Philippine journalist Marites Vitug was not at her desk the October morning in 1988 when an anonymous man called the newsroom of the Manila Chronicle looking for her. A copy boy picked up the line. "You tell Marites Vitug to stop writing or papatayin s'ya [she'll be killed]," the caller said. The day before, the popular national daily had published her story -- MONEY GROWS ON TREES -- about logging on Palawan, an island in the western part of the Philippines.

"Just for a day I was really scared," remembers Vitug, a small woman with a boyish haircut and large, deepset eyes. A month later, a major story Vitug wrote with co-author James Clad for the Far Eastern Economic Review -- "The Politics of Plunder" -- mapped out the empire of Philippine timber tycoon Jose "Pepito" Alvarez and exposed his relationship with Palawan Congressman Ramon "Monching" Mitra, a rancher and one-time crocodile hunter, and possibly the next Philippine president after May's election.

The article documented how Alvarez, who controls some 415,000 acres of prime logging concessions in northern Palawan, was clearcutting forests at an alarming rate and cutting outside of his licensed concessions. Twenty-five years ago, 92 percent of Palawan was covered with virgin rain forest, rich in old-growth Philippine mahogany, teak, and other tropical hardwoods. Today, more than half of those trees are gone. Following the lumber "trail," Vitug showed how Alvarez's gifts of lumber to local church and military officials silenced potential antagonists, and disclosed that Alvarez's friendship with Mitra, the House majority leader, included free campaign trips on Alvarez's personal helicopter.

Alvarez has sued Vitug and Clad for civil and criminal libel, asking for a total of twenty-six million pesos ($ 1 million) in damages in the civil suit. (The average salary of a Manila journalist is about 60,000 pesos a year.)

Environmental reporting in the Philippines is "not about pollution," Vitug says. "It's about power." Only a handful of families control the country's forests, coastal resources, and land. "They are the wealthy, well-connected and well-entrenched," she says, "and that's why environmental reporting is not safe here."

Despite the danger, more than a third of some sixty stories underwritten by the Manila-based Center for Investigative Journalism, which Vitug helped found in 1989, have something to do with the environment. The center, with money from the Asia Foundation and other sources, pays top Philippine journalists, some on leave from newspapers, to do long-term investigative stories, then sells those stories to the quality Manila press.

The end of censorship has given reporters like Vitug, who now works as a free-lancer, the chance to write about controversial issues. At the same time, it has exposed them to greater physical danger. According to the New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists, thirty-two journalists have been killed during the six years Corazon Aquino has been in power -- two more than were killed during the entire fourteen years of the Marcos dictatorship. Philippine journalists say that perhaps twice that number have been threatened or attacked.

Recently, those writing about the environment have come under fire. In 1991, three journalists who reported on local officials' involvement in illegal logging and mining were threatened. A fourth, Nesino P. Toling, editor of a crusading little paper in northwestern Mindanao, the Panguil Bay Monitor, was shot and killed while he was typing a story in his two-desk office.

Reporters have also been intimidated by threats of libel. The phenomenon may be a predictable result of the excesses of a rambunctious post-censorship press -- a press whose thirty newspapers in Manila alone vie for readership, using juicy political tidbits and titillating headlines. But increasingly, journalists say, libel suits are filed by those in power expressly to prevent reporters from pursuing stories that threaten their interests. It is rare to find a journalist with two or more years of experience who doesn't face a libel suit. Vitug faces two. And a criminal libel suit carries the threat of imprisonment.

Fear has led other journalists in the Philippines to leave the profession or, in a few cases, to leave the country. Some have found creative ways to adapt to the problem. Each time Joey Lozano, one of the journalists who have received support from the Center for Investigative Journalism, breaks another story about landgrabbing by local political warlords or illegal mining in tribal areas, he takes a trip. Lozano, editor of the Ecology Advocate, published in an outback community in southern Mindanao, nearly lost his life to an assassin's bullet six years ago. "My strategy is simple," he says. "Write, and hide."

"If I thought about the risks involved, I wouldn't be able to do much," says Vitug, who is now working on a book on the politics of logging. "I just follow my instincts, and try not to preoccupy myself with the consequences."

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