“Food Rules” by Michael Pollan – RSA/Nominet Trust competition from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.

To date, however, the food movement can claim more success in changing popular consciousness than in shifting, in any fundamental way, the political and economic forces shaping the food system or, for that matter, in changing the “standard American diet”—which has only gotten worse since the 1970s. Recently there have been some political accomplishments: food movement activists played a role in shaping the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act and the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, both passed in the last Congress, and the last couple of farm bills have thrown some significant crumbs in the direction of sustainable agriculture and healthy food. But the food movement cannot yet point to legislative achievements on the order of the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act or the establishment of the Environmental Protection Administration. Its greatest victories have come in the media, which could scarcely be friendlier to it, and in the food marketplace, rather than in the halls of Congress, where the power of agribusiness has scarcely been disturbed.

The marked split between the movement’s gains in the soft power of cultural influence and its comparative weakness in conventional political terms is faithfully mirrored in the White House. While Michelle Obama has had notable success raising awareness of the child obesity problem and linking it to the food system (as well as in pushing the industry to change some of its most egregious practices), her husband, after raising expectations on the campaign trail, has done comparatively little to push a reform agenda. Promising anti-trust initiatives to counter food industry concentration, which puts farmers and ranchers at the mercy of a small handful of processors, appear to be languishing. Efforts to reform crop subsidies during the last farm bill debate were halfhearted and got nowhere. And a USDA plan to place new restrictions on genetically modified crops (in order to protect organic farms from contamination) was reportedly overruled by the White House.

There are two ways to interpret the very different approaches of the president and the first lady to the food issue. A cynical interpretation would be that the administration has decided to deploy the first lady to pay lip service to reform while continuing business as usual. But a more charitable interpretation would be that President Obama has determined there is not yet enough political support to take on the hard work of food system reform, and the best thing to do in the meantime is for the first lady to build a broad constituency for change by speaking out about the importance of food.

If this is the president’s reading of the situation, it may well be right. So far, at least, the food movement has only a small handful of allies in Congress: Tom Harkin, Jon Tester and Kirsten Gillibrand in the Senate; Earl Blumenauer and Jim McGovern in the House. The Congressional committees in charge of agricultural policies remain dominated by farm-state legislators openly hostile to reform, and until big-state and urban legislators decide it is worth their while to serve on those committees, little of value is likely to emerge from them. Whatever its cost to public health and the environment, cheap food has become a pillar of the modern economy that few in government dare to question. And many of the reforms we need—such as improving conditions in the meat industry and cleaning up feedlot agriculture—stand to make meat more expensive. That might be a good thing for public health, but it will never be popular.

So what is to be done? The food movement has discovered that persuading the media, and even the president, that you are right on the merits does not necessarily translate into change, not when the forces arrayed against change are so strong. If change comes, it will come from other places: from the grassroots and, paradoxically, from powerful interests that stand to gain from it.

The most promising food activism is taking place at the grassroots: local policy initiatives are popping up in municipalities across the country, alongside urban agriculture ventures in underserved areas and farm-to-school programs. Changing the way America feeds itself has become the galvanizing issue for a generation now coming of age. (A new FoodCorps, launched in August as part of AmeriCorps, received nearly 1,300 applications for fifty slots.) Out of these local efforts will come local leaders who will recognize the power of food politics. Some of these leaders will run for office on these issues, and some of them will win.

It’s worth remembering that it took decades before the campaign against the tobacco industry could point to any concrete accomplishments. By the 1930s, the scientific case against smoking had been made, yet it wasn’t until 1964 that the surgeon general was willing to declare smoking a threat to health, and another two decades after that before the industry’s seemingly unshakable hold on Congress finally crumbled. By this standard, the food movement is making swift progress.

But there is a second lesson the food movement can take away from the antismoking campaign. When change depends on overcoming the influence of an entrenched power, it helps to have another powerful interest in your corner—an interest that stands to gain from reform. In the case of the tobacco industry, that turned out to be the states, which found themselves on the hook (largely because of Medicaid) for the soaring costs of smoking-related illnesses. So, under economic duress, states and territories joined to file suit against the tobacco companies to recover some of those costs, and eventually they prevailed.

The food movement will find such allies, especially now that Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has put the government on the hook for the soaring costs of treating chronic illnesses—most of which are preventable and linked to diet. No longer allowed to cherry-pick the patients they’re willing to cover, or to toss overboard people with chronic diseases, the insurance industry will soon find itself on the hook for the cost of the American diet too. It’s no accident that support for measures such as taxing soda is strongest in places like Massachusetts, where the solvency of the state and its insurance industry depends on figuring out how to reduce the rates of Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

The food movement is about to gain a powerful new partner, an industry that is beginning to recognize that it, too, has a compelling interest in issues like taxing soda, school lunch reform and even the farm bill. Indeed, as soon as the healthcare industry begins to focus on the fact that the government is subsidizing precisely the sort of meal for which the industry (and the government) will have to pick up the long-term tab, eloquent advocates of food system reform will suddenly appear in the unlikeliest places—like the agriculture committees of Congress.

None of this should surprise us. For the past forty years, food reform activists like Frances Moore Lappé have been saying that the American way of growing and eating food is “unsustainable.” That objection is not rooted in mere preference or aesthetics, but rather in the inescapable realities of biology. Continuing to eat in a way that undermines health, soil, energy resources and social justice cannot be sustained without eventually leading to a breakdown. Back in the 1970s it was impossible to say exactly where that breakdown would first be felt. Would it be the environment or the healthcare system that would buckle first? Now we know. We simply can’t afford the healthcare costs incurred by the current system of cheap food—which is why, sooner or later, we will find the political will to change it.

Certainly these are heady days for people who have been working to reform the way Americans grow food and feed themselves–the “food movement,” as it is now often called. Markets for alternative kinds of food–local and organic and pastured–are thriving, farmers’ markets are popping up like mushrooms and for the first time in many years the number of farms tallied in the Department of Agriculture’s census has gone up rather than down. The new secretary of agriculture has dedicated his department to “sustainability” and holds meetings with the sorts of farmers and activists who not many years ago stood outside the limestone walls of the USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic with their tractors. Cheap words, you might say; and it is true that, so far at least, there have been more words than deeds–but some of those words are astonishing. Like these: shortly before his election, Barack Obama told a reporter for Time that “our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil”; he went on to connect the dots between the sprawling monocultures of industrial agriculture and, on the one side, the energy crisis and, on the other, the healthcare crisis.

Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago. To many Americans it must sound like a brand-new conversation, with its bracing talk about the high price of cheap food, or the links between soil and health, or the impossibility of a society eating well and being in good health unless it also farms well.

But the national conversation unfolding around the subject of food and farming really began in the 1970s, with the work of writers like Wendell Berry, Frances Moore Lappé, Barry Commoner and Joan Gussow. All four of these writers are supreme dot-connectors, deeply skeptical of reductive science and far ahead not only in their grasp of the science of ecology but in their ability to think ecologically: to draw lines of connection between a hamburger and the price of oil, or between the vibrancy of life in the soil and the health of the plants, animals and people eating from that soil.

I would argue that the conversation got under way in earnest in 1971, when Berry published an article in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue introducing Americans to the work of Sir Albert Howard, the British agronomist whose thinking had deeply influenced Berry’s own since he first came upon it in 1964. Indeed, much of Berry’s thinking about agriculture can be read as an extended elaboration of Howard’s master idea that farming should model itself on natural systems like forests and prairies, and that scientists, farmers and medical researchers need to reconceive “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.” No single quotation appears more often in Berry’s writing than that one, and with good reason: it is manifestly true (as even the most reductive scientists are coming to recognize) and, as a guide to thinking through so many of our problems, it is inexhaustible. That same year, 1971, Lappé published Diet for a Small Planet, which linked modern meat production (and in particular the feeding of grain to cattle) to the problems of world hunger and the environment. Later in the decade, Commoner implicated industrial agriculture in the energy crisis, showing us just how much oil we were eating when we ate from the industrial food chain; and Gussow explained to her nutritionist colleagues that the problem of dietary health could not be understood without reference to the problem of agriculture.

Looking back on this remarkably fertile body of work, which told us all we needed to know about the true cost of cheap food and the value of good farming, is to register two pangs of regret, one personal, the other more political: first, that as a young writer coming to these subjects a couple of decades later, I was rather less original than I had thought; and second, that as a society we failed to heed a warning that might have averted or at least mitigated the terrible predicament in which we now find ourselves.

For what would we give today to have back the “environmental crisis” that Berry wrote about so prophetically in the 1970s, a time still innocent of the problem of climate change? Or to have back the comparatively manageable public health problems of that period, before obesity and type 2 diabetes became “epidemic” (Most experts date the obesity epidemic to the early 1980s.)

But history will show that we failed to take up the invitation to begin thinking ecologically. As soon as oil prices subsided and Jimmy Carter was rusticated to Plains, Georgia (along with his cardigan, thermostat and solar panels), we went back to business–and agribusiness–as usual. In the mid-1980s Ronald Reagan removed Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House, and the issues that the early wave of ecologically conscious food writers had raised were pushed to the margins of national politics and culture.

When I began writing about agriculture in the late ’80s and ’90s, I quickly figured out that no editor in Manhattan thought the subject timely or worthy of his or her attention, and that I would be better off avoiding the word entirely and talking instead about food, something people then still had some use for and cared about, yet oddly never thought to connect to the soil or the work of farmers.

It was during this period that I began reading Berry’s work closely–avidly, in fact, because I found in it practical answers to questions I was struggling with in my garden. I had begun growing a little of my own food, not on a farm but in the backyard of a second home in the exurbs of New York, and had found myself completely ill prepared, especially when it came to the challenges posed by critters and weeds. An obedient child of Thoreau and Emerson (both of whom mistakenly regarded weeds as emblems of wildness and gardens as declensions from nature), I honored the wild and didn’t fence off my vegetables from the encroaching forest. I don’t have to tell you how well that turned out. Thoreau did plant a bean field at Walden, but he couldn’t square his love of nature with the need to defend his crop from weeds and birds, and eventually he gave up on agriculture. Thoreau went on to declare that “if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.” With that slightly obnoxious declaration, American writing about nature all but turned its back on the domestic landscape. It’s not at all surprising that we got better at conserving wilderness than at farming and gardening.

It was Wendell Berry who helped me solve my Thoreau problem, providing a sturdy bridge over the deep American divide between nature and culture. Using the farm rather than the wilderness as his text, Berry taught me I had a legitimate quarrel with nature–a lover’s quarrel–and showed me how to conduct it without reaching for the heavy artillery. He relocated wildness from the woods “out there” (beyond the fence) to a handful of garden soil or the green shoot of a germinating pea, a necessary quality that could be not just conserved but cultivated. He marked out a path that led us back into nature, no longer as spectators but as full-fledged participants.

Obviously much more is at stake here than a garden fence. My Thoreau problem is another name for the problem of American environmentalism, which historically has had much more to say about leaving nature alone than about how we might use it well. To the extent that we’re finally beginning to hear a new, more neighborly conversation between American environmentalists and American farmers, not to mention between urban eaters and rural food producers, Berry deserves much of the credit for getting it started with sentences like these:

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in…farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd. Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy. They can eat only if land is farmed on their behalf by somebody somewhere in some fashion. If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature. –”Conservationist and Agrarian,” 2002

That we are all implicated in farming–that, in Berry’s now-famous formulation, “eating is an agricultural act”–is perhaps his signal contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today. All those taking part in that conversation, whether in the White House or at the farmers’ market, are deep in his debt.

But all this is about to change, now that Wal-Mart itself, the nation’s largest grocer, has decided to take organic food seriously. (Nascar is not quite there yet.) Beginning later this year, Wal-Mart plans to roll out a complete selection of organic foods — food certified by the U.S.D.A. to have been grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers — in its nearly 4,000 stores. Just as significant, the company says it will price all this organic food at an eye-poppingly tiny premium over its already-cheap conventional food: the organic Cocoa Puffs and Oreos will cost only 10 percent more than the conventional kind. Organic food will soon be available to the tens of millions of Americans who now cannot afford it — indeed, who have little or no idea what the term even means. Organic food, which represents merely 2.5 percent of America’s half-trillion-dollar food economy, is about to go mainstream. At a stroke, the argument that it is elitist will crumble.

This is good news indeed, for the American consumer and the American land. Or perhaps I should say for some of the American land and a great deal more of the land in places like Mexico and China, for Wal-Mart is bound to hasten the globalization of organic food. (Ten percent of organic food is imported today.) Like every other commodity that global corporations lay their hands on, organic food will henceforth come from wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply. It is about to go the way of sneakers and MP3 players, becoming yet another rootless commodity circulating in the global economy.

Oh, but wait. . .I meant to talk about all the good that will come of Wal-Mart’s commitment to organic. Sorry about that. When you’re talking about global capitalism, it can be hard to separate the good news from the bad. Because of its scale and efficiency and notorious ruthlessness, Wal-Mart will force down the price of organics, and that is a good thing for all the consumers who can’t afford to spend more for food than they already do. Wal-Mart will also educate the millions of Americans who don’t yet know exactly what organic food is or precisely how it differs from conventionally grown food.

The vast expansion of organic farmland it will take to feed Wal-Mart’s new appetite is also an unambiguous good for the world’s environment, since it will result in substantially less pesticide and chemical fertilizer being applied to the land — somewhere. Whatever you think about the prospect of organic Coca-Cola, when it comes, and come it surely will, tens of thousands of acres of the world’s cornfields — enough to make all that organic high-fructose corn syrup — will no longer receive an annual shower of pesticides like Atrazine. O.K., you’re probably registering a flicker of cognitive dissonance at the conjunction of the words “organic” and “high-fructose corn syrup,” but keep your eye for a moment on that Atrazine.

Atrazine is a powerful herbicide applied to 70 percent of America’s cornfields. Traces of the chemical routinely turn up in American streams and wells and even in the rain; the F.D.A. also finds residues of Atrazine in our food.

So what? Well, the chemical, which was recently banned by the European Union, is a suspected carcinogen and endocrine disruptor that has been linked to low sperm counts among farmers. A couple of years ago, a U.C. Berkeley herpetologist named Tyrone Hayes, while doing research on behalf of Syngenta, Atrazine’s manufacturer, found that even at concentrations as low as 0.1 part per billion, the herbicide will chemically emasculate a male frog, causing its gonads to produce eggs — in effect, turning males into hermaphrodites. Atrazine is often present in American waterways at much higher concentrations than 0.1 part per billion. But American regulators generally won’t ban a pesticide until the bodies, or cancer cases, begin to pile up — until, that is, scientists can prove the link between the suspect molecule and illness in humans or ecological catastrophe. So Atrazine is, at least in the American food system, deemed innocent until proved guilty — a standard of proof extremely difficult to achieve, since it awaits the results of chemical testing on humans that we, rightly, don’t perform.

