Paperback, 297 pages
English language
Published May 27, 2002 by Random House Trade Paperbacks.
Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?
The conceit - are plants using us more effectively than we use them? - still works over 20 years later. The stories still feel relevant even if they have since taken some unexpected turns. An interesting contrast to Camille Dungy's "Soil", but as a non-gardener they both have my admiration.
Pollan is undoubtedly a gifted writer. There is a a sort of lightness to his writing, even when he writes about heavy things (like Montsanto or the Irish Potato Famine). In Botany of Desire he examines the complex relationship between Man and 4 other classes of organisms: Apples, tulips, ganja and potatoes. He's a good tales-teller and it's never boring with him. To sum the experience of reading this book I would say that I enjoyed most of his ideas about gardening and co-evolution, pagan nature-worship and genetic engineering (even though some were not as brilliant as others), and that it's a great book for amateur botanists.
I always both read more in the spring and enjoy reading more, because I have what feels like infinite plane time during my annual conference binge. Some books really benefit, and I think this is one -- Pollan was quite dry in parts of his exploration of the culture relationship between humans and cultivated plants and I'm not sure I would have been able to maintain interest without a plane ride sprawling in front of me.
The dryness of the writing, which in my opinion arose from bizarre literary choices, like the need to categorize every human instinct and plant behavior into Dionysian or Apollan (because...actually I never figured it out. I think it was to contrast chaos in the natural world with artificial imposition of order. But I think you can do that while still consigning Dionysus to the books about grapes.) Once I got past that, the book …
I always both read more in the spring and enjoy reading more, because I have what feels like infinite plane time during my annual conference binge. Some books really benefit, and I think this is one -- Pollan was quite dry in parts of his exploration of the culture relationship between humans and cultivated plants and I'm not sure I would have been able to maintain interest without a plane ride sprawling in front of me.
The dryness of the writing, which in my opinion arose from bizarre literary choices, like the need to categorize every human instinct and plant behavior into Dionysian or Apollan (because...actually I never figured it out. I think it was to contrast chaos in the natural world with artificial imposition of order. But I think you can do that while still consigning Dionysus to the books about grapes.) Once I got past that, the book was actually quite good. I usually am terrified of books invoking evolutionary concepts because it's just so poorly done in most popular literature, but Pollan has a very good grasp on genetics; often he first offers an anthropomorphized or simplified hypothesis about why a trait such as sweetness evolved and then goes deeper to explore how that would actually be a competitive advantage for a plant carrying a specific gene.
I thought it was extremely interesting that most of the plants in the book were plants that don't "breed true" (i.e. have a sexual reproductive pattern resulting in genetically diverse offspring), such as apples and tulips, and how the extreme diversity that results within a single species of plant turns out to be a strong advantage. Pollen argues that this is particularly true as an artificial advantage because it makes plants adapt more quickly to human demands for cultivation. Interesting, but not completely convincing.
Anyway, I found the individual stories of each plant also interesting, in particular the story of the apple, how it was first used almost entirely for alcohol on the American frontier and the Johnny Appleseed story and the story of the tulip and the Dutch tulip mania. I was less convinced by the exploration of marijuana, which had a strong focus on why humans would evolve an endogenous cannabinoid pathway that I found overly speculative. Potatoes, the Irish potato famine and genetically-modified organisms was done in a less speculative manner and I thought Pollan explored the differences between the artificial selection already introduced in the book with GMOs in a very even-handed manner.
At the end of the Epilogue he suggests that man and nature are in the boat together.
I believe we are, But I suspect nature is the better swimmer.
A bunch of liberals venting over greed corporations and politics. We need to get some Republicans to come to get a different viewpoint.
