A gospel according to the Earth: sown by science, a new eco-faith takes root. (Folio).

I. The Book of Tomato

I first encountered the mysteries of compost when I rented a farmhouse in Connecticut a few years back. There was an apple orchard on the land and an old red barn. Alongside one listing wall were two old compost bins, both topped off years ago and neglected by a series of unconcerned tenants.

At the bottom of each bin was a slot with a door just big enough to accommodate a shovel. After a struggle involving my boots, a shovel, and some cuss words, out fell black dirt that crumbled like a muffin. And almost smelled like one, strangely sweet.

A friend who was becoming a fantastic gardener cautioned me to be sparing with the stuff.

"It's nuclear," he warned. I was old enough to know better but still young enough to cling to the logical fallacy that if some is good, a lot more is better. So I filled two half barrels on my back porch with pure compost. From a nearby nursery I bought a couple of tomato plants. The pictures that came with them indicated they'd be just like the ones I grew up eating on John's Island, South Carolina--big, fat, deep red, juicy beauties that would need only to be sliced and salted. The plants seemed to tremble in anticipation, their ganglia of white desperate roots trapped in no more than a thumb of dirt. I poked a soft hole in the compost and inserted a single plant in each new bed. I couldn't wait.

And, given what I had done, I didn't have to. After a day or so of quietly settling in, the plants went berserk. They seemed to double in size every night, like some mathematical fable about the dark side of exponents. In the morning, standing out on the porch with a cup of coffee, I would eye them warily--the way I once stared at kudzu as a kid. Kudzu can grow eighteen inches a day in the South. Its nearly visible movement is languid and serpentine, even beautiful. My new plants, on the other hand, seemed to lurch toward the heavens with a beanstalk's intensity. Soon enough I had to stake them, then run strings to nearby eaves to hold the plants up. As the sun rose each morning and burned off the dew, the tomatoes appeared to shudder, as if in anguish at the steroidal mandate of the day. I came to fear my tomatoes.

The flowers appeared one morning, in full bloom, but soon enough they were gone. Not fallen to decorate the soil with romantic decay; gone--poof--incinerated by the strain of living so large. The tomato fruits that followed immediately grew just as quickly and reddened even faster. I didn't know whether or not to pick them. They didn't appear big enough, but they did seem ripe. No matter. The next morning it was obvious that some varmint had gotten to them. They hung like spent red balloons. Then I looked more closely. My tomatoes--wracked by compost overdose, forced (by me) to endure some unspeakable hellish chaos at the cellular level--had simply exploded.

II. The Book of Stag's Bladder

ROUGHLY a year later, I was visiting another friend deep in the woods of Appalachia, where he lived in a cabin. It was a late spring night, warm enough for five or six of us to sit on the porch and talk, unaware of time until rosy-fingered dawn fired off a few early warning flares suggesting we get some sleep.

In that long stretch of fluid darkness, an acquaintance and I talked while rocking on a porch swing. He lived "off the grid"--no electricity, no gas bills, grew most of his own food, shit in the woods. Every aspect of his comparatively ascetic existence involved thinking about the relationship between his desire and nature's. He strived for a kind of simplicity that I, as a man with more than a decade of Manhattan life behind me, could only listen to as some charming and exotic idea, like hearing a Zen monk explain that he can grip a prickly burr with the muscles of his sphincter and transport it backward via reverse peristalsis until it reappears at the other end, still sharp enough to catch on the bristly surface of his tongue.

Impressive, but, you know, why?

Then the man mentioned his compost pile, and I at last felt free to enter the conversation. I had my tomato anecdote. He listened to me without laughing. Compost had long ago ceased to be a source of humor for him. After my tomato fiasco, I wasn't surprised to hear him describe compost's physical warmth as transcendental. He, too, had experienced its mysteries, and where I had found a story for cocktail parties, he'd found a way of life. He told me of his unusual and ornate method for preparing his compost. The system was developed by Rudolf Steiner, an early-twentieth-century thinker whose ideas ranged from the brilliant to the freaky. On the matter of compost, he indulged the far side of freaky.

"It involves remaking the soil itself," my acquaintance said hesitantly. "It's a complicated process. I can't really describe it. I'm not sure I should. It involves using, you know, yarrow flowers fermented in stag's bladder."

