April 2 (Bloomberg) -- Bill McKibben makes it clear what he abhors: Wal-Mart (the scourge of small retailers) and Archer Daniels Midland (the bane of family farms).

Instead of a growth-oriented economy, he writes in ``Deep Economy,'' we need one that meets deep human needs, such as the sense of community that he says has been vanishing from the U.S. along with all those businesses and farms.

``Deep Economy'' is a critique on the order of the late John Kenneth Galbraith's ``The Affluent Society.'' Galbraith questioned ``conventional wisdom'' about economics, noting that riches hadn't erased poverty or inequality.

Almost 50 years later, that's still true. But as McKibben sees it, the biggest problem now is that growth not only fails to make the affluent feel any better about their lives but also (and more direly) destroys communities and threatens the Earth.

``A single-minded focus on increasing wealth has driven the planet's ecological system to the brink of failure, without making us happier,'' he writes.

McKibben is an accomplished author (10 books), and he makes his case with flair and a wealth of fascinating detail, as in his description of a Utah farm with 1.5 million pigs and ``a sewage problem larger than that of the city of Los Angeles.''

A scholar in residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, he isn't an economist, but he has clearly thought long and hard about the matters in his book, including economic development.

Globetrotting Writer

He often comes off as the brightest kid in class: The book smacks of multiple influences, with echoes of Galbraith, the biologist and presidential candidate Barry Commoner and maybe even Helen and Scott Nearing, the late romantics of homesteading.

But McKibben doesn't just sit in Middlebury and read. The book is also informed by the author's globetrotting -- to China, for instance, and to Cuba.

He rues the dark side of globalization, which includes an agricultural system with ``miserable animals, abused workers, vulnerability to sabotage and to salmonella.''

He's also eloquent about what he likes: farmers' markets, for one thing. He's nostalgic for the more agrarian America that used to be; he sees greenmarkets in cities both as oases and as catalysts for social connection. He admires the Cubans for having increased their output of food after the loss of Soviet aid by creating thousands of urban gardens, including more than 200 in the Havana area.

That makes Cuba less reliant on the global system of supply, and perhaps points in a promising direction for even the U.S. --or so McKibben concludes.

Oil Depletion

A good deal of angst underpins the book. McKibben is worried not only that the world is running out of oil (and maybe water), making much of the economy as currently structured unsustainable, but also that using up all that oil (and other fossil fuels) is going to have nasty effects.

``We might as well have a contest to pick a new name for Earth, because it will be a different planet,'' he writes in a discussion of global warming. ``Humans have never done anything bigger, not even the invention of nuclear weapons.''

While the book is given to one-sidedness and oversimplification, it isn't tedious: Though it's less witty and less original than ``The Affluent Society,'' it has barely a dull sentence. Surprisingly, it isn't gloomy, either. McKibben finishes on a note of optimism as he envisions ``exciting possibilities, experiments to try out, ways to imagine humans thriving more fully and more durably than at present.''

But you can't turn back the calendar, and his bright prescriptions may not be sufficient to save the day -- assuming that you agree with his doomsday scenario in the first place.

``Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future'' is published by Times Books (272 pages, $25).

(Jeffrey Tannenbaum is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeffrey Tannenbaum in New York at jtannenbaum@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 2, 2007 00:20 EDT