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# 2023-04-11 - Second Nature by Michael Pollan | |
This book was a gift. It is at heart a nature book written from the | |
angle of middle-class gardening. The author came across to me as | |
long winded and a little full of himself. Even so, i felt interested | |
in what he had to write, particular about the historical angle of | |
gardening. It helps tell the story of our relationship with nature | |
at a national level. | |
Below are excerpts, with comments enclosed in square brackets. | |
# Introduction | |
Like most Americans out-of-doors, I was a child of Thoreau. But | |
the ways of seeing nature I'd inherited from him, and the whole | |
tradition of nature writing he inspired, seemed not to fit my | |
experiences. ... When one summer I came across Emerson's argument | |
that "weeds" (just then strangling my annuals) were nothing more | |
than a defect of my perception, I felt a certain cognitive | |
dissonance. | |
[ | |
Regarding weeds, many of them are highly beneficial. For example, | |
the humble dandelion sends roots deep into clay soil and draws | |
nutrients up to the surface. When its leaves decompose they enrich | |
and improve the soil. | |
] | |
Yet for the most part, Americans who write about nature don't write | |
about the garden... This is an odd omission, for although | |
gardening may not at first seem to hold the drama or grandeur of, | |
say, climbing mountains, it is gardening that gives most of us our | |
most direct and intimate experience of nature... | |
Thoreau, in fact, was the last important American writer on nature | |
to have anything to say about gardening. He planted a bean field | |
in Walden and devoted a chapter to his experiences in it. ... | |
Thoreau had to forsake the bean field, eventually declaring that he | |
would prefer the most dismal swamp to any garden. With that | |
declaration, the garden was essentially banished from American | |
writing on nature. | |
[ | |
Once i heard a comedian say that white people have a different | |
perspective on gardening because they have traditionally held | |
"supervisory" roles in agriculture. That helps them be romantic | |
about growing beans. | |
] | |
# Chapter 1, Two Gardens | |
I figured that if there was one place where an elderly reactionary | |
and an aspiring hippie could find a bit of common ground, it was in | |
the vegetable garden. | |
# Chapter 2, Nature Abhors A Garden | |
The forest, I now understand, is "normal"; everything else--the | |
fields and meadows, the lawns and pavements and, most spectacularly, | |
the garden--is a disturbance, a kind of ecological vacuum which | |
nature will not abide for long. If it sometimes seems as if she has | |
singled out the garden for special attention, that's because the | |
"vacuum" here is greatest. | |
And garden plants are sitting ducks. Just as cultivated soil | |
constitutes a kind of vacuum in the environment, so do most of the | |
plants we choose to grow in it. | |
The word garden derives from the old German word for enclosure, and | |
the Oxford English Dictionary's definition begins, "An enclosed piece | |
of ground..." | |
# Chapter 3, Why Mow? | |
So perhaps the allure of the lawn is in the genes. The | |
sociobiologists think so: they've gone so far as to propose a | |
"Savanna Syndrome" to explain our fondness for grass. Encoded in our | |
DNA is a preference for an open grassy landscape resembling the | |
shortgrass savannas of Africa on which we evolved and spent our first | |
few thousand years. A grassy plain dotted with trees provides safety | |
from predators and a suitable environment for grazing animals... | |
Americans like Olmsted and Scott did not invent the lawn--lawns had | |
been popular in England since Tudor times. But in England lawns were | |
usually found only on estates; the Americans democratized them, | |
cutting the vast manorial greenswards into quarter-acre slices | |
everyone could afford (especially after 1830, when Edwin Budding... | |
patented the first practical lawn mower.) | |
But Scott's most radical departure from Old World practice was to | |
dwell on the individual's responsibility to [her or] his neighbors. | |
... Scott, like Olmstead before him, sought to elevate an unassuming | |
patch of turfgrass into an institution of democracy; those who would | |
dissent from their plans were branded as "selfish," "unneighborly," | |
"unchristian," and "undemocratic." | |
The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns | |
seemed. Gardening was a subtle process of give-and-take with the | |
landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and | |
nature. A lawn was nature under culture's boot. | |
What is the alternative? To turn them [lawns] into gardens. | |
Foodscaping | |
# Chapter 4, Compost and Its Moral Imperatives | |
Much of the credit for compost's exalted status must go to J.I. | |
Rodale, the founding editor of Organic Gardening, who, until his | |
death in 1971, promoted the virtues of organic gardening with a zeal | |
