Ridgeway and St. Clair have subtitled Environmental Bad Guys (and a Few Ideas on How to Stop Them). The most important of these ideas, Ridgeway explains, is that hope for saving the environment lies not with "the large environmental groups which sit in Washington, and don't represent anybody or anything," but with the smaller groups that have maintained their edge, practice a combative politics and are directly confronting corporate power. It turns out that while highlighting individual bad guys may be a key to focusing the public on environmental degradation, the key to blocking them is not to rely on individual celebrities, but garnering public support. Prominent environmental good guys--people like David Brower, founder of the Earth Island Institute and Friends of the Earth, and Lois Gibbs, made famous at Love Canal and now heading the Center for Health, Environment and Justice--have made their mark not as backroom lobbyists, but as effective organizers and crusaders for environmental justice.

A crucial component of the new guidelines will be the requirement that manufacturers test certain new livestock drugs for a tendency to foster the growth of resistant bacteria that could prove harmful to people. Testing will be required for a drug both before and after its approval.

The proposed guidelines have drawn criticism from both sides of a bitter debate, ongoing for three decades. At issue is the extensive use of antibiotics in livestock: of the 50 million pounds of antibiotics pro duced every year in the United States, about 40 percent is given to animals, mostly as feed additives to promote growth.

On one side, the drug and agriculture industries were cited as saying that the FDA is going too far toward restricting access to antibiotics, which they insist are essential to produce safe and affordable meat and poultry. The industries were cited as saying the proposed rules will make drug development, already difficult and expensive, even more so.

On the other side, public-health and consumer advocates were cited as saying that the FDA is not going far enough, because antibiotics are a precious medical resource that should not be squandered to fatten animals. On Tuesday, a coalition of 37 groups, led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit group based in Washington, will petition the FDA to separately rule if a drug is used to treat diseases in people, it can no longer be given to animals as a growth promoter.

Dr. Fred Angulo, a medical epidemiologist in the foodborne and diarrheal disease branch at the CDC, said that, drug resistance in Campylobacter bacteria rose from zero in 1991 to 13 percent in 1997 and 14 percent in 1998. He said epidemiologists were "alarmed" by the Campylobacter figures, because the resistance is to fluoroquinolones, the very class of drug that the FDA is trying hardest to preserve.

Angulo said he and his colleagues blamed much of the increase in fluoroquinolone resistance on the FDA's approval of the drugs to treat a respiratory infection in chickens in 1995. It was an approval the CDC opposed, because it would lead to extensive use of the drugs on chickens.

A recent study, scheduled to appear in the New England Journal of Medicine, was cited as offering strong evidence that people pick up drug-resistant bacteria from chickens. In that study, researchers at the state Health Department in Minnesota found that fluoroquinolone resistant Campylobacter had increased from 1.3 percent of cases in 1992 to 10.2 percent in 1998. The sharpest rise began in 1996, a year after fluoroquinolones were approved for chickens.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, the former state epidemiologist in Minnesota, said the health department also found Campylobacter in 88 percent of the chickens they bought in supermarkets in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Twenty percent of the chickens had a resistant strain.

Given the widespread availability of antibiotics on farms and the long entrenched habit of using them, Angulo said regulation alone probably would not bring about the changes that are needed, adding, "People would have to accept that there is a problem. Many don't. It's a societal change, and we have the same problems in human medicine." Many people, he added, demand antibiotics for viral infections and other problems that the drugs cannot help.

Angulo was quoted "The way we will make major progress, unfortunately, is when there is continuing emergence of treatment problems, not just in humans, but when these drugs don't work in sick animals. As that increases, the realization might come."