Protecting Panama; the land made famous by Noriega needs to protect its rainforests.

In the United States, the rainforest has become a floral fantasy land, decorating shampoo bottles and candy boxes, selling T-shirts and deodorant sticks on TV commercials, inspiring bad Hollywood movies, and growing in planter pots in offices everywhere. The zoo in hot, tropical Denver, Colorado has even built a $10 million rainforest exhibit under two glass pyramids that draws crowds like tourists to Eden. But in Panama City, where the rainforest starts right in town, the mass mind drifts to other lands. The local buses are carnivals of paint with red lipstick sides, hippie hieroglyphic bumpers, and back doors air brushed with soap opera stars. Above the front windshield appears a panorama of each bus's vision of Shangri La. It's never a rainforest. It's a New England farm in autumn, a Rocky Mountain beyond a bubbling brook, a Swiss castle pillowed with snow. Panama may be a remarkable biological linchpin between the American continents with more than 900 species of birds and over 1,200 species of trees, but the wealthy Panamanians would rather vacation at the beach. And the poor are slashing and burning the forests in order to plant crops to survive.

Research scientists have explored Panama for years. They first arrived early in the century to fight yellow fever and malaria so the U.S. could finish the Panama Canal in 1914. This new waterway across the rolling hills drastically altered the geography, creating Lake Gatun, which has the sprawling shape of a runover starfish, but it also made a de facto ecological reserve out of the U.S. military land along the canal zone. In 1924, the Smithsonian Institution opened a research station--really a wooden house on stilts--on an island in the lake, and major discoveries about the tropics have been coming out of Panama ever since. In recent years nearby Costa Rica has drawn most of the conservation press, but Georgina de Alba of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute insists, "Our researchers would say Panama is better."

The slender isthmus lets marine researchers commute easily between the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean to study quite different coral reefs, and the rainforests are much more accessible than in other tropical countries. The Smithsonian's most intriguing experiment, a giant construction crane that drops scientists in a gondola into the thick of a rainforest canopy, stands right in Panama City. But the Smithsonian has kept a low profile, unlike its Costa Rican rivals, because of politics. During the U.S. invasion to oust Noriega, two researchers were actually kidnapped for a day. "We have managed to stay here under difficult situations because we haven't meddled in Panamanian affairs," de Alba says. "It's a difficult role. A lot of conservation is political."

In 1985, Juan Carlos Navarro, a 23-year-old from the wealthy class returned home with a Harvard MBA and founded the Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON) with several friends and computers. They were starting from scratch, especially by U.S. standards, since few Panamanians birdwatch, backpack, or pursue any of the other outdoor hobbies that have spawned so many conservation activists here.

But since the Noriega crisis, when ANCON starved financially and had to fire half of its staff, the group has taken off, growing from a budget of $1 million in 1991 to $9 million in 1994. It now taps an international network of wildlife conservation groups and imports the techniques of U.S. environmentalism, from an "adopt-a-hectare" fundraising campaign, to creating a network of 2,000 volunteers for beach cleanups and other activities, to "cinema verite"-like TV commercials of illegal logging. ("They will find one good mahogany tree every few miles," says Marco Gandasequi of ANCON, "and they will bulldoze everything in their way to get to it.") The group has filed the first environmental lawsuit against the government and established the first private nature preserve on the southeastern coast of the country.

ANCON has now become an established word in the Panamanian vocabulary, Gandasequi reports. What it means remains a little murkier in the public mind. His father, also named Marco Gandasequi, one of the leading political analysts in the country, says, "If we were at zero 10 years ago, we are at one now. But that was an extraordinary step. Maybe from one to 10 will be easier." In last May's presidential elections, however, the environment was not even an issue, even though Panama faces changes that may alter its landscape forever. By the year 2000, all of the U.S. military land in the canal zone will revert to Panamanian control. As real estate, it's worth $30 billion in a country with a $5 billion gross domestic product. But as nature it's relatively pristine, aside from areas littered with ordnance from old war games, and it's valuable as a watershed that keeps the canal flowing clean. Panama has already created two national parks around the Rio Chagres river that feeds the canal, and conservationists would like to see much more of the zone protected as parkland. But to the national commission overseeing the transfer of the bases, the real estate value may count more.

After putting into Rio Chagres by small boat, you soon travel into the magical rainforests of North American lore. Blue skies. Lumpy cumulous cloud berets scattered to the horizons. Tall, spindly, gray "emergent" trees that umbrella their surroundings, bare for the dry season until they blossom orange, yellow or red in spring. The understory remains a dozen shades of green, impossibly tangled up with vines like an old sailing ship's rigging after a wreck. The broad blue river wends through mud flats and waterplants. Black jacata birds restlessly stalk the shallows, jumping and landing with fingery flashes of yellow under their wings. Turtles lined up along exposed logs like World War I trench helmets dive into the water at the first sign of boats. It's easy to see why naturalists are hooked on Panama's ecology.

An ANCON guard sits at the head of the boat with a short 12-gauge shotgun laid across his bare knees, a reminder that, in the national parks, poachers can be a deadly problem. One Smithsonian guard was killed several years ago. For all of the media age savvy gleaned from the U.S., ANCON realizes that conservation works differently down here. Even suing the government, Gandasequi admits, is something of an empty exercise since the laws can't be enforced. So ANCON has gone out to the field to try to teach the poor people new ways to farm, alternatives to the slashing and burning of rainforests that have already turned so much of the country into grasslands in this century.

The boat lands near an old cattle ranch that ANCON bought in 1990 to create a model "agroforestry" farm, which plants annual crops amid trees that can be harvested in 20 years. The trees replenish the soil, shade out an alien grass that would otherwise capture the sunny ground with 12-foot-high stalks, and give the farmers reason to stay put. ANCON also hopes to teach villagers to raise green iguanas for meat and eggs in pens, so they will stop poaching them in the wild. And the farm sprouts thousands of tree seedlings, like mahogany, for replanting around the country.

ANCON isn't without critics. An indigenous leader from the tribes who live in the region of ANCON's nature reserve says: "ANCON is the children of the big rich." Others seem to resent the media slickness. And the group isn't shy about raising money from corporations, such as Texaco which fouled one Smithsonian coral reef research station with an oil spill in 1986. Until the Panama City buses display panoramas from the Rio Chagres only half an hour's drive away, however, conservation in this contry needs more friends than enemies. Contact: ANCON, Apdo. 1387, Panama 1, Rep. de Panama/(507)64-8100.