The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century.

Robert D. Kaplan, Random House, $22 By Geraldine Brooks It's hard to think of a more eclectic journalist than Robert D. Kaplan, nor one who has so relentlessly followed his own interests into the earth's odd corners when the attention of the foreign policy establishment was elsewhere.

The subjects of Kaplan's books have ranged from starving Eritrean secessionists to embattled Afghan warriors to fat-cat Arabists of the U.S. State Department. Sometimes, his inquiries have proven stunningly influential, such as Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. Kaplan began his inquiry into the historical roots of the Yugoslav crisis before the war, when the subject languished in the fogs of Foggy Bottom. By the time his book appeared in 1993, however, the thirst for understanding of the conflict was so strong that the Clintons and Colin Powell read the book avidly and allowed it to shape their thinking on involvement.

President Clinton is also said to have carried around a heavily underlined copy of Kaplan's 1994 Atlantic Monthly article "The Coming Anarchy," which is in many ways a distillation of the central thesis of his ambitious new book, The Ends of the Earth.

But if the historical determinism of Balkan Ghosts soured Clinton on Bosnian intervention and helped delay U.S. involvement, the policy implications of The Ends of the Earth are harder to extract and even harder to implement. Kaplan's long journey takes him along the coast of West Africa, down the Nile, across Turkey's Anatolian plain, through Iran and the emerging nations of Central Asia, briefly into Western China, and then on to Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

In the first chapter, he admits that his journey was, in the end, too extensive to yield neat answers. "At the beginning of my journey, I was naive. I didn't yet know that answers vanish as one continues to travel, that there is only further complexity, that there are still more interrelationships and more questions."

Yet Kaplan does himself an injustice. He does fly home with some powerful observations and conclusions. They aren't packaged neatly in the final chapter, which reads a little as if Kaplan wrote it hastily, on deadline, in one of those reporter's moments of hair-tearing frustration when the computer search-key is malfunctioning, the index cards just blew out the window, and someone has tidied your notebooks so that you can't find anything.

Instead, the book's most enduring messages are seeded throughout the text, in powerful, stereotype-shattering passages. And none of its conclusions will likely be palatable to an administration that has steered clear of global environmental leadership, has aped previous administrations' easy demonization of Iran, and is in rapid retreat from all those reaches of the poor world with no place in the global market.

Kaplan had the option of covering less ground and digging more deeply into each culture. But 1, for one, am glad he opted for this sprawling trek. I would rather have its odd encounters and epiphanies than a neater journey and a pat conclusion.

Most of the time, Kaplan traveled hard, with no more baggage than a notebook and a backpack, taking local buses or simply walking. He explains why as he starts his journey in West Africa and disparages the air-conditioned four-wheel-drive Toyota Landcruiser--the vehicle in which diplomats, U.S. congressional delegations, top Western relief officials, and even most reporters from well-heeled news organizations slip easily through road-blocks and the quotidian discomforts of ordinary existence. "[S]uspended high above the road and looking out through closed windows, your forehead and underarms comfortably dry, you may learn something about Africa. Traveling in a crowded public bus, flesh pressed upon wet, sour flesh, you learn more ... But it is on foot that you learn the most. You are on the ground, on the same level with Africans rather than looking down at them."

Kaplan has been criticized for spending too much time reading old tomes on the countries he visits and peering at their ancient monuments rather than talking to ordinary people. In this book, his encounters are uneven. He talks to many West Africans, even more Anatolians and Iranians. But in Central and SouthEast Asia he turns mainly to his guides and to foreigners to supplement his reading and acute observation.

Even so, it is possible to argue that wide reading and attention to those monuments which have an enduring place in a culture can be as revelatory as a rich personal encounter. If anything, most reportage from the kinds of places Kaplan visits is bedeviled by the opposite sin--that of assuming the history of a country or conflict began on the day that the reporter's foreign desk first noticed it.

The profound ahistoricism of most inhabitants of the United States isn't shared by the rest of the world. In many places, such as Iran and the Balkans, what happened yesterday is far less important than what happened a century or millennium ago. Kaplan defends his dusty library of neglected references: "The more I read about a place and about issues that affect it, the more I feel I am traveling alone ... reading can transport you to places that others only a few feet away will never see."

In Iran, where he lingers longest, he discovers what is so obvious to anyone who has spent any recent time there, and so tragically elusive to those such as Warren Christopher and his Iran "experts"--none of whom has set foot in the country since 1979. In tea houses, men and women mingle. On the street, banners no longer deplore the "Great Satan" but espouse the need for birth control. In the pavilions of Isfahan, the scaffolding that used to hide paintings of buxom women sipping wine has come down. A government official tells that "anti-Americanism is completely gone from Iran. The hardliners only posture now." From all this, Kaplan concludes that in the 1990s, "the Iranian landscape finally stopped shaking and a new equilibrium could be discerned." He concludes that the Iranian revolution's "worst perversities may actually be behind it, while the reckoning for the U.S. favorites of the moment, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, might still be due."

In Egypt, Kaplan studies the Aswan High Dam, which has caused the salination, waterlogging, and erosion of agricultural land even as the Egyptian population soars. He concludes that Egypt may fall to fundamentalism not only because its U.S.-supported government is blind and deaf to the need to curtail corruption and stop stuffing ballot boxes, but because resource scarcity and climactic shift "could eventually produce political chaos on a truly biblical scale."

Almost everywhere, Kaplan sees similar potential environmental holocausts already ignited and about to flare: in the falling forests of West Africa and Thailand; in the industrial wastes poisoning Central Asia; in Pakistan's dry faucets; in China's still-growing population, despite the world's most coercive birth control. One is reminded of Al Gore's remarks, just after taking office, to the environmental writer Bill McKibben: "We are in an unusual predicament as a global civilization. The maximum that is politically feasible, even the maximum that is politically imaginable right now, still falls short of the minimum that is scientifically and ecologically necessary."

Kaplan believes that the current U.S. retreat into "fortresslike nationalism" can only be a temporary one; that imported diseases, environmental degradation and tidal waves of economic refugees will force us "to realize that we inhabit one increasingly small and crowded earth."

But Kaplan might be less sanguine if he took his rucksack and notebook and tried to talk his way past the security guards of one of the "gated communities" proliferating right here in the United States. Fortresslike nationalism that won't crumble before this still-spreading fortresslike suburbanism does. For now, U.S. citizens are in full retreat from the fact that we inhabit one increasingly crowded country. Until we are willing to fund our own inner-city schools and hospitals, I don't hold out much hope for the shanty towns of Sierra Leone. Geraldine Brooks is the author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women.