The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

“This is the assembly of life that it took a billion years to evolve,” the zoologist E. O. Wilson has written, speaking of biodiversity. “It has eaten the storms—folded them into its genes—and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.” To risk this multiplicity is to risk unstringing the world.