Future Toxic.

• Author: McKibben, Bill
• Position: Review

EARTH ODYSSEY: Around the World in Search of Environmental Future By Mark Hertsgaard Broadway Books, $26

The information age features a dearth of actual reporting--no one tells you what is actually going on in the world, as opposed to the endless commentary on what should or shouldn't be happening. I've read 6,000 guesses about how bad the Y2K bug will or won't be, for instance, but almost no reporters seem to have ventured out to Russian power stations or Nigerian oil fields to see what's actually being done. Every once in a while, someone cracks open a door and the real world blows in for a minute -- The New York Times series on the Asian financial crisis last winter, for instance, which offered a sense of what it felt like to be an Indonesian gripped by the meltdown. And in so doing, of course, gave you some solid ground for guessing what might happen in the future.

This shortage of actual data is nowhere more apparent than in the environmental field. Either the environment is going to be a crucial issue for the next century, or it is going to be The Crucial Issue for the next century. Either it will be one threat among many to our well-being, or it will be a threat to our existence. And the answers to a few questions would help us judge that more clearly.

For instance, how fast are the rain forests being cut down? If tropical deforestation is being brought under control, it would be at least a modest help in stabilizing climate change, and it would certainly slow the rate of species extinction. But since the late 1980s, when every news-gathering organization did a slew of stories from the jungles of Amazonia and Chico Mendes was a household name, it's been extremely difficult to get a clear picture. For some years, the Brazilians didn't bother to analyze the satellite data they had collected; rare are the stories that dig deep enough to tell you if attitudes on the South American frontier have changed, if laws are being enforced, if the country's economic crisis will speed or slow deforestation.

So the first thing to say about Earth Odyssey, Mark Hertsgaard's account of his trip "around the world in search of our environmental future," is that it provides answers to at least a few of the critical questions. In particular, Hertsgaard offers valuable and disturbing reporting from China that allows one to make certain guarded judgments about the future.

China, of course, lies near the heart of a dozen issues. The course of its economic...