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Green Leaves

Sharon shares three great eco-focused reads to kick off the new year.

Thursday Jan 03, 2008.     By Sharon Hoyer

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2007 was a banner year for ecological consciousness; never have Americans been so bombarded with alarming statistics of the human impact on the natural world and tips on how best to curb it. But mass awareness was carved with the double-edged sword of ubiquity. As Michael Pollan pointed out in the Times a few weeks ago, the adjective "sustainable" runs the danger of becoming as shopworn and meaningless as "nice." (The Thumb occasionally suffers eco-malaise too; six months into writing this column and I'm already struggling for pithy titles that don't include a pun on the word "green." Failed again this week.) Abstruse terms like "organic" and "sustainable" are now in common use across the industrial, political and even religious spectrums, but often without definition or context.

Fortunately, the long, dark month of January provides plenty of time to sit back and assess the last 12 months. It's also a great time to retreat with a good book or three. Here are a few tomes that will help you sort out the melange of ecological issues shaping the zeitgeist of 2008.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Okay, this one came out two years ago but it's still at the top of my must-read list. Michael Pollan's quest for the perfect meal starts in the industrial cornfields of Iowa and ends, successfully, foraging for mushrooms in California. In between are 400 of the most compelling pages about food committed to print. A gifted storyteller, Pollan can make topics like the relationship between the military-industrial complex and agribusiness positively fascinating. While reading this book, I talked the ears off (pun fully intended) of anyone willing to listen to a two-hour diatribe on corn.

This exhaustive study of American agribusiness, concentrated feedlots, supermarket distribution systems and the various grades of organic also manages to be a deeply personal celebration of food. Pollan, an omnivore, dedicates a lengthy chapter to the ecological and philosophical implications of eating meat. After a wild boar hunt, he marvels in horror at his own predatory instincts. The fungi chapter may be credited, in part, with my new found love—er, tolerance—for mushrooms. This book will forever change the way you look at, purchase and revere food.

Exposed: the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power
At a time when hysterical reports on lead paint in toys blare from the boob tube every 12 minutes, it's refreshing to read a cool-headed explanation of just what chemicals we should be worried about and why. Thirty years ago, the United States set the global standard for restrictions on toxic substances. Today, thanks to decades of deregulation, the U.S. government jeopardizes not only the health of its citizens, but its position in an increasingly health-and-ecology-minded world marketplace. Mark Schapiro, director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, uses this economic argument as a launching point to discuss the toxins generated by the cosmetics, toy and electronics industries.

Schapiro notes that debates continue to rage about the long-term effects of exposure to many of these substances; it's too soon to say for sure, but one considerable strike against toxins is the fact that the European Union (along with dozens of other growing "second world" nations) no longer import our products. In certain circumstances, these countries even ship toys and cosmetics that don't pass their own inspections to us. The result: American teenagers have more toxins in their blood than their grandparents. Schapiro warns in clear, pressing language that waiting to see the long-term effects gambles with our health, our economy and our political world standing.

Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline
While I was at home over the holidays, my dad pointed out a newly erected tower on the border of our Detroit suburb. "That's Livonia's first oil well." I couldn't imagine a more surreal, yet appropriate sight in southeast Michigan; an area as reliant on the oil industry as it is, it was, until recently, removed from the production of it. But there it stood: a symbol of our privileged past and uncertain future, looming on the hill at 7 Mile and Haggerty Road as it does in the greater American subconscious.

In her new book, Lisa Margonelli starts at a family-owned gas station and follows a trail of oil backward through refineries, drilling operations, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and around the globe, finishing in the biggest future oil market in the world, China. While Margonelli has neither Pollan's felicity for storytelling nor Schapiro's gruff, no-nonsense charm, she competently tackles a dry and complex topic, particularly when she disposes with overusing similes to try and make the material approachable (as in the drilling rig chapter) and gives her reader the chance to find the subject interesting in its own right (like her excellent layman's overview of the New York Mercantile Exchange). Oil on the Brain is an extensive portrait of the single most influential—and rapidly diminishing—substance on earth.

It took a move from the regimented lawnscapes of the suburbs to the congestion of a major metropolis for Sharon to look twice at what she puts in the trash, down the sink and into her own body. She reports fortnightly on her endeavors to change "greening" from calculated deviation to a practicable way of life. You can contact her here.