Or maybe more like that little angel that sits on one shoulder: “Avoid food products that contain high fructose corn syrup.” (Not, he says, because it’s less healthful than sugar, but because it’s a sign of a highly processed product.)

Those and 61 other notions make up the influential author’s new book, “Food Rules” (Penguin, $11 paperback), meant to be a simple guide to eating, something anyone can use without reading through a lot of science and nutrition research. And it is really simple, with many of the rules along the lines of things many people know if they stop to think about it. Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and a professor at UC Berkeley, makes some of the advice clever: “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

The book is based on his mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Pollan bemoans the fact that many people rely on “experts” to know what to eat when, really, there are just two major facts.

The first is: “Populations that eat a so-called Western diet – generally defined as a diet consisting of lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains … invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.”
And the second is that people who eat a range of traditional diets don’t suffer from those diseases.

Many of the rules are based on traditional wisdom; some are based on more modern notions.

Rule No. 27: “Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.”

No. 36: “Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.”

And, there’s the all-important last rule – thank goodness: “Break the rules once in a while.”

Michael Pollan, the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” has synthesized that tome’s analysis and explanation into “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.”

It doesn’t get much easier than this.

Each page has a simple rule, sometimes with a short explanation, sometimes without, that promotes Pollan’s back-to-the-basics-of-food (and-food-enjoyment) philosophy.

Rule No. 1: Eat food.

He explains that he’s referring to edible items that haven’t been processed beyond recognition. A third of the book focuses on this theme. The second part addresses the type of food people should eat: Mostly plants. The third part focuses on how much food (you might be able to see this coming): Not too much.

Among the gems: Be the kind of person who takes supplements — then skip the supplements. (That’s Rule No. 40.) Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk (Rule No. 36). It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car. (Rule No. 20). Try not to eat alone (Rule No. 59).

So if you need simple directions to achieve a more healthful, perhaps more sane way of eating — not a fancy, complex eating plan involving percentage of carbs and timing (and you also don’t want to have to read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” though you think you should) — this could be your year.

(As for cleaning your plate, he advises against it. Rule No. 61.)

That optimism fueled two of his earlier books: “The Botany of Desire,” about our relationship with food, and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which urged variety in our diet. It’s most evident in the last of the trilogy, “In Defense of Food,” whose simple message is “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The good news is, he thinks we can do it. Twenty years ago, it might have been difficult, but today organic, regionally grown food is more available than it has been since the food industry began controlling our consumption.

Pollan subtitles his new book “An Eater’s Manifesto,” but he’s way too polite to tell us what to eat. Instead, he uses his familiar brand of carefully researched, common-sense journalism to persuade, providing guidelines and convincing arguments. “[W]hat other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat?” he asks. Once, we had culture (“just a fancy word for your mother”), but culture has been replaced by “scientists and food marketers (often an unhealthy alliance of the two).” Americans are “increasingly sick and fat. Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.”

We have been buffeted so often by conflicting studies that we’ve stopped thinking of food as food. We think of it as nutrition. (Recess at my children’s schools in Santa Monica is no longer called recess, but “nutrition.”) Pollan argues that food needs defending from “nutrition science on one side and from the food industry on the other — and from the needless complications around eating that together they have fostered.”

“In Defense of Food” is in three parts. The first explains the perils of “nutritionism,” like most isms a reductionist, contextless ideology. Nutritionism divides our food into nutrients (Pollan shows the complexity involved by listing the astonishing number of antioxidants in thyme) and pits them against each other: fats versus carbs, carbs versus proteins. Moreover, it “has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions among foods,” allowing marketers to avoid thorny issues of how food is grown and how humans process it. Nutritionism is a boon to food marketers, not only because it helps with splashy packaging but also because it lets them advise buyers to eat more of a particular food, exacerbating an already imbalanced, unvaried diet.

There’s an all-too convenient relationship between the scientists and the marketers, he writes: “The food industry needs theories so it can better redesign specific processed foods; a new theory means a new line of products, allowing the industry to go on tweaking the Western diet instead of making any more radical change to its business model.” The medical community also benefits; Pollan notes that as Americans spend less on food, they spend more on healthcare.

