The Sins of Affluence

…McKibben, unlike Barber, drills into the fundamental question of the planet


So McKibben sets out to find happiness in simpler, less eco-destructive lives. His investigative technique is to travel the world and report what he sees, from factory life in northeast China (surprisingly humanized in his account) to organic farming in urban Havana, and as far afield as the Bengali river deltas. He is an elegant travel writer. But most of all, he writes from close to home, in northern Vermont, and most of what he is concerned with, here and there, is food.

Can we actually feed ourselves for less? Can we do it without sowing millions of tons of petroleum, in the form of fertilizer, into the Iowa soil, and without the billions of gallons of oil required to process grain and meat and move them around the world? McKibben thinks we can, and he has tried it, personally, with good results; local farming works in the Vermont woods if you have a good freezer to get the vegetables through the winter. The Cubans have tried it too, and they