BOOK REVIEW Brazil’s Highway: Amazonian Battle : THE ROAD TO EXTREMA <i> by Bob Reiss</i> ; Summit Books $22; 250 pages

Bob Reiss has organized “The Road to Extrema” around BR-364, the controversial highway Brazil is building through the Amazon to link itself to the Pacific and thus Japan.

He chronicles, kilometer by kilometer, the lives of the people brought to the area (native Indians aside) by the highway and its attendant development, and the strategy proves a fairly effective way of presenting the major issues facing Amazonia.

At Kilometer One, outside Porto Velho, Reiss walks the forest with an ecologist researching the effects of dam-created flooding; at Kilometer Forty-Five, in a slum, he encounters a newly arrived settler about to “invade”--read squat--a small plot of farmland, hoping eventually to own it under informal frontier law; at One Hundred Ninety he meets water-borne miners on an Amazon tributary who pipe silt, 24 hours a day, into carpeted sluices that trap particles of gold, and at Two Hundred Twenty, men who become cattle ranchers--and thus deforesters--for tax reasons rather than from a burning desire to raise livestock.

Midway through “The Road to Extrema,” Reiss finally gets to meet a member of the “forest police,” enforcers of Brazil’s new and formidable environmental laws, whom Reiss expects to be “the Texas Rangers, the Elliot Nesses of the frontier.”

Reiss is immediately disappointed, however, realizing that the forest police are no more than lowly bureaucrats, that what little power they wield is no match for the power of large Amazonian land-owners.

When Reiss, a free-lance journalist, asks forest policeman Robson Vitali why he doesn’t fine a rancher who appears not only to have cut down rain forest without permission but to have felled protected Brazil nut trees, Vitali replies, “I’d rather lose my job than my life.”

Reiss is fairly sympathetic to the forest police, however ineffective, and that sensitivity is one of the strongest things about “The Road to Extrema”: Reiss’ reluctance to lay blame for the mismanagement of the Amazon rain forest.

He prefers to let his sources--scientists, doctors, environmentalists, native Amazonians, government officials, rubber-tappers, gold prospectors, businessmen, farmers, squatters, functionaries like the forest policemen, even the strip-clearing ranchers themselves--speak their minds in some detail, even when he disagrees with them.

Although Reiss obviously sides with the environmental groups, he makes clear that deforestation of the Amazon is a much more complex problem than the one typically portrayed in this country.

Reiss demonstrates the complications early on, when he describes his encounter with the Karitianas tribe, which has not one chief but two, a shaman who wants to stick to the old ways and a much younger man, Garcia.

“Civilization is better,” Garcia tells Reiss: “We want roads. We want television. We want electricity,” he says, so he is quite happy to see the Karitianas’ trees cut.

In order to demonstrate the interconnections between life in the Amazon and life in the developed world, Reiss intersperses his Brazilian chapters with a few based in New York.

Here Reiss’ work is hit-and-miss: his accounts of a cancer patient’s treatment with a drug derived from a tropical plant and of a corporate drop-out’s transformation into a leading rain-forest activist are good, but the chapter attempting to evoke New York City in the midst of a greenhouse-effect-induced heat wave is downright silly.

(The chapter focusing on an advertising agency’s sun block campaign has even fewer redeeming qualities, to the point that one wonders how many trees died to print it.)

Reiss deserves much credit, nonetheless, simply for underscoring the fact that environmental issues transcend national borders.

Reiss has a penchant for statistics, and he cites them so frequently that they blur and become ineffective. The reader, moreover, soon wonders about the accuracy of those statistics, even before Reiss--again, to his credit--questions them himself.

Reiss notes that in 1984, a Brazilian environmentalist had predicted that the state of Rondo nia would be completely deforested by 1990, a prediction that wasn’t even close to coming true; deforestation there is thought to have gone no higher than 25%.

Fortunately, though, “The Road to Extrema,” doesn’t depend on numbers, for Reiss is more interested in describing the forces at play in the Amazon than in laying out a course of action.

Reiss does ends the book with a few paragraphs describing ways of saving the Amazon, and they are the conventional steps promoted by environmental groups--buying only “green” products, supporting environmentally enlightened politicians and organizations, etc.

The evidence Reiss provides within “The Road to Extrema,” however, demonstrates that any lasting solution must be broader, one recognizing that deforestation, at bottom, is as much about people, and political will, as it is about trees.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Twice Blessed” by Ninotchka Rosca (W. W. Norton).