Endangered Species No, not owls or elephants. Humans who fight to save the planet are putting their lives on the line.

By Anastasia Toufexis

FOR MOST PEOPLE INTERESTED IN protecting the environment, the costs of activism are measured by a little time and a little money. Attend an Earth Day rally, write a check, recycle the trash -- that's about all it takes. But for some of the most determined defenders, the commitment -- and the costs -- can be much higher. Around the world, more and more ecoactivists are paying with pain and peril, and sometimes their lives.

Chico Mendes, the Brazilian organizer who was assassinated in 1988 by ranchers for trying to preserve the Amazon forests for small-scale rubber tappers, remains the best known of the ecomartyrs, but his case is far from unique. In many countries, crusaders bring down the wrath of private interest groups, government agencies and even fellow citizens, and endure abuse ranging from intimidation and arrests to beatings and murder. "It's not at all unusual to have someone threatened or harassed in some way," says Pat Costner, director of toxics research for Greenpeace U.S.A. "It happens more often than not."

Costner, who testifies at public hearings on the hazards of waste incinerators, became a target herself last year. She returned home one night and discovered that her home and office near Eureka Springs, Ark., had burned to the ground. Lost in the fire were valuable reference materials and reports. At first police ignored her request for an investigation; they got moving after arson detectives hired by Greenpeace found an empty fuel can in her burned-out living room. But no one has been charged in the case.

Stephanie McGuire has a more harrowing tale. The Florida activist has threatened to sue Procter & Gamble, charging that a company pulp mill has polluted the water around the town of Perry. Two weeks ago, she was attacked at her remote fishing camp by three men who beat her and burned her with a cigar. The men cut her on the cheek and chest and poured water from the contaminated river on the wounds, taunting her, she says, with the words "This is what you get for trying to make us lose our jobs." P&G denies any connection with the assault but has offered a $5,000 reward for the apprehension of McGuire's attackers.

Judi Bari, a member of the radical group Earth First!, is still hurting from the explosion in 1990 of a pipe bomb in her Subaru station wagon. The Oakland blast left her with a paralyzed right foot and a dislocated spine. Earth First! is known for tactics that sometimes endanger the safety of loggers, though Bari insists that she is against violence. Authorities arrested her on suspicion that she knowingly transported the bomb, but no charges were brought. Bari claims that officials have failed to investigate the case seriously, and has filed a civil rights suit against the Oakland police and the fbi.

For Canada's Colleen McCrory, the torment has been mostly emotional and financial. In her two decades of crusading against the clear-cutting of forests in British Columbia, she has endured a smear campaign by the pro- logging newsletter Red Neck News, the beating of a friend and the vilifying of her three children at school. A high school dropout and divorced mother, McCrory supported her family on income from a small clothing store she ran in her hometown of New Denver, which sits in the shadows of the Valhalla mountains, part of a spectacular range thickly forested by ancient trees. A three-year boycott organized by logging advocates forced her out of business in 1985 and deep into debt. Says McCrory, who founded Canada's Future Forests Alliance, which calls for the setting aside of 12% of the land as wilderness: "The scars remain on us, and in the town."

Persecution of activists appears to be worst in developing countries, where environmentalism has become entwined with the struggle to ensure basic rights for the underprivileged and disenfranchised. There is new recognition that the livelihood of millions of native people and other rural populations depends on the protection of their environment. In Malaysia, logging destroys the hunting and fishing of the indigenous peoples, including the Penan and Kelabit. In Brazil, ranchers, loggers and gold miners menace Amazon tribes. In India, the huge dams and power plants that the government has favored to foster industrial growth have displaced millions of peasants. The issue, says Sunderlal Bahuguna, who is fighting to halt construction of India's Tehri dam project, is "not development vs. environment. It is extinction vs. survival."

Since the environmental battle has economic and social dimensions, ecoactivists have forged natural alliances with political groups such as trade unions, women's organizations and civil liberties proponents. Kenya's Wangari Maathai, creator of the Green Belt movement, which has planted 10 million trees worldwide, has helped found the new Forum for the Restoration of Democracy, a group opposed to the regime of President Daniel arap Moi. She is now leading a hunger strike by mothers who are fasting for the release of political prisoners.

Ecoactivists' bolder profile has led to crackdowns by governments and their supporters, who see the agitation as a major challenge to their power and plans. Last month the chief minister in Sarawak, a Malaysian state, labeled logging opponents "traitors," a charge increasingly leveled at protesters. Another name commonly given them is "ecoterrorists."

That may be a fair description of some activists who have crossed the line between agitation and lawlessness. In the U.S., for instance, members of the radical Earth First! allegedly poured sand in bulldozer gas tanks and drilled dangerous metal spikes into trees marked for chopping. But most environmental protesters endorse more traditional, nonviolent tactics. Activists maintain that they violate laws as a last resort and usually only when the law has been misused or formulated to crush opposition.