I don’t know about you, but as the father of an adolescent boy, I sort of like the idea of keeping such a molecule out of my son’s diet, even if the scientists and nutritionists say they still don’t have proof that organic food is any safer or healthier. I also like that growing food organically doesn’t pollute the rivers and water table with nitrates from synthetic fertilizer or expose farm workers to toxic pesticides. And the fact that animals raised organically don’t receive antibiotics or synthetic growth hormones. Sounds like a better agriculture to me — and Wal-Mart has just put the force of its great many supermarkets behind it.

But before you pour yourself a celebratory glass of Wal-Mart organic milk, you might want to ask a few questions about how the company plans to achieve its laudable goals. Assuming that it’s possible at all, how exactly would Wal-Mart get the price of organic food down to a level just 10 percent higher than that of its everyday food? To do so would virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart’s version of cheap organic food is not sustainable, at least not in any meaningful sense of that word. To index the price of organic to the price of conventional is to give up, right from the start, on the idea, once enshrined in the organic movement, that food should be priced not high or low but responsibly. As the organic movement has long maintained, cheap industrial food is cheap only because the real costs of producing it are not reflected in the price at the checkout. Rather, those costs are charged to the environment, in the form of soil depletion and pollution (industrial agriculture is now our biggest polluter); to the public purse, in the form of subsidies to conventional commodity farmers; to the public health, in the form of an epidemic of diabetes and obesity that is expected to cost the economy more than $100 billion per year; and to the welfare of the farm- and food-factory workers, not to mention the well-being of the animals we eat. As Wendell Berry once wrote, the motto of our conventional food system — at the center of which stands Wal-Mart, the biggest purveyor of cheap food in America — should be: Cheap at any price!

To say you can sell organic food for 10 percent more than you sell irresponsibly priced food suggests that you don’t really get it — that you plan to bring business-as-usual principles of industrial “efficiency” and “economies of scale” to a system of food production that was supposed to mimic the logic of natural systems rather than that of the factory.

We have already seen what happens when the logic of the factory is applied to organic food production. The industrialization of organic agriculture, which Wal-Mart’s involvement will only deepen, has already given us “organic feedlots” — two words that I never thought would find their way into the same clause. To supply the escalating demand for cheap organic milk, agribusiness companies are setting up 5,000-head dairies, often in the desert. These milking cows never touch a blade of grass, instead spending their days standing around a dry-lot “loafing area” munching organic grain — grain that takes a toll on both the animals’ health (these ruminants evolved to eat grass, after all) and the nutritional value of their milk. But this is the sort of milk (deficient in beta-carotene and the “good fats” — like omega 3′s and C.L.A. — that come from grazing cows on grass) we’re going to see a lot more of in the supermarket as long as Wal-Mart determines to keep organic milk cheap.

We’re also going to see more organic milk — and organic foods of all kinds — coming from places like New Zealand. The globalization of organic food is already well under way: at Whole Foods you can buy organic asparagus flown in from Argentina, raspberries from Mexico, grass-fed meat from New Zealand. In an era of energy scarcity, the purchase of such products does little to advance the ideal of sustainability that once upon a time animated the organic movement. These foods may contain no pesticides, but they are drenched in petroleum even so.

Whether produced domestically or not, organic meat will increasingly come not from mixed, polyculture farms growing a variety of species (a practice that makes it possible to recycle nutrients between plants and animals) but from ever-bigger Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFO’s, which, apart from using organic feed and abjuring antibiotics, are little different from their conventional counterparts. Yes, the federal organic rules say the animals should have “access to the outdoors,” but in practice this often means providing them with a tiny exercise yard or, in the case of one organic egg producer in New England, a screened-in concrete “porch” — a view of the outdoors. Herein lies one of the deeper paradoxes of practicing organic agriculture on an industrial scale: big, single-species CAFO’s are even more precarious than their conventional cousins, since they can’t use antibiotics to keep the thousands of animals living in close confinement indoors from becoming sick. So organic CAFO-hands (to call them farmhands seems overly generous) keep the free ranging to a minimum and then keep their fingers crossed.

Wal-Mart will buy its organic food from whichever producers can produce it most cheaply, and these will not be the sort of farmers you picture when you hear the word “organic.” Big supermarkets want to do business only with big farmers growing lots of the same thing, not because big monoculture farms are any more efficient (they aren’t) but because it’s easier to buy all your carrots from a single megafarm than to contract with hundreds of smaller growers. The “transaction costs” are lower, even when the price and the quality are the same. This is just one of the many ways in which the logic of industrial capitalism and the logic of biology on a farm come into conflict. At least in the short run, the logic of capitalism usually prevails.

Wal-Mart’s push into the organic market won’t do much for small organic farmers, that seems plain enough. But it may also spell trouble for the big growers it will favor. Wal-Mart has a reputation for driving down prices by squeezing its suppliers, especially after those suppliers have invested heavily to boost production to feed the Wal-Mart maw. Having done that, the supplier will find itself at Wal-Mart’s mercy when the company decides it no longer wants to pay a price that enables the farmer to make a living. When that happens, the notion of responsibly priced food will be sacrificed to the imperatives of survival, and the pressure to cut corners will become irresistible.

Up to now, the federal organic standards have provided a bulwark against that pressure. Yet with the industrialization of organic, these rules are themselves coming under mounting pressure, and forgive my skepticism, but it’s hard to believe that the lobbyists from Wal-Mart are going to play a constructive role in defending those standards from efforts to weaken them. Just this past year the Organic Trade Association used lobbyists who do work for Kraft Foods to move a bill through Congress that will make it easier to include synthetic ingredients in products labeled organic.

Organic is just a word, after all, and its definition now lies in the hands of the federal government, which means it is subject to all the usual political and economic forces at play in Washington. Inevitably, the drive to produce organic food cheaply will bring pressure to further weaken the regulations, and some of K Street’s finest talent will soon be on the case. A few years ago a chicken producer in Georgia named Fieldale Farms persuaded its congressman to slip a helpful provision into an appropriations bill that would allow growers of organic chicken to substitute conventional chicken feed if the price of organic feed exceeded a certain level. That certainly makes life easier for a chicken producer when the price of organic corn is north of $5 a bushel, as it is today, and conventional corn south of $2. But in what sense is a chicken fed on conventional feed still organic? In no sense but the Orwellian one: because the government says it is.

After an outcry from consumers and some wiser heads in the organic industry, this new rule was repealed. The moral of the Fieldale story is that unless consumers and well-meaning organic producers remain vigilant and steadfast, the drive to make the price of organic foods competitive with that of conventional foods will hollow out the word and kill the organic goose, just when her golden eggs are luring so many big players into the water. Let’s hope Wal-Mart recognizes that the extraordinary marketing magic of the word “organic” — a power that flows directly from our dissatisfaction with the very-cheap-food economy Wal-Mart has done so much to create — is a lot like the health of an organic chicken living in close confinement with thousands of other chickens in an organic CAFO, munching organic corn: fragile.

The problem with risk analysis, which came out of the world of engineering and caught on during the late 70′s, is that it hasn’t done a very good job predicting the ecological and health effects of many new technologies. It is very good at measuring what we can know—say, the weight a suspension bridge can bear—but it has trouble calculating subtler, less quantifiable risks. (The effect of certain neurotoxins on a child’s neurological development, for example, appears to have more to do with the timing of exposure than with the amount.) Whatever can’t be quantified falls out of the risk analyst’s equations, and so in the absence of proven, measurable harms, technologies are simply allowed to go forward.

In Europe, a different approach has taken hold. When Germany, for example, discovered in the 70′s that its beloved forests were suddenly dying, there was not yet scientific proof that acid rain was the culprit. But the government acted to slash power-plant emissions anyway, citing the principle of Vorsorge, or “forecaring.” Soon, Vorsorgeprinzip—the forecaring, or precautionary, principle—became an axiom in German environmental law. Even in the face of scientific uncertainty, the principle states, actions should be taken to prevent harms to the environment and public health.

Germany’s idea has since gone international. It has popped up in the preamble of the U.N. Treaty on Biodiversity and was written into a slew of protocols and rules issued by the European Union in the 90′s. It informs treaties like the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which allows countries to bar genetically modified organisms on the basis of precaution. The idea has not prevailed over risk analysis, however, at least not yet. The E.U.’s ban on American beef treated with hormones, for example, is based on the precautionary principle. But since world-trade rules are based on risk analysis rather than precaution, and the health risk of eating hormone-treated beef has not been proved, the World Trade Organization has ruled that the ban is illegal.

What explains the W.T.O.’s resistance to the precautionary principle? It doesn’t sound like a revolutionary idea. Indeed, it sounds like common sense: better safe than sorry; look before you leap. But, in fact, the precautionary principle poses a radical challenge to business as usual in a modern, capitalist, technological civilization. As things stand, whenever questions are raised about the safety of, say, antibiotics in livestock feed, not until someone finds the smoking gun can anything be done about it. When President Bush earlier this year challenged the Clinton administration’s tougher standards for arsenic levels in drinking water, he did it on the grounds that “the science isn’t in yet.” (He subsequently relented.) The problem very often is that long before the science does come in, the harm has already been done. And once a technology has entered the marketplace, the burden of bringing in that science typically falls on the public rather than on the companies selling it.

If introduced into American law, the precautionary principle would fundamentally shift the burden of proof. The presumptions that flow from the scientific uncertainty surrounding so many new technologies would no longer automatically operate in industry’s favor. Scientific uncertainty would no longer argue for freedom of action but for precaution and alternatives.

Just how revolutionary an idea this really is is just now dawning on thinkers tied to American industry. In April, a fellow at the Hoover Institution published an attack on the precautionary principle, calling it, quite rightly, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The Bush administration has adopted a hard line in international negotations. In the spring, its delegates to the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the world body that sets food safety standards for world trade, scuttled an agreement rather than allow precautionary language into a single footnote.

Critics argue that the precautionary principle is “antiscientific.” No and yes. No, in the sense that it calls for more science in order to dispel the uncertainties surrounding new technologies and to develop less harmful alternatives. And yet there is a sense in which the idea is “antiscientific,” if by scientific we mean leaving it to scientists to tell us what to do. For the precautionary principle recognizes the limitations of science—and the fact that scientific uncertainty is an unavoidable breach into which ordinary citizens sometimes must step and act.

There was plenty of talk about the events in New York, though if you listened carefully you could hear two different strains. Cornwall is full of transplanted New Yorkers (not to mention weekenders) who retain close ties to the city; their talk was all about who they knew and how difficult it was to get through to anyone on the phone. In the map of their lives, New York City is still in the middle. The true locals live at a greater psychological distance from New York.

Their experience of Sept. 11 seemed more national, mediated mainly by television and newspapers, rather than by the telephone. Same town, two different maps.

In a sense, the Cornwall Agricultural Fair is all about those maps. It is one of a handful of semihokey annual rituals we have (the Memorial Day bridge dance and frog jumping contest are two others) to help people here work out exactly what sort of place we live in. My guess is, we need the fair and the cow-chip raffle that tops off the event, because exactly where we live isn’t self-evident any more.

Is Cornwall the country? To the eye it still looks pretty New England countryish, a hilly patchwork of forests and open fields in northwestern Connecticut studded with Holsteins, though over the last few years many of the farms have been bought by former city people like me. Most of us still keep the fields open, but mainly for aesthetic reasons. And if the old dairy farm I live on produces anything these days, it’s mostly books and paintings (my wife is a landscape painter).

Baird’s, the old general store, still has a creaky wooden floor, but it now sells free-range chickens. And though the big wheel of Cheddar still sits on its ancient maple chopping block, these days you can also get fresh mozzarella for $6.99 a pound.

But Cornwall isn’t an incipient suburb yet either. We’re a solid two hours from the city, too far to commute, so the suburban tide hasn’t reached our shores. So Cornwall is neither the country nor the suburbs. Where then exactly do we live? We live in a town that holds an agricultural fair each fall—something that doesn’t happen in Pelham, N.Y., say, or Menlo Park, Calif.

Curiously, Cornwall didn’t hold an agriculture fair until we no longer had much agriculture to speak of; this year’s edition was only the 10th. What competition there is is really among gardeners, not farmers.

Fortunately, there are still a couple of working farms left in town to lend the fair a bit of agricultural cred. This means the hayride wagon is pulled by an ancient John Deere, and there are also a pair of actual cows to perform, if that’s the right word, in the cow-chip raffle. A cow-chip raffle, in case you haven’t come across one, is a fund-raising event (in our case for the Volunteer Fire Department) consisting of a fenced-in field divided into 1,024 squares, two cows (in our case, Zora, a bony Holstein, and Silly, a compact Jersey) and a keenly anticipated cowpat. Think of it as a slow, rectangular form of roulette, with the vicissitudes of the bovine digestive system in the role of Lady Luck. Five dollars buys you one square, and if Zora or Silly happens to relieve herself on yours, you leave $1,000 richer. No, urination doesn’t count.

It probably sounds a lot more exciting than it is, though each fall just about everyone in Cornwall buys at least one square and turns out in the field next to the town hall to wait and wait, and wait, and wait.

Twenty minutes spent waiting for a cow to defecate is not like any other 20 minutes in your life. Watching paint dry is allegro by comparison.

Unfortunately this year the cows took their sweet time. It was more than a half hour before Zora moseyed over to a square not far from the center (No. 610) and dropped an indisputable bull’s-eye. That last fact is important, because if the cowpies overlap two or more squares, it falls to the judges to determine the winner—a process that can slow things down even further. (The rules say the material must then be divided up and weighed, a procedure the selectman who serves as one of Cornwall’s cowpie judges, Gordon Ridgway, will tell you he does not relish.) Anyway, the judges trotted out onto the field, took a few evidentiary photographs, and announced that, since no one had bought Square 610, the prize would go to the owner of the square immediately to its north, as per the official rules.

That left the rest of us to drift back to our cars, the children disappointed not to have won, again, the grown-ups feeling pretty good, again, about living in a town that holds a cow-chip raffle and a traditional agricultural fair, even if the tradition is only 10 years old.

And yet this year, I couldn’t shake the sense that our September ritual, while it may look like a pure expression of rural values, in fact is an expression of something newer. A cow-chip raffle is a ritual of exurban life. The exurb has risen up in response to the suburbs, proposing yet another marriage between country and city.

Even the motto of the event—”organic gaming at its best”—sounds to me like an urban conceit, and the raffle itself a somewhat citified idea of country whimsy.

In this corner of Connecticut, we’re drawn to the idea of the country, but not the reality of having to make a living off the land. We are inventing traditions to unite us, something that is neither country nor suburb but somehow straddles the two. You have to look carefully to see the changes taking place. But down at the end of dirt roads you can find risk arbitrageurs working in trading rooms wired to Wall Street. The roads aren’t paved, because if we obliterate the countryside we risk the sort of suburbanism we are hoping to escape.

