ENVIRONMENT : Holden’s Star Still Shines Bright in Kenya : The late American actor’s wildlife foundation is teaching African youngsters to treasure the land and animals their generation will inherit.

Ten years after his death, actor William Holden remains a legend in Kenya, where a foundation that bears his name is shaping the attitudes of African children toward wildlife and the environment.

These are new concerns for Africa. Traditionally, trees were viewed as being useful only for firewood, wildlife a nuisance unless it provided ivory or food and land a resource that could be used indefinitely with little thought given to proper management. Streams were both a source of drinking water and a repository for human waste.

But ecological awareness is slowly creeping into the African consciousness, and a handful of institutions such as the William Holden Wildlife Foundation are at the forefront of the change, teaching a new generation that their parents’ mistakes cannot be repeated.

More than 3,000 Kenyan students a year spend from an afternoon to a week at the Holden Foundation, nestled on the slopes of Mt. Kenya, a three-hour drive north of Nairobi. Many have never been out of a city or seen a wild animal, and most are unaware of the benefits of recycling garbage or raising rabbits instead of goats. (Rabbits have more protein, reproduce faster and do less damage to the land.)

The group of 12-year-olds from Nairobi who arrived for a two-day stay last month were bright-eyed and well-dressed. “The important thing about this trip,” said their teacher, Luke Ouko, “is that what they learn here, they can take back to the parents. For the first time they’re being exposed to their heritage of wildlife and to the need to protect the environment.”

Sitting in open-air classrooms and walking through the 15-acre facility along the Nanyuki River, the youngsters learned how cattle dung mixed with water produces gas for fuel--a sounder environmental practice than destroying forests to make charcoal. They saw how to build a trout farm on a small plot of land that would turn a handsome profit and how to plant fast-growing trees whose leaves are good feed for livestock. Each evening they helped separate the tin and paper and plastic from that day’s trash.

James Vermey, the foundation’s education director who himself was a student here in 1985, said the goal of the informal class sessions and the field trips to an adjacent 1,200-acre game ranch that Holden set up with an American partner, Don Hunt, is to stimulate the students’ imagination and to make them understand the repercussions of mismanaging the land and mistreating the wildlife.

Kenya has the world’s highest birthrate, and almost every inch of its marginal land already is under cultivation. Its prime source of foreign exchange is tourism, an industry based on the well-being of the country’s wondrous herds of wildlife.

Increasingly, though, man and animal are in competition for the same land, and what most threatens wildlife now is not poachers but the shrinking boundaries of unused land.

The first attempt at grass-roots conservation in Kenya--and probably in all Africa--was the Wildlife Clubs of East Africa, started in 1968. Like the newer Holden Foundation, it recognized that the future of Kenya’s wildlife depended on teaching the nation’s youth that they had been bequeathed a special resource.

“It’s a slow battle,” said Vermey, “but there’s far more awareness now about the environment and the importance of wildlife than there was a few years ago. These are no longer things that only Western aid people think about.”

The Holden Wildlife Foundation, started in 1984, was established by the actor’s longtime companion, actress Stefanie Powers. It is sufficiently endowed to operate for more than 100 years without additional funding. Holden spent 25 years in Kenya on and off, first coming here on a hunting safari in the 1950s. Hunting is now banned in Kenya.

The Holden project is supported by the Kenya Wildlife Department.