Reading “Soil not Oil” is hard work. In seeking justice in today’s desperate world of peak oil, global warming and food riots, Vandana Shiva rages at globalization and mega corporations and champions the poor. But this book does not flow gently along and draw you in with beautiful prose or clear, compelling logic. Instead the message is delivered largely as a rant, a diatribe relying on repetition and emotional generalities. Many will push this book aside long before it’s finished. Pity, for her message is one that touches the heart.

Shiva brings imposing credentials and has been hailed as one of the world’s most prominent radical scientists. An internationally recognized environmental thinker and activist, she has devoted her life to fighting for the ordinary people of India. Born in 1952, she earned a Ph.D. in the philosophy of physics and fights against globalization and for women’s rights.

The basic message in “Soil not Oil” is that globalization and big corporations are ruining agriculture and creating poverty by imposing immense farms on the world that rely on pesticides, machines that guzzle oil and monoculture crops. Shiva argues that we should revert to small, organic farms that grow diverse crops and use human and animal power. The benefits are many: jobs, healthy and plentiful food, preserving the soil rather than depleting it and kicking our addiction to fossil fuels. Best of all, this helps the poor of the world.

But it goes further. Shiva sees soil as a metaphor for a decentralized and deep democracy. Soil teaches us how to be earth citizens and embodies “a culture of non-violence. … of permanence. … of dignity in work.” In contrast, the age of oil has brought “a rule of capital, of centralized control and coercive government, of pollution and non-sustainability, of injustice and inequality, of violence and war.”

She is fighting against the greed of big corporations and for the rights and dignity of the poor. One billion people live in poverty, and the first of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. This book definitely addresses a critical issue.

The subtitle, “Environmental Justice in a Time of Climate Crisis,” suggests that Shiva presents solutions to solving the planet’s biggest environmental headache, global warming. Although a long chapter describes the problems caused by climate change and hurls invective at the use of carbon trading, she does not provide global solutions.

Shiva’s ideas relate primarily to agriculture and rural areas, especially in third-world nations. Instead of tractors and combines, for example, she advocates using bullocks, horses and even elephants. These ideas may be applicable in rural India, but her proposals contain a serious oversight: They are not relevant to the large and growing segment of humanity living in high-density cities.

The biggest omission in Shiva’s arguments, however, is that she completely ignores human population. Yes, egacorporations are too big and their power needs to be curtailed and made socially responsible. But the growing number of humans, and their appetites, has also been a primary driver of the Green Revolution, which is now looking bedraggled with its pesticides, reliance on oil and soil depletion. The world needs food, lots of it, and the amount we need increases every year. Population cannot be ignored in seeking solutions to the world’s ailments.

Nuclear power plays no role in Shiva’s future. In justifying this, she mentions the health problems related to uranium mining on Navajo lands and that the Navajo banned mining on their reservation in 2005.

Shiva describes Navdanya, an organic farming movement she started in India, and how much better it performs than mega-farming. She makes a strong case, saying, “We do not need to end up in food dictatorship and food slavery.” Instead, she argues that biodiverse organic, small, local farming can bring food freedom, end farmers’ suicides and even mitigate global warming. She describes drought and saline-resistant rice varieties and how yields of diverse crops are higher than monocultures.

The book ends with an appeal to unleash our inner energies and transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy. Shiva urges us to reinvent democracy and use Shakti, the creative energy of a self-organizing universe. Shiva’s book describes a tempting Utopia. I hope her readers – those who can slog through it – will take a step in that direction.