific and the Canadian firms International Forest Products (interfor) and Western Forest Products. "These companies are dinosaurs," says Tzeporah Berman, a forests campaigner for Greenpeace, speaking of interfor and Western. "They've been unwilling to seriously address environmental concerns." The companies have some harsh words of their own, particularly for the in-your-face Greenpeace activists. "As far as I'm concerned we're the underdogs; they're the international corporation," says a beleaguered Fred Lowenberger, senior vice president at interfor. "The harder the industry tries to do better, the harder Greenpeace complains."

Mitsubishi, which is the object of a four-year-old ran campaign to boycott its cars, electronics and other products, points to positive responses. While denying that it is an ecological buccaneer, Mitsubishi has started a raft of pro-environment projects, including financing a Japanese forest-regeneration project in the Malaysian state of Sarawak that is intended to develop methods of helping tropical forests grow back more quickly.

No industry initiative is more closely watched than an agreement by Canadian timber giant MacMillan Bloedel last January to stop logging on British Columbia's Vancouver Island in Clayoquot Sound and sit down with the local Nuu-Chah-Nulth people to plan for sustainable management of the company's forest operations. When logging resumes in 1998 or 1999, says Dennis Fitzgerald, a MacMillan Bloedel spokesman, it will likely be at 10% of its previous level. "We've come up with a plan that's a very progressive illustration of sensitivity to environmental values," Fitzgerald says. But he adds that it might also shoot a bullet into the company's bottom line.

That is one of the reasons such agreements are too rare. "There's been a lot of words spoken over the last five years," says Don Henry, chair of the forest group of the World Wide Fund for Nature, "but the world's forests continue to fall at an ever-increasing rate." It's a trend that cannot continue indefinitely--because the world only has so much forest and little left to spare.

--Reported by John Colmey/Sabah, Joanna Downer/Washington, Jennifer Greenstein/New York, Michael Kepp/Rio de Janeiro, David Liebhold/Jakarta, Sebastian Moffett/Tokyo, Ursula Sautter/Bonn and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow