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. [ archive.org 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: tags: book,non-fiction,outdoor title: Second Nature Tags ==== book non-fiction outdoor