“The PBS short released just this week (October 28th 2009) is far better than the book...
I don't agree with his premise, but the concept is intriguing.
Thu at 8:00pm Xex Igent (FB)
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/note.php?note_id=184789411498&ref=mf
Counterpoint to Michael Pollan: The Juicy Monotony of Empires
Thu at 8:00pm
About the The Botany of Desire, the PBS version of Michael Pollan's book:
Yes, it is more interesting than the book, which I, like that Blue Rosie person, have not yet finished. It is well filmed, well paced, well narrated.
If your right brain needs feeding, skip
the book and head straight for the PBS
documentary like the rest of us
But do you find his thesis convincing (that plants have used us humans to widen their ranges by offering us something we'll always want more and more of)? Really? I don't.
Is it not a bit anthropocentric to assume that because our rather toxic, hyper, and greedy species worships "growth" and expansion as its Darwin-derived purpose, that's what all the more intelligent and well behaved species strive for, too? Most non-human species have been content to survive and adapt over millions of years — think of your Golden Retriever — rather than spread like kudzu in just a few centuries via clothing-draped, war-making, bipedal, antiperspirant carriers.
Pollan is reticent on certain points. Is the paradigm of eco-dominance really the primary purpose of all Earth species? How many of them answered the questionnaire? Is it just plants? Or are Yorkshire Terriers secretly plotting to occupy the state of Delaware?
Might Pollan's theory overemphasize the four-century blip (since the Renaissance) during which humans became obsessed with technology and the cheap energy to make it move around — steamships, trains, trucks, dirigibles, Messerschmitts, Edsels, choppers, that sort of thing — a period that accounts for only 0.000015% of the time that life has inhabited Earth? Do apples, tulips, potatoes, and pot really aspire to the same kind of conquest that buoyed Cortez, Custer, and Condoleezza?
Happily deluded anti-utilitarian
The cultivation and frantic transportation worldwide of all those tulips 24/7, for example — Pollan admits that they have no utilitarian value whatsoever — has deposited millions of tons of carbon in the ecosystem. When all that stuff finally condenses into barbecue briquettes, won't it pummel tulip habitats?
If tulips were wise enough to arrange to spread via humans, wouldn't they also have been wise enough to understand the existential consequences of such a short-sighted strategy? Can botanical sociologists even count the strip malls that have seen mass tulip suicides? And wouldn't smart tulips have evolved sophisticated botanical mechanisms to frustrate human exploitation (e.g., waving "come hither" with their stamens at Lyme disease ticks)?
But they didn't. Dumb tulips.
Cannabis, Pollan claims, is an ambitious plant leaf that also assures its own worldwide spread via humans. Wouldn't any really smart plant understand that its principal carrier will eventually go extinct if it spreads at the cost of addiction, premature death — supposedly pot use is more damaging to the lungs than tobacco — and severely reduced vocabulary? If you were a weed paranoid from being continuously stoned out of your gourd, would you put your faith in humans? Humans, after all, take pot plants to places horny sailors wouldn't visit. But humans have yet to find a way to guarantee uninterrupted power to the high-voltage grow-lamp grid.
Careful not to bump your head —
those things are HOT
Dumb cannabis.
Actually, Pollan pretends not to notice that his thesis implies that the subservience of Homo sapiens to the plant world could be just another thorn in the seed pod of a failed life-form experiment. We're but one species out of millions, after all. Yet rather than resign ourselves to never standing out in that kind of crowd, we evolved selfish, short-sighted, delusional behaviors and neoplastic reproductive rates that have raised us from oblivion to overpopulation and resource abuse on a scale that none of our co-species can touch.
The fact is that, for the four species Pollan highlights here, no matter how sophisticated their straightforward strategies are, the human genius for prevailing is stronger. Has it not invariably devised a way to test its robustness by flirting with self-destruction?
At this rate, there may only be enough flirtations left to last out the century. The Desire that Pollan lauds as a botanical survival strategy has launched a spectacular, if geologically brief, party, shrouded in pot smoke. For those who arrive early, it teems with potato chips, cider, and easy-to-pick flowers for filling homebound SUVs — just like the good old days. It's the latecomers who discover deserts encroaching on the once-inexhaustible croplands.
So, the party's over, then. OK. We humans, it goes without saying, are renowned among terrestrial species for the grace and good cheer with which we accept the consequences of our actions. (We know that about ourselves because it says so right in our Human Brand™ user's manual. The one we wrote about ourselves. The one no other species needs.)
Fun while it lasted, though, wasn't it? Well, now it's time to sober u... unless ... unless in the short time remaining, we can figure out how to make ourselves desirable to the aliens who, as thousands of authoritative web pages tell us, are looking us over from hovering intergalactic stealth spacecraft?
Say, what if we addicted them to us, the way we did with dogs? Remember how we never quite shook that thing we had for fructose? If we can make aliens want us, why wouldn't they put us on a leash and take us home with them from the human-pound here on Earth?
Of course we can seduce them. Botox, tea parties, liposuction, derivatives, the occasional genocide, nipple rings, tweets, and Céline Dion. Seriously, who could resist spreading our seed to Alpha Centauri?
Pollan, what was I thinking? I take it all back. You're one pukka wizard, dude.”
Blue Roses wrote this review Sunday, November 1, 2009.
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