IS ANYTHING going to be left of the the high-flown declarations of the Earth Summit two years ago? Although there was never much hope for many of the waffly wish-lists, the two international treaties – the Biodiversity and Climate Change Conventions – should surely have been binding. Alas, discussion among signatories to the Biodiversity Convention, at their first formal meeting in the Bahamas last week, turned out to be pure fudge. Everything that could have been put off for a year was. The signatories couldn’t even agree on where to base their secretariat (see This Week). Only a handful of nations has so far submitted action plans for protecting national biodiversity. (Britain, for once, was in the vanguard.) And the meeting effectively ceded control of global forest conservation policy to two nations with terrible records – Canada and Malaysia. What is the point of a biodiversity treaty if it will not tackle forests, where half the world’s species live?Without a coordinated international plan, absurdities can result. Two years’ kerfuffle in the northwestern US about saving the forest habitat of the spotted owl has cut local timber production. But that has pushed up prices and boosted production in Brazil, Venezuela and Russia. How many species of Amazon beetle will be obliterated to save the spotted owl? Let’s hope for better from the climate treaty’s signatories, which meet in Berlin next March. They, at least, are still talking about targets.