Whether this new marriage can hold is really the big question around here. We still don’t know what this new urban-rural culture will look like; exurbia doesn’t yet have its Cheevers and Updikes. What it does have are these semihokey annual rituals by which we affirm our fealty to the idea of country and give thanks there are still cows enough, and time, for people to place their bets, and wait.

By Susanne Antonetta.

242 pp. Washington:

Counterpoint. $26.

“This is the story of a body,” Susanne Antonetta tells us near the end of her arresting memoir of a New Jersey girlhood lived in the shadows of the 20th century’s most sinister molecules: the DDT, tritium, chlordane, benzene and plutonium that are now part of the American landscape. Antonetta, the author of three collections of poetry, spent her childhood summers in a bungalow on Barnegat Bay in southern Ocean County, one of the relatively low-income “sacrifice communities” where the toxic wastes of postwar civilization have pooled. We know a little about these places from the news, from books and movies like “Erin Brockovich” and “A Civil Action,” but for the most part we’ve glimpsed them only from a distance, through the eyes of crusading reporters and lawyers. Susanne Antonetta’s considerable achievement in “Body Toxic” is to devise a literary voice for the people who live in such places, for the bodies that have been “charged and reformed by the landscape” of pollution. Hers is one of those bodies.

Antonetta is fully conscious of the ways American writers have traditionally drawn lines of connection between landscape and character, place and psychology. It is precisely these lines she sets out to reconfigure—or blow up. She’s writing against childhood’s summery pastoral, the afternoons spent swimming in the Toms River, crabbing in Potter’s Creek, picking berries on the Bayville Road. All such scenes are doubled here, the childhood idyll recollected in the grown-up knowledge of its poisoning. So Potter’s Creek turns out to flow near Denzer & Schafer X-Ray, a negative-stripping plant that leached lead and chromium and mercury into the water. Along the shores of the Toms River, the Ciba-Geigy Corporation left 14,000 barrels of toxic chemicals and released into the drinking water “a poison plume a mile square and dozens of feet deep.” A nuclear plant five miles from her bungalow left the waters of Oyster Creek “jazzed with radioactive particles.”

Of course there was no way to know then that the landscapes of Antonetta’s childhood harbored such secrets, though hints of the percolating evil do bubble up in her narrative now and then, eruptions of the Superfund Gothic. Her parents on their evening walks notice the growing pile of Union Carbide drums on the old Reich Farm; the tap water “had an odor like food. It tasted like H2O pumped from hell’s drinking fountain: 10 times the legal limit of iron, manganese, a reek of sulfur. We all developed an unaccountable taste for it. Uncle Eddie bottled it and drank it at home.” This is a book in which the simplest acts—washing the dishes, say, or mixing up a pitcher of Tang—take on a retrospective horror. (It is also a book that will set the image of the Garden State back to the time before Springsteen and Roth and McPhee found its romance. This is the Jersey that still smells, of “something mustardy, something corrosive.”)

Like any memoirist, Antonetta is mining her past in the hope of explaining the woman she became, but in this construction of self, chemistry largely takes the place of psychology. This is because the woman she has become is virtually the sum of her body’s betrayals. “I have or have had one spectacular multiple pregnancy, a miscarriage, a radiation-induced tumor, a double uterus, asthma, endometriosis, growths on the liver,” and so on. Elsewhere we learn she is a manic-depressive who has been treated with lithium, has a seizure disorder and is a recovered drug addict.

What Antonetta has written is something new—a postpsychological memoir. For her it is chemistry, more than childhood trauma, that embodies the power of the past to shape the self. While she is an acid (and often quite funny) observer of her dysfunctional family, which brims with nearly as many poisons and unacknowledged secrets as the landscape, the family romance counts for less here than the periodic table and base pairs of DNA. “I wondered how much else of her was in me,” Antonetta writes at one point of her icy mother, “not the what-she-said-to-me and what-I-said-to-her stuff a shrink can pry out but what comes in through the blood and the cells.” She’s thinking here not just of her genetic inheritance but of the real possibility that DDE, a metabolite of DDT that collects in mothers’ milk, is responsible for the fact she has two uteruses and can no longer conceive.

Establishing cause and effect in these matters is never simple, and this presents a problem. Are we prepared, as readers, to accept that the etiology of our narrator’s troubled brain chemistry is to be found in the South Jersey landscape? Or that, as a teenager, she poisoned herself with drugs to compensate for “the years my landscape poisoned me” Not always; the journalist in me bridled occasionally at the easy commerce between biological fact and literary conceit. This is very much a poet’s book, gravitating toward the striking image and away from the linear narrative—which by its nature might have forced the author to try to deal more explicitly with cause and effect than she does.

Instead, Antonetta’s essayistic chapters themselves pool, like migrating chemicals, around such themes as DNA or drugs or water, a familiar literary topos she manages here to completely refresh. Throughout, her approach is associative rather than explanatory, but before long the sheer force of the writing makes the reader accept the agency of her migrating molecules: the DDT moving out of the land to take up residence in her mother’s breast, the calcium-loving isotopes searching out a place to rest in a body’s bones and teeth. (Under a Geiger counter, Ocean County baby teeth “twitch with picocuries of strontium 90.”)

Whatever resistance the reader may erect, Antonetta has anticipated. “I don’t expect anyone to explain what’s wrong with me,” she writes near the end of “Body Toxic.” “No one can explain what’s wrong with anybody, I don’t think. Though I don’t believe in coincidences of this magnitude either: clusters of children with brain disorders, toxic plumes and clouds, radiation spewing in the air. Every vital system of my body disrupted: an arrhythmic heart, a seizing brain, severe allergies, useless reproductive organs. Either it’s Sodom and this is the wrath of God or it’s the wrath of man, which is thoughtless, foolish and much more lasting.”

By the end of this dark, disturbing book, you realize Antonetta has posed a challenge to our prevailing notions of science and journalism and even literary narrative. “No one can explain what’s wrong with anybody”: yet why is it we will so much more readily accept the psychological explanations of self and suffering retailed in the common run of novels and literary memoirs? In books, at least, the Oedipal complex still trumps “what comes in through the blood and the cells.” Why not construct a childhood from the influences of loosed electrons and chemicals “fretted into our DNA” rather than the stuff a shrink can pry out? Science has been moving into this territory for some time now; Antonetta’s aim in her “environmental memoir” is to take literature there, too. It is a testament to her fearlessness and talent that she has largely succeeded.

I quite like living in the exurbs, and while I hope this fine form of civilization—this late-20th-century cross of countryside and latte—will last indefinitely, I’ve always assumed that it won’t, that my town will eventually succumb to the ineluctable, almost geologic forces of sprawl. There didn’t seem much anyone could do about it, at least nothing that didn’t feel selfish or elitist or hypocritical, not to mention perfectly futile. But that was before the Clinton Administration made “quality of life” a fit subject for national politics, and Vice President Gore kicked off his campaign talking, of all things, about sprawl.

The sprawl threatening the quality of this particular life is massed somewhere to the south of where I live, and I recently took a drive down Route 7 in search of its current frontier. I had only driven 15 miles, through the cornfields and pastures strung along the Housatonic River, before encountering a new townhouse development just north of New Milford. I recognized it as sprawl because it has one of those sad picturesque names (“Twin Oaks”) that memorialize whatever feature of the local landscape has just been obliterated.

As I continued south, the big maples gave way to even bigger signs, the traffic thickened and the franchises began reiterating themselves every five miles or so, the only indication that I’d left one town and entered another. I tried to decide what it meant—was it ridiculous or significant?—for a Presidential candidate to declare that the sorry state of this landscape (even this traffic!) was the nation’s business. “In too many places across America,” Vice President Gore had said in a January speech laying out his Livability Agenda, “the beauty of local vistas has been degraded by decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development.” The agenda itself was so Clintonian in its modesty (a thimble of money for buying open land, a minor rejiggering of Federal highway spending, some funds to encourage “smart growth”) that I initially dismissed it as the urban-planning equivalent of school uniforms.

But the response to Gore’s initiative has been so vociferous as to make me think again. The free-market think tanks spewed forth studies arguing that sprawl doesn’t really exist or that, if it does, it’s exactly what Americans want. George Will detected in the antisprawl movement an echo of 60′s disdain for middle-class consumer culture. A high-ranking official of the National Association of Homebuilders issued a threat to any politician who dared get in the industry’s way.

As I thought more about it, I realized that George Will may actually be on to something. For by elevating “livability” to a national issue, the Vice President has put a new spin on two legacies of the 60′s that the right thought had been safely disposed of a long time ago. One of these is the conviction that “the personal is political.” The other is the habit of questioning the wisdom and sovereignty of the free market. Rub these two supposedly discredited ideas together, and you can generate some surprising political heat.

This Administration’s quality-of-life issues—a rubric that embraces everything from family leave and the V-chip to traffic congestion, movie violence and smoking—are often derided in the media as examples of small-bore, middle-class, “feminized” politics. Yet the very act of injecting such personal matters into national political discourse draws the middle class, unawares, into a conversation about capitalism that is anything but trivial. For implicit in that conversation is the notion that the free market need not have the last word on the state of the American landscape or public health or even popular culture. In a remarkable feat of political jujitsu, Clinton and Gore have taken the right’s own emphasis on “values” and turned it into a middle-class critique of consumer capitalism.

Conservatives like to argue that, with sprawl, the free market has given Americans exactly what their spending decisions say they want. And yet many of us—or maybe I should say some part of most of us—are dismayed by the landscape and traffic that our own dollars and desires have wrought. That’s why it is possible both to deplore the arrival of a new Home Depot in my area and also to shop there.

The right would have you believe that the real me, the only one that finally matters, is the shopping me—the consumer; the deploring me should be dismissed as a sentimentalist or elitist or hypocrite. Until now, that’s been the general view on sprawl, one I’ve bought into myself. But it overlooks a complicated truth about modern life that conservatives would have us forget. It is that although we are consumers, we are not only consumers, but parents and neighbors and citizens too. The sort of world we bring into being with our dollars does not necessarily match the world we would vote for with our hearts, and one of the things politics is good for is to help us bring those worlds into a more pleasing alignment. What a radical idea.

Today I planted something new in my vegetable garden — something very new, as a matter of fact. It’s a potato called the New Leaf Superior, which has been genetically engineered — by Monsanto, the chemical giant recently turned ”life sciences” giant — to produce its own insecticide. This it can do in every cell of every leaf, stem, flower, root and (here’s the creepy part) spud. The scourge of potatoes has always been the Colorado potato beetle, a handsome and voracious insect that can pick a plant clean of its leaves virtually overnight. Any Colorado potato beetle that takes so much as a nibble of my New Leafs will supposedly keel over and die, its digestive tract pulped, in effect, by the bacterial toxin manufactured in the leaves of these otherwise ordinary Superiors. (Superiors are the thin-skinned white spuds sold fresh in the supermarket.) You’re probably wondering if I plan to eat these potatoes, or serve them to my family. That’s still up in the air; it’s only the first week of May, and harvest is a few months off.

Certainly my New Leafs are aptly named. They’re part of a new class of crop plants that is rapidly changing the American food chain. This year, the fourth year that genetically altered seed has been on the market, some 45 million acres of American farmland have been planted with biotech crops, most of it corn, soybeans, cotton and potatoes that have been engineered to either produce their own pesticides or withstand herbicides. Though Americans have already begun to eat genetically engineered potatoes, corn and soybeans, industry research confirms what my own informal surveys suggest: hardly any of us knows it. The reason is not hard to find. The biotech industry, with the concurrence of the Food and Drug Administration, has decided we don’t need to know it, so biotech foods carry no identifying labels. In a dazzling feat of positioning, the industry has succeeded in depicting these plants simultaneously as the linchpins of a biological revolution — part of a ”new agricultural paradigm” that will make farming more sustainable, feed the world and improve health and nutrition — and, oddly enough, as the same old stuff, at least so far as those of us at the eating end of the food chain should be concerned.

This convenient version of reality has been roundly rejected by both consumers and farmers across the Atlantic. Last summer, biotech food emerged as the most explosive environmental issue in Europe. Protesters have destroyed dozens of field trials of the very same ”frankenplants” (as they are sometimes called) that we Americans are already serving for dinner, and throughout Europe the public has demanded that biotech food be labeled in the market.

By growing my own transgenic crop — and talking with scientists and farmers involved with biotech — I hoped to discover which of us was crazy. Are the Europeans overreacting, or is it possible that we’ve been underreacting to genetically engineered food?

After digging two shallow trenches in my garden and lining them with compost, I untied the purple mesh bag of seed potatoes that Monsanto had sent and opened up the Grower Guide tied around its neck. (Potatoes, you may recall from kindergarten experiments, are grown not from seed but from the eyes of other potatoes.) The guide put me in mind not so much of planting potatoes as booting up a new software release. By ”opening and using this product,” the card stated, I was now ”licensed” to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would water and tend and harvest was mine, yet also not mine. That is, the potatoes I will harvest come August are mine to eat or sell, but their genes remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under numerous United States patents, including Nos. 5,196,525, 5,164,316, 5,322,938 and 5,352,605. Were I to save even one of them to plant next year –something I’ve routinely done with potatoes in the past — I would be breaking Federal law. The small print in the Grower Guide also brought the news that my potato plants were themselves a pesticide, registered with the Environmental Protection Agency.

If proof were needed that the intricate industrial food chain that begins with seeds and ends on our dinner plates is in the throes of profound change, the small print that accompanied my New Leaf will do. That food chain has been unrivaled for its productivity — on average, a single American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed 100 people. But this accomplishment has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot achieve such yields without enormous amounts of chemical fertilizer, pesticide, machinery and fuel, a set of capital-intensive inputs, as they’re called, that saddle the farmer with debt, threaten his health, erode his soil and destroy its fertility, pollute the ground water and compromise the safety of the food we eat.

We’ve heard all this before, of course, but usually from environmentalists and organic farmers; what is new is to hear the same critique from conventional farmers, government officials and even many agribusiness corporations, all of whom now acknowledge that our food chain stands in need of reform. Sounding more like Wendell Berry than the agribusiness giant it is, Monsanto declared in its most recent annual report that ”current agricultural technology is not sustainable.”

What is supposed to rescue the American food chain is biotechnology — the replacement of expensive and toxic chemical inputs with expensive but apparently benign genetic information: crops that, like my New Leafs, can protect themselves from insects and disease without being sprayed with pesticides. With the advent of biotechnology, agriculture is entering the information age, and more than any other company, Monsanto is positioning itself to become its Microsoft, supplying the proprietary ”operating systems” — the metaphor is theirs — to run this new generation of plants.

