BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Preservation of a Tribe Versus Development: Who Will Win? : SAVAGES by Joe Kane; Alfred A. Knopf; $25, 273 pages

With the disintegration of communism, it’s getting hard to mouth the phrase “cultural imperialism” without an extended apology. Not for the reasons you might expect, though: Radical critiques of Western industrialism have been largely discredited in recent decades, but that doesn’t mean market-economy culture is any less a steamroller.

Cultures with different orientations have little choice but to adapt or get out of the way in the face of the never-ending search for dwindling resources and new markets. And these days even the latter option has evaporated, as journalist Joe Kane illustrates in his brilliant new book, “Savages,” which recounts the attempt by the Huaorani people to save their homeland from petroleum development. Not only has the corporate world penetrated into the farthest depths of the Amazon River basin; it has proved so inexorable a force that respected conservation groups have turned collaborator, satisfied that self-appointed guardians living in New York and Washington can decide what’s best for people living in unnamed villages in Ecuador.

Polemical volumes on the environmental movement, pro and con, have flooded bookstore shelves in the past few years. “Savages” is head and shoulders above most of them, though, for Kane is intimately familiar with the object of his dissection--his previous book was “Running the Amazon”--and his immune system seems resistant to ideological prejudice.

Kane lived and traveled, slept and ate with the Huaorani and allows personal experience, rather than expectation, to form his beliefs. The result is a book that becomes more and more convincing, and complex, as it goes along, Kane letting the reader tag along for his continuing education in a culture that doesn’t deserve to be pitched on the slag heap of history.

Most schoolchildren in the United States have long since been told that South American rain forests are the “lungs” of the hemisphere, that their destruction could eventually destroy the planet. It would be easy and convenient for Kane to follow this conventional environmental line, but he hardly acknowledges it, and wisely so; his concern is for the residents of the rain forest, not for their utility to the West--as cultural models, as forest guardians, as photo ops for jet-in, helicopter-out celebrities. No: The Huaorani are a warrior people, have been known to kill missionaries and other travelers, but the “savages” of Kane’s title turn out to be not the likable, guileless tribesmen he comes to know but those who push their culture toward extinction in the name of economic progress.

The leading individuals in “Savages”--they deserve better than to be called “characters”--are Moi, Enqueri and Nanto, three Huaorani hoping to save their people, each in his own way, from destruction. The Huaorani have some interest in Western culture--they appreciate guns for hunting, engines for river boating--but Conoco’s determination to develop the oil reserves under tribal land has compelled them into an unexpected and unwanted level of interaction.

Enqueri, a charming opportunist who becomes Kane’s guide, is the most Westernized of the three. He meets the author wearing headphones with the cord running into a hip pocket. Nanto is more deliberate, and more gullible, despite being president of the loose Huaorani federation: He is easily seduced by city pleasures (ice cream and karate movies, particularly) and promises.

It is Moi, though, who stands at the center of “Savages,” for he has no stomach for compromise. The Huaorani have reached a consensus among their far-flung clans, they have voted against change, and for Moi the story ends there. “We have told the company--Conoco--to get out,” Moi tells Kane after leaving the jungle many times for meetings with government representatives, environmental activists and corporate executives. “Somebody does not seem to understand.”

And indeed they didn’t, and don’t. Beginning in the ‘80s, the Nature Conservancy and the Natural Resources Defense Counsel negotiated with Conoco on the Huaorani’s behalf, and gained major concessions--but the battle was waged along Western lines with Western values, which meant the Huaorani lost without a fight.

The Huaorani were patronized and didn’t even know it; nor did they know that many of their self-identified friends had conflicting institutional and political agendas. The only action the tribe knows is direct action--which is why Moi at one point tells Kane that his people will surround the company and “attack with spears from all sides,” and tells another tribesman that his people should kill Ecuador’s president by putting “fishhooks in his rice.”

“Savages” is a funny and endearing book most of the time, Kane being a patient and sympathetic narrator. But ingenuous threats like those just noted also make it heartbreaking. Through Western eyes, the limited development of Huaorani territory--it is going forward--is a reasonable compromise among native, national and international interests; through Huaorani eyes--knowing what they know of the forest, of hunting once the roads go in--it is surrender, a slow death.

Kane tells a sad story in “Savages,” and the only thing approaching a silver lining to this cloud is the book itself. Moi may continue to believe, as he once told Kane, that “writing is a very good way to get things without doing work,” but the work Kane put into “Savages” has paid off handsomely for readers--and just possibly will also pay off, someday, for Moi and his people.