He is not the conservative child of hippies rejecting how he was raised, but he looks critically at each piece before he decides how he wants to raise his own family. He is honestly trying to decide which pieces he wants to carry forward based on the best available science, not values and emotions. As a bonus, his personal story compelling and very funny and he keeps the reader laughing while we approaching topics that usually make people tense and angry instead.

Yes! Or at least that’s what I hoped to accomplish. Then I also saw this–a library in Chandler, Arizona (with some really savvy web jockeys!) reviewed the book this way:

Comparing modern Caesarean sections and Guatemalan birth customs, raw milk and upscale probiotic-infused yogurt, economically turbulent small ranches and high-tech factory farms populated by identical pigs, Johnson keeps searching for an answer to the question of nature versus technology. It is perhaps unsurprising that he never finds a clear winner, but some of what he discovers in his quest will surprise you. Whether you normally find yourself leaning toward the natural side or the scientific one, you might start to think a little differently about your own assumptions.

Again, I hope so. Thanks Michelle at the Chandler Public Library!

I’d subscribe to the Daily Mail if it paid more paparazzi to photograph people buying All Natural. But it’s really not a self-help book guys.

Here’s the thing about those old nutrient comparison studies: We don’t know if they are counting the right things. Every plant is packed with chemicals with affects that we don’t understand (consider the falcarindiol 3-acetate found in carrots) or haven’t yet noticed. Over and over in the course of nutritional history, we’ve thought that we knew about everything we needed to eat, only to discover that, (for example) there was something else important (vitamin C to stave of scurvy, not to mention amino acids, and iodine to help with your little goiter issue). I’ve written about the evidence suggesting that the structure of nutrients (not the chemicals themselves but the way they are stacked) may be important, and the power our gut microbes have over us. The point is, there are huge unknown unknowns in nutrition.

The nice thing about this new study (published in PLoS One), is that it’s holistic: Instead of looking just at those nutrients we already know, the scientists tried to look at organic foods in all their complex glory. They did this by comparing fruit flies fed on organic versus conventional produce (both purchased from a Whole Foods in Austin, Texas, incidentally). And the bugs eating organic did better: They lived about 25 percent longer and were more fertile, a basic sign of randy vitality. If this sounds like a simple school science project that’s because, in a way, it was. The lead author of the study, Ria Chhabra, is still in high school. She brought the idea to real-deal scientist Johannes Bauer and he took on the project. Pretty cool.

They made a nice little video explaining it:

There are also problems with holistic studies like this. When you embrace complexity you then have to ask, what piece of this complicated system is causing this effect? Is it some unknown phytochemical? Is it the balance of nutrients in organic food? The synergy between food chemicals? What? As a supporter of organic food, I’m going to refrain from gloating over this result: There’s just way too much here that still needs to be unpackaged.

My bet is that the flies fed organic foods did better because they were exposed to fewer pesticides. There is consensus that organic food contains significantly lower levels pesticides. We are talking about tiny, tiny amounts here: hardly enough to hurt a human, but maybe enough to slow down a little fruit fly. Plus, many insecticides don’t target humans (they go after things like exoskeleton development, which those of us who aren’t mutant superheroes don’t have to worry about).

The takeaway? It will be fascinating to see what this area of study turns up, but don’t start celebrating just yet.

It’s a fascinating read if you want to go beyond the video. (After holistic management: note the hill with the blue line)

Savory starts with his own story as a ecologist managing parks in Africa: “No sooner did we remove the hunting drumbeating people to protect the animals, then the land began to deteriorate.”

They intervened, hunting the grazers as the previous stewards of the lands (they presumed) had. They shot 40,000 elephants, and situation got worse rather than better. And it seems that whenever you remove the cattle to prevent desertification, the desertification gets worse. This makes sense if you think about it: The grazing animals are part of the system, and more importantly, they are walking reservoirs of water and microbes. Remove all that from the system and you have big problems.

Of course there is some controversy here (and there always is whenever you upend conventional wisdom). There’s range science that purports to show that this holistic management doesn’t work. The holistic management people respond that the scientists are conflating their very exacting system with intensive rotational grazing, a method that they agree does not work. I haven’t traced the scientific argument to it’s germ (and can’t in the time I have for a blog post), but there are just too many amazing case studies of holistic management to dismiss it. Clearly it works in at least some cases:

Before…

And after holistic management:

Here’s one example from stateside, and I know that dozens of ranching families have adopted these techniques with a lot of success. We tend to think that protecting nature means backing away and not touching it. But nature as we know it evolved to require touch.

If you look very closely you can see the blossoms against the red.

The two most popular vices in the world?

Emma Marris (who, full disclosure, blurbed my book), has begun working on something quietly profound here. It has to do with kids, and the way they see the world. As Emma puts it,

This blog is inspired by my daughter’s ever expanding collection of natural specimens, a part of which you see here. She relates to nature by picking it up and asking me to carry it. As a result, I have begun really looking at and thinking about everyday nature in our backyard, on the street, and on our travels. This is exactly what I prescribed in my 2011 book, Rambunctious Garden. Nature isn’t the epic stuff you see on Planet Earth documentaries, I said. Nature is all around us, in the city, on the highway median. And now, all over my house.

My daughter is a lot younger than Emma’s – just barely walking. And when she does walk it’s frustrating: She’s forever veering off course, or bending down to pick at something in the crack in the sidewalk. But when I allow her to draw my attention to those sidewalk cracks, I’m often surprised at what I find there: Tiny flowers, even tinier snails, dead leaves (but then, where do those leaves come from? What do they signify?)

The world turns grey and boring if every tree simply registers as “tree” and before you pass it by. But every tree, every crack in the sidewalk, contains boggling unsolved mysteries. Consider Emma’s shell, above. The tendency of a grown up is to say, “that’s pretty, a robin’s egg.” It takes a child (or a scientist, interestingly) to ask, “why is it blue?” And the answer? Nobody knows. Actually, we have no idea why any bird goes to the trouble of coloring its eggs. Some birds lay down successive layers of color, streaking their eggs with color glands as they pass through the oviduct. Hypotheses: It could camouflage the egg (but blue?), or it could help the parents tell which eggs are theirs and root out brood parasites. But again, it’s a mystery. Think the age of Romantic discovery is over? That all the white patches on the map have been filled in? Unexplored territory, right there, in the sidewalk cracks.