There is, of course, a second food chain in America: organic agriculture. And while it is still only a fraction of the size of the conventional food chain, it has been growing in leaps and bounds — in large part because of concerns over the safety of conventional agriculture. Organic farmers have been among biotechnology’s fiercest critics, regarding crops like my New Leafs as inimical to their principles and, potentially, a threat to their survival. That’s because Bt, the bacterial toxin produced in my New Leafs (and in many other biotech plants) happens to be the same insecticide organic growers have relied on for decades. Instead of being flattered by the imitation, however, organic farmers are up in arms: the widespread use of Bt in biotech crops is likely to lead to insect resistance, thus robbing organic growers of one of their most critical tools; that is, Monsanto’s version of sustainable agriculture may threaten precisely those farmers who pioneered sustainable farming.

Sprouting

After several days of drenching rain, the sun appeared on May 15, and so did my New Leafs. A dozen deep-green shoots pushed up out of the soil and commenced to grow — faster and more robustly than any of the other potatoes in my garden. Apart from their vigor, though, my New Leafs looked perfectly normal. And yet as I watched them multiply their lustrous dark-green leaves those first few days, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first doomed beetle, I couldn’t help thinking of them as existentially different from the rest of my plants.

All domesticated plants are in some sense artificial — living archives of both cultural and natural information that we in some sense ”design.” A given type of potato reflects the values we’ve bred into it — one that has been selected to yield long, handsome french fries or unblemished round potato chips is the expression of a national food chain that likes its potatoes highly processed. At the same time, some of the more delicate European fingerlings I’m growing alongside my New Leafs imply an economy of small market growers and a taste for eating potatoes fresh. Yet all these qualities already existed in the potato, somewhere within the range of genetic possibilities presented by Solanum tuberosum. Since distant species in nature cannot be crossed, the breeder’s art has always run up against a natural limit of what a potato is willing, or able, to do. Nature, in effect, has exercised a kind of veto on what culture can do with a potato.

My New Leafs are different. Although Monsanto likes to depict biotechnology as just another in an ancient line of human modifications of nature going back to fermentation, in fact genetic engineering overthrows the old rules governing the relationship of nature and culture in a plant. For the first time, breeders can bring qualities from anywhere in nature into the genome of a plant — from flounders (frost tolerance), from viruses (disease resistance) and, in the case of my potatoes, from Bacillus thuringiensis, the soil bacterium that produces the organic insecticide known as Bt. The introduction into a plant of genes transported not only across species but whole phyla means that the wall of that plant’s essential identity — its irreducible wildness, you might say — has been breached.

But what is perhaps most astonishing about the New Leafs coming up in my garden is the human intelligence that the inclusion of the Bt gene represents. In the past, that intelligence resided outside the plant, in the mind of the organic farmers who deployed Bt (in the form of a spray) to manipulate the ecological relationship of certain insects and a certain bacterium as a way to foil those insects. The irony about the New Leafs is that the cultural information they encode happens to be knowledge that resides in the heads of the very sort of people — that is, organic growers — who most distrust high technology.

One way to look at biotechnology is that it allows a larger portion of human intelligence to be incorporated into the plant itself. In this sense, my New Leafs are just plain smarter than the rest of my potatoes. The others will depend on my knowledge and experience when the Colorado potato beetles strike; the New Leafs, knowing what I know about bugs and Bt, will take care of themselves. So while my biotech plants might seem like alien beings, that’s not quite right. They’re more like us than like other plants because there’s more of us in them.

Growing

To find out how my potatoes got that way, I traveled to suburban St. Louis in early June. My New Leafs are clones of clones of plants that were first engineered seven years ago in Monsanto’s $150 million research facility, a long, low-slung brick building on the banks of the Missouri that would look like any other corporate complex were it not for the 26 greenhouses that crown its roof like shimmering crenellations of glass.

Dave Stark, a molecular biologist and co-director of Naturemark, Monsanto’s potato subsidiary, escorted me through the clean rooms where potatoes are genetically engineered. Technicians sat at lab benches before petri dishes in which fingernail-size sections of potato stem had been placed in a nutrient mixture. To this the technicians added a solution of agrobacterium, a disease bacterium whose modus operandi is to break into a plant cell’s nucleus and insert some of its own DNA. Essentially, scientists smuggle the Bt gene into the agrobacterium’s payload, and then the bacterium splices it into the potato’s DNA. The technicians also add a ”marker” gene, a kind of universal product code that allows Monsanto to identify its plants after they leave the lab.

A few days later, once the slips of potato stem have put down roots, they’re moved to the potato greenhouse up on the roof. Here, Glenda DeBrecht, a horticulturist, invited me to don latex gloves and help her transplant pinky-size plantlets from their petri dish to small pots. The whole operation is performed thousands of times, largely because there is so much uncertainty about the outcome. There’s no way of telling where in the genome the new DNA will land, and if it winds up in the wrong place, the new gene won’t be expressed (or it will be poorly expressed) or the plant may be a freak. I was struck by how the technology could at once be astoundingly sophisticated and yet also a shot in the genetic dark.

”There’s still a lot we don’t understand about gene expression,” Stark acknowledged. A great many factors influence whether, or to what extent, a new gene will do what it’s supposed to, including the environment. In one early German experiment, scientists succeeded in splicing the gene for redness into petunias. All went as planned until the weather turned hot and an entire field of red petunias suddenly and inexplicably lost their pigment. The process didn’t seem nearly as simple as Monsanto’s cherished software metaphor would suggest.

When I got home from St. Louis, I phoned Richard Lewontin, the Harvard geneticist, to ask him what he thought of the software metaphor. ”From an intellectual-property standpoint, it’s exactly right,” he said. ”But it’s a bad one in terms of biology. It implies you feed a program into a machine and get predictable results. But the genome is very noisy. If my computer made as many mistakes as an organism does” — in interpreting its DNA, he meant — ”I’d throw it out.”

I asked him for a better metaphor. ”An ecosystem,” he offered. ”You can always intervene and change something in it, but there’s no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don’t get one rude shock after another.”

Flowering

My own crop was thriving when I got home from St. Louis; the New Leafs were as big as bushes, crowned with slender flower stalks. Potato flowers are actually quite pretty, at least by vegetable standards — five-petaled pink stars with yellow centers that give off a faint rose perfume. One sultry afternoon I watched the bumblebees making their lazy rounds of my potato blossoms, thoughtlessly powdering their thighs with yellow pollen grains before lumbering off to appointments with other blossoms, others species.

Uncertainty is the theme that unifies much of the criticism leveled against biotech agriculture by scientists and environmentalists. By planting millions of acres of genetically altered plants, we have introduced something novel into the environment and the food chain, the consequences of which are not — and at this point, cannot be — completely understood. One of the uncertainties has to do with those grains of pollen bumblebees are carting off from my potatoes. That pollen contains Bt genes that may wind up in some other, related plant, possibly conferring a new evolutionary advantage on that species. ”Gene flow,” the scientific term for this phenomenon, occurs only between closely related species, and since the potato evolved in South America, the chances are slim that my Bt potato genes will escape into the wilds of Connecticut. (It’s interesting to note that while biotechnology depends for its power on the ability to move genes freely among species and even phyla, its environmental safety depends on the very opposite phenomenon: on the integrity of species in nature and their rejection of foreign genetic material.)

Yet what happens if and when Peruvian farmers plant Bt potatoes? Or when I plant a biotech crop that does have local relatives? A study reported in Nature last month found that plant traits introduced by genetic engineering were more likely to escape into the wild than the same traits introduced conventionally.

Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Technology Assessment in Washington, told me he believes such escapes are inevitable. ”Biological pollution will be the environmental nightmare of the 21st century,” he said when I reached him by phone. ”This is not like chemical pollution — an oil spill — that eventually disperses. Biological pollution is an entirely different model, more like a disease. Is Monsanto going to be held legally responsible when one of its transgenes creates a superweed or resistant insect?”

Kimbrell maintains that because our pollution laws were written before the advent of biotechnology, the new industry is being regulated under an ill-fitting regime designed for the chemical age. Congress has so far passed no environmental law dealing specifically with biotech. Monsanto, for its part, claims that it has thoroughly examined all the potential environmental and health risks of its biotech plants, and points out that three regulatory agencies — the U.S.D.A., the E.P.A. and the F.D.A. — have signed off on its products. Speaking of the New Leaf, Dave Stark told me, ”This is the most intensively studied potato in history.”

Significant uncertainties remain, however. Take the case of insect resistance to Bt, a potential form of ”biological pollution” that could end the effectiveness of one of the safest insecticides we have — and cripple the organic farmers who depend on it. The theory, which is now accepted by most entomologists, is that Bt crops will add so much of the toxin to the environment that insects will develop resistance to it. Until now, resistance hasn’t been a worry because the Bt sprays break down quickly in sunlight and organic farmers use them only sparingly. Resistance is essentially a form of co-evolution that seems to occur only when a given pest population is threatened with extinction; under that pressure, natural selection favors whatever chance mutations will allow the species to change and survive.

Working with the E.P.A., Monsanto has developed a ”resistance-management plan” to postpone that eventuality. Under the plan, farmers who plant Bt crops must leave a certain portion of their land in non-Bt crops to create ”refuges” for the targeted insects. The goal is to prevent the first Bt-resistant Colorado potato beetle from mating with a second resistant bug, unleashing a new race of superbeetles. The theory is that when a Bt-resistant bug does show up, it can be induced to mate with a susceptible bug from the refuge, thus diluting the new gene for resistance.

But a lot has to go right for Mr. Wrong to meet Miss Right. No one is sure how big the refuges need to be, where they should be situated or whether the farmers will cooperate (creating havens for a detested pest is counter-intuitive, after all), not to mention the bugs. In the case of potatoes, the E.P.A. has made the plan voluntary and lets the companies themselves implement it; there are no E.P.A. enforcement mechanisms. Which is why most of the organic farmers I spoke to dismissed the regulatory scheme as window dressing.

Monsanto executives offer two basic responses to criticism of their Bt crops. The first is that their voluntary resistance-management plans will work, though the company’s definition of success will come as small consolation to an organic farmer: Monsanto scientists told me that if all goes well, resistance can be postponed for 30 years. (Some scientists believe it will come in three to five years.) The second response is more troubling. In St. Louis, I met with Jerry Hjelle, Monsanto’s vice president for regulatory affairs. Hjelle told me that resistance should not unduly concern us since ”there are a thousand other Bt’s out there” — other insecticidal proteins. ”We can handle this problem with new products,” he said. ”The critics don’t know what we have in the pipeline.”

And then Hjelle uttered two words that I thought had been expunged from the corporate vocabulary a long time ago: ”Trust us.”

‘Trust” is a key to the success of biotechnology in the marketplace, and while I was in St. Louis, I asked Hjelle and several of his colleagues why they thought the Europeans were resisting biotech food. Austria, Luxembourg and Norway, risking trade war with the United States, have refused to accept imports of genetically altered crops. Activists in England have been staging sit-ins and ”decontaminations” in biotech test fields. A group of French farmers broke into a warehouse and ruined a shipment of biotech corn seed by urinating on it. The Prince of Wales, who is an ardent organic gardener, waded into the biotech debate last June, vowing in a column in The Daily Telegraph that he would never eat, or serve to his guests, the fruits of a technology that ”takes mankind into realms that belong to God and to God alone.”

Monsanto executives are quick to point out that mad cow disease has made Europeans extremely sensitive about the safety of their food chain and has undermined confidence in their regulators. ”They don’t have a trusted agency like the F.D.A. looking after the safety of their food supply,” said Phil Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications. Over the summer, Angell was dispatched repeatedly to Europe to put out the P.R. fires; some at Monsanto worry these could spread to the United States.

I checked with the F.D.A. to find out exactly what had been done to insure the safety of this potato. I was mystified by the fact that the Bt toxin was not being treated as a ”food additive” subject to labeling, even though the new protein is expressed in the potato itself. The label on a bag of biotech potatoes in the supermarket will tell a consumer all about the nutrients they contain, even the trace amounts of copper. Yet it is silent not only about the fact that those potatoes are the product of genetic engineering but also about their containing an insecticide.

At the F.D.A., I was referred to James Maryanski, who oversees biotech food at the agency. I began by asking him why the F.D.A. didn’t consider Bt a food additive. Under F.D.A. law, any novel substance added to a food must — unless it is ”generally regarded as safe” (”GRAS,” in F.D.A. parlance) — be thoroughly tested and if it changes the product in any way, must be labeled.

”That’s easy,” Maryanski said. ”Bt is a pesticide, so it’s exempt” from F.D.A. regulation. That is, even though a Bt potato is plainly a food, for the purposes of Federal regulation it is not a food but a pesticide and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the E.P.A.

Yet even in the case of those biotech crops over which the F.D.A. does have jurisdiction, I learned that F.D.A. regulation of biotech food has been largely voluntary since 1992, when Vice President Dan Quayle issued regulatory guidelines for the industry as part of the Bush Administration’s campaign for ”regulatory relief.” Under the guidelines, new proteins engineered into foods are regarded as additives (unless they’re pesticides), but as Maryanski explained, ”the determination whether a new protein is GRAS can be made by the company.” Companies with a new biotech food decide for themselves whether they need to consult with the F.D.A. by following a series of ”decision trees” that pose yes or no questions like this one: ”Does. . .the introduced protein raise any safety concern?”

Since my Bt potatoes were being regulated as a pesticide by the E.P.A. rather than as a food by the F.D.A., I wondered if the safety standards are the same. ”Not exactly,” Maryanski explained. The F.D.A. requires ”a reasonable certainty of no harm” in a food additive, a standard most pesticides could not meet. After all, ”pesticides are toxic to something,” Maryanski pointed out, so the E.P.A. instead establishes human ”tolerances” for each chemical and then subjects it to a risk-benefit analysis.

When I called the E.P.A. and asked if the agency had tested my Bt potatoes for safety as a human food, the answer was. . .not exactly. It seems the E.P.A. works from the assumption that if the original potato is safe and the Bt protein added to it is safe, then the whole New Leaf package is presumed to be safe. Some geneticists believe this reasoning is flawed, contending that the process of genetic engineering itself may cause subtle, as yet unrecognized changes in a food.

The original Superior potato is safe, obviously enough, so that left the Bt toxin, which was fed to mice, and they ”did fine, had no side effects,” I was told. I always feel better knowing that my food has been poison-tested by mice, though in this case there was a small catch: the mice weren’t actually eating the potatoes, not even an extract from the potatoes, but rather straight Bt produced in a bacterial culture.

So are my New Leafs safe to eat? Probably, assuming that a New Leaf is nothing more than the sum of a safe potato and a safe pesticide, and further assuming that the E.P.A.’s idea of a safe pesticide is tantamount to a safe food. Yet I still had a question. Let us assume that my potatoes are a pesticide — a very safe pesticide. Every pesticide in my garden shed — including the Bt sprays — carries a lengthy warning label. The label on my bottle of Bt says, among other things, that I should avoid inhaling the spray or getting it in an open wound. So if my New Leaf potatoes contain an E.P.A.-registered pesticide, why don’t they carry some such label?

