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# 2023-04-11 - Second Nature by Michael Pollan
This book was a gift. It is at heart a nature book written from the
angle of middle-class gardening. The author came across to me as
long winded and a little full of himself. Even so, i felt interested
in what he had to write, particular about the historical angle of
gardening. It helps tell the story of our relationship with nature
at a national level.
Below are excerpts, with comments enclosed in square brackets.
# Introduction
Like most Americans out-of-doors, I was a child of Thoreau. But
the ways of seeing nature I'd inherited from him, and the whole
tradition of nature writing he inspired, seemed not to fit my
experiences. ... When one summer I came across Emerson's argument
that "weeds" (just then strangling my annuals) were nothing more
than a defect of my perception, I felt a certain cognitive
dissonance.
[
Regarding weeds, many of them are highly beneficial. For example,
the humble dandelion sends roots deep into clay soil and draws
nutrients up to the surface. When its leaves decompose they enrich
and improve the soil.
]
Yet for the most part, Americans who write about nature don't write
about the garden... This is an odd omission, for although
gardening may not at first seem to hold the drama or grandeur of,
say, climbing mountains, it is gardening that gives most of us our
most direct and intimate experience of nature...
Thoreau, in fact, was the last important American writer on nature
to have anything to say about gardening. He planted a bean field
in Walden and devoted a chapter to his experiences in it. ...
Thoreau had to forsake the bean field, eventually declaring that he
would prefer the most dismal swamp to any garden. With that
declaration, the garden was essentially banished from American
writing on nature.
[
Once i heard a comedian say that white people have a different
perspective on gardening because they have traditionally held
"supervisory" roles in agriculture. That helps them be romantic
about growing beans.
]
# Chapter 1, Two Gardens
I figured that if there was one place where an elderly reactionary
and an aspiring hippie could find a bit of common ground, it was in
the vegetable garden.
# Chapter 2, Nature Abhors A Garden
The forest, I now understand, is "normal"; everything else--the
fields and meadows, the lawns and pavements and, most spectacularly,
the garden--is a disturbance, a kind of ecological vacuum which
nature will not abide for long. If it sometimes seems as if she has
singled out the garden for special attention, that's because the
"vacuum" here is greatest.
And garden plants are sitting ducks. Just as cultivated soil
constitutes a kind of vacuum in the environment, so do most of the
plants we choose to grow in it.
The word garden derives from the old German word for enclosure, and
the Oxford English Dictionary's definition begins, "An enclosed piece
of ground..."
# Chapter 3, Why Mow?
So perhaps the allure of the lawn is in the genes. The
sociobiologists think so: they've gone so far as to propose a
"Savanna Syndrome" to explain our fondness for grass. Encoded in our
DNA is a preference for an open grassy landscape resembling the
shortgrass savannas of Africa on which we evolved and spent our first
few thousand years. A grassy plain dotted with trees provides safety
from predators and a suitable environment for grazing animals...
Americans like Olmsted and Scott did not invent the lawn--lawns had
been popular in England since Tudor times. But in England lawns were
usually found only on estates; the Americans democratized them,
cutting the vast manorial greenswards into quarter-acre slices
everyone could afford (especially after 1830, when Edwin Budding...
patented the first practical lawn mower.)
But Scott's most radical departure from Old World practice was to
dwell on the individual's responsibility to [her or] his neighbors.
... Scott, like Olmstead before him, sought to elevate an unassuming
patch of turfgrass into an institution of democracy; those who would
dissent from their plans were branded as "selfish," "unneighborly,"
"unchristian," and "undemocratic."
The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns
seemed. Gardening was a subtle process of give-and-take with the
landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and
nature. A lawn was nature under culture's boot.
What is the alternative? To turn them [lawns] into gardens.
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# Chapter 4, Compost and Its Moral Imperatives
Much of the credit for compost's exalted status must go to J.I.
Rodale, the founding editor of Organic Gardening, who, until his
death in 1971, promoted the virtues of organic gardening with a zeal
bordering on the messianic.