As a professional listener, I sit through boring stories all the time. But occasionally some detail will force me to pay attention. The phrase "stag's bladder" pretty much is a dictate to listen until daybreak. Into the night he described an elaborate and mysterious process. Cow manure was buried all winter, dug up, and mixed with bark that had been fermented in an animal skull. He took this rich blackness and solemnly cut it into the beds of his carrots and his asparagus and his corn. Then he said this: "The food I grow from this soil is different from other food. It's better. It's superior. It changes you when you eat it. The vegetables from my garden, I believe, are actually structurally different from the ones you buy in the store. I believe they actually are changing the cellular structure of my body. They're turning me into something different. When I eat now, it's like I'm consuming something sacred, something holy, something divine."

Sitting on the porch swing, I didn't speak for, oh, it might have been two minutes, or two hours. At some point I excused myself and went to the bathroom, where I wrote down a mess of notes like some pumped-up ethnographer who had stumbled upon a new tribal ritual. My swing companion had described, almost exactly, the act of theophagy: the consumption of the divine essence, the total conversion born of epiphany, the payoff of transcendence. It was communion, but a rustic one not yet encumbered with liturgy and custom. No ceremony, no interpretation, just the thing itself.

In the clear light of the following afternoon, I reread my notes, and I couldn't quite decide whether what I had heard was important or absurd. I filed my papers away, but I couldn't shake this small moment. I never again thought of environmentalism as a movement about the politics of the land without noticing how often there were about it inklings of the divine.

III. The Book of Zealots

CRITICS of the environmental movement frequently charge its members with being "zealots" on a "religious mission." They are usually talking about the kind of Green Party kid who handcuffs himself to the fence of a nuclear plant or gathers out front before a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Calling people "religious zealots" is mass-media shorthand for kook--a term of contempt applied to almost any group other than actual religious zealots. What I saw in the woods was less political. It was cultural, anthropological. It made me aware of just how deeply some of the new ecological ideas kicking around about our relationship to the land were affecting people.

"Communion" and "compost"--the words, oddly, have similar roots in Latin, meaning a sharing or putting together. The real differences between the words exist in the extensive connotations they have (or have not) gathered over time and the sound they make when spoken. "Communion" hums serenely on the palate like notes of celestial music; the other plops earthily from the mouth, suggesting something else altogether.

Scribbling down these simple comparisons between organized religion and environmentalism became a little game for me. "Off the grid," "monastery": Both are forms of asceticism, and the practices of friends of mine who live off the grid do resemble a monastic life. Both involve a kind of sensual denial. Nature freaks (as they're known in the mass media's land of zealots) eat simple foods grown in the back yard in order to avoid fast foods, processed foods, and environmentally luxurious foods (such as winter strawberries flown in from New Zealand). The more restrictive clans of monks avoided just such foods, though perhaps for different reasons. Monks and off-gridders both resist the comforts of urban living, whether electricity or a comfy bed. Both groups try to integrate into the world around them ideas they have about living a just life. Both find virtue in absence, and cultivate abstention because they believe that by opening an intimate space within their daily lives, it will be filled with something that is closer to God or Nature.

One of the comforts of religion is that it provides a wide frame of understanding, a worldview that gives a devotee a sense of how everything works. Environmentalism seems to do this in a harmlessly practical way. Or maybe not so harmless. A great deal of current biblical scholarship regarding the advent of a much earlier worldview--that brought to the Roman Empire and Judaism by Jesus--is revealing just how grounded those ideas were in a practical and material understanding. We think of the Bible as chock-full of spiritual language, but that's not the only way early followers heard it. They also understood it, to use an anachronistic term, literally--as a Weltanschauung describing the concrete world around them, a view that very much resembles how we now think about the environment. These shifts in the power of words are not inconsequential. Religious leaders today strain to retrieve the literal quality of Scripture. Contemporary notions of apocalypse are (dangerous) efforts to re-anchor religious ideas to the realm we inhabit. Or take creation science, a nearly comic attempt to reclaim a factual reading of Scripture.

In the decades leading up to the odometer turn of Y2K, it was possible to hear from each of the three faiths of the Book--Judaism, Christianity, Islam--louder and louder cries for a return to a literal reading of the Word. From Christians we hear that wives should be subservient to their husbands or that queers should be stoned. To settlement-obsessed Jews, Yahweh is less a deity than an ancient real-estate broker whose original land grant pre-empts all subsequent claims. Among the new murderous wing of Islam, a novel interpretation of the word "jihad" …