THE HOT ISSUE

It's the Great Awakening. Hollywood gets ready for the nineties— by turning various shades of green

MICHAEL SHNAYERSON

Environment

Mary Allegretti, who lives in Brazil, can tell you exactly when the environment became a hot issue in Hollywood. She was the one who took the long-distance call that February evening from British documentary-film maker Adrian Cowell. Who would do the Mendes story? he wanted to know.

Chico Mendes, the Brazilian activist whose peaceful campaign to preserve the rain forest for his fellow rubber tappers had recently resulted in his brutal assassination, was already earning in death the world attention for his cause that it had never received during his life. Cowell had been well into the filming of a documentary on Mendes when the killing occurred; it was his thought now that a feature film be made—not by himself but by Chris Menges, the British cinematographer whose credits include The Mission.

Cowell and Menges had close ties with independent producer David Puttnam.

Puttnam was very, very interested, Cowell stressed; this could mean big money and even more publicity for the rubber tappers' cause.

Allegretti, an anthropologist whose Amazon research had led to her pivotal role in the movement, was more concerned with keeping the tappers united in the wake of Mendes's death than with re-creating the tragedy. But even as she began helping Mendes's widow, Ilza, shape a foundation to carry on his work, the other calls began to come in. Ted Turner. Peter Guber and Jon Peters. Robert Redford. A Brazilian group. An Australian group. William Shatner.

Allegretti passed the callers on to Ilza Mendes. The dark-haired young woman came to Washington to hear the rich American producers, one after another, make their proposals. "Thank you,'' she told them, "but I am not here to decide. I will bring home all your offers.''

Then Ilza Mendes flew back to Brazil, and the producers flew back to London and Los Angeles and Atlanta, and for week after week nothing happened at all, which to any devotee of Hollywood blood sports was the most fascinating twist in the tale. Nearly a dozen powerful moviemakers, their eagerness sharpened by fierce competition, waited on a ragtag group of rubber tappers in the Brazilian jungle to make up their minds. You could feel the temperature rise: Suddenly Chico Mendes was the most sought-after property in town. The struggle to save the Brazilian rain forest had gone from partisan cause to American pop culture. The environment was in.

Were mainstream tastemakers flocking to the Mendes story "out of the usual cynicism—betting, say, that rain-forest martyrs would be next year's equivalent of buddy adventure comedies? Had the day of the locusts finally arrived? At least three of the bidders were longtime environmentalists: Redford, Puttnam, and Turner. And if the others were newer converts, they seemed no less sincere. "This is a fairly hard-bitten community," says Alan U. Schwartz, the entertainment lawyer who eventually stepped in to represent the Chico Mendes Foundation on a pro bono basis, "and I can't remember people ever expressing such concern." Indeed, the Mendes bidding seemed only the most visible sign of an extraordinary sea change in the entertainment industry both here and abroad: a Great Awakening at last to ecological woes, and a grim determination to use the power of movies, television, and the press to make the nineties the decade of the environment.

The Green Machine

HARDY PERENNIALS

ROBERT REDFORD JANE FONDA BARBRA STREISAND JOHN DENVER

GRASS ROOTS

GOLDIE HAWN CHEVY CHASE ALI MACGRAW ROSANNA ARQUETTE WHOOPI GOLDBERG JEFF BRIDGES

NEW BUDS

MERYL STREEP MEG RYAN GLENN CLOSE BELINDA CARLISLE MICHAEL LANDON SANDRA BERNHARD MEL GIBSON FRANK WELLS DAWN STEEL

GREEN THUMBS

NORMAN AND LYN LEAR BARRY DILLER MICHAEL AND JANE EISNER TED AND SUSIE FIELD ALAN AND CINDY HORN TERRY AND JANE SEMEL BRANDON AND LILLY TARTIKOFF GRANT TINKER AND MELANIE BURKE JACK AND MARY VALENTI

