COLUMN ONE : Salvador’s Ecological Nightmare : Pollution and pesticides are killing the people, plants and animals of the once-lush country. Greed, war, overpopulation and ignorance are blamed, and little relief is in sight.

This is a site of retching foulness where cows, children and vultures stand side by side, wrenching survival from a mountain of rotting animal corpses and human waste. Where flowering trees once sheltered flocks of fabulously colored birds that drank from clear, flowing rivers, a seemingly endless stream of trucks now disgorges cargoes of poisonous trash.

No trees grow here. Streams are clogged with garbage and the eroded silt of barren, chemical-ridden soil. In this circle, shrouded by smoke from a perpetual fire, humans also are not spared: 50-year-old men look 70; teen-agers are physically the size of 6-year-olds; a cut on the arm can lead to amputation.

Officials call Cutumay Camones, located just north of the town of Santa Ana, a landfill.

But it is also a metaphor for El Salvador’s ecological nightmare, a symbol of how this country has all but destroyed its environment--because there are too many people, because of a costly civil war, because it is cheaper to do so, because it is profitable, because officials are ignorant or guilty of wishful thinking.

The damage in El Salvador now is so severe that “we are losing the capacity to sustain life here,” asserted Ricardo Navarro, an ecological activist who heads a private environmental agency called CESPA.

“The environment is in extreme chaos,” conceded Marisol Ferrer de Toledo, executive assistant to El Salvador’s agriculture minister. “Our development never took the environment into account.”

The evidence of that is clearly visible. In the town of Ciudad Arce, a cement company flattens mountains for sand without restoring the land or preventing erosion. A landfill in a San Salvador suburb breeds radioactive waste. In the city of Perquin, much of the area has been scorched by war, while in oceanside La Union a housing development is being built on a landfill made up of toxic residue brought from the United States.

By the accounts of environmental groups and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, El Salvador, once a lush, vibrant land, now has lost 94% of its original forest and 80% of its natural vegetation. The resulting erosion has damaged or rendered useless 77% of its soil.

The abuse of pesticides, some so dangerous they are banned in the United States, has made much of the remaining land perilous to farm, although that has not stopped farmers from planting crops there.

Indeed, the water table under the capital of San Salvador, overwhelmed by silt, has fallen more than three feet per year over the past decade. The city of more than 1 million people thus must draw its water from a badly polluted river more than 80 miles away.

But almost all of El Salvador’s water supplies are contaminated.

“In Europe, they bottle water; here we just destroy it,” Ferrer de Toledo observed.

Recent tests by international health groups found in a nationwide test of food markets that local vegetables, irrigated and washed with local water, contained at least 2 1/2 times acceptable levels of residue from human feces. The taint was even greater, because the contamination reached measuring devices’ maximum readings.

“It’s like putting a 400-pound man on a scale that tops out at 300 pounds,” one foreign development official said. “It shows the man is fat, but it’s nowhere the real story.”

Children Poisoned

Besides human waste, Salvadoran waters have been fouled with pesticides and toxic chemicals, including DDT, banned in the developed world, which kills fish, birds and other animals. Such residues have killed nearly all plant life in 75% of 290,000 acres of once-fertile marshland, a coastal region where pigs now consume fish killed by the contamination. The villagers later slaughter the pigs and eat them.

According to U.N. and Salvadoran environmental groups, pollution has destroyed three species of trees and three species of mammals. Threatened with extinction are 62 species of trees, 63 types of orchids, five species of freshwater fish, three kinds of frogs, 21 species of reptiles, 68 species of birds and 18 types of mammals.

Human life is threatened, too. Children’s Hospital in San Salvador reports that an average of 50 children die each year of pesticide poisoning in that facility alone.

The human toll of El Salvador’s environmental destruction also can be seen less than a mile below Cutumay Camones in the village of Las Cocinas, a ragged collection of broken-down huts lining a stream that runs from the garbage dump. Looming above it is Cerro El Nispero, or Medlar Tree Hill.

There is irony in these place names, as well as a sense of what once was.

Las Cocinas means the kitchens, and it refers to a time when the hamlet was a place where farmers gathered to eat. There are no trees of any kind on Cerro El Nispero. All natural vegetation on the 400-foot hill has been cleared away for crops. The hillside, so steep that farmers often lose their balance and fall, is guttered with ditches caused by erosion. And soil fills the stream and gathers in mounds across the bottom of the hill.

“Every time it rains, the dirt washes down from the mountain,” said Dionis Sandoval, 50, a Las Cocinas resident. “Each year the crops get worse. There is hardly any corn anymore.”