This is the wilderness in which Rodale found the American gardener
and confronted [her or] him with a stark moral choice: he [or she]
could continue to use petrochemicals to manufacture flowers and
vegetables, or he [or she] could follow Rodale, learn how to compost,
and redeem the soil--and, the implication was clear, [herself or]
himself.
At least in a metaphorical way, compost restores the gardener's
independence--if only from the garden center and the petrochemical
industry.
A people who believed that nature is somehow sacred--God's second
book, according to the Puritans; the symbol of Spirit, according to
the transcendentalists--will probably never feel easy bending it to
their will, and certainly not for aesthetic reasons. Indeed at least
since the time of Thoreau, Americans have seemed more interested in
the idea of bending THEMSELVES to nature's will, which might explain
why this country has produced so many more great naturalists than
great gardeners.
# Chapter 5, Into the Rose Garden
Emerson wrote that "nature always wears the colors of the spirit," by
which he meant that we don't see nature plainly, only through a
screen of human tropes. So in our eyes spring becomes youth, trees
truths, and even the humble ant becomes a big-hearted soldier. And
certainly when we look at roses and see aristocrats, old ladies, and
girl scouts, or symbols of love and purity, we are projecting human
categories onto them, saddling them with the burden of our metaphors.
... the fact that Thoreau's beans were no match for his weeds does
not mean the weeds have a higher claim to the earth, as Thoreau seems
to think.
Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well
adapted to man-made places. They don't grow in forests or
prairies--in the "wild" ... They grow where we live, in other words,
and hardly anywhere else.
[Tell that to the invasive species patrols in Oregon who work every
summer removing harmful weeds from forests and other wild areas.]
As I see it, the day I decided to disturb the soil, I undertook an
obligation to weed. For this soil isn't virgin and hasn't been for
centuries. It teems with hundreds of thousands of weed seeds for
whom the thrust of my spade represents the knock of opportunity. Not
"nature," strictly speaking, these seeds are really the descendants of
earlier gardeners.
# Chapter 7, Green Thumb
All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable
with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of
reacting with anger or frustration, they seem freshly intrigued...
The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much
stands beyond our control here...
# Chapter 8, The Harvest
Those most awed by [entropy] preach "limits to growth"--that we
should consume our fixed, unreplenished stores as slowly as possible.
On a spaceship, this makes good sense. But the second law of
thermodynamics, under which entropy increases as matter converts to
energy, applies only to closed systems, and, as the environmentalist
Barry Commoner points out, the global ecosystem is not a closed
system. The Earth in fact is nothing like a spaceship, because new
energy is continually pouring down on it, in the form of
sunlight--free, boundless, virtually infinite sunlight.
[
A) limits to growth applies to human industry, not to the global
ecosystem. We have a total disconnect between human industry, the
global ecosystem, and our ability to completely comprehend either one
of them.
B) in which fantasy can we power our agriculture, industry, and
transportation on solar power alone? We lack the technology. Oil
enabled our population explosion and we have no viable alternative
yet. There is no meaningful, genuine way in which oil is renewable.
]
Thoreau, like his mentor Emerson, for the most part kept his moments
of resignation confined to his journals. At least until those last
months when, dying of tuberculosis, he took up the subject of autumn
leaves.
# Chapter 9, Planting a Tree
As it happens, the etymology of the word "true" takes us back to the
old English word for "tree": a truth, to the Anglo-Saxons, was
nothing more than a deeply rooted idea.
The American Indians were not the first or the only pre-Christian
peoples practicing some form of tree worship. Frazier's Golden Bough
catalogs dozens of instances, from every corner of Northern Europe as
well as from ancient Greece, Rome, and the East.
... the medieval popes had regularly issued proclamations prohibiting
the worship of trees and ordering the destruction of sacred groves.
