Like many of us, Mark Hertsgaard has long worried about the declining health of our environment. But in 1991, he decided to act on his own concern and investigate the escalating crisis for himself. Traveling on his own dime, he embarked on an odyssey lasting most of the decade and spanning nineteen countries. Now, in Earth Odyssey he reports on our environmental predicament through the eyes of the people who live it. Earth Odyssey is a vivid, passionate narrative about one man's journey around the world in search of the answer to the essential question of our time: Is the future of the human species at risk? Combining first-rate reportage with irresistible storytelling, Mark Hertsgaard has written an essential--and ultimately hopeful--book about the uncertain fate of humankind. "One of the best environmental books in recent years." -- Time "Hertsgaard's focus is the human dimension to global ecological decline, and in Earth Odyssey he displays an authentic talent for storytelling . . . He has transformed a daunting subject into a stirring contribution to the growing literature on the global environment." -- The New York Times Book Review "Hertsgaard's sharp reporting jolts us awake.  He has an acute eye for detail, an endless appetite for chitchat with locals, and a knack for tying his observations to his hefty background research . . . The result is a surprisingly fair-minded and therefore important book." -- The Washington Post Book World "There is a world of difference between knowing, in some abstract sense, that we face 'environmental problems' and having a gifted reporter show you the situation on the ground. Mark Hertsgaard has taken the planet for his beat, and he has delivered the goods --Bill McKibben "[An] intelligent and useful report on the environment." -- The New Yorker Like many of us, Mark Hertsgaard has long worried about the declining health of our environment. But in 1991, he decided to act on his own concern and investigate the escalating crisis for himself. Traveling on his own dime, he embarked on an odyssey lasting most of the decade and spanning nineteen countries. Now, in Earth Odyssey he reports on our environmental predicament through the eyes of the people who live it. Earth Odyssey is a vivid, passionate narrative about one man's journey around the world in search of the answer to the essential question of our time: Is the future of the human species at risk? Combining first-rate reportage with irresistible storytelling, Mark Hertsgaard has written an essential--and ultimately hopeful--book about the uncertain fate of humankind. Mark Hertsgaard is the author of three previous books, in-cluding On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency and A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles . He has contributed to the New York Times , The New Yorker , the Atlantic Monthly , Outside , Vanity Fair , the Nation , and numerous other publications at home and abroad. He teaches nonfiction writing at Johns Hopkins University and lives near Washington, D. C. Will the human species survive the many environmental pressures crowding in on it at the end of the twentieth century? By the time I left China in 1997, I had spent the better part of six years trying to answer that question. My quest had taken me on a trip around the world that included extended (and sometimes repeated) stops in nineteen countries and interviews with everyone from heads of state like Vàclav Havel in Prague to starving peasants in war-torn Sudan. I had left the United States in May 1991, eighteen months after the Berlin Wall fell and three months after a U.S.-led army drove Iraqi invaders from Kuwait to maintain the flow of oil that modern economies crave like lungs crave oxygen. Leaving San Francisco and traveling west to east, I began my global tour in Europe. After two months in Holland, France, Italy, Germany, and Sweden, I went to what was still the Soviet Union for five weeks. I continued on to Czechoslovakia, Greece, Turkey, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, Thailand, and Brazil, where I visited the Amazon and attended the UN Earth Summit in June 1992. I later returned to Europe and the United States before concluding my travels with six weeks in China. I financed my wanderings by traveling light, living low on the food chain, and writing occasional magazine articles from the road. Scientists had long studied whether elephants in the wild and dolphins in the deep were heading for extinction. I wanted to shift the gaze and turn the binoculars on my fellow humans. Just as scientists compare a given animal's behavior with the dynamics of its habitat to determine whether it is endangered, I planned to analyze human behavior in relation to the earth's ecosystems to gauge the environmental prospects of Homo sapiens. In The Naked Ape, his provocative study of the human animal, zoologist Desmond Morris observed that humans "suffer from a strange complacency that . . . we are some