The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between August 2 - August 31, 2018
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“fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.
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There’s the old heroic story, where Man is at war with Nature; the romantic version, where Man merges spiritually with Nature (usually with some help from the pathetic fallacy); and, more recently, the environmental morality tale, in which Nature pays Man back for his transgressions, usually in the coin of disaster—three different narratives (at least), yet all of them share a premise we know to be false but can’t seem to shake: that we somehow stand outside, or apart from, nature.
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A land grant in the Northwest Territory specifically required a settler to “set out at least fifty apple or pear trees” as a condition of his deed. The purpose of the rule was to dampen real estate speculation by encouraging homesteaders to put down roots. Since a standard apple tree normally took ten years to fruit, an orchard was a mark of lasting settlement.
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Dionysian revelry, which begins in ecstasy and often ends in blood, embodies this truth: the same wine that loosens the knots of inhibition and reveals nature’s most beneficent face can also dissolve the bonds of civilization and unleash ungovernable passions.
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particularly the practice of growing a dwindling handful of cloned varieties in vast orchards—has rendered it less fit as a plant, which is one reason modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop.
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“In wildness is the preservation of the world,”
Daniel
Henry Thoreau
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Maybe the love of flowers is a predilection all people share, but it’s one that cannot itself flower until conditions are ripe—until there are lots of flowers around and enough leisure to stop and smell them.
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symmetry is a reliable expression of formal organization—of purpose, even intent.
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Symmetry is an unmistakable sign that there’s relevant information in a place.
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The tulip, by contrast, is all Apollonian clarity and order. It’s a linear, left-brained sort of flower, in no way occult, explicit and logical in its formal rules and arrangements (six petals corresponding to six stamens), and conveying all this rationality the only way conceivable: through the eye.
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the word tulip comes from the Turkish word for “turban.”)
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But one of the great lessons of coevolution (a lesson recently learned by designers of pesticides and antibiotics) is that the all-out victory of one species over another is often Pyrrhic.
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But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember.
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“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit,” Emerson wrote, by which he meant we never see the world plainly, only through the filter of prior concepts or metaphors.
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Agriculture is, by its very nature, brutally reductive, simplifying nature’s incomprehensible complexity to something humanly manageable; it begins, after all, with the simple act of banishing all but a tiny handful of chosen species.
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Everything affecting everything else” is not a bad description of what happens in a garden or, for that matter, in any ecosystem.
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No monoculture could succeed under such circumstances, so the Incas developed a method of farming that is monoculture’s exact opposite. Instead of betting the farm on a single cultivar, the Andean farmer, then as now, made a great many bets, at least one for every ecological niche. Instead of attempting, as most farmers do, to change the environment to suit a single optimal spud—the Russet Burbank, say—the Incas developed a different spud for every environment.
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Now, it is true that genes occasionally move between species; the genome of many species appears to be somewhat more fluid than scientists used to think. Yet for reasons we don’t completely understand, distinct species do exist in nature, and they exhibit a certain genetic integrity—sex between them, when it does occur, doesn’t produce fertile offspring. Nature presumably has some reason for erecting these walls, even if they are permeable on occasion. Perhaps, as some biologists believe, the purpose of keeping species separate is to put barriers in the path of pathogens, to contain their ...more
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DDT in its time was thoroughly tested and found to be safe and effective—until it was discovered that this unusually long-lived chemical travels through the food chain and happens to thin out the shells of birds’ eggs. The
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Jumping genes and superweeds point to a new kind of environmental problem: “biological pollution,” which some environmentalists believe will be the unhappy legacy of agriculture’s shift