The Martyr of the Rain Forest : THE BURNING SEASON The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest <i> by Andrew Revkin (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 511 pp.) </i>

We Norteamericanos are suddenly smitten with the Amazonian rain forest. Now that our passion burns so brightly--and seemingly without end--it is politically instructive to consider briefly how such a state of affairs came to pass in just a few years.

Only a decade ago, biologists working in the tropics began to warn their colleagues that agricultural practices and development in tropical America were beginning to have an impact on some species, and that ambitious development plans such as the trans-Amazonian highway could lead to catastrophe for what was then the largest and most diverse uninterrupted biological community in the world. Anthropologists had begun to protest the progressive extinctions of native people both through loss of habitat and by direct genocide.

By the mid-’80s, climatologists were contributing a new chord: the Greenhouse Effect, in which the burning of Amazonia was contributing carbon dioxide while eliminating one of the world’s great storehouses of excess carbon. And perhaps, they suggested, clear-cutting would lead to irreversible desertification of one of the wettest places on Earth.

We worried about trading golden lion tamarins in the forest for Brazilian beef for our hamburgers. Photographs of the scarring and burning from the space shuttle offered dramatic visuals.

Now, as we enter the ‘90s, the world’s bankers, agronomists and politicians are asking if there isn’t a “softer path” for the tropics to develop, something more compatible with its own ecological rhythms. And finally the world’s communications media have penetrated Amazonia in a big way, providing their own peculiar contribution of information and shallow, exploitative confusion.

This last has meant--as usual--that the First World, especially America--as usual--has engendered an Amazonia in its own image, with noble rustics, exploitative capitalists, cuddly animals, graceful trees and miraculous powers of global salvation. Almost nobody north of the Equator knew who Chico Mendes was until he was murdered, but today he is the martyr of the rain forest.

The best thing about “The Burning Season” is its insistence on complexity. The Amazon of our imaginings is a cartoon. Andrew Revkin, whose customary beats are science reporting for The Times and Discover magazine, demolishes that cartoon. His foil is Chico Mendes, the radical Brazilian rubber tapper ( seringueiro ) who fought deforestation to sustain the culture of his people, and who was adopted by the world’s environmental avant-garde shortly before his predictable murder by ranchers as 1988 drew to a close.

Revkin took a cram course in Portuguese, then spent a couple of months talking to people in the Amazon basin and another month getting to know the rest of Brazil. He invested enough time and consideration in his story to do what reporters are supposed to do but usually don’t. He has constructed a representation of “reality” in multiple dimensions, in which the characters have motivations--often multiple and imperfect--and in which both the good guys and the bad guys get to tell their own stories and show themselves to be quite human. He tells enough of the history of Brazil and the Amazon and provides enough data about the geography, ecology and resources of the Amazon for an American to begin to get the picture.

The gist of this story concerns the first indigenous counterforce that has arisen in Brazil to stem the deforestation of the Amazon. Until quite recently, most of the pressure to conserve arose from foreign environmentalists, who had started by crying alarm and had progressed, with only slightly more success, to applying pressure on Brazil by getting to the vast flow of North American and European capital that not only fuels development but keeps the Brazilian economy from collapsing in red ink.

As conservationists slowly have come to realize, environmental protection never really succeeds until it is adopted by local people. In Brazil, the only “local people” who have had any say have been members of the traditional Latin American clique of autocrats who, abetted by First World capital, have achieved vast wealth at the expense of both human and natural resources.

In the past, one of the greatest sources of Brazilian wealth was latex painstakingly extracted from the native rubber trees of the Amazon rain forest by the seringueiros for slave wages, but sold on the international market at vast profit. In South America, rubber trees must grow as a relatively scarce element of the intact forest, or else they are attacked by pests and diseases.

“The Burning Season” focuses on the efforts of Mendes and his compatriot rubber tappers to organize themselves for economic survival. Once, that meant eliminating the middlemen who sucked most of the profits from the raw-rubber trade. Now, it is preserving the very forest where these hardy folk have carved a sustainable niche from harvesting rubber and Brazil nuts. In this, the mixed-blood seringueiros have of late discovered a natural alliance with the Indians, who likewise require the forest to survive and who have had even less political power than the tappers.

The ranchers, their wealthy sponsors and their local lackeys have represented traditional right-wing power; the tappers, as they have learned to organize politically, have therefore found themselves naturally allied with leftist revolutionary forces in Latin America. But to view this as a struggle between left and right is to miss much of the point and most of the consequences.

Contrary to the myth that Greens have constructed around Mendes, he was never a Brazilian John Muir. But he was a quick study, and rapidly learned the connection between the protection of the tappers’ way of life and larger global desires to protect the rain forest. Smart, well-read and charming, he led his dispersed flock to political awareness, to alliances first within Brazil and later beyond its borders.

Despite its rich store of insight, “The Burning Season” does not reveal what will happen to the Amazon. Brazil has recently become more democratic; even the wealthy and relatively conservative new president has shown a strong interest in environmental preservation and in protecting indigenous, non-destructive uses of the forest. On the other hand, the forest continues to fall and burn at a fearsome clip, and the meager economics of latex and Brazil nuts are not sufficient to save it. What Revkin does offer, and it is substantial, is the understanding necessary for any of us who care to contribute to a solution.