Do they use pesticides? he was asked. “Oh, yes. We spray all the time, but it doesn’t help. There is less corn.”

Ruben, Sandoval’s 13-year-old son, wandered over. He had been scavenging at the dump and carried a splintered board he hoped to sell to a junk dealer in Santa Ana, the provincial capital three miles to the south.

Ruben, barely 4 feet tall, wore torn boots he reclaimed from the dump. His bare toes were swollen and infected.

“He is always sick,” his father said. “The doctor in Santa Ana said it is because of the water. We’re not supposed to drink it. But what else is there? Sometimes it is so bitter I can’t swallow it.”

Cows that roam the dump provide milk for the village. When the animals die, they are butchered and eaten in Las Cocinas.

How did the village and the entire nation get into such dire environmental straits?

Population Pressures

At the root of El Salvador’s environmental nightmare is population. Almost 6 million people are crowded into a country roughly the size of Massachusetts. The resulting density, highest in Latin America, puts intolerable pressures on available supplies of land and water. And with an annual population growth rate of 3.1%, the situation is likely to worsen.

To provide fuel for cooking and heating and lumber for builders, the Salvadorans steadily have been ravaging their forests. In the northern province of Chalatenango, once-verdant hills are pocked with ugly holes and jagged ditches. Gone are the toucans, parrots and other bright-hued birds that once filled the air with chatter and flashing wings. They have been replaced by silent vultures, circling slowly in search of carrion.

In many rural areas where trees once stood, peasants planted corn. But that crop soon failed, as nutrients were leached from the soil. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers provided a respite. But soon those chemical products were poisoning the soil and water.

Faced with the growth of such threats to their survival, rural people have been moving to cities and towns at such a rate that 75% of El Salvador is now urbanized.

On the outskirts of Santa Tecla, just west of San Salvador, construction crews are building tiny townhouses to meet the housing demand.

The development, called Villas de Santa Teresa, covers 200 acres, an expanse of concrete and blacktop. Except for 3-by-4-foot patches of grass in front of every other unit, no plant life is visible. No parks are planned. There is no room for trees.

“It’s cheaper to clear the site of all trees,” one construction worker said. “And they don’t want to waste space for houses by having parks.”

The development has one positive feature: It has a modern sewage treatment plant, one of the few such facilities in a country where untreated wastes flow directly into rivers, streams and the ocean.

War’s Impact

El Salvador’s 11-year civil war has added to the environmental destruction, preventing farmers from working their land and driving them to make a living by cutting and selling wood from forests.

The government says the cost of the war prevents it from funding reclamation and reforestation projects or from building sewage treatment plants. Officials blame the war for the absence of pesticide controls.

In the crowded capital, there was a time when twilights were graced with flights of small, green-and-yellow parrots, swooping into parks and wooded neighborhoods for nightly roosts. But now these birds are seldom seen--except when they are perched on the arms of curbside vendors, who sell them to passing motorists.

Ecologists wonder if there is any hope for improvement in El Salvador’s environmental woes. There is a germ of awareness and concern. But the solutions mentioned by Ferrer de Toledo of the Agriculture Ministry reflect a lack of urgency and a continuing denial of national responsibility.

Instead of specific projects, she sees a need for “building an infrastructure to deal with the environment. We first need a specific (government) department to study the problem.” When pressed about other concrete actions, she responded: “The government is looking for donor countries.” That reflects an attitude that someone else must pay.

El Salvador has turned to the United States, and there has been some response, particularly from the Agency for International Development. The agency is spending $40 million to drill wells in towns with populations of less than 2,000 and is building 600 latrines.

But much of the more than $290 million in U.S. economic aid allocated this year for El Salvador is still going for development. Building more houses and roads, providing loan guarantees for construction--all of these are moves that compound environmental problems.

Grim Outlook

Experts say that the cost of just making this land basically livable again, without even hoping to restore the country to what it once was, is incalculable.

“Just in terms of purifying water, if you had $40 billion you couldn’t produce enough (treatment) plants in five years to fight off what we expect will be a plague of cholera,” one foreign official said.

Navarro, the environmental activist, expressed grave concern about El Salvador’s environmental future, saying: “I’m very pessimistic. It’s not just the size of the problem, it is the attitude of the government and the Establishment here. There are important people here who even say protecting the environment threatens free enterprise and that the (U.S.) Environmental Protection Agency is Communist. . . . These people don’t understand that everything will collapse, that it is a matter of life and death.”

Even Salvadoran officials trying to deal with the emergency seem resigned to failure.

“While we invest millions in war,” Ferrer de Toledo said, “we don’t seem to have money to plant a tree.”