THE BOTANY OF DESIRE, BY MICHAEL POLLAN

A gift from a friend (thanks Jess!), though I have been meaning to read it for ages. I’m only through the introduction and already I’m in a huff of frustration, but that’s usually the sign of some great non-fiction. Looking forward to the rest.

Done

Wonderful, wonderful book, full of fantastic info and insights. My main critique of the book is Pollan’s central conceit, and the language used to express it: plant species have domesticated humanity just as much as humanitiy has domesticated them. From the introduction (xiii),

Gardeners like me tend to think such choices are our soverign prerogative: in the space of this garden, I tell myself, I alone determine which species will thrive and which will disappear. … But … [w]hat if it’s really nothing more than a self-serving conceit? A bumblebee would probably also regard himself as a subject in the garden and the bloom he’s plundering for a drop of nectar as an object. But we know this is just a failure of his imagination. The truth of the matter is that the flower has cleverly manipulated the bee into hauling its pollen from blossom to blossom.

Essentially what he’s saying that domestication is a kind of coevolution. Like the flower and the bee, the human and the potato both benefit from their partnership. The problem is his constant insertion of agency into the process of evolution and mixing metaphors of individuals and of species. Flowers are not individually clever, and neither are species of flowers. Flowers do not manipulate bees in the same way that a botanist manipulates a flower species through artificial selection or genetic modification. Species do not have agency, the will to act. Only individuals have that, and individuals bees, potatoes, or water buffalo do not (to our knowledge), have the will to offer themselves up as willing partners to humanity.

It’s clear from passages like, “Evolution doesn’t depend on will or intention to work,” (xxi) that Pollan has firm grasp on the basics of evolution, but using language like he does to simplify the concept is, I think, dangerous. If we start confusing the astoundingly complex results of evolution for the products of design, it isn’t a far leap to intelligent design

Pollan draws an interesting distinction that I haven’t encountered in my amateur meanderings between “wilderness” and “wildness.” He uses “wilderness” in the sense of the Wilderness Act of 1964, “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” “Wildness,” on the other hand, is anything that humans cannot control. As Bill McKibben famously pointed out, the atmosphere of our planet is no longer a wilderness, tainted as it is by the byproducts of our industry, but as every hurricane and tornado reminds us, it is still profoundly wild.

Pollan uses this distinction to emphasize that while all domestication is a destruction of wilderness, it is almost never an abolition of wildness. The gardener uses his sense of order not to control his plants absolutely, but to guide and shape their wildness in certain ways. He goes on to suggest that genetic engineering may violate this pact, that by attempting to guide evolution on such a basic level is a powerful new way to write wildness out of the equation. He also offers the counterpoint that current techniques for gene insertion are (sometimes literally) so scattershot as to yield results that are even less predictable that conventional breeding (my old pal Agrobacterium makes an appearance).

The topic of wilderness feeds into another interesting point, which is that “memory is the enemy of wonder” (168). He argues that cannabinoids like THC help us experience awe and wonder but forcing constant short term memory loss, and that meditation or physical exertion probably induce the same effect, making the view from a mountain peak infinitely more profound after having hiked to it instead of having driven.

Another insight he had about marijuana is that drugs could be considered the mutagens of culture. If one assumes a meme is like a gene, then a culture is like a genome. Memes are constantly recombining through thought and discourse (intercourse in both culture and biology), but genuinely new ideas are rare. At the risk of spreading a metaphor too thin, Pollan suggests that drugs could be thought of as mutagens, radiation nuking the genetic fundaments of culture, producing mostly irrelevant or deleterious nonsense, but now and again creating viable gems (149). Kind of a fun thought.

Notes

• pathetic fallacy (xxv): “pathetic fallacy is the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human feelings, thoughts and sensations,” according to Wikipedia.
• pirogue (31): a dugout canoe
• (119): witches apparently applied their potions (“flying ointments”) vaginally
• chthonic (200): pertaining to spirits beneath the earth.