The Botany of Desire is Pollan's attempt to inspire us to reconsider the understanding we have of our relationship to the organisms we humans "domesticate" for our own uses--for food and fiber and work and companionship and so on. Pollan's thesis is that, in a very real sense, they are "domesticating" us at the same time, that what we are engaged in is a coevolutionary process of selection that works both ways, not a process of strictly human-directed "artificial selection" in which we are the subjects and the domesticated are the objects. While we have made and do make conscious choices about what characteristics we wish to breed into these organisms, they are playing upon our desires for these characteristics to get what they "want"--in an evolutionary sense. He doesn't argue that they are doing so consciously, but (depending on what you mean by consciousness) I, for one, am not so sure they aren't after reading Derrick Jensen's A Language Older than Words (which also comes highly recommended by me). Even if one concludes that plants aren't behaving consciously in the general sense of the term, it seems clear to me that sort of consciousness isn't required for the process of evolution to occur.

Pollan attempts to achieve this intellectual reconfiguration by focusing on four plants in particular: apples, tulips, marijuana, and genetically-engineered potatoes. He turns our attention to domesticated plants rather than animals precisely because people generally think of them as completely passive objects without any form of consciousness. Here's a passage which illustrates in brief the ways in which the author seeks to turn our assumptions onto their heads:

"By the same token, we're prone to overestimate our own agency in nature. Many of the activities humans like to think they undertake for their own good purposes--inventing agriculture, outlawing certain plants, writing books in praise of others--are mere contingencies as far as nature is concerned. Our desires are simply more grist for evolution's mill, no different from a change in the weather: a peril for some species, an opportunity for others. Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That's why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees."

Pollan covers a lot of territory in dealing with each of his four plant subjects: In the section on apples, I learned that the term "apple" covers a great deal more genetic diversity than I ever imagined or that one would be led to believe by the selection in even the most bountiful market. I also learned that Johnny Appleseed was a far more interesting and subversive character than the myth would have us believe. On the subject of tulips, I learned that the market tulipomania that enflamed the Dutch nearly four hundred years ago is eerily similar to the dot-commania that not so long ago gripped the markets of the United States. I learned much I didn't know about marijuana (having smoked it less times than I have fingers and having never managed to actually "feel high" as a result) including just how the selection pressure of the U.S. drug war has worked to produce a far more potent hybrid plant. And then there was that smirksome aside revealing just what the infamous witches' broomsticks actually were, and what kind of flying they did with them. The final section on biotech potatoes offered what I thought was one of the most persuasive arguments against this new technology I've read while also opening up an almost wholly new-to-me history of the Irish-British geopolitics of the humble spud.

I cracked open this book with a very skeptical mind but closed it after finishing with a largely persuaded one. Pollan didn't express ideas and assumptions I suspected he might at the outset, and I think he made a powerful case for understanding the world differently. I adore books which do that for me, particularly ones which puncture the self-aggrandizing view we have of ourselves. How audacious of Pollan to assert that we are not in control here, that we are not just acting upon other species but being acted upon by other species! What gall to claim we're mere players in the evolutionary drama rather than its culmination and its conquering directors! I honor him for his impudence.

If this subject also interests you, I highly recommend you pick up a copy from your local library. Click here to read a full chapter excerpt from the book and a review.