Maryanski had the answer. At least for the purposes of labeling, my New Leafs have morphed yet again, back into a food: the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act gives the F.D.A. sole jurisdiction over the labeling of plant foods, and the F.D.A. has ruled that biotech foods need be labeled only if they contain known allergens or have otherwise been ”materially” changed.

But isn’t turning a potato into a pesticide a material change?

It doesn’t matter. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act specifically bars the F.D.A. from including any information about pesticides on its food labels.

I thought about Maryanski’s candid and wondrous explanations the next time I met Phil Angell, who again cited the critical role of the F.D.A. in assuring Americans that biotech food is safe. But this time he went even further. ”Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food,” he said. ”Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job.”

Meeting the Beetles

My Colorado potato beetle vigil came to an end the first week of July, shortly before I went to Idaho to visit potato growers. I spied a single mature beetle sitting on a New Leaf leaf; when I reached to pick it up, the beetle fell drunkenly to the ground. It had been sickened by the plant and would soon be dead. My New Leafs were working.

From where a typical American potato grower stands, the New Leaf looks very much like a godsend. That’s because where the typical potato grower stands is in the middle of a bright green field that has been doused with so much pesticide that the leaves of his plants wear a dull white chemical bloom that troubles him as much as it does the rest of us. Out there, at least, the calculation is not complex: a product that promises to eliminate the need for even a single spraying of pesticide is, very simply, an economic and environmental boon.

No one can make a better case for a biotech crop than a potato farmer, which is why Monsanto was eager to introduce me to several large growers. Like many farmers today, the ones I met feel trapped by the chemical inputs required to extract the high yields they must achieve in order to pay for the chemical inputs they need. The economics are daunting: a potato farmer in south-central Idaho will spend roughly $1,965 an acre (mainly on chemicals, electricity, water and seed) to grow a crop that, in a good year, will earn him maybe $1,980. That’s how much a french-fry processor will pay for the 20 tons of potatoes a single Idaho acre can yield. (The real money in agriculture — 90 percent of the value added to the food we eat — is in selling inputs to farmers and then processing their crops.)

Danny Forsyth laid out the dismal economics of potato farming for me one sweltering morning at the coffee shop in downtown Jerome, Idaho. Forsyth, 60, is a slight blue-eyed man with a small gray ponytail; he farms 3,000 acres of potatoes, corn and wheat, and he spoke about agricultural chemicals like a man desperate to kick a bad habit. ”None of us would use them if we had any choice,” he said glumly.

I asked him to walk me through a season’s regimen. It typically begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes, many potato farmers douse their fields with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Then, at planting, a systemic insecticide (like Thimet) is applied to the soil; this will be absorbed by the young seedlings and, for several weeks, will kill any insect that eats their leaves. After planting, Forsyth puts down an herbicide — Sencor or Eptam — to ”clean” his field of all weeds. When the potato seedlings are six inches tall, an herbicide may be sprayed a second time to control weeds.

Idaho farmers like Forsyth farm in vast circles defined by the rotation of a pivot irrigation system, typically 135 acres to a circle; I’d seen them from 30,000 feet flying in, a grid of verdant green coins pressed into a desert of scrubby brown. Pesticides and fertilizers are simply added to the irrigation system, which on Forsyth’s farm draws most of its water from the nearby Snake River. Along with their water, Forsyth’s potatoes may receive 10 applications of chemical fertilizer during the growing season. Just before the rows close — when the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next — he begins spraying Bravo, a fungicide, to control late blight, one of the biggest threats to the potato crop. (Late blight, which caused the Irish potato famine, is an airborne fungus that turns stored potatoes into rotting mush.) Blight is such a serious problem that the E.P.A. currently allows farmers to spray powerful fungicides that haven’t passed the usual approval process. Forsyth’s potatoes will receive eight applications of fungicide.

Twice each summer, Forsyth hires a crop duster to spray for aphids. Aphids are harmless in themselves, but they transmit the leafroll virus, which in Russet Burbank potatoes causes net necrosis, a brown spotting that will cause a processor to reject a whole crop. It happened to Forsyth last year. ”I lost 80,000 bags” — they’re a hundred pounds each — ”to net necrosis,” he said. ”Instead of getting $4.95 a bag, I had to take $2 a bag from the dehydrator, and I was lucky to get that.” Net necrosis is a purely cosmetic defect; yet because big buyers like McDonald’s believe (with good reason) that we don’t like to see brown spots in our fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals in use, including an organophosphate called Monitor.

”Monitor is a deadly chemical,” Forsyth said. ”I won’t go into a field for four or five days after it’s been sprayed — even to fix a broken pivot.” That is, he would sooner lose a whole circle to drought than expose himself or an employee to Monitor, which has been found to cause neurological damage.

It’s not hard to see why a farmer like Forsyth, struggling against tight margins and heartsick over chemicals, would leap at a New Leaf — or, in his case, a New Leaf Plus, which is protected from leafroll virus as well as beetles. ”The New Leaf means I can skip a couple of sprayings, including the Monitor,” he said. ”I save money, and I sleep better. It also happens to be a nice-looking spud.” The New Leafs don’t come cheaply, however. They cost between $20 and $30 extra per acre in ”technology fees” to Monsanto.

Forsyth and I discussed organic agriculture, about which he had the usual things to say (”That’s all fine on a small scale, but they don’t have to feed the world”), as well as a few things I’d never heard from a conventional farmer: ”I like to eat organic food, and in fact I raise a lot of it at the house. The vegetables we buy at the market we just wash and wash and wash. I’m not sure I should be saying this, but I always plant a small area of potatoes without any chemicals. By the end of the season, my field potatoes are fine to eat, but any potatoes I pulled today are probably still full of systemics. I don’t eat them.”

Forsyth’s words came back to me a few hours later, during lunch at the home of another potato farmer. Steve Young is a progressive and prosperous potato farmer — he calls himself an agribusinessman. In addition to his 10,000 acres — the picture window in his family room gazes out on 85 circles, all computer-controlled — Young owns a share in a successful fertilizer distributorship. His wife prepared a lavish feast for us, and after Dave, their 18-year-old, said grace, adding a special prayer for me (the Youngs are devout Mormons), she passed around a big bowl of homemade potato salad. As I helped myself, my Monsanto escort asked what was in the salad, flashing me a smile that suggested she might already know. ”It’s a combination of New Leafs and some of our regular Russets,” our hostess said proudly. ”Dug this very morning.”

After talking to farmers like Steve Young and Danny Forsyth, and walking fields made virtually sterile by a drenching season-long rain of chemicals, you could understand how Monsanto’s New Leaf potato does indeed look like an environmental boon. Set against current practices, growing New Leafs represents a more sustainable way of potato farming. This advance must be weighed, of course, against everything we don’t yet know about New Leafs — and a few things we do: like the problem of Bt resistance I had heard so much about back East. While I was in Idaho and Washington State, I asked potato farmers to show me their refuges. This proved to be a joke.

”I guess that’s a refuge over there,” one Washington farmer told me, pointing to a cornfield.

Monsanto’s grower contract never mentions the word ”refuge” and only requires that farmers plant no more than 80 percent of their fields in New Leaf. Basically, any field not planted in New Leaf is considered a refuge, even if that field has been sprayed to kill every bug in it. Farmers call such acreage a clean field; calling it a refuge is a stretch at best.

It probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise that conventional farmers would have trouble embracing the notion of an insect refuge. To insist on real and substantial refuges is to ask them to start thinking of their fields in an entirely new way, less as a factory than as an ecosystem. In the factory, Bt is another in a long line of ”silver bullets” that work for a while and then get replaced; in the ecosystem, all bugs are not necessarily bad, and the relationships between various species can be manipulated to achieve desired ends — like the long-term sustainability of Bt.

This is, of course, precisely the approach organic farmers have always taken to their fields, and after my lunch with the Youngs that afternoon, I paid a brief visit to an organic potato grower. Mike Heath is a rugged, laconic man in his mid-50′s; like most of the organic farmers I’ve met, he looks as though he spends a lot more time out of doors than a conventional farmer, and he probably does: chemicals are, among other things, labor-saving devices. While we drove around his 500 acres in a battered old pickup, I asked him about biotechnology. He voiced many reservations — it was synthetic, there were too many unknowns — but his main objection to planting a biotech potato was simply that ”it’s not what my customers want.”

That point was driven home last December when the Department of Agriculture proposed a new ”organic standards” rule that, among other things, would have allowed biotech crops to carry an organic label. After receiving a flood of outraged cards and letters, the agency backed off. (As did Monsanto, which asked the U.S.D.A. to shelve the issue for three years.) Heath suggested that biotech may actually help organic farmers by driving worried consumers to the organic label.

I asked Heath about the New Leaf. He had no doubt resistance would come — ”the bugs are always going to be smarter than we are” — and said it was unjust that Monsanto was profiting from the ruin of Bt, something he regarded as a ”public good.”

None of this particularly surprised me; what did was that Heath himself resorted to Bt sprays only once or twice in the last 10 years. I had assumed that organic farmers used Bt or other approved pesticides in much the same way conventional farmers use theirs, but as Heath showed me around his farm, I began to understand that organic farming was a lot more complicated than substituting good inputs for bad. Instead of buying many inputs at all, Heath relied on long and complex crop rotations to prevent a buildup of crop-specific pests — he has found, for example, that planting wheat after spuds ”confuses” the potato beetles.

He also plants strips of flowering crops on the margins of his potato fields — peas or alfalfa, usually — to attract the beneficial insects that eat beetle larvae and aphids. If there aren’t enough beneficials to do the job, he’ll introduce ladybugs. Heath also grows eight varieties of potatoes, on the theory that biodiversity in a field, as in the wild, is the best defense against any imbalances in the system. A bad year with one variety will probably be offset by a good year with the others.

”I can eat any potato in this field right now,” he said, digging Yukon Golds for me to take home. ”Most farmers can’t eat their spuds out of the field. But you don’t want to start talking about safe food in Idaho.”

Heath’s were the antithesis of ”clean” fields, and, frankly, their weedy margins and overall patchiness made them much less pretty to look at. Yet it was the very complexity of these fields — the sheer diversity of species, both in space and time — that made them productive year after year without many inputs. The system provided for most of its needs.

All told, Heath’s annual inputs consisted of natural fertilizers (compost and fish powder), ladybugs and a copper spray (for blight) — a few hundred dollars an acre. Of course, before you can compare Heath’s operation with a conventional farm, you’ve got to add in the extra labor (lots of smaller crops means more work; organic fields must also be cultivated for weeds) and time — the typical organic rotation calls for potatoes every fifth year, in contrast to every third on a conventional farm. I asked Heath about his yields. To my astonishment, he was digging between 300 and 400 bags per acre — just as many as Danny Forsyth and only slightly fewer than Steve Young. Heath was also getting almost twice the price for his spuds: $8 a bag from an organic processor who was shipping frozen french fries to Japan.

On the drive back to Boise, I thought about why Heath’s farm remained the exception, both in Idaho and elsewhere. Here was a genuinely new paradigm that seemed to work. But while it’s true that organic agriculture is gaining ground (I met a big grower in Washington who had just added several organic circles), few of the mainstream farmers I met considered organic a ”realistic” alternative. For one thing, it’s expensive to convert: organic certifiers require a field to go without chemicals for three years before it can be called organic. For another, the U.S.D.A., which sets the course of American agriculture, has long been hostile to organic methods.

But I suspect the real reasons run deeper, and have more to do with the fact that in a dozen ways a farm like Heath’s simply doesn’t conform to the requirements of a corporate food chain. Heath’s type of agriculture doesn’t leave much room for the Monsantos of this world: organic farmers buy remarkably little — some seed, a few tons of compost, maybe a few gallons of ladybugs. That’s because the organic farmer’s focus is on a process, rather than on products. Nor is that process readily systematized, reduced to, say, a prescribed regime of sprayings like the one Forsyth outlined for me — regimes that are often designed by companies selling chemicals.

Most of the intelligence and local knowledge needed to run Mike Heath’s farm resides in the head of Mike Heath. Growing potatoes conventionally requires intelligence, too, but a large portion of it resides in laboratories in distant places like St. Louis, where it is employed in developing sophisticated chemical inputs. That sort of centralization of agriculture is unlikely to be reversed, if only because there’s so much money in it; besides, it’s much easier for the farmer to buy prepackaged solutions from big companies. ”Whose Head Is the Farmer Using? Whose Head Is Using the Farmer?” goes the title of a Wendell Berry essay.

Organic farmers like Heath have also rejected what is perhaps the cornerstone of industrial agriculture: the economies of scale that only a monoculture can achieve. Monoculture — growing vast fields of the same crop year after year — is probably the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture. But monoculture is poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a field of identical plants will be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds and disease. Monoculture is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer, and that virtually every input has been designed to solve.

To put the matter baldly, a farmer like Heath is working very hard to adjust his fields and his crops to the nature of nature, while farmers like Forsyth are working equally hard to adjust nature in their fields to the requirement of monoculture and, beyond that, to the needs of the industrial food chain. I remember asking Heath what he did about net necrosis, the bane of Forsyth’s existence. ”That’s only really a problem with Russet Burbanks,” he said. ”So I plant other kinds.” Forsyth can’t do that. He’s part of a food chain — at the far end of which stands a long, perfectly golden McDonald’s fry — that demands he grow Russet Burbanks and little else.

This is where biotechnology comes in, to the rescue of Forsyth’s Russet Burbanks and, if Monsanto is right, to the whole food chain of which they form a part. Monoculture is in trouble — the pesticides that make it possible are rapidly being lost, either to resistance or to heightened concerns about their danger. Biotechnology is the new silver bullet that will save monoculture. But a new silver bullet is not a new paradigm — rather, it’s something that will allow the old paradigm to survive. That paradigm will always construe the problem in Forsyth’s fields as a Colorado potato beetle problem, rather than as a problem of potato monoculture.

Like the silver bullets that preceded them — the modern hybrids, the pesticides and the chemical fertilizers — the new biotech crops will probably, as advertised, increase yields. But equally important, they will also speed the process by which agriculture is being concentrated in a shrinking number of corporate hands. If that process has advanced more slowly in farming than in other sectors of the economy, it is only because nature herself — her complexity, diversity and sheer intractability in the face of our best efforts at control — has acted as a check on it. But biotechnology promises to remedy this ”problem,” too.

Consider, for example, the seed, perhaps the ultimate ”means of production” in any agriculture. It is only in the last few decades that farmers have begun buying their seed from big companies, and even today many farmers still save some seed every fall to replant in the spring. Brown-bagging, as it is called, allows farmers to select strains particularly well adapted to their needs; since these seeds are often traded, the practice advances the state of the genetic art — indeed, has given us most of our crop plants. Seeds by their very nature don’t lend themselves to commodification: they produce more of themselves ad infinitum (with the exception of certain modern hybrids), and for that reason the genetics of most major crop plants have traditionally been regarded as a common heritage. In the case of the potato, the genetics of most important varieties — the Burbanks, the Superiors, the Atlantics — have always been in the public domain. Before Monsanto released the New Leaf, there had never been a multinational seed corporation in the potato-seed business — there was no money in it.