The second part, titled “The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization,” begins with a 1982 study, in which a group of Aborigines who had left the bush, taken up a Western diet and developed Type-2 diabetes were returned to the bush and their native diet. The diabetic abnormalities all but disappeared. Pollan uses this and other studies to show how we can regain our own lost health. “What would happen,” he asks, “if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?” If we consume foods grown in degraded soils, or beef from cattle that have eaten grasses grown in such soils, or milk and cheese from those cattle, we won’t get the nutrients we need. This is why processed food so often has to be fortified (something marketers trumpet as a bonus).

The third section offers rules (rather, gentle suggestions) for how to “escape the Western diet.” Many are familiar, if you’ve spent any time paying attention to what you eat — for example, don’t eat packaged foods with lots of chemical ingredients. Some involve behavioral changes: Eat mostly plants, avoid supermarkets whenever possible, buy a freezer, “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” pay more to eat less and don’t buy food where you buy gas. Some are more about how we eat than what we eat — for example, do all your eating at a table, don’t eat alone, eat slowly.

Here’s the manifesto part. Pollan isn’t just asking us to consider changing the way we eat. He’s asking us to join a movement that’s “renovating our food system in the name of health . . . in the very broadest sense of that word.” By “health,” he means avoiding diseases that kill us, but he also means happiness, pleasure, community — factors ignored in studies or marketing plans or by government agencies such as the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, chaired by George McGovern in the late 1970s, so vulnerable to free-market bullying. Government and business together can stand between human beings and their instincts. That pernicious link has been weakened, Pollan believes; it has certainly become a weak link in the food chain. We know what to eat. We just have to remember it.

In the last couple of months a choir of disparate voices has been sending the same message through books, magazines and the Internet that advocates of farmers markets and eating locally have been preaching for years: The cost of industrialized food is too high, both literally and environmentally. And the thought is sinking in.

At least four ambitious books connecting the dots between what we eat and how it affects the world have been published recently, and the most insightful of them, Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” has been a bestseller. Time magazine has devoted an issue to getting right with food, and the Nation (of all publications) is about to do so. Activist author Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) has returned for round two in his fight against fast food, with not just a children’s book but also a movie. All this reflects the fact that the national mind-set is changing. Farmers markets are not just continuing to expand in every state but also have come to be perceived less as precincts of the privileged and more as the future as they evolve for a new generation of consumers. Wal-Mart is taking baby steps toward organics, while Whole Foods has jumped on the next new buzzword: local. “Locavore” is even replacing “gourmet” as the badge of an informed eater.

The reasons behind this sudden consciousness-raising are myriad, but Pollan summarizes them most succinctly. In an e-mail, he says Americans are starting to understand “just how important the food issue is “” how it is linked to energy and global warming (17% of our fossil fuel use goes to feeding ourselves); to environmental pollution (farming is the single biggest source of water pollution); health (obesity and diabetes turned attention to the way we produce food); world trade, the federal budget and the welfare of animals.”

“Increasingly,” Pollan adds, “people recognize that the industrial food system is failing us “” it is not keeping us or our world healthy. And there are alternatives.”

Rethinking the quick fix

AMERICANS are becoming more proactive (you can’t buy a congressman the way the high-fructose corn syrup lobby can, but you can say yes to locally grown berries). They are no longer putting faith in the quick cure, in vitamin-enhanced food and low-carb anything, but instead are looking for the real deal.

On top of all that, the Internet makes it quicker and easier to spread a message and win converts. Pollan’s debate with the cofounder and chief executive of Whole Foods Markets, John P. Mackey, played out in real-time, online. The New Age grocer took the writer to task over how the company was treated in the book for selling out-of-season asparagus imported from half a world away, even if it was organic. By the end of the duel by blog, Mackey had agreed to start working more with local farmers.

The result communicated two concepts: Americans can now vote with their grocery dollars. And buying locally offers a relatively simple solution to specific and immediate problems: small farms forestall suburban sprawl; eating food grown nearby takes less of a toll on the environment.

