U.S. May Try to Alter Earth Summit Declaration : Environment: Some fear that reopening the document might lead to so much criticism that it would be abandoned.

With time running out on Earth Summit negotiators, U.S. delegates Tuesday considered attempting to rewrite portions of a “Rio Declaration” to be issued at the close of the conference, raising the possibility that the controversial document could be destroyed.

Although the declaration of general principles for protecting the environment was supposedly completed weeks ago, government delegations and environmental activists have roundly criticized it.

But so far none of its critics have been willing to reopen the 27-paragraph document for fear that it would be set upon from all directions and perhaps wiped out.

What chiefly concerns the U.S. delegation is language about individual nations’ “right to development.”

In the past, say U.S. negotiators, political and military regimes have used diplomatic language affirming nations’ sovereign rights to carry out economic development as a cover for abuses of human rights and freedom of the press.

Whether the Washington delegation will attempt to turn the declaration into something more palatable, sources said, largely depends on whether time is available.

With major issues still unresolved, U.S. delegation members worked through lunch and dinner Tuesday, sending out for “brown bag” meals.

As negotiators here and officials in Washington debated whether to attempt changes in the Rio Declaration, the pace of the huge conference quickened. Among the day’s actions:

- After some hesitation, Great Britain announced that it would sign the biological diversity agreement being spurned by the United States. The pact is aimed at conserving plants, animals, microorganisms and their habitats.

- Negotiators completed an agreement to create a high-level Sustainable Development Commission. It would serve as the principle instrument to implement the lengthy Agenda 21 environmental action plan being completed here.

- Panels worked overtime on a declaration of principles designed to protect world forests and on arrangements for developed countries to provide additional environmental assistance to developing nations.

- With President Bush preparing to head to the Rio summit, members of the European Community spurned U.S. pressure and agreed to issue a statement reasserting their differences with the United States concerning the summit’s global warming treaty.

An intractable split erupted between Washington and its industrial partners at the outset of the treaty’s negotiation.

The Europeans wanted a binding commitment to stabilize emissions of greenhouse gas pollution at 1990 levels by the turn of the century, but the United States insisted that the treaty focus on action plans without the firm target and deadline.

In the end, Washington prevailed, but European nations moved to reassert their more aggressive position at the summit, and the United States retaliated with pressure to head them off.

In a pre-summit message to Europeans, obtained by The Times on Tuesday, Washington warned that “a public effort in Rio to highlight differences between our approaches” would “isolate and embarrass the United States . . . “ and would be “unhelpful and not conducive to building the global partnership that will be needed as we come to grips with this important environmental issue.”

When a move to write a statement by like-minded European nations went ahead anyway, sources said, Washington stepped up pressure on Austria, Switzerland and Holland, the leaders of the initiative.

Tuesday, the 12-nation European Community made plans to issue a statement calling for renewed negotiations on the issue in August.

“This is the beginning of the protocol process,” said Jessica Tuchman Mathews, vice president of the Washington-based World Resources Institute.

Washington’s warning notwithstanding, Laurens Brinkhorst, chief of the European Community’s environmental office, said Tuesday that the European Community statement will “emphatically not” serve to isolate the United States at the summit.

Bush will be at the summit when Portuguese Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva signs the treaty for the European Community and the EC releases its statement reaffirming its goals for stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions.

Although the thought of seeking changes in the Rio Declaration caused many delegates to be nervous, the United States is far from alone in finding the document seriously flawed.

At the outset of preparations for the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development--as the summit is formally known--the hope was to produce an Earth Charter presenting the responsibilities of developed and developing countries for environmentally responsible action.

But hopes for the charter were dashed when delegations from industrialized nations thought that they were being unfairly accused of creating all the planet’s environmental problems. In the final round of talks, negotiators, working under mounting pressure, shaped the 27-point Rio Declaration as a substitute for the charter.

Ole Holthe, a Norwegian diplomat, who helped salvage the declaration, compared it to the fairy-tale frog turned into a prince by the kiss of a beautiful princess.

In the final preparatory negotiations in New York, he said: “We started kissing the frog. We kissed and kissed and kissed until we turned it into something royal--at least in our imagination.”

The contradictory, sometimes vague document that resulted is not binding and will not be offered for signature here.

For that reason, many representatives prefer that the United States abandon any attempt to improve it and perhaps create yet another rift as the summit approaches its end.