DISCOVERIES

CRADLE TO CRADLE: Remaking the Way We Make Things

By William McDonough and Michael Braungart

North Point Press: 208 pp., $25

“This book is not a tree,” write William McDonough and Michael Braungart. It looks like a book, but it feels different. It’s heavier than the average paperback, the pages are whiter (and resist dog-earing!), and it is waterproof. “It celebrates its materials rather than apologizing for them.” This book is made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers. It is recyclable by conventional means. It can be “circulated infinitely in industrial cycles.” It is also good-looking, stylish even.

“Cradle to Cradle” is about eco-efficiency, designing materials and products that can be recycled not just once but again and again, about the intertwining of the biological metabolism on Earth and the technical (man-made) metabolism. Unlike eco-efficiency models of the past, McDonough and Braungart are not proposing a return to smaller scale, no-growth industry. They propose designing industries “to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world.”

They call for an end to the “us against nature” design based on grids and walls and hedges. We have a right to be here, they claim, without shame. We are part of the ecosystem. As for the “throw-away” culture, “away has gone away.”

But “Cradle to Cradle” is not all philosophy. Braungart is a chemist, and McDonough is an architect. Reading about their practical solutions to environmental problems is tremendously inspiring. McDonough redesigned the Ford factory in Dearborn, Mich., for example, so that many offices and public spaces were open to the outdoors and full of light.

He has designed rooftops for buildings in urban areas that are covered with grass and other plants instead of concrete, serving drainage and energy-saving purposes. The two are working on finding substitutes for what are called “X-substances,” those chemicals that resist being broken down and are therefore poisonous and polluting, like mercury for thermometers and the chemicals used in leather tanning. The realization is slowly dawning that we have the talent and creativity and even money to live eco-efficiently. What lingers after reading “Cradle to Cradle” is frustration that change is not happening faster.

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A DESERT CALLING

Life in a Forbidden Landscape

By Michael A. Mares

Harvard University Press: 320 pp., $29.95

The word “desert” comes from the Latin word desere, meaning to abandon. Michael A. Mares, a field biologist, has spent decades in deserts around the world searching for new species.

In “A Desert Calling,” he describes the marvelous adaptations some of these species make to survive in the desert. The kangaroo rat, for example, uses its forepaws to sift through the sand, uncovering an average 60 seeds per second, which it buries in various seed banks that account for the frequent clustering of desert blooms. Mares describes rodents with such refined hearing that they can detect the wing beats of owls at night, squirrels that can live without water for a month and the fierce northern grasshopper mouse, which eats scorpions and other mice. In Argentina, he studies vampire bats, rats and peccaries; in Patagonia, penguins and vicuna and lamas; in Iran, jerboas, cavies and hyrax.

Mares loves the desert and his work; even a day in the Chaco desert in Argentina, when temperatures reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and birds began dropping from the trees, cannot jar his deep respect for this environment.

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WHERE THE RIVER BENDS, A Memoir

By Barry Raine

Ontario Review: 150 pp., $21.95

Barry Raine thinks he behaved like a coward, but any time a person turns to face a horrible memory like this one, he is proving hisbravery. In 1981, Raine was 19, a sophomore in college. One night, he went to a local park in a good neighborhood with his brother Paul and two friends, Catharine and Alex. They sat on the banks of the Mississippi. Catharine played guitar.

Suddenly, a man approached them and demanded money. He appeared to be drugged and behaving strangely. He had a gun. He forced them all to lie on the ground, raped Catharine and violently kicked Raine and Paul in the groin. Alex was able to run away and get help. This terrible event leaves Raine feeling guilty for not “saving” Catharine and confused about race relations. (The rapist was black and the victims, white.) Each of the victims comes away with a different set of hurdles to jump so that life can go on. Catharine’s hell is different from Raine’s, but this is his story.