Pollan is the leading proponent of that message, particularly in his latest book, subtitled “A Natural History of Four Meals,” which looks at the ramifications of the American way of eating and offers countless suggestions for changing it for the radically better. Researched as well as a rocket science manual but written as seductively as a beach novel, it could be considered a written version of the Al Gore film documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Message: What we eat has consequences.

During the five years of research into what he calls “our national eating disorder,” Pollan does a fair amount of enlightened shopping but also goes so far as to kill his own chicken and pig. Of all food experts, he has a sharp sense of why the country is waking up, and why now.

“My hunch is that, at a time when world problems seem so dire and intractable, food represents one area where people feel they can actually make a difference, here and now,” he said. “As I tell audiences, if you feel your tax dollars are going to support practices you find deplorable, you can’t withdraw your support for those practices without going to jail. But if you feel that your food dollars are supporting morally or ethically objectionable practices “” brutal factory farms or environmental pollution “” you can withhold your support, and vote with your fork for a better alternative.”

Nina Planck, who has written the second most compelling culinary bible published this summer, “Real Food: What to Eat and Why,” sees another phenomenon at work. To her, what is happening is nothing less than a second revolution in food, following very belatedly on the heels of the breakthrough of Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. (And of an era marked by food co-ops and macrobiotic food and “Diet for a Small Planet.”)

For 35 years, Planck notes, the emphasis was on local fruits and vegetables. Now, for the first time, locally grown meat and dairy are becoming prize ingredients. “Insofar as it was a vegetarian revolution,” she said, “it’s over.”

Eating well expands

PLANCK, who was raised by small farmers, remembers a world when health food, local food and vegetarianism “were all the same.” Now, she said, eating well can encompass local lamb, local beef, local cheese “” even the much-touted Mediterranean diet, American style, is expanding to include meat.

Planck believes in eating as her grandparents did, which means avoiding all those better-living-through-chemistry advances Americans have been conditioned to worship. Better butter than margarine, better local tomatoes than organic, even.

Other advocates’ new books throw more hardwood on the grill. Marion Nestle guides shoppers through the real world of the supermarket in “What to Eat,” giving back stories on everyday foods and offering advice on what to avoid and embrace. Her view is more toward personal than planetary health, but the overlap keeps overlapping. And she has received so much publicity that mothers across the country should have shaking hands as they reach for the drinkable yogurt, which she documents is more dessert than dairy.

Peter Singer and Jim Mason trudge down the same aisles in “The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter,” an earnest book that makes generally the same points as Nestle and Pollan in a more pedestrian manner.

All these have hit bookstores almost exactly five years after Schlosser’s powerful “Fast Food Nation,” which has now been made into a movie by Richard Linklater with a preview rated four stars on You-Tube.com. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival last spring and due in theaters in October, it is being described as a “fictionalized exposé” of the real issues involved in industrial beef and fast food, including the danger to teenagers employed as burger jockeys and the chemical wizardry that puts the flavor into industrial food.

Schlosser and a coauthor, Charles Wilson, have also written what is essentially the same book for children: “Chew on This: Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About Fast Food.” Many of the problems that were making front-page news when his first book was published, particularly mad cow disease and outbreaks of E. coli food poisoning, have faded from public awareness. But now there are more worries, such as how animals are raised and what they eat and whether they are drugged.

Time magazine tackled the issue of grass-fed beef in June, along with other topics not normally on the front burner at a news magazine: the importance of family meals, better food for babies, improving school lunches, six tips for eating better from Pollan and, of course, locavores (by one definition, people who eat primarily food grown within 100 miles of their tables). Later this month the Nation will publish its own food issue, featuring Pollan and Schlosser along with Waters, devoted to “the way we eat and what it means for the world.”

Anyone who puts down these new books and magazines determined to eat smarter has increasing choices this summer. Farmers markets have now become as commonplace as Wal-Marts in most cities across the U.S.; the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service estimates there are more than 3,800 nationwide, more than double the number there were in 1994. In California nearly 500 farmers markets are operating, with about 80 in Los Angeles County.

