An Upbeat Look at the Earth : Environment: In the fight to save the planet, author Linda Starke sees ‘Signs of Hope.’

It’s not that we are now doing everything right: It’s that we are starting to realize that we had been doing everything wrong.

--Environmental writer Linda Starke

Monitoring the environment is not an upbeat job.

By most indicators, the globe’s health continues to deteriorate as forests shrink, deserts expand, topsoil erodes, the ozone layer thins and the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases grows.

But the dismal picture has an emerging bright side, and environmental consultant Linda Starke has found it. Digging through reports, brochures, letters, interviews, proposals and newspaper clippings from around the world, she has produced an environmental first: a book for people tired of the bad news.

Titled “Signs of Hope,” her red, white and blue paperback (on recycled paper from Oxford University Press) chronicles the disparate steps taken over the last three years to save the planet, not destroy it.

The book is a progress report, Starke explains: “I like to say we haven’t turned the corner yet, but the corner is in sight.”

She thinks 1989 was a pivotal year. Citing events that range from the international level (the industrial nations’ first “green summit”) to the local level (a small supermarket chain announcing a plan to phase out pesticide-treated produce), the book argues that “more things are going right than people realize.”

“Earth Day gave us a major focus on the importance of individual action,” she said. “But I think most people are depressed about the global scope--they wonder if personal recycling makes any difference in the big picture. This book shows that things are moving in the right direction.” The 41-year-old author spoke recently from her co-op apartment in Washington where a party had just launched the book’s distribution in the United States.

“I’m more optimistic having done this book than I was 10 years ago or five years ago,” she said. “Now I look for good news and keep it in my files.”

Flipping through files, she ticked off newspaper headlines over a three-day span:

* “Senator Urges Military Resources Be Turned to Environmental Battle.”

* “Power Authority to Offer Conservation Plan”

* “Ninety-Three Nations Agree to Ban Chemicals That Harm Ozone”

* “Suffolk County Adopts Strict Newsprint Recycling Law”

* “Lawn-Care Concern Admits Safety Claims Were Too Low”

Such changes in attitude and action, she maintains, are occurring on enough levels to signal that “things are starting to head in a better direction.”

That is the trend she has chronicled in her 186-page book, which is receiving cautious approval from environmental leaders, who are always wary of false complacency.

“She has captured the sense of urgency that has swept through much of the world today,” said Gus Speth, president of the World Resources Institute. “There are some encouraging developments today but still not enough real momentum, especially in the United States.”

And at Washington’s Worldwatch Institute, where Starke was editor for seven years of the prestigious “State of the World” reports, President Lester Brown, described the book as a “framework in which people can see that what they are doing, even on a personal scale, matters.”

While emphasizing that there is an ongoing global crisis, he commended Starke: “It’s an ambitious undertaking and she was well-positioned to do it. She’s familiar with the material and has done a lot of work gathering together things that are happening that no one of us has done--an update on what’s happening in the field.”

“Signs of Hope” is a sequel, commissioned by the Centre for Our Common Future in Geneva, a clearinghouse for the implementation of recommendations in “Our Common Future.” That was the influential 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, whose members spent three years taking global soundings on environmental issues. Commission members met with scientists, governmental policy-makers and ordinary people.

Their findings, in “Our Common Future,” linked economics and the environment to lay out a global plan for “sustainable development,” briefly defined as “meeting the needs of today’s generation without borrowing from the future.”

“Our Common Future,” edited by Starke, was a surprise hit. From its initial small press run at Oxford University Press, it is still selling, with an estimated half-million copies in print around the world.

On this basis, publisher Thomas Webster decided last summer on a follow-up report, to be presented this spring at a United Nations European environmental conference.

“We decided to try for a positive book, to look at things that are moving us in a positive direction,” Starke said. “The subject was huge, and we were limited by time. I was somewhat daunted by the prospects. I didn’t have enough time to get information on the Third World.”

For the bulk of her material, she spent two weeks last November in Geneva at the Centre for Our Common Future. Located in the Palais Wilson, a decaying neoclassical palace that once housed the League of Nations, the center provides a global receiving point for environmental reports.

In a drafty office with 20-foot ceilings and a stunning view of Lake Geneva, Starke worked her way through files revealing glimpses of new activity around the world as governments, businesses, groups and individuals tackle environmental deterioration. In many cases, she noted, “the public is leading the leaders.”

She took notes on: suspension of commercial logging permits by the Brazilian and Thai governments; a comprehensive proposal in Southern California to clean up the air; an accord signed in Montreal to halve production of ozone-destructive chemicals; an international treaty controlling the movement of hazardous wastes; subsidies in Denmark for farmers to convert to organic farming; the world’s first “carbon tax” on fossil fuels in the Netherlands.

With a ton of research, she holed up in her apartment, with a Toshiba 1200, “living on Lean Cuisine and adrenaline,” writing her book in two months.

The result falls somewhere between just rattling off a list of “firsts” and laying out a comprehensive picture of the world situation today.

Starke, acknowledging the impossibility of a total global picture, describes it as “snapshots.”

“I have tried to pull together as much as I could of the scattered good news, to give people a feeling of movement on the issues,” she said.

Starke, who describes herself as a “sociologist who got into the environment,” grew up in suburban New York and was graduated from Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., where reading Paul Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb” set her on a course of global concern.

After five years with Family Planning Associates in London, she joined the Worldwatch staff in Washington; in 1981, she became a free-lance consultant-editor. She worked with groups such as the Environmental Policy Institute, and U.S. Office of Technology Assessment.

In 1986, she joined the staff of the World Commission on Environment and Development for an eight-month stint, where her work on “Our Common Future” led to the assignment to write a book accentuating the positive.

This month she is off to Pakistan to edit a conservation report that will be submitted to the Pakistani cabinet for consideration as a national policy.

While her immersion in global environmentalism has convinced her that the world is finally paying some attention to the state of the Earth, she sees it as only a beginning.

“All this is good, but not good enough,” she writes. “Virtually ignored in all this is the urgent need to eliminate world poverty, which is both a cause and an effect of environmental degradation. This is just a starting point.”