The Botany of Desire with Michael Pollan

Pollan gives us a witty insight into a plant-centered view of evolution and ecology, flipping the usual human-focused narrative of the interaction between people and plants. Through the stories of four familiar plant species – apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes – he demolishes the “erroneous impression that we’re in charge”. We did not “domesticate” these species. Rather, the plants’ evolutionary nimbleness allowed them to insinuate themselves into human desire and so thrive. Human minds, emotions, and tastes are part of the environment to which plants adapt. Like bees guided to the work of pollination by petals and nectar, we’ve been willing and industrious servants of some plants’ needs.

Pollan’s account of the reciprocal web of relationships among plants and people takes our understanding of coevolution out of the specialized world of evolutionary theorists and into our everyday experience of orchard, forest, garden, and kitchen. In learning how apples spread from Kazakhstan, we understand how the fates of people and plants are conjoined across the world. In the interplay between plant evolution and human desire, we see the future of forests: Humans have become world-changing bees. Plant evolution in the future will be largely a matter of adapting to and exploiting – or not, for many species – the proclivities of a hyper-abundant Great Ape.