Bibliophilia: 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

I absolutely loved The Omnivores Dilemma (please read), and while this didn’t cause quite the paradigm shift of TOD, I enjoyed this a whole lot. Humans like to think that we control plants....but perhaps plants are far more active participants in the whole affair. One of the most mind blowing sections of TOD was on corn. This is a continuation of that exploration of the link between people and plants.

He examines four plants and the things that we appreciate about them: Apples and Sweetness, Tulips and Beauty, Marijuana and Intoxication, and Potatoes and Control. Each of those plants was at one time endemic to only a small part of the planet, but the qualities that humans found attractive about them meant that we spread them across the globe, a feat that would have been difficult or impossible without the intervention of humans. In time humans tweaked these plants into ever newer strains and variants, that, again would likely have been impossible without the brains and hands of people. But could it be that there is some vast plant intelligence that knew what it was doing and used unwitting people to help in its aim to spread throughout the world? Do we control them or did they seduce us into controlling them?