Botany of Desire Michael Pollan's Term Paper

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He thus makes some plants appealing to us and the author calls this determinism: "We too cast evolutionary (deterministic?) votes every time we reach for the most symmetrical flower or the longest French fry. The survival of the sweetest, the most beautiful....proceeds according to a dialectical processes, a give and take between human desire and the universe of all plant possibility." (243-244)

The convoluted histories of plants have been very carefully explored. The author has done a marvelous job in exploiting historical changes to plants and agriculture to support his thesis. However it would have been better to hypothesize that our relationship with the plants falls in the bigger scheme of things instead of presenting plants as some thinking beings. It is interesting but often a little too far-fetched nonetheless. Pollan's premise is definitely original and his histories of apple and tulip are worth reading more than once; if not for their own sake then for the sake of understanding how we are all connected in the larger frame. Our ambitions are connected with the ambition of the plants to survive and multiply but at the same time, I cannot shrug the feeling that instead of the plants, it is the Nature itself that helps us stay connected with each other. And since human beings are the most powerful creation, they are in a better position to take care of plants and animals and thus their powers are effectively utilized. But while the author was making the assumption that plants force us to make copies of them so they can survive and that they may actually be just as conceited as we are, he probably forgot to see that eventually even these plans benefit the human race more than anyone else.

Thus man is not altogether wrong in assuming that the world has been created for his benefit.

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This is because when plants survive as did apples and potatoes, they eventually offered more benefits to mankind than we could ever offer them. We consume them and when we don't, we use them to decorate our homes and please our senses. However the same cannot be said of the plants since we human offer little or no real service to them except that we grow them so we can please ourselves.

Pollan has used the four plants because they are considered the most "domesticated species." Their domesticated nature or the fact that we grow them indoors makes us believes that "we are in charge." The author would however love to differ. He feels that the reason he choose these plants was because more wild creatures and creations do not really need our patronage. They command more respect because they appear to care less about us and more about themselves. They have managed to survive on their own like the big old oak. However domesticated species are given less respect and consideration but the author believes that they are just as self-serving as their "wild cousins."

In short Pollan has reversed the human-centric perspective and given us a wider, larger and better point-of-view. The book is an interesting read even if it has its share of flaws. However what is truly amazing is the history which the author presents with an interesting twist. It is not the history of plants from a man's point-of-view, it's the history that a plant would have written about its own evolution. Suddenly the plants have become these thinking manipulating souls that are using humans, animals and insects for their survival. That is definitely worth exploring right from the tulip viewing gatherings in an eighteenth-century Turkish sultan's palace down to an American farmer's re-writing of agricultural revolution......

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