bordering on the messianic. | |
This is the wilderness in which Rodale found the American gardener | |
and confronted [her or] him with a stark moral choice: he [or she] | |
could continue to use petrochemicals to manufacture flowers and | |
vegetables, or he [or she] could follow Rodale, learn how to compost, | |
and redeem the soil--and, the implication was clear, [herself or] | |
himself. | |
At least in a metaphorical way, compost restores the gardener's | |
independence--if only from the garden center and the petrochemical | |
industry. | |
A people who believed that nature is somehow sacred--God's second | |
book, according to the Puritans; the symbol of Spirit, according to | |
the transcendentalists--will probably never feel easy bending it to | |
their will, and certainly not for aesthetic reasons. Indeed at least | |
since the time of Thoreau, Americans have seemed more interested in | |
the idea of bending THEMSELVES to nature's will, which might explain | |
why this country has produced so many more great naturalists than | |
great gardeners. | |
# Chapter 5, Into the Rose Garden | |
Emerson wrote that "nature always wears the colors of the spirit," by | |
which he meant that we don't see nature plainly, only through a | |
screen of human tropes. So in our eyes spring becomes youth, trees | |
truths, and even the humble ant becomes a big-hearted soldier. And | |
certainly when we look at roses and see aristocrats, old ladies, and | |
girl scouts, or symbols of love and purity, we are projecting human | |
categories onto them, saddling them with the burden of our metaphors. | |
... the fact that Thoreau's beans were no match for his weeds does | |
not mean the weeds have a higher claim to the earth, as Thoreau seems | |
to think. | |
Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well | |
adapted to man-made places. They don't grow in forests or | |
prairies--in the "wild" ... They grow where we live, in other words, | |
and hardly anywhere else. | |
[Tell that to the invasive species patrols in Oregon who work every | |
summer removing harmful weeds from forests and other wild areas.] | |
As I see it, the day I decided to disturb the soil, I undertook an | |
obligation to weed. For this soil isn't virgin and hasn't been for | |
centuries. It teems with hundreds of thousands of weed seeds for | |
whom the thrust of my spade represents the knock of opportunity. Not | |
"nature," strictly speaking, these seeds are really the descendants of | |
earlier gardeners. | |
# Chapter 7, Green Thumb | |
All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable | |
with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of | |
reacting with anger or frustration, they seem freshly intrigued... | |
The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much | |
stands beyond our control here... | |
# Chapter 8, The Harvest | |
Those most awed by [entropy] preach "limits to growth"--that we | |
should consume our fixed, unreplenished stores as slowly as possible. | |
On a spaceship, this makes good sense. But the second law of | |
thermodynamics, under which entropy increases as matter converts to | |
energy, applies only to closed systems, and, as the environmentalist | |
Barry Commoner points out, the global ecosystem is not a closed | |
system. The Earth in fact is nothing like a spaceship, because new | |
energy is continually pouring down on it, in the form of | |
sunlight--free, boundless, virtually infinite sunlight. | |
[ | |
A) limits to growth applies to human industry, not to the global | |
ecosystem. We have a total disconnect between human industry, the | |
global ecosystem, and our ability to completely comprehend either one | |
of them. | |
B) in which fantasy can we power our agriculture, industry, and | |
transportation on solar power alone? We lack the technology. Oil | |
enabled our population explosion and we have no viable alternative | |
yet. There is no meaningful, genuine way in which oil is renewable. | |
] | |
Thoreau, like his mentor Emerson, for the most part kept his moments | |
of resignation confined to his journals. At least until those last | |
months when, dying of tuberculosis, he took up the subject of autumn | |
leaves. | |
# Chapter 9, Planting a Tree | |
As it happens, the etymology of the word "true" takes us back to the | |
old English word for "tree": a truth, to the Anglo-Saxons, was | |
nothing more than a deeply rooted idea. | |
The American Indians were not the first or the only pre-Christian | |
peoples practicing some form of tree worship. Frazier's Golden Bough | |
catalogs dozens of instances, from every corner of Northern Europe as | |
well as from ancient Greece, Rome, and the East. | |
... the medieval popes had regularly issued proclamations prohibiting | |
the worship of trees and ordering the destruction of sacred groves. | |
As was often the case when outright prohibition of such a pagan | |
practice failed to eliminate it, Christianity's next move was to | |
co-opt it, and it's possible to interpret the arch of Gothic | |