TREE HUGGERS

GREGORY PECK MARLON BRANDO JACK NICHOLSON DON HENLEY WARREN BEATTY CHARLTON HESTON

GREAT VINES

RON HOWARD AND BRYAN GRAZER BARRY HIRSCH AND JAKE BLOOM QUINCY JONES DENNIS WEAVER

SPADEWORKERS

JOSH BARAN PATRICK LIPPERT PAT KINGSLEY PATRICIA MEDAVOY DANNY GOLDBERG STEPHEN RIVERS

HEAVYWEIGHT HYBRID

TED TURNER

GLOBAL GARDENERS

PRIME MINISTER GRO BRUNTLAND OF NORWAY PRINCE CHARLES DAVID PUTTNAM CHRIS MENGES

SAPLINGS

ALLY SHEEDY SARAH JESSICA PARKER ROBERT DOWNEY JR. JUDD NELSON REBECCA DEMORNAY MICHAEL J. FOX AND TRACY POLLAN ROB LOWE

WATER WHEELS

TED AND CASEY DANSON

ALL OVER THE PLOT

MORGAN FAIRCHILD ED BEGLEY JR. ROBERT WALDEN

RAIN-FOREST ROOTERS

STING

KENNY SCHARF MADONNA MARIE-PIERRE ASTIER THE GRATEFUL DEAD HERBIE HANCOCK ELTON JOHN

WISE OAKS

JEREMY RIFKIND JOHN ADAMS LESTER BROWN NOEL BROWN

The horrors of last summer, of course, had galvanized the world. As medical waste washed up on American beaches and mysterious fish deaths plagued Europe—amid the killing drought that seemed to confirm the reality of the greenhouse effect—the seriousness of our planet's plight became suddenly, appallingly clear. And what dawned in the minds of even the most casual of newspaper readers was the interrelatedness of all the crises. Syringes floating in the surf meant more than water pollution; they traced back to the problems of urban waste and the growing unfeasibility of ocean dumping. Irreplaceable trees cut in the Brazilian rain forest resulted not only in desertification but in the loss of a unique resource to absorb industry-produced carbon dioxide and generate global oxygen, thus contributing to ozone depletion and global warming. The ensuing Valdez oil spill in Alaska didn't just despoil Prince William Sound, it ruined a pristine ecosystem, resulting in the death of a wide variety of fish and game. Every chain of events led back to the same origins. Overpopulation. Ignorance. And greed.

The media tapped into the new concern: newsweekly cover stories proliferated; the networks stepped up their news coverage of the environment. And Hollywood, the great finger on America's pulse, began at last to twitch. All over L.A., once selfish and cynical potentates went through three stages of personal growth. First: a sudden sense of impending doom, accompanied by the realization that even switching from an aerosol deodorant to a roll-on may not be enough to save the world. Second: a desperate determination to learn the facts, fast, so as not to announce oneself as an environmentalist, only to be stumped by a question like "What's acid rain, really?" And third: an overwhelming desire to trade terrifying statistics at cocktail parties like so many baseball cards.

It's all admirable and important, if just occasionally overeamest. And certainly it makes sense that Hollywood's communicators are the most zealous of the new environmentalists—suddenly aware of the power they wield to beam ecological realities to the largest possible audiences in the critical next decade. To anyone remotely aware of the Hollywood charity circuit, it makes perfect sense, too, that Norman Lear and his second wife, Lyn, a psychotherapist, have become L.A.'s new lord and lady of environmental activism.

Ever since All in the Family's extraordinary success at blending sitcom humor with social commentary, Lear has been intrigued by the power of television to change attitudes. In the last four years, after selling his 50 percent share in Embassy Communications to Coca-Cola for $220 million, Lear started the liberal lobbying group People for the American Way. He also created Act III, a communications company which owns movie theaters and broadcast stations, produces movies, and has just plunged back into television programming. With equal fervor, both Lears have started up EMAthe Environmental Media Association.

Were mainstream tastemakers betting that rain-forest martyrs would be next year's equivalent of buddy adventure comedies?

The Lears live in Brentwood, in a big white comer house that looks more New England than L.A. It's the same home Lear shared with his first wife, of twenty-five years, Frances—founder of the New York-based magazine that bears the family name. Inside, all is tasteful and rather traditional, with comfortable sofas and familiar art on the walls—a Steinberg "map" of Los Angeles, a Warhol portrait of Mao—and sliding glass doors that offer a view of the pool.

On this early evening, a meeting is just concluding in the living room—a meeting typical of the Lears' new environmental commitment. Lyn, blonde, gracious, and pragmatic, seems to guide the proceedings. Lear himself sits back, a sort of Yoda-like figure, but when he tosses out an idea, the others defer. Among those present tonight is Denis Hayes, a serious, lanky lawyer and activist in his forties who is chairman of the burgeoning Earth Day 1990. The Lears have just agreed to join his board, one that already spans the cultural gamut from the Reverend Jesse Jackson to Laurence Rockefeller II. They will certainly be able to expand the Earth Day network further; they may also be able to help organize international television coverage. "Have you approached the South American stations?" Lear offers. "If you had their cooperation, and if that kind of symbol were created in every country..."