No wonder Whole Foods is acceding to Pollan’s prodding. At a time when a gallon of gas sells for almost as much as a Frappuccino, more Americans are starting to understand viscerally the real cost of shipping in ingredients from everywhere in the world. Not to mention the freshness factor.

Critics worry that Wal-Mart’s decision to hitch a ride on the organic bandwagon will force growers to take shortcuts, and cynics say Wal-Mart is merely targeting higher-income shoppers. But Planck voices a more practical attitude: Anything that makes industrial food better is a good thing. “We used to have two kinds of food: industrial and ecological,” she said. “Now we have three: industrial, ecological and commercial organic.”

In the end, the mainstreaming of “ecological” may be the biggest advance in the American food supply. This summer the USDA has been taking public comment on a new standard for grass-fed beef, with a proposal that the meat must be from animals that have eaten grass 99% of the time, from weaning to the slaughterhouse. To most Americans, accustomed to corn-fed cows and oblivious to context, this once would have sounded revolutionary. Now it is simply part of a greater awareness. Grass-feeding steers not only affords them a more natural life but also could produce safer meat.

Unlike the last revolution in food, in the ’70s, the movement toward change is not coming from the fringe and cannot be easily written off as the pipe dreams of a bunch of vegetarian hippies. The right stuff is no longer segregated in health food stores and co-ops; it’s gone mainstream.

And that may explain one more sea change in the Summer of Food: Priorities have shifted. Americans concerned about how their food is raised now know they can make a difference. Hence the scandale over lobsters (Whole Foods promised to stop selling them live to give them a finer quality of life) and the growing movement to outlaw foie gras on the grounds that it represents cruelty to ducks.

A year ago those tempests at the table would have dominated headlines. This summer, conscientious eaters seem to have started moving onward and upward on the food chain, informed all the way.
]]> http://michaelpollan.com/profiles/voting-with-their-forks/feed/ 0 http://michaelpollan.com/profiles/taking-a-bite-out-of-organics/ http://michaelpollan.com/profiles/taking-a-bite-out-of-organics/#comments Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000 mp_admin http://michaelpollan.local/wordpress/?p=139 More »

Although Pollan has watched these chickens (“an eager, gossipy procession of Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds and New Hampshire Whites”) fan out across pastures as they feed, they are technically not organic. That’s because the farmer who raises them would rather buy feed corn from a local grower, who may have used a nonorganic herbicide, than buy “pure product” transported from so far away that it’s “coated in diesel fuel.” This is vintage Pollan; he closes in on a single chicken and broadens out to engage the larger argument. What does “organic” mean? How is the term abused and how did it become both a code word for purity and integrity and the rubric of a huge enterprise as beholden to fossil fuels and aggressive a marketer as the industrialized food chain it opposes?

A journalism professor at UC Berkeley, Pollan is a writer for whom structure is particularly important. Because he deals with nature and ideas, which don’t have ready-made frames to drape a story on, he must come up with one. In his last book, “The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World,” he did so brilliantly. Its thesis is that plants are smarter than we are and that by domesticating them we’ve fallen in with their master plan to increase their habitat. His present book, about the American appetite, lacks the charm of that conceit but is more important. He asks us to consider our everyday decisions about eating: How do we make them, and what are the moral and ecological repercussions?

The book is divided into three sections, each on one of “the three principal food chains that sustain us today: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer.” Each culminates in a meal (two, in the organic section). First stop is the supermarket, the cornfield’s point of sale. (Oh, would that he were talking about just-picked ears of corn, their silk still warm, kernels waiting for a knob of butter to make them perfect!) Everything we eat seems to come from the crop. “Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon… The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives tethered to machines, eating corn.”

The invention of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer by Fritz Haber (a German chemist who also invented Zyklon B) marks the moment when “the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel.” The “flood tide of cheap corn” this produced “made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots instead of on grass… Iowa livestock farmers couldn’t compete with the factory-farmed animals their own cheap corn had helped spawn.” With that, Pollan is standing in a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) on “the high plains of western Kansas,” unsuccessfully looking for the cow he has bought and intends to follow until it comprises the patty of a McDonald’s meal.