As was often the case when outright prohibition of such a pagan
practice failed to eliminate it, Christianity's next move was to
co-opt it, and it's possible to interpret the arch of Gothic
cathedrals, whose soaring spaces and filtered light resemble a
forest's, an ingenious attempt to appropriate the sacred grove for
Christ.
Planting trees had the additional advantage of being regarded as a
patriotic act, for the Crown had declared a perilous shortage of the
hardwood on which the Royal Navy depended.
Thus at the same time Americans were hard at work deforesting their
continent, the English were embarking on what was probably the first
large-scale planting of trees in history.
One legal scholar, Chrisopher D Stone, has gone so far as to argue in
a book entitled Should Trees Have Standing? that forests, lakes, and
mountains should be granted the right to sue (called "standing") in
American courts. The idea is not quite as farfetched as it sounds;
corporations and ships are already "persons" in the eyes of the law,
so why not also trees? Stone's argument was actually accepted by
Justice William O Douglas...
Science has also come to regard trees as barometers of our ecological
health, since they seem to exhibit the effects of the damage
[humanity] is doing to the environment long before they show up
elsewhere. Ecologists think that the greenhouse effect will show up
first in the forests, where cool-weather tree species, unable to
migrate northward fast enough to keep pace with a warming climate,
may soon begin to sicken and die.
[
I've seen a bunch of ancient, dead yew trees along a dry creek bed
outside of Gold Hill. My first thought was that the creek bed didn't
used to be so dry a century or so ago. At the Crater Lake National
Monument there is a display showing historic snow levels on the
mountain going back over a century, and there used to be way more
snow than there is now.
]
# Chapter 11, "Made Wild by Pompous Catalogs"
Winter in the garden is the season of speculation, a time when the
snow on the ground is an empty canvas that invites the idle planting
and replanting of countless hypothetical gardens between now and
spring thaw. ... We gardeners have always had trouble heeding Henry
Ward Beecher's sound nineteenth-century advice, that we not be "made
wild by pompous catalogs from florists and seedsmen."
The big mainstream catalogs--Burpee, Park, Harris, Stokes,
Gurney's--have no such compunctions about hybrids. In fact they love
nothing better than a novel cross, the more improbable the better.
Bigger, better, newer, just plain differenter--these are the supreme
values of what I think of as the middle-class catalogs. Burpee is
relatively upscale these days...; at the other end of the spectrum
stands Gurney's... What joins all these catalogers is their worship
of the new; for better or worse, they represent the triumph of
progress and middle-class taste in the gardener.
[
The Internet Archive has some old seed catalogs:
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Emerging in the last few years to take their place are a small but
flourishing group of "counterculture" catalogs that define themselves
in opposition to the big mainstream seed houses. I imagine these
catalogs being written by ex-hippies who went back to the land in the
seventies and stayed on.
By narrowing the genetic base of our agriculture we have made it much
more vulnerable and, in turn, more dependent on chemical defenses.
It is no coincidence that several of the big seed houses are now
owned by chemical companies.
By preserving and disseminating heirloom seeds, which are "open
pollinated" (that is, they can reproduce themselves in nature...), we
help to keep the gene pool wide and deep.
# Chapter 12, The Garden Tour
The Puritans despised ornamental gardening and, they wrecked many of
the great Tudor gardens during their time of power.
The Genius of this Place: for me, that has meant chiefly two things,
one historical (the place had been a farm), the other topographical.
The lay of this land is too dramatic and, in places, too difficult to
ignore. A garden will either make use of it or be defeated by it.
These [medieval] gardens, which frequently adjoined monasteries, were
cerebral places--rather more hermeneutical than hedonistic. Every
plant in them bore an allegorical significance and, much like the
allegorical literature and painting of the time, the full meaning of
these gardens was available only to the educated, to those who held
the key.
Rosemary stood for the fidelity of lovers (since it was thought to
aid memory), safe for old age, bay (Lauris nobilis) for the laurel
that crowns the poet, etc.
author: Pollan, Michael
LOC: SB455 .P58 |