Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future.

Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future by Mark Hertsgaard Broadway Books. 372 pages. $26.00.

Mark Hertsgaard provocatively states: "Poverty is the number one threat to the planetary environment. The rich need the poor to survive."

Hertsgaard, who wrote On Bended Knee, a book on how the media fell for Ronald Reagan, has now tackled the global environmental crisis. In Earth Odyssey, he ventured out to see the worst flashpoints firsthand. In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that Hertsgaard is a friend of mine. But I can recommend this book with a clean conscience. It's an excellent piece of work.

For decades, too much writing on the environment has been long on theory and jargon, but short on reporting and grassroots grit. Hertsgaard's book is a graceful but down-and-dirty diorama of poverty and planetary disease.

Hertsgaard's first book, Nuclear, Inc., documented the interlocking directorates of the nuclear power industry. In this new one, his chapter on the horrifying residue of the global bomb industry weaves together both the economic and the ecological folly of our abysmal flirtation with radioactive immolation.

At one point, Hertsgaard attempts to visit the most polluted lake on Earth, a body of water so radioactive that to read even of the author's proximity to it makes you shudder for his health and that of his progeny. The lake is in the Ural Mountains, home of the former Soviet nuclear weapons industry, where radioactive spills and lethal emissions have been a way of life for half a century. "Since 1951," Hertsgaard writes, "Lake Karachay had accumulated an awesome 120 million curies worth of radioactivity and absorbed nearly 100 times more strontium 90 and cesium 137 than was released at Chernobyl." Russian bureaucrats ultimately bar Hertsgaard from visiting Lake Karachay. When Hertsgaard gently suggests to the staff of a Russian medical institute that they may have helped hide a full-blown radioactive catastrophe, a saddened doctor replies: "Da ... just like Hanford," the nuclear complex in Washington state.

At the center of Earth Odyssey are Hertsgaard's visits to impoverished eco-disaster zones in parts of Africa, Brazil, and China. In China, he describes chlorine waterfalls pouring from paper mills and air made thick and black from coal smoke and auto emissions. And he notes the government's contemptuous attitude that the environment must suffer to fuel new wealth. "Is your stomach too full?" is the official retort to those who wonder aloud whether air to breathe and water to drink might be more precious than cell phones and private automobiles. "Heavy pollution will kill you in 100 days, but without enough heat and food you die in three," a top environmental official tells him. Even when strict laws are passed, it is virtually impossible to enforce them. Despite China's image as a tight totalitarian society, its polluters violate the law at will, Hertsgaard reports.

But Hertsgaard doesn't have to travel away from home to find polluters. "The legal bribery known as campaign contributions" allows corporate polluters in the United States to befoul the environment, he points out. And he does not put much stock in Al Gore, the Great Green Hope. Rescuing the environment, Gore once wrote, must become "the central organizing principle for civilization." But at the Rio summit, the best Gore could tell Hertsgaard was that the global crisis warrants being "cautious," as if that were sufficient justification for the Clinton-Gore Administration's abject failure to challenge polluting corporations.

Hertsgaard makes two crucial points. First, he argues that the rising demands for material well-being from the world's impoverished people threaten everyone's ecological future. But, second, he explains that the core of the problem is not the legitimate demands of the needy, but the overconsuming West and its suicidal model of development.

When a fellow left-leaning journalist bemoans all those hungry Third World mouths, Hertsgaard responds: "A baby born in the United States creates thirteen times as much environmental damage over the course of its lifetime as a baby born in Brazil, and thirty-five times as much as an Indian baby. My San Francisco friend had one child in diapers and a second on the way, thus giving him the Brazilian equivalent of twenty-six children."

In the face of Western arrogance and overconsumption, Hertsgaard recommends a Global Green Deal. The U.S. government should slash military spending and use the savings to perfect eco-friendly production techniques, promote organic farming, and push sustainable development. That's how the meek can join the rich in inheriting a healthier Earth, he says.

Hertsgaard skillfully interweaves issues of poverty, population, and future growth. But the book is a chapter or two short. For instance, while his call for a Global Green Deal is attractive, it would have been more compelling if he reported in detail on the grassroots battles being waged today for this cause.

If the planet can be salvaged, it will be because concerned citizens fought it out, polluter by polluter, community by community. Toxic incinerators, sprawlburbian developments, unnecessary pavement, lethal landfills--wherever they are, local activists are in the trenches.

Waiting for the A1 Gores of the world doesn't cut it. It's the shut reactors and stopped Wal-Marts, the canceled roads and purchased organic produce that dictate whether humankind saves its life-support systems.

Eco-battles are thrilling and decisive. They weren't on Hertsgaard's itinerary this time, but let's hope for a sequel.

Harvey Wasserman is the author of "Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States" (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1988).