Whatever their tactics, the crusaders often find themselves in serious trouble. Some examples:

-- Kenya's Maathai is facing trial on charges of publishing "a false rumor which is likely to alarm the public," namely that the Moi government was planning to hand over power to the military. Last month, during a protest by fasting mothers of political prisoners, she was tear-gassed and clubbed unconscious by police. In January more than 100 police officers swarmed her house in Nairobi and arrested her. A night in jail with no mattress or blankets so aggravated her rheumatism that she was hospitalized for several days after her release.

A winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize last year, Maathai interweaves her new political activities with her old fight to preserve Kenya's land. Her opposition to a plan by the ruling party and the late Robert Maxwell to build a 62-story office building on the site of Nairobi's Uhuru Park frightened away other foreign investors and scuttled the project. She also led the outcry against destruction of 20 hectares (50 acres) of forest on Nairobi's outskirts so that roses could be grown for export. Maathai countered official claims that the site contained no indigenous trees with a photograph of herself in the cleared forest, clinging to the stump of a recently felled giant hardwood.

-- Malaysia's Anderson Mutang, founder of the Sarawak Indigenous People's Alliance, is scheduled to go on trial in September for operating an illegal organization. In the past six years, Mutang, a native Kelabit who grew up in Sarawak's forests, has directed six blockades of logging roads. Arrested in February, he was released on bail after four weeks, including 10 days in solitary confinement in a windowless room. During his imprisonment, he says, three pairs of police officers questioned him for seven or eight hours a day, sometimes until 4 a.m. His interrogators, who threatened him with torture, demanded the names of associates and explanations of notes in his confiscated files.

-- India's Medha Patkar is a passionate critic of big dam projects, especially the one scheduled for the Narmada Valley, which will submerge 245 villages and uproot 100,000 people. Taking a leaf from Mahatma Gandhi's book, she has organized hunger strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins, roadblocks and rallies. A measure of her success: the World Bank has ordered an independent review of the environmental impact of the Narmada dam and plans for resettling villagers, prompting foreign investors to delay releasing fresh funds.

For her protests, Patkar has been beaten, arrested and banned from several villages. The former Bombay social worker faces 10 or so trials on offenses ranging from arson to kidnapping government officials. Patkar claims that the charges are trumped up and that she advocates only nonviolent civil disobedience.

-- In Brazil, dozens of activists, including rural labor leaders, native Indians and priests, have been beaten and shot, allegedly by the hirelings of ranchers, logging companies, gold miners and other interests. On top of all this, activists contend, the justice system serves only the interests of the rich and powerful. In February a state appeals court in Acre overturned -- on grounds of insufficient evidence -- the conviction of rancher Darly Alves da Silva for his participation in the Chico Mendes murder and ordered a retrial. "The conviction was the first time an executor of a crime against an activist was brought to justice," says Sueli Bellato, one of the prosecuting attorneys in the Mendes case. "The reversal is an incentive to continue the killing."

Many activists contend that they are on freely circulating "hit lists." Gumercindo Rodrigues, an adviser to Mendes' National Council of Rubber Tappers, is recovering from two gunshot wounds he suffered last September. Gumercindo was shot on a main street in Rio Branco, the Acre state capital. One shot in the back at point-blank range came from a police officer. Press accounts have also implicated Camilo Yunes Junior, a lumber baron, in the shooting. Yunes denies any involvement. No charges have been filed in what the courts have dismissed as a crime of passion because Gumercindo was involved with the timber merchant's wife. Gumercindo points out that the woman had been separated from her husband for several months.

In another incident last September, Antonio Batista de Macedo, who has been organizing Indians and rural workers into cooperatives and trade unions in western Acre, escaped death only when an assassin's gun failed to fire. Last December, Joao Bosco dos Santos Freire, who had been mobilizing rubber tappers in Tarauaca, Acre, was ambushed and killed, allegedly by the son of a landowner, who has not been charged. In January the president of the Tarauaca rural workers union was almost killed when two gunmen invaded his home.

Is there a way to prevent abuses? The best method may be to arouse global indignation. To that end, Amnesty International publishes regular notices of outrages against environmental activists. "The only kind of protection that these people have is for their enemies to be made aware that if they commit a crime, there will be a big repercussion that will embarrass the government," observes Marcio Santilli, executive secretary of the Nucleus for Indigenous Rights in Brasilia. U.S. Senator Albert Gore this month introduced a congressional resolution that calls on the U.S. government to apply pressure on Malaysia to uphold the human rights of indigenous peoples. New Zealand has gone further: it has said it will stop importing tropical woods from places where there is uncontrolled logging.

"We feel we have the international community with us," says Malaysia's Mutang. That is some small comfort when he is alone in a dark cell. But the real satisfaction will come when his efforts -- and those of hundreds of courageous men and women like him -- begin to turn back the forces destroying earth's irreplaceable natural resources.

With reporting by Hannah Bloch/New York, Ian McCluskey/Rio de Janeiro and Anita Pratap/New Delhi