Biotechnology changes all that. By adding a new gene or two to a Russet Burbank or Superior, Monsanto can now patent the improved variety. Legally, it has been possible to patent a plant for many years, but biologically, these patents have been almost impossible to enforce. Biotechnology partly solves that problem. A Monsanto agent can perform a simple test in my garden and prove that my plants are the company’s intellectual property. The contract farmers sign with Monsanto allows company representatives to perform such tests in their fields at will. According to Progressive Farmer, a trade journal, Monsanto is using informants and hiring Pinkertons to enforce its patent rights; it has already brought legal action against hundreds of farmers for patent infringement.

Soon the company may not have to go to the trouble. It is expected to acquire the patent to a powerful new biotechnology called the Terminator, which will, in effect, allow the company to enforce its patents biologically. Developed by the U.S.D.A. in partnership with Delta and Pine Land, a seed company in the process of being purchased by Monsanto, the Terminator is a complex of genes that, theoretically, can be spliced into any crop plant, where it will cause every seed produced by that plant to be sterile. Once the Terminator becomes the industry standard, control over the genetics of crop plants will complete its move from the farmer’s field to the seed company — to which the farmer will have no choice but to return year after year. The Terminator will allow companies like Monsanto to privatize one of the last great commons in nature — the genetics of the crop plants that civilization has developed over the past 10,000 years.

At lunch on his farm in Idaho, I had asked Steve Young what he thought about all this, especially about the contract Monsanto made him sign. I wondered how the American farmer, the putative heir to a long tradition of agrarian independence, was adjusting to the idea of field men snooping around his farm, and patented seed he couldn’t replant. Young said he had made his peace with corporate agriculture, and with biotechnology in particular: ”It’s here to stay. It’s necessary if we’re going to feed the world, and it’s going to take us forward.”

Then I asked him if he saw any downside to biotechnology, and he paused for what seemed a very long time. What he then said silenced the table. ”There is a cost,” he said. ”It gives corporate America one more noose around my neck.”

Harvest

A few weeks after I returned home from Idaho, I dug my New Leafs, harvesting a gorgeous-looking pile of white spuds, including some real lunkers. The plants had performed brilliantly, though so had all my other potatoes. The beetle problem never got serious, probably because the diversity of species in my (otherwise organic) garden had attracted enough beneficial insects to keep the beetles in check. By the time I harvested my crop, the question of eating the New Leafs was moot. Whatever I thought about the soundness of the process that had declared these potatoes safe didn’t matter. Not just because I’d already had a few bites of New Leaf potato salad at the Youngs but also because Monsanto and the F.D.A. and the E.P.A. had long ago taken the decision of whether or not to eat a biotech potato out of my — out of all of our — hands. Chances are, I’ve eaten New Leafs already, at McDonald’s or in a bag of Frito-Lay chips, though without a label there can be no way of knowing for sure.

So if I’ve probably eaten New Leafs already, why was it that I kept putting off eating mine? Maybe because it was August, and there were so many more-interesting fresh potatoes around — fingerlings with dense, luscious flesh, Yukon Golds that tasted as though they had been pre-buttered — that the idea of cooking with a bland commercial variety like the Superior seemed beside the point.

There was this, too: I had called Margaret Mellon at the Union of Concerned Scientists to ask her advice. Mellon is a molecular biologist and lawyer and a leading critic of biotech agriculture. She couldn’t offer any hard scientific evidence that my New Leafs were unsafe, though she emphasized how little we know about the effects of Bt in the human diet. ”That research simply hasn’t been done,” she said.

I pressed. Is there any reason I shouldn’t eat these spuds?

”Let me turn that around. Why would you want to?”

It was a good question. So for a while I kept my New Leafs in a bag on the porch. Then I took the bag with me on vacation, thinking maybe I’d sample them there, but the bag came home untouched.

The bag sat on my porch till the other day, when I was invited to an end-of-summer potluck supper at the town beach. Perfect. I signed up to make a potato salad. I brought the bag into the kitchen and set a pot of water on the stove. But before it boiled I was stricken by this thought: I’d have to tell people at the picnic what they were eating. I’m sure (well, almost sure) the potatoes are safe, but if the idea of eating biotech food without knowing it bothered me, how could I possibly ask my neighbors to? So I’d tell them about the New Leafs — and then, no doubt, lug home a big bowl of untouched potato salad. For surely there would be other potato salads at the potluck and who, given the choice, was ever going to opt for the bowl with the biotech spuds?

So there they sit, a bag of biotech spuds on my porch. I’m sure they’re absolutely fine. I pass the bag every day, thinking I really should try one, but I’m beginning to think that what I like best about these particular biotech potatoes — what makes them different — is that I have this choice. And until I know more, I choose not.

That’s right, there are no private lawns in Seaside. The town’s strict design guidelines prohibit them. So the set designers for “The Truman Show” had to rip out the garden of native plants surrounding Truman Burbank’s perfect little house on Natchez Street in order to roll out the carpet of Kentucky bluegrass his cliched existence demanded. For how was this perfectly ordinary American going to spend his Saturday mornings if he had no lawn to mow?

In the last few years a million or so words have been written pointing up the environmental and philosophical folly of the Great American lawn. Lawns consume unconscionable amounts of energy and chemicals, while producing little more than landscape conformity and social anxiety. People complain—but people continue to mow, as if it were their solemn civic duty.

Except, that is, in Seaside.

By permitting only native species in front yards, and by outlawing sod, Seaside has seceded from the great green river of lawn that joins Americans, yard by unfenced yard, from Maine to California. In March, I spent a couple of days at Seaside, and though it would be foolish to proclaim I’ve seen the future, I had a vision of what post-lawn America might look like.

Much about Seaside was revolutionary when it was founded 17 years ago, but perhaps nothing about it remains as radical as its landscape: the exuberant thickets of native plants (live oak, Southern magnolia, beach rosemary and a host of others) that threaten to burst their tidy picket enclosures. By now the town’s neotraditional houses look downright familiar, for the simple reason that Seaside helped bring back such traditional elements as the front porch.

At the same time the town-planning concepts that Robert Davis, Seaside’s developer, and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, its designers, pioneered here—houses on tiny lots pulled up close to walkable streets leading to public spaces—have gone on to inspire a national movement.

But if the reach of Seaside’s influence has blunted the novelty of its architecture and layout, the town’s gardens—just now coming into their own—have lost none of their power to astonish. Seaside’s landscaping may well be the most revolutionary thing about the place. It’s one thing to challenge the architecture and planning of the American subdivision, but it’s quite another to abolish something as fundamental as the American front lawn.

When I asked Mr. Davis why a real estate developer hoping to sell houses to Americans would challenge their inalienable right to mow, he smiled. “I suppose I didn’t know enough to know how crazy it was,” he said.

Besides being a developer, Mr. Davis was a child of the 60′s, an ardent environmentalist who happened to inherit 80 acres of scrubby Gulf Coast beachfront and decided to experiment with them. When Douglas Duany, Seaside’s landscape architect (and Andres Duany’s younger brother), first met with Mr. Davis to discuss the town’s landscape style, Mr. Davis simply pointed out the window at the low, windswept scrub clinging to the sugary white sand and said, “I sort of like what’s out there now.”

This was 1982, years before nurseries in the area began carrying the sand live oak, woody goldenrod and wild lupins that make up the local scrub forest. Yet, growing turf on a barrier island would have been, in Mr. Davis’s words, “dumber than dirt.” For one thing, there was no dirt, only sand.

So Douglas Duany drew up a list of the plants Seaside would allow, and turf grass was not among them. To preserve as much of the existing vegetation as possible, builders were told they could disturb no more than a four-foot zone surrounding the house. “One contractor almost took my head off when I told him he couldn’t simply scrape the lot with a bulldozer and fix it later with grass and shrubs,” Mr. Duany told me.

Initially, Seaside’s sales force encountered some resistance, too, though they soon learned the “grass question” was a good way to identify serious buyers. “Prospects who gagged on the ‘no lawn’ rule usually had trouble with the rest of the concept, too,” one broker explained. Which makes sense: Seaside posed a challenge to the whole suburban regime of private castles surrounded by vast moats of lawn; those home buyers who welcomed the idea of shrinking their private realms were the ones least wedded to their Toros.

The fact that only a tenth of Seaside’s 300-plus families live here year round also helped, since the landscape rules promised homeowners almost complete freedom from yard chores.

AT first, I didn’t get it when Mr. Davis described Seaside’s garden style as “Gertrude Jekyll gone native.” Walking down one of Seaside’s older streets for the first time, I wasn’t sure these yards even qualified as gardens—many of them looked untended and disorganized, as if the “gardener” had merely thrown a fence around a patch of the scrub forest to keep it from escaping. Yet, the more I walked, the more these yards came into focus as exquisitely subtle gardens.

Actually, it wasn’t until I went for a jog through the scrub forest just beyond Seaside’s town line that I understood the Seaside yard wasn’t simply a restoration of the native plant community but a carefully edited representation of it. It was, like all gardens, a metaphor of nature.

Where the real scrub formed a low, impenetrable thicket, Seaside’s trees, protected from the salt spray by the architecture, have by now risen well above head height, creating an agreeably shady canopy that shelters walkers. The contorted branches of the live oaks throw webs of spooky shadows against the freshly painted houses. Since much of Seaside’s architecture tends to err on the side of sweetness and light, this unexpectedly Gothic inflection renders the houses more interesting, less wholesome.

The typical Seaside garden is layered vertically. Beneath the canopy of oak and magnolia leaves is a relatively open space at eye level that affords a welcome sense of prospect; then, around waist level, the density resumes, with informal plantings of beach rosemary, woody goldenrod, lupins, gopher apple and bluestem grass. A few small areas have been carved out for barbecues, benches or paths, but for the most part, human life is meant to take place on porches and decks—realms of Culture set within patches of seemingly unreconstructed Nature.

“Gardening by subtraction” is how Randy Harelson explained the method. A garden designer by training, Mr. Harelson moved from New England to Seaside six years ago. Nowadays he consults with the Town Council on horticultural issues, designs private gardens for homeowners and runs the Gourd Garden, a native-plant nursery two miles east of Seaside.

“The landscape here gets very little credit for putting Seaside on the map,” he told me. “But if you try looking at the architecture by itself, mentally removing the scrub and replacing it with lawn and foundation plantings, it gets boring very quickly.”

The point is proven by Truman Burbank’s intentionally trite yard, as well as by most of the new houses rising on the west side, where trees have yet to subdue the noisy parliament of Architectural Expression.

It’s the rub between the neat white picket fences and the luxuriant, heedless plantings that gives Seaside’s best gardens their power. Remove the tidy enclosures and the plantings would immediately look slovenly or go slack—the fate of all too many wild or native gardens.

Gertrude Jekyll understood it wasn’t enough to bring England’s native plants into the garden; they needed the frame of architecture if they hoped to make the leap from meadow to garden. The tight, controlling picket fences set off Seaside’s raucous planting much the same way that Sir Edwin Lutyens’s formal walls and paths set off Gertrude Jekyll’s relaxed perennial borders. At Seaside the juxtapositions reach an almost violent pitch that I suspect would have popped Miss Jekyll’s spectacles. But the underlying principle is the same.

MR. HARELSON says Seaside residents have taken the town’s landscape to heart, especially now that the tree canopy has matured. “The challenge was getting people to prune from below to create an understory, rather than from above, which is what most of us are accustomed to,” he said.

Definitive proof that Seaside’s landscape has set deep roots in the community came a few years back when the town planners decided that the scrub crowding the median strip of Seaside Avenue, a main axis, should be replaced with grass. Residents on the avenue rebelled, defending their corridor of wilderness in a battle that some say marked the moment when Seaside—residents and plants alike—slipped from the control of developers and designers.

Mr. Davis, for one, regards this as healthy, part of the town’s inevitable passing from idea into history. He described a recent conference at which a visiting English architect criticized Seaside’s landscaping. “He told us it was time to cut everything back—hard—since the foliage was now obscuring the architecture,” Mr. Davis said. “We had to explain that that’s exactly what people like about it. There are so many tourists passing by that our porches would be fishbowls if not for the trees.”

Thanks to the town’s celebrity, sure to increase with the release of “The Truman Show,” a porch wreathed in a tangle of oak and magnolia is a blessing. The sheer wildness of Seaside’s gardens is thus an inadvertent byproduct of the town’s success.

As I walked Seaside’s streets, I wondered why Seaside’s many imitators have so far failed to imitate it. Other New Urbanist communities have managed to shrink the front lawn and fence it in, but I don’t know of another town in America that has dared to do away with it entirely. In fact, at Disney’s town of Celebration—where Truman Burbank would have fit in without changing a thing—the rules actually require homeowners to maintain a minimum amount of lawn.

Seaside’s landscape is a special case, one that may not lend itself to imitation. It has taken everything from the abundance of gawkers to the paucity of humus to the conviction of its slightly naive developer to make lawns untenable here. It is also true that landscape styles, rooted as they are in the particularities of place, never traveled as easily as architectural styles. Even so, Seaside points a way, one way, and if we Americans ever do declare our independence from the tyranny of lawns, we will look back at Seaside as our exuberantly overgrown…

At various times over the last several years, developers have threatened to slice up the valley’s picturesque views and sell them to weekenders from New York. Thanks largely to the efforts of the nine-year-old Kent Land Trust, a considerable chunk of the landscape has been saved from the overdevelopment that has already spoiled much of Route 7. These days, however, the threat to an agricultural landscape in New England comes from a new quarter: the second-growth forest, which is steadily marching down from the wooded hilltops to reclaim the fields for itself.

Kent’s little valley is an epitome of America’s middle landscape, poised between nature and civilization, and it is precisely this “middleness” that the Kent Land Trust is fighting to preserve. As Harmon Smith, the president of the trust, explained it: “To protect the rural character of a town like this, we realized it wasn’t enough to stop development. You also have to keep the farmland open.” The problem is, how do you keep farmland open when there are no longer enough farmers left to mow the fields and thin the hedgerows?

Like many conservation organizations around the country, the Kent Land Trust has discovered that it is no longer adequate to lock up a precious piece of land and throw away the key. To preserve America’s dwindling landscape of family farms it is often necessary to help out struggling farmers and, when that fails, to take up arms against the advancing forest. “You can’t go away and simply forget about these places,” Mr. Smith said, “because they won’t stay the same.”

Even wilderness preservation often requires human intervention—to reintroduce predators or weed out exotic species. Increasingly, people interested in saving the land find themselves not only defending it but actively “gardening” it—an approach that can get them into hot water with environmentalists who would just as soon let nature take its course. Who would think that touching up a hedgerow would be cause for controversy?

