TracyFood

From “Planting a Tree” 20 June 2007 7:00 pm

Posted by Tracy in : garden, reviews, Michael Pollan, books , trackback

Tracy is on vacation. You can read all about it at Van Boothe Tandem Adventures. Regularly-scheduled non-vacation TracyFood posts will be back on Monday, July 9. Meanwhile….

* * * * *

Excerpt from Chapter 9 of Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education:

From my desk up in the barn loft I have a good view of the new tree, and whenever my attention wanders from my work, it seems to settle there, amid its leafless branches. A frail thing to burden with so much reflection, I know, but that seems to be the fate of trees in a world of humans — our thoughts and metaphors cling to them like iron filings to a magnet. Obviously trees exist apart from our evolving pictures of them — we didn’t invent them — but trees were married to our metaphors so long ago, we have no idea what they would be like ingle. Every time we think we’ve figured out what a tree really is — the habitation of the gods, a commodity, part and parcel of transcendent nature, component of the forest ecosystem — it turns out we’ve simply come up with a temporarily handy new description of it. Yet given who we are, that’s no mean thing: our metaphors matter. Indeed, our metaphors about trees by and large determine the fate of trees.

…My hunch is that we sense our old metaphors about trees, and nature as a whole, are wearing thin, and we’re casting around for new and more powerful ones. By the time my maple reaches maturity, it probably will mean something very different from what it means today.

What might these new metaphors be? Some philosophers and activists have recently advanced the notion that my tree (and nature generally) possesses “rights.” They see Western history as a continuing struggle to widen the circle of rights-holders, from nobles to property holders to white males to men generally and, most recently, to women. They propose we now draw this circle still wider, to encompass nature. With perfectly straight faces, they offer analogies between the condition of African-Americans prior to abolition and the condition of nature today. (170-71)

Like the passage I chose to begin this review, the paragraphs quoted above demonstrate Second Nature’s strengths and weaknesses. I think Pollan’s all-too-pithy (and sarcastic) sentence-long summary of the history of social justice movements is especially ironic given his book’s problematic but I hope inadvertent sexist language. For me, that awkwardness is more than overcome by the strength of Pollan’s ideas, although it does detract from them somewhat by distracting me as a reader. Anyway, I chose this passage for the opportunity to discuss the author’s ideas about humans and the natural world — in this case, represented by trees. Elsewhere in Second Nature, Pollan expresses the thought that at this point in history, there are few if any places left on Earth that can be considered truly wild, as in unaffected by human actions, beause even the areas humans have agreed to set aside and not develop can be considered gardens of a sort. In this way, national parks and wilderness preserves are as much a result of second nature — the one humans imagine — as they are produced by the laws of the universe. In other words, all nature is second nature.

Rather than lament this state of affairs, Pollan chooses to interpret it as full of opportunities. If more of us saw the natural world, regardless of its cultivation, as a garden tended and enjoyed by humans, instead of something separate from people, maybe we would all be less alienated from nature, and even each other. Thinking about ourselves as forces of nature could help us work with, or better yet within the natural world, instead of trying to conquer it for being The Other. There is no getting back to nature, because we never left. These and many more are the lessons I took from Chapter 10 of Second Nature, “The Idea of a Garden.”