cathedrals, whose soaring spaces and filtered light resemble a | |
forest's, an ingenious attempt to appropriate the sacred grove for | |
Christ. | |
Planting trees had the additional advantage of being regarded as a | |
patriotic act, for the Crown had declared a perilous shortage of the | |
hardwood on which the Royal Navy depended. | |
Thus at the same time Americans were hard at work deforesting their | |
continent, the English were embarking on what was probably the first | |
large-scale planting of trees in history. | |
One legal scholar, Chrisopher D Stone, has gone so far as to argue in | |
a book entitled Should Trees Have Standing? that forests, lakes, and | |
mountains should be granted the right to sue (called "standing") in | |
American courts. The idea is not quite as farfetched as it sounds; | |
corporations and ships are already "persons" in the eyes of the law, | |
so why not also trees? Stone's argument was actually accepted by | |
Justice William O Douglas... | |
Science has also come to regard trees as barometers of our ecological | |
health, since they seem to exhibit the effects of the damage | |
[humanity] is doing to the environment long before they show up | |
elsewhere. Ecologists think that the greenhouse effect will show up | |
first in the forests, where cool-weather tree species, unable to | |
migrate northward fast enough to keep pace with a warming climate, | |
may soon begin to sicken and die. | |
[ | |
I've seen a bunch of ancient, dead yew trees along a dry creek bed | |
outside of Gold Hill. My first thought was that the creek bed didn't | |
used to be so dry a century or so ago. At the Crater Lake National | |
Monument there is a display showing historic snow levels on the | |
mountain going back over a century, and there used to be way more | |
snow than there is now. | |
] | |
# Chapter 11, "Made Wild by Pompous Catalogs" | |
Winter in the garden is the season of speculation, a time when the | |
snow on the ground is an empty canvas that invites the idle planting | |
and replanting of countless hypothetical gardens between now and | |
spring thaw. ... We gardeners have always had trouble heeding Henry | |
Ward Beecher's sound nineteenth-century advice, that we not be "made | |
wild by pompous catalogs from florists and seedsmen." | |
The big mainstream catalogs--Burpee, Park, Harris, Stokes, | |
Gurney's--have no such compunctions about hybrids. In fact they love | |
nothing better than a novel cross, the more improbable the better. | |
Bigger, better, newer, just plain differenter--these are the supreme | |
values of what I think of as the middle-class catalogs. Burpee is | |
relatively upscale these days...; at the other end of the spectrum | |
stands Gurney's... What joins all these catalogers is their worship | |
of the new; for better or worse, they represent the triumph of | |
progress and middle-class taste in the gardener. | |
[ | |
The Internet Archive has some old seed catalogs: | |
Burpee's | |
Gurney's | |
Others | |
] | |
Emerging in the last few years to take their place are a small but | |
flourishing group of "counterculture" catalogs that define themselves | |
in opposition to the big mainstream seed houses. I imagine these | |
catalogs being written by ex-hippies who went back to the land in the | |
seventies and stayed on. | |
By narrowing the genetic base of our agriculture we have made it much | |
more vulnerable and, in turn, more dependent on chemical defenses. | |
It is no coincidence that several of the big seed houses are now | |
owned by chemical companies. | |
By preserving and disseminating heirloom seeds, which are "open | |
pollinated" (that is, they can reproduce themselves in nature...), we | |
help to keep the gene pool wide and deep. | |
# Chapter 12, The Garden Tour | |
The Puritans despised ornamental gardening and, they wrecked many of | |
the great Tudor gardens during their time of power. | |
The Genius of this Place: for me, that has meant chiefly two things, | |
one historical (the place had been a farm), the other topographical. | |
The lay of this land is too dramatic and, in places, too difficult to | |
ignore. A garden will either make use of it or be defeated by it. | |
These [medieval] gardens, which frequently adjoined monasteries, were | |
cerebral places--rather more hermeneutical than hedonistic. Every | |
plant in them bore an allegorical significance and, much like the | |
allegorical literature and painting of the time, the full meaning of | |
these gardens was available only to the educated, to those who held | |
the key. | |
Rosemary stood for the fidelity of lovers (since it was thought to | |
aid memory), safe for old age, bay (Lauris nobilis) for the laurel | |
that crowns the poet, etc. | |
author: Pollan, Michael | |
LOC: SB455 .P58 | |
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Second_Nature_(book) | |
tags: book,non-fiction,outdoor | |
title: Second Nature | |
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non-fiction | |
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