Nearly twenty years ago, Hayes coordinated the first Earth Day, an event that helped inspire Congress to write the Clean Air Act and create the Environmental Protection Agency. The problems seemed simpler then—water and air pollution—and the participants more hippie-ish. In Hollywood, as in much of America, the effort came and went with the sparkle of a fad. A few actors became the community's resident environmentalists. Eddie Albert spoke out strongly against pesticides. Ed Begley Jr. earned a reputation for traveling ten miles with his cans and bottles to the city's one recycling plant—by bicycle, so as not to cause the trip's worth of air pollution by car. And Morgan Fairchild attended so many marches and meetings that even friends began asking if there was anything she didn't show up for. To most, however, the environment meant smog, and any prolonged discussion of smog raised the inconceivable notion of some sort of change in L.A.'s automobile life-style: smaller limousines, perhaps; carpooling; or, perish the thought, mass transportation.

A turning point came in 1986, with the passage of Proposition 65, a bill requiring the state to publish a list of 250 chemicals known to cause cancer. To help push the bill through, Jane Fonda led a bus caravan of stars up and down the state, publicizing the issue. Soon after, a plucky band of locals began what would emerge as the area's strongest environmental group, Heal the Bay, to curb the dumping of raw sewage and toxic waste. As L.A. traffic worsened and residents began muttering about a deterioration of life-style in the city, momentum gathered last fall for a sweeping revision of California's Air Quality Management Plan, calling for sharp reductions in auto and industrial emissions by the year 2000.

The Great Awakening, though, traces more directly to a series of dinners last December, when social philosopher and veteran environmentalist Jeremy Rifkind flew out for a three-day flurry of meetings with Hollywood notables. The trip was financed in part by the Barbra Streisand Foundation, which last year dispensed $1 million in grants, most to grass-roots environmental projects. (Along with Redford and singer John Denver, Streisand has come to be one of Hollywood's more important environmental activists.) Rifkind spoke one night at actress Meg Ryan's house, to a youthful group including Robert Downey Jr., Judd Nelson, Rebecca DeMornay, Michael J. Fox, and Tracy Pollan. Director Larry Kasdan and his wife, Meg, hosted the next evening, attended by roughly a hundred industry figures. The Lears hosted the third night, to which yet another hundred came. "Jeremy couldn't even recognize the stars," says Bonnie Reiss, who orchestrated the whistle-stop tour. "But he knew how to talk to them: out of about three hundred people who heard him those days, two hundred signed on to help."

Reiss formed the first group to grow out of the Rifkind talks: the Earth Communications Office, or ECO. An entertainment lawyer and co-founder of the Hollywood Women's Political Committee, she persuaded many of the two hundred, among them Quincy Jones, Tom Cruise, and Dennis Weaver, to make a $5,000 annual commitment. The goal, as Reiss puts it, is to get environmental information "shot out to the globe" in as many ways as possible. One line of attack is celebrity public-service announcements on television; Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson have done the first from the set of Bird on the Wire. More broadly, Reiss hopes to recruit producers, directors, and writers to weave environmental messages into everything from TV movies to Saturdaymorning cartoons.

Even in the Great Awakening, however, studio heads prefer not to march with the rank and file. And so it was that the Lears decided to start a group of their own, to target Hollywood's top echelons. EMA coalesced with a ladies' lunch of concerned new mothers, among them Cindy Horn, wife of Castle Rock Entertainment's Alan Horn {When Harry Met Sally...); Susie Field, wife of Interscope's Ted Field {Three Men and a Baby); and hostess Lyn Lear. The Homs, who live in Bel-Air, are what one friend calls "classic new L.A. environmentalists." Last year they staged a fund-raiser that boosted Heal the Bay's budget by $50,000; more recently, they hosted a gathering for William K. Reilly, Bush's new head of the E.P.A. What a visitor notes immediately is how rooted the Homs' environmentalism is in their life-styles. Forty-six-year-old Alan appears in jogging clothes, fiercely fit. Cindy, a former model, is at thirty-two not only strikingly beautiful but an almost blinding vision of health, with a radiant complexion and picture-perfect teeth. It's hardly surprising to learn that the Homs eat little but grains and speak seriously of not letting their baby outside for fear that the air may do it harm.

