One last big Michael Pollan quotation 22 June 2007 6:51 pm
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,books,environment,garden,Michael Pollan,work , trackbackTracy 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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From “The Harvest”
I ended yesterday’s post by quoting a stirring bit of rhetoric about getting down to the work of the land, and that is exactly what Pollan describes at the beginning of chapter 8 of Second Nature, the beginning of the Fall section: the overwhelming, bittersweet work of gathering late summer and fall garden abundance. Once again, instead of waxing mournful, he casts a skeptical eye on the melodramatic point of view and focuses on the positive perspective:
Entropy is the great faith of our time. Those who are most awed by it preach “limits to growth” — that we should consume our fixed, unreplenishable stores as slowly as possible…. But the second law of thermodynamics, under which entropy increases as matter converts to energy, applies only to closed systems, and… the global ecosystem is not a closed system…. new energy is continually pouring down on it, in the form of sunlight — free, boundless, virtually infinite sunlight. And sunlight come down to Earth is used by the process of photosynthesis to create new plant matter. Plants, in other words, are energy returned to matter, entropy undone, at least here on Earth.
The lesson in this is not that we should feel free to waste our resources; it’s that our environmental problems may have more to do with our technologies and habits and economic arrangements than with the planet’s inherent limits or the burden of our numbers. All we could ever possibly need is given. In terms of the global ecosystem, there is a free lunch and its name is photosynthesis. In a sense, the ancients were entirely correct to regard the harvest’s abundance as a gift from the heavens….
…this strikes me as the harvest’s most salutary teaching — indeed, as reason enough to garden. Here in my garden the second law of thermodynamics is repealed. Here there is more every year, not less. Here it is ever early, never late. Here… newness comes into the world. (145)
Just like the harvest season it describes, this passage and the chapter I took it from can move me to tears. What I love most about gardening (besides the delicious food, anyway) is the hope. Seeds always seem to put up sprouts the day after I’ve started to think they were eaten by birds, or worms, or that maybe they were just plain dead and I should have known better than to plant them to begin with. Every time I prune my rose bushes, I think maybe this time I’ve killed them, and instead they reward me with an abundance of flowers that still feels inexplicable (which just might have something to do with why I don’t prune as often or as ruthlessly as I should). Every time I eat something that grew in my garden with little more help from me than my own hands, tools, and attitude, I think, “This is as real as magic gets.” And of course, I’ve already discussed the wonder of learning that my garden, like the rest of the natural world, which is all of it, goes on without me, albeit not always in the ways I’ve imagined in the second nature of my mind.
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Dear readers who have made it this far: your dedication is amazing. (Also, thanks Mom!)