The second section centers on the aforementioned Virginia farm, owned by one Joel Salatin, an endearingly pugnacious man who classifies himself as “beyond organic.” Their relationship gets off to a rocky start when Salatin refuses to FedEx a chicken and a steak to Pollan because the requisite dry ice, Styrofoam and jet fuel imperil environmental sustainability, which is much more important to him. When Pollan presses the “what is organic?” issue, Salatin obligingly explodes: “A ten-thousand-bird shed that stinks to high heaven or a new paddock of fresh green grass every day? Now which chicken shall we call ‘organic’? I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the government, because now they own the word.”

Pollan doesn’t ask the government, but he does go to the quintessential purveyor of organic fare, Whole Foods Market. He coins the phrase “supermarket pastoral” for all that copy about “humanely raised” and “range fed” and reveals most of it as an outright lie. A Whole Foods marketing consultant allows that such terms help convince shoppers that they’re “engaging in authentic experiences.” The quaint little farms the chain wants you to think are its sources cannot fill the bill. “As soon as your business involves stocking the frozen food case or produce section at a national chain,” Pollan writes, “whether it be Wal-Mart or Whole Foods, the sheer quantities of organic produce you need makes it imperative to buy from farms operating on the same industrial scale you are.” Organic milk doesn’t come from cows wandering the pasture but from massive feedlots where they eat organic corn but produce the same manure lakes as any other CAFO. As for organic chickens, they spend their short lives in a reeking shed with fans at each end, along with a bolt hole leading to a small grassy yard, in compliance with U.S. Department of Agriculture rules.

As I read, I felt myself troubled by a basic question. What did the title mean? It could be a term from behavioral science about the dangers faced by omnivores, such as rats and humans, that are tempted to eat something unsafe, or it could allude to plain old supermarket confusion about what to buy for dinner. Pollan doesn’t make up his mind. Forewarned by this confusion, I was less surprised than I might have been to find the third section disappointing. Pollan sets off on a quest for the foraged meal. Among other things, he needs to get a gun license, learn to shoot, hunt for chanterelles and pan for salt in San Francisco Bay. No sooner has he hit the Berkeley Hills than he drops his entire tone and point of view. He meets an Italian who makes salami, and the book starts reading like bad Castaneda. Moreover, it’s hard to believe that a writer with Pollan’s gimlet eye can consider a meal that involves hunting in a private forest, crossing California in an SUV and the use of ATVs and GPS technology as living off the land. He seems to have been ambushed by his book’s structure. After I’ve seen industrial agriculture destroyed and industrial organic eviscerated, I need to hear more than people in Berkeley carrying on about Italian cured meats. I want answers, bullet points, a program I can sign on to, at least a glimmer of hope that we can know where our food comes from and still enjoy it.

Fittingly, it is the land and gardening and what it means to Pollan that saves the book: “Growing food has been my atavism of choice since I was ten years old, when I planted a ‘farm’ in my parent’s suburban yard… The mysteries of germination and flowering and fruiting engaged me from an early age, and the fact that by planting and working an ordinary patch of dirt you could in a few months’ time harvest things of taste and value was, for me, nature’s most enduring astonishment. It still is.”

That’s the man we see knife in hand and weak-kneed before an oblivious chicken at Salatin’s farm. He’s followed the energy chain from sunlight to grass to chicken; after he inserts the knife he’ll compost the entrails to start the whole cycle again. When Pollan writes that the resulting meal of chicken grilled over wood served with roast corn, a lemony rocket salad and a local Viognier has a “declarative quality,” where the foods taste “almost flamboyantly themselves,” I found myself deeply moved that the earth can produce such bounty, that an author can put a single meal in its broadest context, and that, in the natural order of things, good food still has a place.

One of the ballyhooed successes of the North American Free Trade Agreement has been the opening of Mexico to American farmers, who are now selling millions of bushels of corn south of the border. But why would Mexico, whose people still subsist on maize (mostly in tortillas), whose farmers still grow more maize than any other crop, ever buy corn from an American farmer? Because he can produce it much more cheaply than any Mexican farmer can. Actually that’s not quite right—it’s because he can sell it much more cheaply.