EMA'S official debut took place in April with an extraordinary gathering of Hollywood muscle at the Lear compound. Out of the Rolls-Royces and stretch limousines that filled die driveway came Disney chairman Michael Eisner and his wife, Jane; CAA's Michael Ovitz and wife Judy; Warner Bros.' Terry and Jane Semel; the Fields and Homs; NBC's Brandon Tartikoff; Grant Tinker; Barbra Streisand; Marvin Davis; and many more. After introductory remarks from Eisner, the gathering heard from Noel Brown, North American director of the United Nations Environment Programme, who made the point that has since become a mantra for the Great Awakening: only ten years may remain before the global environmental crisis becomes irreversible.

Given the power assembled in that room, there seems little doubt that a wide cross section of television programs this fall will contain environmental themes or pointers. To help scriptwriters and directors, EMA is establishing a research library in downtown L.A. Andy Spahn, EMA'S young director, has been inundated with r6sum6s from production executives, lawyers, and others who want either to help part-time or to chuck their high-powered jobs altogether for an active role on the environmental front. Meanwhile, the Lears are off to Europe to establish working ties with David Puttnam and fellow English environmentalists, Norway's environmentminded prime minister, Gro Brundtland, and others. Says Denis Hayes hopefully, "If you should stumble into an audience with Prince Charles..."

Hayes leaves, but others soon will arrive chez Lear: a lunch one day for John Adams of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a lunch another day for Senator A1 Gore, who along with Colorado's Tim Wirth has seized political leadership on the environment. To all, the big white comer house has become an essential stop on the environmental circuit, and the Lears have become den mother and dad. But not leaders, Lear admonishes. "We're not leading," he says. "Television follows. It's really just reflecting what's already out there. But because it's so bloody powerful it seems to take the initiative—and that's still a major job."

While the Lears are mounting a broad-based movement, others find it easier to throw their weight behind a single cause. In the months since Chico Mendes's death, the Brazilian rain forest has become that cause, not only for Hollywood but for the whole matrix of figures on both coasts who make up the entertainment industry.

On the West Coast, three new rainforest fund-raising groups have sprung up; one, the Rainforest Action Network, has worked with the Grateful Dead to raise $90,000. In New York, where at least two other rain-forest groups have sprouted, Madonna headlined a benefit evening, "Don't Bungle the Jungle!," which raised $500,000 for research. At the Wetlands Preserve, a downtown club, born-again ecologists browse through rain-forest literature as they listen to sixties rock 'n' roll. In Vermont, Ben & Jerry's is busy concocting Rainforest Crunch, an ice-cream flavor that uses Brazil nuts imported from the source.

And then, off on a piece of higher ground all his own, is the British rock star Sting.

Three years ago, on the Amnesty International "Conspiracy of Hope" tour, Sting was led into the Amazon jungle and introduced to Kayapo chief Raoni, who asked bluntly for his help. The Kayapos' Texas-size domain lies almost at the heart of Brazil, but the ranchers' slash-artd-burn border had advanced from the southeast at an alarming pace; it was as if some great hand were peeling off the country's skin in one long strip, and would soon rip away the Kayapos' world. Sting and his longtime companion, actress Trudie Styler, agreed to embark on a global tour to raise $3.5 million for the establishment of a vast nature preserve encasing the Kayapos' land.

Famous as he is, Sting has invariably been upstaged on this peculiar press tour by the Kayapos who flank him. They wear the ceremonial garb and feathered headdresses of their endangered Megkronotis tribe; Chief Raoni sports a disk the size of a saucer that distends his lower lip. Sting and his entourage have met Prince Charles; they've met the pope. Less clear is how much money will come from the hubbub. At New York's Explorers Club, they found an eager audience that included Mike Nichols, Diane Sawyer, and Candice Bergen, but no effort was made to reap checks, because Fundagao Mata Virgem, as the campaign is formally known, didn't yet have the proper tax forms. In Los Angeles now, delivering the same speeches at three back-to-back press conferences, the group is visibly tired, and the whole exercise seems momentarily futile. "This has been the most exhausting tour of my life," Sting says to a Saturdaymorning crowd in a museum auditorium. "This is much harder than rock 'n' roll."

