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(Book Review) The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Article in Anthropology of Consciousness · March 2002
DOI: 10.1525/ac.2002.13.1.68
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BOOK REVIEW
By Tina R. Fields
Anthropology of Consciousness 13(1), March 2002, pp. 68-69.
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World.
By Michael Pollan, 2001. New York: Random House.
The aptly-named Pollan is a delicious writer, and in this book
he calls into question our long-standing assumption that human
consciousness allows us to be the only species which imposes our
will onto other beings. Using four examples – the apple, tulip,
marijuana, and potato – he describes how the widespread planting of
certain crops over others may have come through the plants’ volition
as much as through human choice. He points out that plants use
animal desires to their own benefit: for example, the bumblebee
chooses certain flowers over others precisely because those flowers
have evolved to please bumblebees. Therefore, contrary to our initial
interpretation, the bee is actually being used by the plant. Similarly,
Pollan argues, humans choose certain plants to fulfill our desires for
sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control – and plants like the
apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato have co-evolved to best exploit
these desires. So who is using whom? In an exquisite animistic
introduction, Pollan points this out:
“We’re prone to overestimate our own agency in nature. ... but
in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object,
every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense
to think of agriculture as something the grasses did as a way to
conquer the trees.” (p. xxi)
Pollan’s writing is anything but dry. In the opening chapter, he
discusses the forces by which apples spread in terms which read like
a detective novel. He first reveals that apple trees never repeat their
predecessors’ genetic templates; in their case, ontogeny does not
replicate phylogeny. In fact, every single seed will grow to become its
own unique being, supremely adaptable to, and largely created by,
its surroundings. All of the commercial apples we enjoy now, those
with names like Jonathan or Golden Delicious, grow on cloned
graftings from one original individual tree. Apple trees are therefore
one glorious example of nature’s continual wild experimentation.
The chapter then goes into the history of Johnny Appleseed, a
major force by which apples spread across a new continent. It seems
that the main vision we Americans hold of Appleseed, that of a
happy-go-lucky barefoot eco-freak merrily planting seeds hither and
yon for a wholesome farmer populace to enjoy a fresh apple pie after
a hard day’s work, is only part of the story. Actually, Pollan reveals,
those early apples were not soft or sweet at all, and the only reason
the folk of the harsh interior wanted them was for their capacity to be
easily fermented into hard alcoholic cider! The mystically-inclined
Appleseed is then likened to an American Dionysus, in wonderfully
funny language: “He was a kind of satyr without the sex – a
Protestant satyr, you might say...” (p.35).
The Botany of Desire calls into question centuries of
assumptions about the dominance of human consciousness and the
locus of ecological control. It illustrates important and timely ideas
concerning an animistic, volitional-reciprocity worldview through
rigorous botanical and historical investigation. All of this is wrapped
up in a journalist’s engaging writing style. Read it, and then feed it to
your friends. Who knows what might grow?
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