This is largely because of U.S. agricultural policies. While one part of the U.S. government speaks of the need to alleviate Third World poverty, another writing subsidy checks to American farmers, which encourages them to undersell Third World farmers.

The river of cheap American corn began flooding into Mexico after NAFTA took effect in 1994. Since then, the price of corn in Mexico has fallen by half. A 2003 report by the Carnegie Endowment says this flood has washed away 1.3 million small farmers. Unable to compete, they have left their land to join the swelling pools of Mexico’s urban unemployed. Others migrate to the U.S. to pick our crops—former farmers become day laborers.

The cheap U.S. corn has also wreaked havoc on Mexico’s land, according to the Carnegie report. The small farmers forced off their land often sell out to larger farmers who grow for export, farmers who must adopt far more industrial (and especially chemical- and water-intensive) practices to compete in the international marketplace. Fertilizer runoff into the Sea of Cortez starves its marine life of oxygen, and Mexico’s scarce water resources are leaching north, one tomato at a time.

Mexico’s industrial farmers now produce fruits and vegetables for American tables year-round. It’s ridiculous for a country like Mexico whose people are often hungry to use its best land to grow produce for a country where food is so abundant that its people are obese—but under free trade, it makes economic sense.

Meanwhile, the small farmers struggling to hold on in Mexico are forced to grow their corn on increasingly marginal lands, contributing to deforestation and soil erosion.

Compounding these environmental pressures is the advent of something new to Mexico: factory farming. The practice of feeding corn to livestock was actively discouraged by the Mexican government until quite recently—an expression of the culture’s quasi-religious reverence for maize. But those policies were reversed in 1994, and, just as it has done in the United States, cheap corn has driven the growth of animal feedlots, sewage concentration and water and air pollution.

Cheap American corn in Mexico threatens all corn—Zea mays itself—and by extension all of us who have come to depend on this plant. The small Mexican farmers who grow corn in southern Mexico are responsible for maintaining the genetic diversity of the species. While American farmers raise a small handful of genetically nearly identical hybrids, Mexico’s small farmers still grow hundreds of different, open-pollinated varieties, commonly called landraces.

This genetic diversity, the product of 10,000 years of human-maize co-evolution, represents some of the most precious and irreplaceable information on Earth, as we were reminded in 1970 when a fungus decimated the American corn crop and genes for resistance were found in a landrace in southern Mexico. These landraces will survive only as long as the farmers who cultivate them do. The cheap corn that is throwing these farmers off their land threatens to dry up the pool of genetic diversity on which the future of the species depends.

Perhaps from a strictly economic point of view, free trade in a commodity like corn appears eminently rational. But look at the same phenomenon from a biological point of view and it begins to look woefully shortsighted, if not mad.

On closer inspection, it turned out that what McKibben was really mourning was not the end of nature per se, but the end of a certain romantic and scientifically meaningless idea of nature conceived as the pristine opposite of culture, as “the world apart from man.” McKibben’s biggest contribution to environmental thinking in “The End of Nature” was to unwittingly expose the harmfulness of this idea, which deserves much of the blame for America’s schizoid, all-or-nothing approach toward the environment; we possess the unique ability to worship Edenic wilderness while paving over everything else. Once you conclude, with McKibben, that all of nature is fallen—that even the rain falling upon Yosemite “bears the permanent stamp of man”—you are left with his counsel of despair: “If nature has already ended,” he wrote, “what are we fighting for?” Indeed. And in one of those sentences any writer would sell his first-born to have back, he declared that “fighting for it is like fighting for an independent Latvia”¦”

In the six years since the publication of “The End of Nature,” Latvia has won its independence and McKibben has had the good sense to turn back from the bootlessness of his conclusion—to decide that, fallen or no, nature might still be worth fighting for. “Hope, Human and Wild” is a useful and surprisingly optimistic book that proposes to leave behind “the increasingly sterile debate between wilderness and civilization” and in its place offer “a vision of recovery, renewal, of resurgence.” McKibben is not quite prepared to admit his last book might have been wrongheaded, but he is ready to roll up his sleeves and get down to the hard work of mending our relationship to nature. “I’m done mourning,” he tells us.