The Kent Land Trust’s latest venture into what might be called interventionist preservation is its Adopt-a-View program, whose kickoff brought a dozen or so of us out to the hedgerows lining Route 7 last month. Our purpose was to thin a forbidding tangle of grapevine, multiflora rose, sumac and maple saplings that had grown up between the roadside trees, blinding a picturesque vista of cornfields backed by the broad hump of Cobble Mountain. This particular view had been adopted by the Kent Greenhouse, a local garden center, which had contributed the services of a landscaping crew and equipment for the day. Thanks to the help, we had the hedgerow nicely edited, and the view of the fields restored, by the time we broke for lunch.

Claire Murphy, a retired public relations executive who dreamed up the Adopt-a-View program and stopped by to supervise, was delighted. She had instructed our team to “open up the hedgerows, but please, let’s not make it look like Scarsdale.” Ms. Murphy used to live in Scarsdale, and she has some of the bearing of a Westchester matron; I was reminded of an Irish Barbara Bush. “It should be tidy, I told them, but not too tidy,” she said.

In times past no one would have needed to “adopt” such a view or to make choices regarding its esthetics. It would simply have persisted, as it has for half a millennium, by dint of farmers going about their chores. The challenge today is to preserve the character of such countryside at a time when the farmers who maintained that character are mostly a memory. Suddenly, people find that they have no choice but to make choices and that they need chain saws and pruning shears to save the land from . . . well, from nature itself.

This particular irony has not escaped the critics of the Kent Land Trust. A recent editorial in The Litchfield County Times, a local weekly, took the Adopt-a-View program to task for, of all things, “endeavoring to subvert the natural order.” The editorial suggested there was something presumptuous, if not anthropocentric, about adopting and restoring views that nature had seen fit to reconquer. “Should blackberry briars be cut, for example, but not Queen Anne’s lace?” the editorial asked. “Who gets to decide which plants have merit and which don’t?”

Considering that The Litchfield County Times is as stout a champion of the environment as the Land Trust, its criticism came as something of a surprise. But like many environmentalists, the newspaper seems to regard what happens to any piece of land as a kind of zero-sum contest between Us and Nature, in which the gain of one party can come only at the expense of the other. Following this line of reasoning to its logical—and, to me, lunatic—conclusion, the editorial likened the Land Trust’s position “to that of a developer claiming a shopping plaza is more widely appreciated than a swamp.” In other words, if you’re going to introduce human preference you might as well go whole hog and put up a shopping mall.

When the issue is as clear-cut as a development that threatens a wilderness, the zero-sum model might fit the facts. But what happens when the alternatives are a little less stark, when the choice is between a 500-year-old working landscape and a second-growth forest?

I suppose that when you don’t trust yourself to make wise decisions about the land, letting nature decide the matter is an appealingly straightforward approach. And yet, while I was struggling to yank grapevines out of the trees, I wondered if it would really have been more “natural” for us to do nothing here, to instead let the forest have its way.

You see, I’d noticed that the hedgerow I was working on was teeming with nonnative species—Japanese honeysuckle, Russian olive, multiflora rose, even a vagrant euonymus vine—all brought by Europeans. These were the species that would triumph if we did nothing here. Yet, a landscape dominated by these exotics would be no less a cultural artifact—a product of human intervention—than a hedgerow or meadow.

In time, a century or longer, this field of exotic brush would be succeeded by second-growth forest—a kind of landscape that would be far more novel here than a patchwork of fields and hedgerows. For this particular landscape has been under continual cultivation for hundreds and possibly thousands of years. According to the English settlers who first laid eyes on it in 1730 it was “charming and picturesque” farmland even then. Human beings have been actively shaping this land for so long that to start excluding them now would be unnatural.

I’ve heard people in town say that preserving farmland just because it’s pretty is an exercise in nostalgia for a world that is not coming back. Certainly it’s easy to make light of city folk fighting to preserve farmland that their very presence has put in jeopardy—since it is partly the run-up in property values that has made farming unviable. The farmers who stick it out often find themselves working to keep other people’s land open expressly to gratify an urban taste for looking at farmland.

Dave Arno, who told me he is the last full-time farmer in Kent, farms several of the Land Trust’s fields; he also mows fields for Anne Bass, who owns several hundred acres of Kent farmland. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Mr. Arno is now as much in the business of producing picturesque views as he is in producing milk.

The paradox is not lost on Mr. Arno; he understands full well that he has himself stepped into the picturesque view. “Cars will slow down on Route 7 when I’m cutting hay,” he told me, smiling. “People like to see a farmer.”

Part of what people like to see, I think, is a middle landscape where humans and nature long ago reached some sort of accommodation. There are sociobiologists who contend that the attraction of such land, which more closely resembles the open, tree-studded savannas on which humans evolved than the shadowy forests they have usually feared, is hard-wired into their nature. But even if the preference is purely cultural, it seems to me worth honoring. The very existence of a working landscape that has persisted quite this long is something to marvel at, and preserve, if only as a lesson or reminder. All this time, people have managed to keep this land in good health, taking care not to tip it too far in the direction of either wildness or civilization.

That balancing act is beautiful to behold. The farmers who performed it are disappearing from this picture, it’s true. But perhaps the gardeners, with their chain saws and loppers and bush hogs, can take over, keeping the memory, and the model, of the middle landscape alive.

Each of us had brought along a specimen of our troubled waters in hopes that the assembled experts—an excavator, an ecologist and a hydrologist—might know how to heal our ponds. And not just our ponds, for as anyone with a sick one knows, a malfunctioning pond casts a pall far beyond its shores, ruining whole landscapes and, in time, its owner’s psychological well-being. For the last few years my own spirits have risen and fallen with the surface of my pond. Imagine my mental state at the end of a dry summer when it doesn’t even have a surface.

The problem begins every year around Memorial Day, when the water level falls as precipitately as a draining bathtub, by as much as a foot a week. You can almost see it happen, all but the sucking clockwise swirl. In a wet year I can count on a respectable puddle through the summer, but most years it drains completely, leaving me with a quarter-acre, 12-foot-deep crater in the middle of my backyard. Frogs have to pack up and leave, a file of startled refugees making their way across the road to the neighbor’s pond. My neighbor has the wet kind.

As reliably as it empties out in summer, the pond steadily and mysteriously fills every autumn, rain or shine. By winter I gaze out on a lovely sight: a glistening lozenge of ice resting in a grove of ash and white oak. As I write, the pond actually boasts a surplus of water; its spillway has leapt noisily to life, and all seems right with the world. And so it will remain until the plug is pulled in June, always the cruelest month in my calendar.

I had gone to the workshop hoping to break this dismal cycle. After listening to lectures on eutrophication, invasive aquatic weeds and the virtues of regular drawdowns and applications of glyphosate, one by one we shared our stories and then watched as the experts held our sorry specimens to the light. They lifted and fingered each clump of glop, expertly sniffed the different scums and ventured their diagnoses. This woman was suffering from a bloom of algae that a UV inhibitor might cure; that fellow was afflicted with South American waterweed, a recent escapee from the aquarium trade.

Oh, what I would have given for a problem like that! If the neighbor’s grass is always greener, his pond is always wetter: every problem in that room, however dire, presumed the presence of water in quantities I could only dream about. When at last my turn to testify came around, the bearded ecologist held my sample up to the light and pronounced my water admirably clear—”gorgeous” is the word he used, a careless cruelty I can’t very well blame him for. When I stopped him to say that the problem was one of quantity not quality, that my pond had no water, the room murmured in pity.

My pond is beautifully sited, if I may say, so that in August I must gaze upon its emptiness not only from the dining room, but also from the studio where I work, which I carefully oriented to take advantage of the anticipated water view. Mine is an obstreperous wedge of land, hilly and strewn with glacial debris, and I thought that a tranquil view of water would have a calming effect on my workday. As it turned out, I now look up from my computer screen to behold an abyss, a view that only an existentialist could love.

Whenever someone visits my garden in summer (something I strenuously discourage), I hurry the guest past my chasm, always careful to stay on the right, lest he or she trip and topple in. And to think that I used to worry about drownings.

So where does my water go, and where does it come from? When the experts ran my soil sample through their fingers, they suggested that it might be too sandy or gravelly to form an adequate seal. This seemed plausible: I have memories of the excavator yelling above the roar of his backhoe, as it ate into the earth, that he “sure wouldn’t mind seeing a little more clay down there.”

Leaving aside the whole water issue, I can’t imagine a better excavator. In fact, I would recommend Al to anyone interested in having a nicely shaped pit dug in his or her backyard. When I told him my pond was not behaving in an entirely pondlike manner, he couldn’t have been more sympathetic, or less defensive. He freely confessed his bafflement, and in this he is in good company.

Al is only one of perhaps a dozen experienced pond men—excavators, engineers, hydrologists—who have rocked their big boots on the lip of my crater while offering little more than an earnest chin pull. Their collective wisdom about the source of my problem, which would fit comfortably into a short paragraph, makes me wonder if anyone really knows what goes on down there just below the skin of this world. It is easier to imagine the weather on Venus than to conceptualize the behavior of ground water just a few feet beneath the crust we walk on every day. Terra incognita, indeed.

WHY me? To dwell on such questions is, I know, a pointless exercise, though in this case I know exactly why me. Very shortly after my pond was dug five years ago I wrote an article in which I gushed, stupidly, about its wonders, how it had so miraculously filled, first with water, then with life. I went on about the sex-crazed frogs that had taken up residence on its banks, the outboard beetles and Jesuitical water striders that lazily doodled its surface, and all the other creatures that in a few months’ time had transformed a gaping wound in the earth into a thriving habitat giddy with life.

My crowning act of hubris, though, was to claim my pond as proof that humans like me can actually improve on nature—can change the land in ways that increase not only the beauty but also the sheer quantity and diversity of life in a place. This was not a smart thing to say in print, not so soon. Within days, nature saw fit to pull the plug on my wondrous ecological achievement, forcing the frogs and water striders and beetles to decamp or expire.

So now, the erstwhile nature-improver spends his Saturdays talking to excavators and engineers, assessing the carrying capacity of glacial till and the irresistibility of hydrostatic pressure. I have entertained a raft of different schemes, everything from spreading bags of powdered clay—bentonite—along the banks (expensive and doubtful), to pumping water into the pond from an old artesian well on the property (expensive, doubtful and loud). A fellow was here one day brimming with confidence that he could fix my pond: he wanted to sell me the latest in clay liners, the kind used to seal the bottoms of toxic waste dumps.

“If they can hold stuff like dioxin,” he told me, “you better believe they can hold a little water.”

And for the sum of $10,000, he estimated, I could find out. I wondered briefly about what it would take to get my pond designated a Superfund site.

I have also wondered, on dark days, what it would cost simply to fill it in and cut my losses. But that, too, now seems to be a multi-thousand-dollar proposition, to truck in and spread the vast quantity of clean fill I’d need to make a pit so big disappear. Either way, it looks as if I’m going to be pouring a lot of money down this hole.

Unless, that is, I do nothing. This is the latest advice I’ve gotten, yet it is not quite the counsel of despair it might sound like initially. I telephoned a local engineer by the name of Pat Hackett, who displayed an understanding of my leaky pond that was uncanny, when you consider that he has never laid eyes on it. Mr. Hackett’s gift, it seems, is to be able to see clear into the opaque soul of the earth. All I did was tell him precisely where in northwestern Connecticut I lived, and he proceeded to describe what was going on directly beneath my feet.

“O.K.,” he said, “I know the place. You’re on a slope of glacial till there, which means the water table changes dramatically over the course of the year. There’s a tremendous amount of ground water coming down that hillside, heading toward the Housatonic, and my guess is it’s riding above a ledge of rock. That’s what’s filling your pond. It’s also what’s emptying it after the snow melt, because glacial till won’t hold water moving like that.”

Water is literally passing through my pond, Mr. Hackett was suggesting. Certainly this explained its gorgeousness. My pond was not so much a reservoir as a kind of window on a seasonal underground river. I asked him about the clay liner.

“Waste of money,” he said. “The hydrostatic pressure is so great, the water coming in will burst right through it.” So is there anything to be done? The engineer didn’t answer, at least not directly.

“Sounds like what you have there is a vernal pool,” he said. “Interesting habitat. You might think about it that way.”

I hung up, discouraged. But in the days that followed, his cryptic answer stayed with me until it acquired an almost koanlike quality.

I began reading up on vernal ponds, which hold water only part of the year, typically in the spring. It seems that these ephemeral bodies of water perform a vital role in the great dance of ecology, especially today, when the world’s frog population is in trouble.

Since vernal pools dry out completely in the summer, fish never become established—very good news for the frogs, whose eggs and offspring fish like to eat. The hole in my backyard may be a lousy pond, but it’s utopia for amphibians. Mr. Hackett had speculated that I probably had no problem with mosquitoes, which, come to think of it, is true, a blessing I owe to the frogs.

So I’m trying to look at it that way—as a vernal pool, rather than a failed pond—and that has made all the difference. True, I need to explain all this to visitors who haven’t had the benefit of Mr. Hackett’s enlightenment; I might even want to put up one of those carved wooden plaques you see in the national parks, explaining that the odd grassy depression before them is in fact a seasonal habitat of inestimable ecological value. Perhaps that’s what I’ll do. Instead of the expensive clay liner, which might not even work, I’ll go with Mr. Hackett’s priceless silver one, which already does.

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.

By planting in rows, in a rectangle, I was behaving “irresponsibly,” a landscape designer from Massachusetts charged in one of the more temperate letters I received. By promoting even this small degree of horticultural formalism, this fellow argued, I was contributing to the degradation of the environment, because “existing esthetic conventions” cannot be realized in the garden without petrochemicals and technology. We are to believe that only a “natural garden”—i.e., one designed to look undesigned—can qualify as ecologically correct.

Since then, the “natural garden” movement has all but seized control of official garden taste in this country. A vocal army of designers and taste makers has decreed that the “new American garden” is henceforth a place that:

1. Outlaws any human artifice in its design;

2. Grants citizenship exclusively to native plants (any immigrant to be treated as “flora non grata,” with “invasive aliens” subject to deportation);

3. Resembles as closely as possible the “presettlement” American landscape of its particular region; and

4. Guarantees the right of self-determination to all its flora and (nonhuman) fauna, and bans the “brutal” practice of pruning.

It doesn’t sound much like a garden, and to judge by the pictures that illustrate the manifestoes, a flurry of which have recently been published, it doesn’t look much like one either. Depending on its site, a natural garden could be a wetland fringed with bulrushes, a dappled grove of birch trees rising from a trillium carpet, a meadow of tall grasses studded with the blooms of gayfeather and goldenrod. Such plantings can be quite beautiful, if a bit subtle. “Visitors will wonder when you plan to start gardening,” warns the new “Taylor’s Guide to Natural Gardening.” Peter Harper counsels in “The Natural Garden Book” that “you may have to adjust your tastes” in order to appreciate a natural garden—or, even, it often seems, to spot one. Indeed, the photographs included in coffee-table-book celebrations of the movement, like Ken Druse’s “The Natural Habitat Garden,” look for all the world as if they were snapped in the wild, which is precisely the point.

