$26.99, 352 pages
A reporter of "the space where food, medicine, and environment meet," and a product of his parents' back-to-nature convictions, Nathanael Johnson is fascinated with our oscillations "between two fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: the technological perspective ... and the all-natural perspective."
So which way is right? Johnson's answer (often in the form of new questions) is "All Natural: A Skeptic's Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing, And the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier."
And where better to begin than at the paradox of childbirth in the world's most technologically advanced society?
Johnson was born in 1978 at home, family and a midwife tending to his mother as she eventually delivered an 11-pound baby. Nate was fine; his mother, hemorrhaging, was not. A doctor came, and in a grisly, painful procedure, staunched the bleeding.
That experience aside, most births now take place in the seemingly safer confines of hospitals. But infant mortality rates in the U.S., after dropping during the last century, have since plateaued at a level higher than in most other developed nations. Low-weight and premature births have increased. And injuries and mortality rates among women in childbirth are on the rise.
Caesarean surgeries, "historically the option of last resort," have increased from 22 percent to 32 percent in the past decade -- another half-million surgeries annually in the U.S. It's a procedure that risks infection, internal scarring and potentially fatal complications in subsequent pregnancies. A study of mothers in California found a small but significant number of deaths directly related to pregnancy and C-sections in 2002 and 2003.
The "extraordinary implication," Johnson writes, is that "an increase in medical care was killing people."
One of the safest places to give birth in the U.S. is under the care and low-tech attention of Ina May Gaskin and her team at The Farm Midwifery Center in rural Tennessee. There, only 3 percent of births are by Caesarean, and their infant mortality rates are half the national average.
Weighing his options, Johnson agrees to his wife's wishes for a hospital birth. (It's a girl!)
Johnson traipses across similarly dicey terrain comparing "natural" versus "technologically sophisticated" approaches to vaccinations and health care, nutrition, hog farming, raw milk, timber management and more.
Much of "All Natural" refines and expands stories reported earlier for Harper's magazine, "This American Life," and the investigative journalism group California Watch. It reflects (positively) on Johnson's tutelage under "The Omnivore's Dilemma" author Michael Pollan at the University of California, Berkeley's journalism school, both in tone and structure of the book, and in topics tackled.
Engaging, informative and heartfelt, "All Natural" gives voice and reason to the ecological anxiety and data ubiquity that permeate our culture. It's less a treatise on the superior single approach than an acceptance of "the real question ... to quote the farmer-poet Wendell Berry, 'How does one act well -- sensitively, compassionately, without irreparable damage -- on the basis of partial knowledge?'"
The answer gradually emerges from folks like Don Harkin, a forest ecologist near Johnson's hometown of Nevada City, Calif., who "was mostly deaf, lived in a cabin without electricity or refrigeration, and generally refused to answer questions directly. ... He looked less like a scholar than a hobo."
When asked how best ways to sustainably manage timber, Harkin would invariably reply, "I guess I'd say that it all depends on what you want."
Reading: Johnson discusses "All Natural" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Powell's Books on Hawthorne, 3723 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.
-- J. David Santen Jr.