McKibben’s journey in search of environmental hope takes him to three very different places; the Adirondacks of northern New York, where he lives, the Brazilian city of Curitiba and the southern Indian state of Kerala. First stop is McKibben’s “home place,” where an astonishing and little-noticed process of ecological recovery has taken hold. Like much of the eastern seaboard, the forests of the Adirondacks were long ago clear-cut, for fuel and to make way for agriculture. But as the farms began to fail early in this century, the eastern forest regenerated itself with remarkable speed. Not only in McKibben’s remote Adirondacks but even in my own exurban Connecticut woods, the beavers, wild turkeys, deer and coyotes have returned in force, and even the black bears and mountain lions are making a comeback. The recovery of the eastern forest, though incomplete and threatened anew by logging, is an important and heartening environmental story, and McKibben tells it with verve, holding it up as an example of “the grace of nature if people back off, give it some room and some time.”

“We have been given a second chance,” McKibben writes, in one of several passages that stand in vivid contrast to the anti-humanist gloom of “The End of Nature.” When he asserts that the recovery of the Adirondacks shows that “the world . . . will meet us halfway” and “the alternative to Eden is not damnation,” one has the feeling he is arguing not so much with his readers as with his earlier self. No matter; McKibben’s willingness to rethink past positions is laudable.

McKibben believes we will not right our relationship to nature until we abandon our culture of consumption and fossil fuel—what he variously calls our “mall fantasies” and “Baywatch world.” (Make no mistake, it is not just our habits but our values that McKibben wants to transform; this might explain why he is so quick to dismiss the possibility that our technology might also offer hope.) But it is one thing to preach living more modestly, quite another to lay out exactly what this might mean—and McKibben is courageous enough to do just that. With his two forays into what used to be called the developing world, he tries to disprove “the idea that only endless economic growth can produce decent human lives.”

Of the book’s two “models of . . . post-utopia,” Curitiba, a city of 1.6 million in the south of Brazil, comes off as by far the more appealing and useful. Under the imaginative leadership of Mayor Jaime Lerner, the city has made impressive strides in solving a variety of urban problems, beginning with the revitalization of its public realm and ending with innovative schemes for feeding and housing the poor, making buses more appealing than cars and picking up the garbage. (For the same money it would cost to haul garbage out of the slums, the city exchanges bags of groceries for bags of collected trash.) Curitiba offers the world a fascinating laboratory of experiments in urban planning and social policy, and McKibben’s spirited account is a salutary reminder of what even a financially strapped government can do to improve the quality of life and the environment.

If this sounds like a distinctly unfashionable message to bear back to America in the Gingrich era, then McKibben’s dispatch from Kerala, a poor, rice-growing state on the southern tip of India, is liable to seem positively off the wall. Kerala might well be a sustainable Third World utopia—literate, egalitarian, healthy and well-nourished, all the while “living lightly” on the land—but it’s hard to see how much other places can reasonably hope to borrow from it. McKibben sees Kerala’s attainment of well-being and social equality without growth as proof that “sharing works,” yet the radical redistribution that is at the core of Kerala’s achievement would never have come about had it not been for the election of a communist government. And for all its hand labor and low technology, Kerala’s economy, ironically, is closely tied to the First World culture of petroleum: some 250,000 Keralians work in the Persian Gulf and send most of their pay home.

But if there are problems with some of the specific models that McKibben has turned up, these seem finally less important than the search itself. Environmental despair is easy, McKibben suggests; he should know. Environmental hope is much harder to nurture, and it hinges on exactly the kind of detailed, nuts-and-bolts specifics that McKibben has thrown himself into with such winning enthusiasm. Writing of bus-door designs and traffic flows, cooperative farms and garbage pickup schemes might be less stirring than prophesies of doom—and may find fewer readers as a result—but it’s a whole lot more valuable too.