Delivering his speech with passion each time and patiently sitting through the others, Sting appears only more remarkable as the days unfold—a bright, articulate fellow who seems in this setting not so much a musician as the schoolteacher he used to be. "It's up to us to try and understand the bigger picture, why the Brazilians are forced into doing this," he says of the rain-forest burning to his class for the day. "We have to accept that we are part of the problem: our governments, and our multinational companies, and our banks. It might surprise some of you to know that Brazil has a healthy economy. It exports more than it imports. What cripples Brazil every year are repayments to the World Bank: sometimes $14 to $17 billion a year. And so, the economy cannot support the people in the cities, and the people move out, and the countryside gets destroyed."

It makes perfect sense that Norman and Lyn Lear have become LA's new lord and lady of environmental activism.

Sting's students are willing, but some have their own agendas. Like any new bandwagon, the rain-forest issue has drawn its share of flakes and opportunists. Among the minglers in this morning's audience are a jewelry designer who presents Sting with a "rain-forest ring," and a tall South American woman in a skintight white sailor suit who announces she's a "potential sci-fi writer" with a story she wants Sting to be involved in. Just say "rain forest," and you get to meet the stars. So determined is one fringe character to elbow her way into the more exclusive benefit lunch that day at 72 Market Street that Josh Baran, the liberal-minded P.R. heavy who's handling the arrangements pro bono, has had to tell her she'll be arrested if she tries to get in.

The lunch illustrates the progress this issue has made in the Hollywood community—and the problems of pushing it further. Many of those invited are in Cannes for the film festival; others may just not have made the effort to pull this invitation from their piles of benefit requests. Elton John shows up, alighting from a long white limousine like a little wood sprite. And Herbie Hancock appears, and Morgan Fairchild, and, halfway through the lunch, a blue-T-shirted Kris Kristofferson. But while the restaurant fills, an undercurrent of disappointment seeps through.

Like any new bandwagon, the rain-forest issue has drawn its share of flakes and opportunists.

After the usual speeches, Sting taps Elton John to serve as auctioneer for a number of Kayapo headdresses and ceremonial bracelets and belts. Wisecracking, at ease, Elton John coaxes up the bidding like a veteran gavel banger. The first headdress he himself buys, for $4,500. "Oh come on, this is just a ride in a Porsche for you lot," he exclaims. But he ends the auction in an unexpected way. "I don't have any children," he says, "and I don't imagine I ever will. But I do have godchildren, and I care about their future." He pauses and surveys the crowd. "And I think it's appalling that of all the people who were invited to this lunch today so few actually came. We could have raised the entire three and a half million dollars right here."

Raising the money is only the first challenge, however. Until recently, the Brazilian government spumed all offers of hands-on help on the rain-forest problem from foreign groups, fearing "internationalization" of the Amazon. At every opportunity, Sting points out that his project is a Brazilian initiative, and that the money will be meted out by its Brazilian board. "If we upset the wrong people, they could just shut the door in our faces," he admits, "as they've done to virtually every other organization— Friends of the Earth, Survival International, Culture International. They're all on the outside looking in."

One good-news dividend from the tour: Sting and Elton John have been invited to perform at an EMA-sponsored benefit for Fundagao Mata Virgem, on November 6 at Ted and Susie Field's house. Week by week, event by event, the network is growing.

To New Yorkers struggling against drug violence and the problems of homelessness, racism, AIDS, and broken car windows, the environment as an issue has seemed at times.. .remote. But the awareness that global warming may actually eclipse these others is growing—thanks in some small part to Kenny Scharf.

Scharf, whose playful paintings have outlived the eighties art boom, spent six months of last winter and spring—"nine to nine every day," he says, as if he still can't believe it—cajoling other artists and musicians into helping him pull off a major rain-forest benefit in late May. Much of the work was done from his home on the west bank of the Hudson Valley, a Victorian Gothic house designed by Calvert Vaux that overlooks the river. On this spring morning, a week before the benefit, old cars clutter the driveway. Inside, Scharf s paintings adorn the walls of big drafty rooms. In the galley kitchen, he introduces his wife, Tereza; it was with Tereza that his interest in the rain-forest began.

