Special

By EUGENE LINDEN

The missionary spirit has always hovered over the U.S.'s relations with far- off, backward lands. In the mid-19th century, New England ministers went abroad to save souls. A century later, foreign aid technocrats preached the virtues of hydroelectric dams and other megaprojects. Now a new generation of globe-trotting officials is spreading the gospel of environmentalism.

The crusade has encountered resistance and stirred resentment. Emil Salim, Indonesia's Minister of Environment, asks how Americans can berate tropical nations for deforestation when U.S. trade barriers discourage development of small industries that might provide an alternative source of exports.

Third World spokesmen may simply be trying to deflect the criticism they deserve, but they have a point: the U.S.'s actions tend to undermine its words. The U.S. is the biggest culprit in the buildup of gases that threaten to disrupt the global climate. Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies has concluded that by using existing technologies, such as more energy-efficient automobiles and manufacturing methods, the U.S. could reduce its CO2 output 40% over 40 years. That action alone would take more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere than a total shutdown of industry in all of Latin America and Africa.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has virtually withdrawn from the battle against overpopulation. Until the Reagan years, the U.S. championed the cause of family planning in poorer countries. Then antiabortion lobbyists persuaded the White House to halt U.S. participation in overseas programs that sanctioned abortion. Nowhere is the slogan pro-life more cruelly inappropriate than in the vast famine-stricken regions of the Third World, where birth and death rates are entwined in a vicious spiral. Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute notes that 40,000 babies die each day from malnutrition and disease, and that many of these deaths occur in areas where overpopulation has destroyed ecosystems vital for human survival.

Too often in developing nations the U.S. has inadvertently contributed to the environmental problem rather than the solution. In the early 1980s, the U.S. Agency for International Development helped build the Mahaweli Dams in Sri Lanka -- a multibillion-dollar construction typical of AID's past tendency to define development in terms of steel and concrete. The project has flooded forests and destroyed tea plantations. Washington's Environmental Policy Institute cites the dams as one of the 18 most destructive water projects on earth.

After many such debacles, AID has started assessing the environmental impact of its funding. Other Executive Branch agencies, such as the Treasury Department, which oversees U.S. contributions to international lending institutions like the World Bank, should follow suit.

The White House might empower one body -- most logically the President's Council on Environmental Quality -- to coordinate environmental policy and to apply tough standards throughout the Government. Partly because it has no such mechanism, the Bush Administration's record has often seemed to reflect the short-term interests of the business community rather than presidential promises to provide international leadership. For example, some African | nations were outraged last spring when the U.S. seemed to be dragging its feet on a convention limiting the dumping of toxic wastes on the shores of developing countries.

Some nations, notably West Germany, are considering a new bookkeeping system to take account of the environmental costs of economic production. Present measures of gross national product were developed in the 1930s, when natural resources seemed infinite. In the Philippines today, renegade coastal villagers harvest fish by dynamiting tropical reefs. Under current accounting methods, this practice shows up as contributing to the GNP, with no adjustment for the depletion of the fisheries that results from the destruction of the reefs.

That kind of shortsightedness, writ large, afflicts the entire globe. This year the U.N. Statistical Commission will undertake a periodic 20-year review of the way it monitors the world economy. The World Resources Institute, a Washington-based think tank, is urging the U.S. to press the commission to adopt a new system to take account of activities that harm the environment and thus to encourage policies that will save it. The opportunity will not arise again until the year 2010. By then, according to nature's own accounting, mankind may be environmentally bankrupt.