The Ecology of Eden, by Evan Eisenberg (Picador, £9.99 in UK)

A some-time synagogue cantor, NYC parks gardener and Harvard/Princeton boy, Eisenberg produces a big, broad, laid-back, erudite…

A some-time synagogue cantor, NYC parks gardener and Harvard/Princeton boy, Eisenberg produces a big, broad, laid-back, erudite meditation on man's edgy relationship to nature. Asserting that all peoples, even the most "primitive", have a myth of a Fall from Eden, he picks at the historical fabric of our symbiotic relationships with annual grasses, fleshy tubers and fruiting trees; from Canaanite and pre-Columbian farming to Renaissance pleasure gardens and trial-and-error experiments in American National Parks. Clambering between archaeological history and comparative mythology, Freudian and Jungian psychology, the history of urban planning and "Arcadian" suburbs, his ruminations are more speculative, indeed poetic, than hard science or advocacy. The real failure of his book is the fact that, other than a rather patronising anecdote about a Sioux man, he completely ignores the Native American view of nature; let alone his lofty classification of eco-worriers into Planet Managers and Planet Fetishists, somehow discounting the more powerful and destructive forces which simply don't give a flying fig.

"From the point of view of the ecologist, the prairie is doing everything right. From the point of view of the hungry ecologist, it has a serious flaw. What Wes Jackson (a maverick geneticist who directs the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas) has in mind is a prairie that can feed the world.

Jackson likes to tell the story of the old Sioux Indian who watches a pioneer plowing up the prairie sod, stoops to examine the furrow, straightens up, and says, `Wrong side up.' Traditionally, the joke is on the Indian.

A century after the Indian's remark, a third of farmland's topsoil, which took millennia to make, is gone. Soil erosion is only one of the sins of modern agriculture . . . But Jackson's quarrel is not just with modern farming, it is with all farming as we know it . . . he thinks the only real solution is to turn agriculture on its head. The field of waving grain he sees in his mind's eye would be plowed maybe once in five years. It would be a mixture, or polyculture, of three or four crops nourishing to humans or to livestock . . . Agronomists would call this a `herbaceous seed-bearing perennial polyculture.' With Jackson's permission, the rest of us would call it a `domestic prairie.' Presumably the old Sioux would call it `right side up'."

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From The Ecology of Eden, by Evan Eisenberg