"My wife is from Bahia, on Brazil's Atlantic coast," he explains at a picnic table out on the lawn. "We met on a plane a little over six years ago. Anyway, we bought a house down there soon after we got married. It had no electricity; it cost almost nothing. Behind the house was this rain forest. Everything was idyllic: coconuts, trees, the ocean. There wasn't even a road. At low tide, the beach would be hard-packed and trucks would drive across it. I couldn't help but notice that some of the trucks were these huge, skeleton-like things—real Road Warrior. They'd drive up empty in the mornings and drive back loaded with huge cut trees.

"I hadn't been back for two years when I went down this winter," Scharf recalls. "I was astounded by what had happened. From my window, I used to see this lush growth. Now I saw a patch of it here, a patch there, and the rest was either black—just burned—or cleared for grazing cattle."

Ironically, for several years a small, intense French art historian and restorer named Marie-Pierre Astier had been pursuing Scharf for help in rallying artists to the rain-forest cause. Astier's work in tracing Portuguese migration routes had brought her to Brazil, where she established ties with several prominent scientists doing rain-forest work and gave them her word that she could raise the funds for what she called Companions of Art and Nature. Before Scharf got involved, "I was considered a crazy ecologist," Astier says. "When Kenny said yes, I was throwing my hat into the air, I was so happy."

Scharf quickly enlisted the help of fellow artists Julian Schnabel, Roy Lichtenstein, Francesco Clemente, Ross Bleckrier, and others to donate work for the "Don't Bungle the Jungle!" benefit. Lining up performers, he learned, was a trickier challenge. "You get an artist to give a painting—and then you've got it," Scharf says. "Performers kept saying yes, then dropping out." The one who never wavered was Madonna. "I wrote her a letter, she said yes, and she's been there the whole time."

The night of the benefit, limousines fill the street outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Through the mostly young, downtown crowd in the lobby, Glenn Close and a tuxedoed party pass like parents. A star clump appears, setting off flashbulbs: Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, Calvin and Kelly Klein, Iman, and a beaming Jann Wenner.

The houselights go down and the curtain goes up, and then Madonna struts across the stage to speak. When Scharf first asked for her help, she tells the crowd, she felt AIDS was the more immediate crisis to be addressed. "Then I got the facts. Every second, an area the size of a football field is gone—forever.

... At this rate, the entire rain forest will be gone in fifty years—forever.... The forests give us life; we've got to find a way to preserve them." Here, too, the scene could be a high-school assembly: Madonna for class president! But the issue is real, and the lady means business; the whooping crowd falls still.

Near the end of the evening—after Ann Magnuson, Bob Weir, and the B-52s, among others—Kenny Scharf takes the stage to introduce Russell Mittermeier of the World Wildlife Fund.

"This man is my hero," Scharf says.

"More Bob (Continued from page 178)

(Continued on page 188)

Weir," shout voices from the balcony.

"If we don't take action now,'' declares Mittermeier, "we're going to lose the mighty Amazon forest of Brazil, the great equatorial forest of Africa and Indonesia, and the unique species of Madagascar. ' '

"MORE BOB WEIR."

In any cultural revolution, a few laggards are bound to slip in.

Eamest and somber as the new converts generally are, longtime environmentalists are almost jubilant. After years of lobbying as a specialinterest group in the political spectrum, they find themselves the heroes of the Great Awakening, invited to elegant homes and asked to speak to moguls who wouldn't have taken their calls a year ago but who now lean forward, humbly asking questions, eager to put their power at the environmentalists' £ disposal.

John Adams of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a legal group that brings suit against polluters and tries to publicize environmental threats, is still a bit stunned by the reception during his own recent Hollywood swing. "The people we met in L.A. are absolutely determined to have an impact," he says in his office at the N.R.D.C.'s sleek new passively solar-heated headquarters in Manhattan. "If anything, it made me worry that we didn't have enough to offer in terms of what they want."

The performer who never wavered was Madonna. "She said yes, and she's been there the whole time."

It was the N.R.D.C. that recruited Meryl Streep last spring to be its front person in the fight against the pesticide Alar. In L.A., that campaign has made it the sexiest of the so-called Gang of Ten (such established East Coast groups as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Audubon Society). And by no coincidence, it has just decided to open an L.A. office—the first of the groups to do so.

