A Day In The Life Of Mother Earth : Environmental Warrior Urges a Battle Plan : * Epilogue: ‘Unless we set ourselves very specific targets. . .nothing is going to happen,’ Egyptian says.

Mostafa Kamal Tolba, an Egyptian botanist who will be 70 years old in December, is one of the world’s best-known warriors in defense of the environment. He has been associated with the United Nations Environment Program, UNEP, ever since it was created two decades ago at a U.N. conference in Stockholm--first as deputy executive director and then, for nearly the past 16 years, as its head.

Environmentalists acclaim him for lobbying for years--long before it became fashionable--for action on ozone depletion and global warming. He is regarded as the architect of the Montreal protocol on the ozone layer, a model of what an environmental treaty ought to be and one of the few significant successes of environmental diplomacy.

But though he is a hero to environmentalists, Tolba is viewed with suspicion by many Third World governments, which fear he may have sold out. For the most part, the Third World looks on global warming and ozone depletion as issues for the rich. These nations see new restrictions as barriers to their own economic development--barriers set up to cripple them just as they enter the race for wealth and power.

Whether they admire or suspect him, however, most everyone listens when Tolba issues a report card on the successes and failures of the environmental revolution.

In a prelude to the Rio summit, Tolba calls a news conference to present copies of UNEP’s “Earth Audit: The World Environment 1972-1992.” A graying, mustached man who looks much younger than his years, he speaks softly as he tries to put matters in perspective. The environment has deteriorated in two decades, but it would have been in even worse shape if that first U.N. environmental conference in Stockholm had not alerted the world to the terrible dangers, he says.

There’s been too much rhetoric and too little action, according to Tolba. “Unless we set ourselves very specific targets over certain periods of time,” he says in an accent tinged almost a half-century ago by his studies in London, “nothing is going to happen with the environment. If we continue the generalities, if we continue the masterly outstanding declarations and statements of intent and good intentions, we are not going to go anywhere.”

He frets about the finger-pointing between industrialized North and developing South. “There is complete destruction of the environment by both sides. . . . The very rich are consuming completely out of proportion to their numbers, and the very poor are the ones who are destroying out of desperation.

“The 1 billion richest are using almost all the resources that are available in the world, and the 1 billion poorest are the ones who have the largest number of children. It is the feeling of being insecure that makes them produce more children. Then we have a population problem and the deterioration of the resources.

“These are the facts and figures,” he adds, “covering every area of the issues that are going to be considered at the U.N. Conference on the Environment.”

What must be done? Tolba has an agenda for the years ahead. He assumes that the Rio summit will produce treaties on global warming and biological diversity and will try to reach compromises on a special Green Fund to help finance Third World environmental protection and on the transfer of “green” technology.

But he ticks off many other measures that must be taken after the delegates leave Rio.

Within three years, governments should ban all exports of hazardous wastes from the industrialized world to developing countries; approve a series of three five-year plans to beat back the expanding deserts; set reforestation targets for every decade of the 21st Century; prepare a plan to reduce pollution of the oceans to 1990 levels by the end of the century, and establish a U.N. center to deal swiftly with environmental emergencies like the Chernobyl disaster.

And, perhaps most important, Tolba proposes that an international body be created to make sure that governments comply with the environmental treaties that they sign. Even mandatory goals do little good unless governments agree on a system to verify compliance and to punish countries that try to evade their commitments, Tolba says.

“We have enough resolutions, enough statements, enough declarations which do not go anywhere. Governments . . . have to commit themselves to establish their own mechanism for ensuring that they are following what they agree on.”

Next week, the extravaganza begins in Rio de Janeiro.

Twenty years after the first U.N. conference on the environment, the organization stages a second. Representatives from 160 countries will confer, including President Bush and 100 other heads of state and government. While they argue and pontificate, 2,000 environmental organizations will hold another, unofficial conference with more than 400 workshops and special events.

All in all, some observers say, 40,000 people will be in Rio, including hundreds of journalists whose mission will be to inform the world about where the Earth has gone in 20 years and where it ought to go from here.

It could be a public relations bonanza for the cause of environmental protection.

Or it could be an empty rhetorical binge.

What does Tolba expect of the Earth Summit? His uncertain, rueful reply bears all the hopes and fears and ambiguity of environmentalists aching for success but nervous about the chances for failure. “I have too many expectations,” he says.