TracyFood

On “The Idea of a Garden” by Michael Pollan 21 June 2007 6:54 pm

Posted by Tracy in : garden, reviews, environment, 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….

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On Chapter 10 of Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education

I would quote and comment on most of this chapter if I thought anyone would rather read that than Second Nature itself, but I will try to contain my enthusiasm. The chapter begins with (and frequently returns to) discussion of an environmental controversy about Cathedral Pines, a forest near Michael Pollan’s hometown, which led him to question what he calls “the wilderness ethic,” which he summarizes as “based on the assumption that the relationship of man and nature resembles a zero-sum game” (178). While part of the problem with the wilderness ethic is that it tends to pit masculine “man” against feminine “nature,” Pollan doesn’t get into that particular issue, perhaps because he himself is so fond of describing nature as female. However, the rest of his comments are so right on that I’m willing to forgive him this particular grammatical failure (if you think you’re sick of my complaints about it, try to imagine how sick I am of reading such good ideas and thinking, “If only they weren’t phrased in a way that sounds so stupidly sexist!”):

…I began to wonder if perhaps the wilderness ethic itself, for all that is has accomplished in this country over the past century, had now become part of the problem. I also began to wonder if it might be possible to formulate a different ethic to guide us in our dealings with nature, at least in some places some of the time, an ethic that would be based not on the idea of wilderness but on the idea of a garden. (179)

As a footnote to this passage, Pollan mentions that some of his thinking about these issues was shaped by a panel discussion on environmental ethics in the April 1990 issue of Harper’s Magazine, which I haven’t yet checked out, but fully intend to look at as soon as I can find a copy (there’s a gap in the archives at my friendly local public library). Meanwhile, here’s what Pollan has to say in response to his attempts to get a scientific perspective about the future of Cathedral Pines and hearing from ecologists who are learning that nature is not just more complicated than people think, it is also more random:

Chance and contingency, it turns out, are everywhere in nature; she has no fixed goals, no unalterable pathways into the future, no inflexible rules that she herself can’t bend or break at will. She is more like us (or we are more like her) than we ever imagined.

To learn this, for me at least, changes everything. I take it to be profoundly good news, though I can easily imagine how it might trouble some people. For many of us, nature is a last bastion of certainty…

But the discovery that time and chance hold sway even in nature can also be liberating. Because contingency is an invitation to participate in history. Human choice is unnatural only if nature is deterministic; human change is unnatural only if she is changeless in our absence. (185)

Again, aside from the pronouns, how simple, how brilliant! What’s more, it is of course not just the wildernesses and less-cultivated parts of the world that go on growing and changing without human intervention, as I learned when I left my front yard vegetable garden for a week to go on vacation last summer. A friend agreed to water the plants (and feed our cats) but I worried that something terrible would happen in my absence, that my precious vegetables would somehow perish without me. Of course, when I got home, everything was fine, perhaps even better than fine. A few fruits had fallen off the tomato vines, and there were more and taller weeds than I had seen in some time, but it was still my beloved garden. Sure, in a few more weeks it might have suffered mishaps like the ones Pollan so humorously describes in “Nature Abhors a Garden” and “Weeds Are Us,” but coming home from that vacation taught me a valuable lesson in letting things be.

I could go on and on about this chapter, which I am tempted to rewrite using inclusive language and snarky comments about how the wilderness ethic is inseparable from the equally obsolete notion that nature is inherently female, but this review is not the place for that attempt. Instead, I will simply say that I strongly recommend reading Pollan’s outline of a garden ethic with an open mind and extreme patience if you’re a woman who gardens. His suggestions for ten central tenets for such an ethic are on pages 190-196 in my copy of Second Nature, and those pages are so full of bookmarks that I suspect I will be thinking about the ideas they contain for a long time to come. Here is one last thought from Pollan, full of the language use and implied ideas that drive me crazy, as well as one last, very important one, towards the end, that once again allows me to forgive the other stuff:

The only thing that’s really in danger of ending is a romantic, pantheistic idea of nature that we invented in the first place, one whose passing might well turn out to be a blessing in disguise….

This old idea may have taught us how to worship nature, but it didn’t tell us how to live with her. It told us more than we needed to know about virginity and rape, and almost nothing about marriage. The metaphor of divine nature can admit only two roles for man: as worshipper (the naturalist’s role) or temple destroyer (the developer’s). But that drama is all played out now. The temple’s been destroyed — if it ever was a temple. Nature is dead, if by nature we mean something that stands apart from man and messy history. And now that it is, perhaps we can begin to write some new parts for ourselves, one that will show us how to start out from here, not from some imagined state of innocence, and let us get down to the work of the land. (189)