The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World
One of my favorite books is the Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. I read it about a year ago and I am constantly referencing the interesting point of view of the book. The Botany of Desire is a book that delves into the evolutionary workings of four common plants. Pollan goes into four chapters about how plants have evolved to satisfy four of major desires: Sweetness, Beauty, Intoxication and Control. Pollan uses four plants to describe how we have tried to gratify our desires through plants and how plants have tried to sustain their species by adapting to our needs.
The way that these plants satisfy our deepest yearnings, have made them indespensible. Can you imagine a world free of apples? Our strong sense of attraction to sweetness has made the apple tree a lasting and enduring plant in our lives. Using his own experience, history and science, Pollan describes how these plants have adapted and how they have become to most sucessful plants not because of their qualities, but their adaptiveness to change to our evolving needs.
Often times, we think of the human species as all to apart from the natural world we were born from. Although much of the book is not rooted in hard science, Pollan’s prose can not help but make you think about plants in a different way and the role we play in nature.
