Future Toxic.

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 development may determine our prosperity in the years to come; its approach to human rights may persuade other emerging nations to follow undemocratic paths; its military ambitions could destabilize its quadrant of the globe. But nowhere are its decisions more crucial than in the area of the environment, mostly because of its population size and the accident of its geology.

That accident--that China sits atop half the world's coal reserves--may well determine how high the planet's temperature rises. Should the Chinese decide to burn that coal in pursuit of modernity, they could double the atmosphere's concentration of carbon dioxide entirely by themselves. Every American could trade in his Ford Explorer for a mountain bike and we would still end up frying; indeed, some time in the next couple of decades, China will surpass the United States as the world's leading emitter of CO2 (though, of course, in per capita terms, we will reign as the unchallenged champs).

Hertsgaard is able to show--albeit with reporting that is already several years dated--that while China has a series of progressive-sounding environmental regulations, they mean next to nothing against the reality of a nation bent on economic growth. He offers a macro-level analysis, interviewing Chinese leaders who publicly extol the steps they are taking to "halt environmental deterioration" by 2000 and then privately explain that they can't close factories for fear of triggering unrest and can't enforce pollution laws for fear of slowing the economic expansion needed to employ the ever-growing population.

The micro-level reporting is far more persuasive, however. Hertsgaard opens his book describing a tour of a paper factory that was officially closed but continued to operate, discharging incredible quantities of chlorine into the neighboring river. It was "a vast roaring torrent of white, easily 30 yards wide, splashing down the hillside from the rear of the factory like a waterfall of boiling milk ... decades of unhindered discharge had left the rocks coated with a creamlike residue, creating a perversely beautiful white-on-white effect."

Even more than the facts on the ground, the attitudes Hertsgaard encounters offer the best glimpses into Chinas future. He travels from city to city, attempting to gauge which one has the worst air of all. Is it Taiyuan, a coal center where particulate concentrations are 20 times worse than the maximum daily standard in the United States? Is it Xi'an, the ancient imperial capital, where "I timed how long I could stare at that artificially veiled sun without hurting my eyes. After 60 seconds, I stopped counting." Or is it Chongqing, where you can't see across a bridge at midday? But in each of these cities, and everywhere else he traveled, Hertsgaard found very few people who worried much about it.

"I am used to it," they told Hertsgaard over and over, explaining that their lungs had long since adapted to the poison (an assertion, needless to say, not borne out by the public health statistics). Once, quizzing a group of local people on a Shenyang street, he told them that a local doctor had urged him to be careful. "A man with a mustache patted my arm and said with a smile, `This was good advice he gave you, because you do not come from around here. But we live here, and we are used to it.'"

The reason the Chinese are nonchalant about pollution is because there's something worse than bad air for them. In some ways, the heart of Hertsgaard's book is in his descriptions of the extreme poverty that still grips most of the nation. His interpreter, Zhenbing, had grown up in the '70s in a mud hut northwest of Beijing. He did not wear shoes until he was 14, and his family heated the house during icy winters by burning straw. One day he took Hertsgaard to see his housing at the university where he taught economics.

"It was on the third floor of a long, barnlike dormitory. From the moment we pushed through the scarred wooden doors on the building's ground floor, we were surrounded by the smell of toilets, stale air, and general uncleanliness ... Following Zhenbing up to the second floor, I saw that the only light came from dim, naked bulbs dangling from the ceiling at intervals of 50 feet or so ... His room was six paces wide and four paces long, yet it somehow contained two cast-iron bed frames, a metal bookcase, two wooden desks, a coat stand, and a set of rickety shelves ... The place felt shabby and grim and spirit-crushing, but Zhenbing pointed out that it was a relative privilege. As a junior faculty member he had this same space, while master's students were packed together, and undergraduates six to eight." And compared with the poverty he'd come from, Zhenbing said it was nothing short of sweet. "You must remember, the government is afraid of students getting upset, so they treat us relatively well. We have access to electricity, to running water, to central heating. Paradise!"

In these sections, Hertsgaard's reporting is worthy of Orwell at Wigan Pier. And if you're trying to guess Chinas willingness to enforce its own air pollution laws, much less its willingness to grapple with invisible problems like global warming, it's enough to go on. If anything, one wishes Hertsgaard's trip had been even longer, so he could have brought the news from more such places. We badly need to understand the situation in India and in the former Soviet Bloc, for instance, as well as in Latin America. Hertsgaard focuses a large chunk of his book on the Sudan and other parts of northern Africa, and while his reporting from that region is interesting, it doesn't carry the same sense of urgency; Africa is so economically pitiful at the end of the 20th century that while it can--and seemingly will--destroy most of its own ecology, it has relatively little effect on the globe as a whole.

Hertsgaard (whom I have met on several occasions, and whose book I blurbed before its publication) wraps a fair amount of analysis around his reporting. Most of it won't be new to people versed in the environmental debate--he is skeptical of corporate environmentalism, and puts much hope in the efficiency revolutions touted by researchers like Colorado's Amory Lovins. He ends with a call for a Global Green Deal, with government refocusing much of the economy toward environmental restoration. I think he is correct, and I also think his reporting makes clear just how unlikely such a scheme really is, at least until the attitudes he describes have begun to change.

Those attitudes, of course, are very nearly as strong in this country as they are in China. That's why we stand in desperate need of lots more reporting like this.

BILL MCKIBBEN's book The End of Nature will be republished this year to mark its 10th anniversary.