The Botany of Desire
Categories: Science & Math
Michael Pollan asks who is domesticating whom. His 2001 book argues that people and plants have shaped each other, with plants evolving to satisfy human desires in exchange for being spread around the world. Pollan tells the stories of four plants and the desires they answer, including the apple and sweetness, the tulip and beauty, and the potato and control. Along the way he visits the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s and follows Johnny Appleseed across the American frontier.
Recommended by 4 people
- Tim Draper
- Samin Nosrat
- Shane Parrish: “(4 Stars) Whereas once humankind exerted its will in the relatively small arena of artificial selection (the arena I think of, metaphorically, as a garden) and nature held sway everywhere else, today the force of our presence is felt everywhere.”
- Jason Silva: “in botany of desire I felt you had put out there the most eloquent account of cannabis phenomenology I had come across”