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

by Michael Pollan

Evolution doesn’t depend on will or intention to work; it is, almost by definition, an unconscious, unwilled process.

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

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“The colors and shapes of the flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive,” the poet and critic Frederick Turner has written. He goes on to suggest that it “would be a paradoxically anthropocentric mistake to assume that, because bees are more primitive organisms . . . there is nothing in common between our pleasure in flowers and theirs.”

Shame seems to be the going price of achievement, particularly the achievement of knowledge or beauty.

By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world’s supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, somehow, both transcendence and necessity. Could that be it—right there, in a flower—the meaning of life?

“If we could hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar,”

You’ve heard that song a thousand times before, but now you suddenly hear it in all its soul-piercing beauty, the sweet bottomless poignancy of the guitar line like a revelation, and for the first time you can understand, really understand, just what Jerry Garcia meant by every note, his unhurried cheerful-baleful improvisation piping something very near the meaning of life directly into your mind.

the workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions.

The new plants are novel enough to be patented, yet not so novel as to warrant a label telling us what it is we’re eating. It would seem they are chimeras: “revolutionary” in the patent office and on the farm, “nothing new” in the supermarket and the environment.

an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement—that power over nature—has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of “inputs,” as they’re called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus the gain in the farmer’s power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities.

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 damage so that a single germ can’t wipe out life on Earth at a stroke.

Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt.

“Terminator,” as the new technique quickly became known, genetic engineers have discovered how to stop on command the most elemental of nature’s processes, the plant-seed-plant-seed cycle by which plants reproduce and evolve. The ancient logic of the seed—to freely make more of itself ad infinitum, to serve as both food and the means of making more food in the future—has yielded to the modern logic of capitalism. Now viable seeds will come not from plants but from corporations.

keep coming back to that image of John Chapman floating down the Ohio River, snoozing alongside his mountain of apple seeds—seeds that held sleeping within them the apple’s American future, the golden age to come. The barefoot crank knew something about how things stand between us and the plants, something we seem to have lost sight of in the two centuries since. He understood, I think, that our destinies on the river of natural history are twined.

the two hulls side by side, so that the weight of the apple seeds balanced the weight of the man, each helping to keep the other steady on the river. Laughable as an example of naval architecture, perhaps, but seaworthy, surely, as a metaphor. Chapman’s craft, his example, invites us to imagine a very different kind of story about Man and Nature, one that shrinks the distance between the two, so that we might again begin to see them for what they are and in spite of everything will always be, which is in this boat together.