Druse is a key figure in the natural-gardening movement. His sumptuous, seductive photography, on display in this new volume as well as in its immensely successful predecessor, “The Natural Garden,” has been instrumental in promoting the new style. But “style” is probably the wrong word here, for much more than esthetics is at stake. As Druse makes clear in “The Natural Habitat Garden,” the aim of the new American garden is not to please people (“it’s no longer good enough to simply make it pretty”) but to “serve the planet” by “simulating natural habitats” that might provide refuge for threatened American flora and fauna. The gardener’s burden is a moral one, Sara Stein announces in “Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards.” “We cannot in fairness rail against those who destroy the rain forest . . . when we have made our own yards uninhabitable.”

Environmental pretensions aside, the esthetic of the natural garden would appear to represent an extreme version of the 18th-century picturesque-gardening style, which was the first to maintain that gardens should closely resemble “natural landscapes.” It turned out, though, that the natural landscape the picturesque designers strove to emulate was one they found not in nature but in the 17th-century landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Although today’s neopicturesque garden designers claim to be emulating actual natural habitats, they too seem to rely on an artistic model. Instead of landscape painting, however, these gardens aspire to the condition of a contemporary nature photograph, an Eliot Porter, say, or an Ansel Adams. Whenever I visit a natural garden I can’t help thinking I’ve walked into the pages of a Sierra Club calendar.

This is an esthetic based on the ideal of wilderness, which might at first seem like a radical departure for American gardening—whose biggest contribution to world garden history, after all, remains the front lawn. But I’m not sure the philosophy behind the natural garden represents as great an advance as its promoters suggest. The worship of wilderness has coexisted in this country with the worship of lawn for more than a century—ever since the decade following the Civil War, when America managed simultaneously to invent both the front lawn and the wilderness park. How could one culture have produced two such seemingly opposite institutions? Easily, if its thinking about nature is as schizophrenic as ours has been. As a nation, we’ve never been sure whether to dominate nature, in the name of civilization, or worship it untouched, as an escape from civilization. It’s always been all or nothing with us: parking lot or wilderness preserve; crew-cut lawn or untended meadow; culture or nature. Neither extreme suggests a particularly useful model for our relations with nature. And neither should ever be confused with a “garden,” a word that used to be reserved for places that mediate between nature and culture, rather than force us to make an impossible choice.

IT’S HARD TO AVOID THE CONCLUSION THAT THE NATURAL gardening movement is antihumanist, particularly in the way it seeks to erase people and history from the land. Yet this can’t be more than a conceit, since even a natural garden needs people to create and cultivate it. At this late date, after the flora of this continent have been transformed irrevocably by the introduction of Eurasian species, a garden of native plants won’t long remain one without ceaseless and sedulous weeding. This fact ties the natural garden up in some uncomfortable environmental knots. Many of its advocates (Druse and Stein among them) find themselves condoning, albeit mumblingly, the use of herbicides as a way to create the clean horticultural slate required to establish a native-plant meadow. Surely a penchant for straight lines is less likely to lead the gardener into a chemical dependence than an obsession with native-plant purity.

Even so, intolerance toward foreign species seems to be rising in the natural-gardening movement, if the progress of Druse’s own thinking is any indication. His first book allowed that “naturalized aliens” (he mentions daisies) “are welcome in the natural garden.” Five years later, he wants to close the border, because “even a short visit by a nonnative can upset the balance of the community enough to cause extirpation or even extinction of a native plant.” He offers no scientific proof for this contention, leaving the reader to wonder if the darkening specter of alien species in the garden might have less to do with ecology than ideology. (Sara Stein is more reasonable, willing to grant citizenship in her garden to well-behaved immigrants.)

I had always assumed that the apotheosis of the native plant was a new phenomenon, a byproduct of our deepening environmental awareness. But it turns out that there have been outbreaks of native-plant mania before, most notably in Germany early in this century. According to a recent series of journal articles by German garden historians Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Groening, pre-World War II Germany saw the rise of a natural-gardening movement “founded on nationalistic and racist ideas” that were often cloaked in scientific jargon. Inspired by the study of “plant sociology,” a group of landscape designers set out—as one of their number put it in 1939—”to give the German people its characteristic garden and to help guard it from unwholesome alien influences,” including foreign plants and landscape formality, which they condemned as both anthropocentric and apt to weaken the “Nordic races.” This “blood-and-soil-rooted” garden, as it was sometimes called, was comprised of native species and designed to look like untended German landscapes.

Wolschke-Bulmahn and Groening have documented how, under National Socialism, the mania for natural gardening and native plants became government policy. A team working under Heinrich Himmler set forth “Rules of the Design of the Landscape,” which stipulated a “close-to-nature” style and the exclusive use of native plants. Specific alien species were marked for elimination. In 1942, a team of Saxon botanists working for the Central Office of Vegetative Mapping embarked on “a war of extermination” against Impatiens parviflora, a small woodland flower regarded as an alien.

Am I implying that natural gardening in America is a crypto-Fascist movement? I hope not. I mention the historical precedent partly to suggest that the “new American garden” is neither as new nor as American as its proponents would have us think. (Nor was the German blood-and-soil garden new in its time: It owed a large debt to the “wild garden” promoted by William Robinson, the 19th-century Irish garden designer. Little in gardening is ever truly new.) The German example also suggests we would do well to beware of ideology in the garden masquerading as science. It’s hard to believe that there is nothing more than scientific concern about invasive species behind the current fashion for natural gardening and native plants in America—not when our national politics are rife with anxieties about immigration and isolationist sentiment. The garden isn’t the only corner of American culture where nativism is in flower just now.

The current attack on alien species usually proceeds by citing a few notorious examples of imported plants that have indeed behaved badly on our shores, kudzu being the all-time favorite, closely followed by Japanese honeysuckle, multiflora rose and purple loosestrife. Branded as “huns,” “invaders” or “monsters,” these demon species are then used to tar the entire class of alien plants with guilt by association.

But just how representative are kudzu and its noxious cronies? In fact, the great majority of introduced species can’t even survive beyond the garden wall, much less thrive. And many of the species that have been successfully naturalized we now regard as unobjectionable, even welcome, figures in the landscape. It’s hard to imagine a New England roadside without its tawny day lilies and Queen Anne’s lace, yet both these species are aliens marked for elimination by some of the more zealous natural gardeners. Could it be these plants have actually improved the New England landscape, adding to its diversity and beauty? Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on their alien status?

I have no idea what impact the day lily and wild carrot have had on the ecosystem in which they now play a part. But what does it mean to say that the New England landscape is more “natural” in their absence? To believe this is to believe that the actions of Native Americans—whose fires and travels and agriculture also remade the New England landscape, and who once were immigrants themselves—are natural in a way that the actions of other human races are not. Evolution will draw no distinction between the migration of species by wind and birds and ice floes and the migration of species by 747.

There’s no question that these migrations are sometimes destructive of the ecological status quo, if indeed such a thing even exists. But migrations of species by whatever means is an abiding part of natural history; in any event, they’re almost always irreversible. Turning back the ecological clock to 1492 is a fool’s errand, futile and pointless to boot. It seems to me we gardeners would do better to try to work with the mongrel ecology we’ve inherited—to start out from here.

We seem to feel these days that we need something we can call the new American garden. But if we must have a national garden style, there’s no reason it has to be xenophobic, or founded on illusions of a lost American Eden. Wouldn’t a more cosmopolitan garden, one that borrowed freely from all the world’s styles and floras, that made something of history rather than trying to escape it—wouldn’t such a garden be more in keeping with the American experience?

In 1938, a German-Jewish landscape designer named Rudolf Borchardt, protesting the blood-and-soil garden movement then taking hold in his country, made a plea for an international garden culture. He wrote: “If this kind of garden-owning barbarian became the rule, then neither a gilliflower nor a rosemary, neither a peach tree nor a myrtle sapling nor a tea rose would ever have crossed the Alps. Gardens connect people, time and latitudes. If these barbarians ruled. . . today we would horticulturally still subsist on acorns. The garden of humanity is a huge democracy. . . . It is not the only democracy which such clumsy advocates threaten to dehumanize.”

Here’s to multihorticulturalism.

I had formed a somewhat grander picture of my tree when Roy had first called to tell me it was on the way. He’d read a magazine article about the institute’s American Liberty elm, a new strain bred for resistance to Dutch elm disease, the fungus that has brought down so many of America’s elms over the past 60 years, and he thought I might like one. In the days before its arrival, I deliberated where in my yard an elm tree should go, and imagined its trunk climbing swiftly beside my driveway and then, as is the habit of American elms, opening all at once its tall, leafy canopy.

What showed up, however, was far too delicate a thing to plant out in the yard. There are blades of grass around here taller and sturdier than this little whip; planted in the open, it was sure to get trampled. So I decided my Liberty elm would spend its formative years in the safe and luxurious confines of my perennial border, where it could be cosseted like a delphinium until the day it was ready to face the real plant world. There the elm has thrived, this season finally lifting its skinny shoulders above the neighboring day lilies and caryopteris. True, a tree whose height is still measured in inches (39) and whose leaves can still be counted (73) may not be much to brag about. But I’m taking a long view. Nursing this skimpy sapling along is the part I can play in the effort to restore the elm to the American landscape.

The fate of the American elm has been bound up with that of our civic culture almost from the beginning, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought elms out of the wilderness and installed them on the Boston Common. Ever since, and right up until Dutch elm disease struck in the 1930′s, the American elm has been the tree of choice for American parks and campuses, for New England commons and Civil War battlefields, and for the best streets of our cities.

There is something about the very form of these trees that seems to imply public space, in the same way that a weeping willow implies water, or a great, old gnarled oak seems to uphold the authority of tradition. If this sounds sentimental, consider that long before we embraced the elm, the Indians favored its shade for tribal councils. No doubt the unusually high canopy has something to do with the tree’s exalted civic status: an elm commits to a branching pattern much later than most trees, with the result that the vault formed beneath its canopy is as grand as a train station’s, more conducive to encounters with strangers than intimates. (By contrast, beech trees form ideal spaces for marriage proposals.) Moreover, the elm’s typical branch pattern can legitimately be described as egalitarian. After the tree’s long, straight ascent, it divides into four or five boughs of more or less equal status: unlike most trees, the elm manages its affairs with no main leader.

And then there is the fact that even the oldest American elms somehow never look old. This is no burled, brooding or backward-looking tree, but a soaring, optimistic one, eminently confident, youthful and sociable. For as impressive as elms are singly, a whole street- or squareful of them, twining their arching canopies overhead to form the most perfect roof in nature, is enough to make one feel civil, even neighborly. If some trees encourage romance, and others solitary reflection, the American elm seems almost to foster republican sentiments.

Now, I realize this is an unfashionable, even politically incorrect, way to talk about trees. These days, we’re told we must value nature on its own terms, overcome our anthropocentrism. In the classic environmental narrative, a species like the elm, or the whale or spotted owl, suffers under the attentions of civilization until the moment we recognize the evil of our ways and step back, giving the species time and wild space enough to recover. But it turns out this narrative doesn’t fit the story of the American elm very well, which perhaps explains why we’ll never hear an environmentalist raise the cry “Save the elms!”

It is true that civilization bears responsibility for the tree’s parlous state. The European elm bark beetle that carries the spore of the Dutch elm fungus came to Ohio in a load of European elm logs destined to be made into furniture. Yet now that the beetle is here, communicating the deadly fungus from treetop to treetop rapidly as rumor, it’s not enough for civilization simply to leave the elm alone. Doing nothing, or very little, has brought us to the point where mature American elms are nearly as exceptional in the landscape as mountain lions or eagles. But unlike these species, which will survive precisely to the extent civilization is willing to cede them wild ground, the best place for an elm today is, ironically, in the very bosom of civilization. How do we square the classic environmental narrative with the fact that one of the last great stands of American elms is not in Yosemite or the Cascades but in the middle of Manhattan?

How many last great populations of anything in nature—apart from rent-control tenants or speakers of Yiddish—can be found in Manhattan? Though it might discomfit the Greenpeace type to hear it, several thousand of North America’s greatest remaining elms survive in Central Park and along Riverside Drive and in Tompkins Square Park precisely because of civilization’s attentions and sentiments. Neil Calvanese, director of horticulture for the Central Park Conservancy, says Manhattan’s elms enjoy advantages elms in the wilderness would (and do) die for: since virtually all the elms in Manhattan are publicly owned, they receive a level of surveillance and care elms in nature (or even in the backyards of Brooklyn) do not. Infections are diagnosed early and trees are promptly pruned; dead trees are cut down before they become a breeding ground for elm bark beetles.

It wasn’t always so. Until quite recently, Manhattan was losing its elms at an alarming rate. After the most recent round of cuts in the Parks Department budget decimated tree crews, the annual toll started to climb, until the annus horribilis of 1992, when 32 big elms came down in Central Park. Last year’s casualties galvanized the friends of the elms, however, and under pressure from people like Calvanese and Pat Sapinsley, of the Riverside Park Fund, the city scraped together sufficient funds to beef up tree crews and attack the problem. This year, only eight mature elms were lost in Central Park. Natural cycles account for some of the improvement, but there seems little doubt that, more than anything else, it is civic-mindedness that is saving this most civic of trees. Perhaps the reason environmentalists haven’t cried “Save the elms!” is that the slogan has a corollary: “Save the cities!”

So it looks as if it’s going to be the city lovers, more than the nature lovers, who will save the elm—parks people, civic-minded types and people like my father-in-law. Which only seems right. Nature, after all, would not miss the American elm half as much as we would. It is probably just coincidence that the decline of the elm has proceeded simultaneously with the decline of the public square in America; we seem to have lost the knack of building the sorts of places where elms belong. (Where exactly do you plant an elm on a modern shopping strip or at a mall?) But if we’ve forgotten how to make attractive public space, the American elm certainly hasn’t. Is it too much to hope that the revival of the one might in some way help bring back the other?

Probably. And yet the space formed by a mature elm does make a powerful argument, one that can hardly be missed on a walk down Central Park’s promenade. Indeed, a recent visit to the park has me wondering whether my yard really is the best place for a Liberty elm to spend the next century. For one thing, the tree’s fine shade is apt to attract a crowd; it’d be wasted on a piece of private property. Also, should Dutch elm disease ever strike my tree, I doubt I could provide the necessary care. So this is what I’m thinking: As soon as my elm attains a bit more stature, I’m going to see if I can’t persuade the city of New York to adopt it.