Streep is not, as it happens, the first star to have pitched in for Adams and the N.R.D.C. For years now, Robert Redford has been a board member, offering help and making introductions. It was Redford who put Streep and Adams in touch with each other; it was Redford who asked the Lears to host a fund-raising lunch for Adams on the recent L.A. trip. For nearly two decades, from his Utah retreat, the reclusive actor has lobbied for clean-air and solar-energy legislation, building an environmental network on both coasts. Increasingly, he has also been absorbed by the challenge of making environment-minded movies. The Milagro Beanfield War, about a small New Mexican town threatened by crass development, proved a modest success. For several years, Redford had another movie in mind, about a ruthless American capitalist who goes to Brazil to start a huge paper-pulp operation in the rain forest, but he couldn't interest any of the major studios in backing it.

That, of course, was before Chico Mendes became a household name in Bel-Air.

'It was in 1986 that I became aware of Chico Mendes and his work," says Redford, checking in from some undisclosed office in New York. "When I did, the character he was in life hit right into a character that was being developed in the script. The script was fictional, but we were drawing on fact." The ruthless capitalist, to be played by Redford, was based on Daniel Ludwig and his abortive billion-dollar effort in the 1970s to build a paper-pulp industry by floating factory boats up the Amazon. In the script that went into development at Twentieth Century Fox a year ago, the capitalist is enlightened by a rain-forest native based directly on Mendes. "And there was a priest involved," Redford says. ''Because there's always a priest involved down there."

When he flew to Washington in March to meet Ilza Mendes, Redford came bearing a fwo-movie proposal. In return for the rubber tappers' endorsement and help, he'd do his rain-forest story as planned, but, according to one source, donate his up-front salary (as would director Steven Spielberg) to the Mendes Foundation. Later, he would finance a Mendes documentary to be made in Portuguese. "The documentary could be an endowment for the foundation," he says. "And my opinion was that the story should be told by Brazilians."

Redford admits he didn't have much luck in establishing contact with Mary Allegretti. He says he found it frustrating, too, to have his intentions distorted by his rivals and the press. ("Big deal he'd donate his fee on the main film," says one rival, in a typical gibe. "He knows perfectly well he'd make $20 million in profits, then turn around and make a documentary for $150,000 that plays for $1.75 a head in Xapuri." Retorts Redford, "That's just the talk of someone who feels threatened. Each film would be true from its own perspective. ") As the bidders jockeyed for position, Redford was said to want to emphasize the environmental aspects of the rain-forest story—as opposed, say, to David Puttnam, who would stress the politics. But Redford denies this. "My film is environmental and political," he says. "They're tied together; you can't separate the two anymore."

Puttnam, who considers Redford a friend and fellow environmentalist, nevertheless saw his own proposal as the more political of the two—which put him in step with the influential Allegretti. "In a way, we felt that Chico was an environmentalist by accident, as a result of his admirable union activities," Puttnam explains from his office in London. "What he offered was an environmental solution to a political problem."

Almost immediately after the killing, the rubber tappers—along with Allegretti and Ilza Mendes—had offered film rights for the story to Adrian Cowell, whom they knew and trusted. Cowell desperately wanted to see the film made by Chris Menges and Puttnam, who by now had hooked up with Warner Bros., but the three men agreed that the tappers would be best served by waiting to hear other offers as well, then choosing the most appropriate of the lot.

The most appropriate didn't necessarily mean the highest. To a strongly politicized, left-leaning group like the rubber tappers, money mattered less than message. Among the ten unions in four Brazilian states represented by the Mendes Foundation, there was strong nationalistic sentiment which argued for a Portuguese film distributed first within Brazil. But perhaps a movie would be the wrong medium in any language; if poorly made, it might be seen by a far smaller audience than hoped. This was the argument Ted Turner made through his Washington-based Better World Society. Forget the movie, Turner proposed with his usual brashness; he would pay as much as any of the Hollywood boys, then make a TV movie with a guaranteed audience in the tens of millions worldwide.

Still, there was money from every direction—more than the tappers had ever imagined. The Hollywood offers nosed as high as $1.4 million: cooperation money for the unions, clear-conscience money for the moviemakers. With the April publication of a piece about Mendes by writer Alex Shoumatoff in the pages of this magazine, as many as thirty offers swirled in the breeze.

Generally, the bids involved payouts directly to the Mendes Foundation, which in turn would compensate the unions. Not so with Hollywood's hot team of Guber and Peters. By several accounts, the producers of Batman and Rain Man did their best to divide and conquer. "They threw piles and piles of money around—some of it directed at individuals,'' says one environmentalist close to the situation.

Longtime environmentalists find themselves heroes, invited to speak to moguls who wouldn't have taken their calls a year ago.

