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

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World | Michael Pollan | The best

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The Botany of Desi...

	The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World Michael Pollan Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 160 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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?

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A Great Read

If you are at all interested in evolution and biology, and man's relationship with the natural world, this is a must-read. Pollan presents the material in a way that makes it digestible to individuals with only a lay-person's knowledge of science.

The best

In style and substance this is one of the best books I've read in recent years, as well as one of the most enjoyable. It also broadened my perspective in several areas. I highly recommend.

A fast read, well written, fascinating!

The connections between plants and people are fascinating. Michael Pollan writes so well, I was pulled through the book. This is a view of the web of life that I haven't seen before. Highly recommended. Another book I enjoyed some time back (not by Pollan) is "Biomimicry".

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The Coevolution of Human Cultures and Domesticated Plants.

In "The Botany of Desire", author and gardener Michael Pollan turns the tables on our view of domesticated species by presenting a would-be "plant's eye view of the world". His premise is that humans may have a more reciprocal relationship with domesticated plants than we like to believe. Perhaps the plants use us to propagate themselves as we use them to satisfy our desires. To explore this idea, Pollan recounts the horticultural histories and the human desires that created them for 4 domesticated plant species: the apple, which satisfies our desire for sweetness, the tulip, cultivated for its beauty, marijuana, for intoxication, and the potato, which gives us control. A fruit, a flower, a drug, and a staple food.

Pollan dedicates a section of the book to each of the 4 plants. The histories of the species are not comprehensive but focus on key events which affected its "artificial selection" and made the plants what they are today. For example, the history of the apple focuses on the introduction of seedlings onto the American frontier by Johnny "Appleseed" Chapman in the early 19th century, spawning an explosion of edible species from what were originally trees planted to make applejack. The section on the tulip predictably talks about "Tulipmania" in 1630s Holland, usually cited as the first "bubble" of the modern global economy, but also addresses the "Tulip Era" in Constantinople, funny and failed attempts to make the tulip useful, and the unending quest for a black tulip.

Likewise, the section on marijuana focuses on the tremendous advances in horticulture spawned by the War on Drugs that forced growers indoors in the 1980s. The discussion of the potato is particularly timely, as it talks about the genetically modified NewLeaf potato, which includes genes from Bt bacterium whose toxin is lethal to the Colorado potato beetle. This potato is designed to rescue the agricultural industry from its toxic and unsustainable strategy of pesticides and fertilizers. It's also designed to prolong the viability of monoculture, around which much of the agricultural industry in built but which is historically and currently problematic.

An interesting aspect of the evolution of these domesticated species is that three of four of them are cloned species, not planted from seeds or allowed to reproduce sexually. They're in trouble for lack of genetic diversity. They've been over-domesticated. So we shall see if Michael Pollan's thesis that the plants have put us in their service as much as we have them holds up. It seems we've made them quite vulnerable. But that premise provides an interesting entry into the subject of horticulture. Michael Pollan is opinionated, and everyone will not agree with his view of marijuana or NewLeaf potatoes, but I do think readers will see his point. "The Botany of Desire" is thought-provoking and timely.

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