"Anyone who says that has a political standpoint," exclaims Peter Guber, who heatedly denies any funny business. "We just didn't want to leave anyone out of the process." Guber admits the first reason he and Jon Peters chose to pursue the story was, as they say in Hollywood, the material. "What the film holds is almost like a Western—like High Noon."

But, adds Guber, "the fact that Jon and I were in sync with that kind of philosophy made the quest to acquire the material all the more charged. It served both our spirit and our creative selves. Both cups were being filled by the experience." The partners knew they'd paid fewer Great Awakening dues than several of their rivals, but they had an excuse: they'd been making big successful movies. Sell them the rights, they stressed to the tappers, and the job would get done right. "It wasn't just the money," Guber says. "The movie has to succeed. You don't have the right song unless you have the right singer. ' '

Ironically, the tappers were divided more by the offers than by any of the grim threats to their movement from ranchers and miners, loggers and politicians. More than one observer began to wonder if a film should be made at all. "Think what happens when a movie crew comes into the rain forest with trailers and equipment," suggests Barbara Bramble of the National Wildlife Federation. "They need generators; they want imported beer. And then, after dispensing money and demonstrating the comforts of northern culture, they leave. What happens? A vacuum."

A decision date was set for early June. Alan Schwartz, the Hollywood lawyer working for the Mendes Foundation, boarded a plane in L.A. with a briefcase bearing the formal proposals—nine of them now, the rest having been discouraged by the competition. From the Rio Branco airport, he and the E.D.F. 's Stephan Schwartzman drove down dirt roads into the jungle to a simple windowless shack—equipped with a table, two benches, and a typewriter—to offer millions of dollars to a bunch of rubber tappers.

As the tappers convened in their shack, however, Ilza Mendes and a new adviser, ex-priest Gilson Pescador, surfaced in Rio de Janeiro to announce that the foundation had made its choice. The film rights, she said, would go to J.N. Films, an obscure Brazilian company. The tappers were shocked—and furious. They declared that the decision had not been made by a majority, and disavowed it. Through Schwartz, they also expressed their consensus that press reports about the bidding had diverted public attention from deforestation and ongoing assassination attempts. "The organization therefore thinks that this is not a propitious moment to make or discuss any film on the life of Chico Mendes," they stressed, adding that the movement "has not received any funds from any film negotiation."

Still, the rivalry will almost certainly continue. J.N. Films may go ahead; Ted Turner will almost certainly make some sort of Mendes documentary. As for Redford, he plans to start shooting his first rain-forest film in January. "I'd be astonished if he tries to weave in the Mendes story without the unions' cooperation," says Puttnam. "After all, Redford is an honorable man." Adds Guber, "If you fictionalize this wellknown figure, having entered and lost the race to acquire the rights, it's not copacetic with the whole process." But Redford is also the man who ended up signing Alex Shoumatoff as a story consultant, and listening now to the secondhand comments of his competitors, he clearly bridles. "Now that you know the whole story," he says, "what do you think I'd do?"

Whatever the fate of the Chico Mendes story, the Great Awakening is a welcome and active reality. Important as it is, however, a cautionary soul like Lester Brown feels obliged to put it in context.

Brown is the founder of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based research group that each year publishes a hardcover "State of the World" report. The report charts ecological trends, giving the earth, as Brown likes to put it, a "physical."

This year's report is almost a bestseller, with more than 80,000 copies in print. It makes clear that the trends are worsening. The root problem is overpopulation: too many people farming too little land. The most common result is soil erosion—in South America's rain forests, in Africa, in the Soviet Union. And in the United States too, though our own agricultural production has been pumped up for four decades by pesticides (which for several reasons are losing their effectiveness). Soil erosion leads to the need for more farming land, which leads to deforestation, which leads to flood-level runoffs, which leads to death on a genocidal level and a new generation of what Brown calls "environmental refugees" who number in the millions.

Brown is gratified by all the attention, but he knows how much more needs to be done. "Carbon emissions are still increasing, deforestation is actually increasing, topsoil is eroding, the stratospheric ozone is being depleted, the greenhouse effect is growing, the number of plant and animal species is shrinking. Any one of these trends, if they continue indefinitely, has the potential of undermining civilization.

"If we can get even one of these trends turned around, that would be exciting," says Brown. Meanwhile, the danger, as he puts it, is confusing "activity with accomplishment."

In the Great Awakening, one will not suffice.