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Garden of Weedin’
I really can’t recommend this Michael Pollan book enough. It’s called Second Nature and is his personal and historical reflections on gardening and moreso human life. In it though, I’ve found some of the better answers I have heard so far to people’s rampant apocalyptic fantasies, especially in his chapter on weeds. Pollan writes:
Thoreau, and his many heirs among contemporary naturalists and radical environmentalists, assume that human culture is the problem, not the solution. So they urge us to shed our anthropomorphism and learn to live among other species as equals. This sounds like a fine, ecological idea, until you realize that the earth would be eveb worse off if we started behaving any more like animals than we already do. The survival strategy of most species is to extend their dominion as far and as brutally as they can, until they run up against some equally brutal natural limit that checks their progress. Isn’t this exactly what we’ve been doing?
What sets us apart from other species is culture, and what is culture but forbearance? Conscience, ethical choice, memory, discrimination: it is these very human and decidedly unecological faculties that offer the planet its last hope. It is true that, historically, we’ve concentrated on exercising these faculties in the human rather than the natural estate, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be exercised there. Indeed, this is the work that now needs to be done: to bring more culture to our conduct in nature, not less.
If I seem to have wandered far afield of weeds, consider what weeding is: the process by which we make informed choices in nature, discriminate between good and bad, apply our intelligence and sweat to the earth. To weed is to bring culture to nature […] As I learned in my flower bed, mere neglect won’t bring back “nature.”
In this, my yard is not so different from the rest of the world. We cannot live in it withour changing nature irrevocably; having done so, we’re obliged to tend to the consequences of the changes we’ve wrought, which is to say, to weed. “Weeding” is what will save places like Yellowstone, but only if we recognize that weeding is not just something we do to the land - only if we recognize the need to cultivate our own nature, too. For though we may be the earth’s gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won’t get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role - that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.
Although, I’m sure posting this - especially in reference to apocalyptic fervor - will only encourage the blooming (like weeds) of a thousand dissenting viewpoints. But so be it. It seems to be in our nature, after all!
- Midnight in the Garden
- Zappa on Christianity
- My Secret Garden
- The New Face Of Home-Grown Terrorism
- Shake it like a polaroid … uh…. flashlight
- Prev: The Dunwich Horror
- Next: Wild & Free
September 9th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Thats what I like about zen, quelling the constant need to discriminate between what’s good and bad, and overeaching our abilities of discretion. Underlying this is being practically attuned to “the heart” whereby one keeps “only dont know mind,” getting straight to the point.
Ever seen a zen garden? No weeds. No flowers. Just rock.
September 9th, 2006 at 11:31 am
Thank you for bringing the analogy of gardening to my attention. Particularly effective is the ambiguity of our role as both gardeners and weeds. But I question Pollan’s notion that “the survival strategy of most species is to extend their dominion as far and as brutally as they can”. Although I haven’t read his book, this statement seems more applicable to flora then to fauna, as the idea contradicts what I understand to be the very nature of ecology; we could not exist if “most species” survived by continually breaching their niche. Most of nature appears to me as a finely balanced interplay of ecologies, not a war between species. I think Thoreau would agree.
September 9th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Nice quote, ties a lot of thing together for me. For one, it seems the dilemma of the gardener is equivalent to that of the parent.
I wonder about whatacharacter’s comment though:
Don’t get me wrong, I like zen (hang on that wasn’t a very zen thing to say was it?) but what if a weed sprouts up in a rock garden? Do you pull it out by the roots? If so, is that not a value judgement? I mean, no matter what one does, isn’t it always a matter of personal taste and/or circumstantial influences? (These are not rhetorical questions.) Personally I discriminate quite a lot, otherwise I could’ve wound up marrying a trailerpark skank and fucking her dog while watching the Da Vinci Code and slurping diet coke.
Anyway, as Ran Prieur has pointed out, all living things garden, but my favorite gardeners are elephants. They eat fruit, and seeds sprout from their shit. Their most-traveled paths become abundant fruit highways, with no more thought or effort required beyond seeking out what they like to eat, then taking a shit. Nice work.
(Ants rate a mention too. They really know how to work it, and remember that they are not monarchies, but are genetically predisposed to be decentralized operations. This elegant balance of control and freedom is what makes them so efficient, ubiquitous and ancient.)
What grows from human shit? The problem is not that we have culture, but that it is not efficient from a metabolic perspective (or that it’s not aesthetically pleasing). Ugly rather than elegant, cancerous rather than symbiotic. Of course symbiotic does not mean ‘don’t touch anything’. It means we cultivate each other. And it means you reap what you sow.
Reminds me a little of God’s advice to Bender on being a god: If you do the job properly, they won’t know you did anything at all.
Same advice for gardeners, parents and governments. It’s not what you do; it’s that you do it with a light touch.
/rant (as per usual)
September 9th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
I think Pollan needs to reread Walden just for fun because Thoreau was pure rock n roll. Thoreau followed his bliss. He wasn’t urging people to copy him. Thoreau’s message isn’t too radical. He simply said you do not need much to be happy and if we were closer to nature we would be happier. But even Thoreau only lived outside of society for two years.
September 9th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
I would tend to agree with the idea that we are at once the problem and the solution. Culture as it is denies nature. We are ashamed of defecation and sex, and we fear death. Thus our culture tries to conquer nature with cement and cities, covering up our shameful biological drives, and the natural world from whence they spring. I don’t know that we can ever find a solution. My favorite theory of the moment is the one that states that firstly free will is an illusion, and that we are being driven by nature without knowing it. Nature, knowing that carbon based life forms are somewhat fragile and prone to death, is frantically driving humans to create machines that can think, so that when the flesh based apocalypse comes, consciousness/awareness (being information) remains.
Unfortunately I only like this theory because I like the idea of sentient space travelling robots.
September 9th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
*slaps unthinkable with a zen-stick*
Well, consider rock/sand/dirt/the-dust-we-are-made-of, as the basis by which everything grows - weed and flower alike.
For me it’s getting to the essential bare truth of the matter, which is the underlying heart, and which keeps you from an undesirable trailer - hitching. Zen is great for allowing us to “know,” when it’s okay to know, and “don’t know” when it’s okay not to know.
Pull weed
rake sand
save all beings from suffering
Now I’m not a 100% zenophile. I like its humility and non dogmatism, and it’s great for tempering the skeptisim, and relaxing the cynicism, I encounter in my quest to know everything …
September 9th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
He goes to great lengths in other parts of the book to show how Emerson, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists and Romanticists had very distorted (if beautiful) views of nature. He also talks about how these viewpoints were necessary and useful at the time to transform thinking but that nowadays they can actually be harmful in our current state. There’s another good passage which I will post in a few days that I think gets more to the heart of this.
In any event, I would have to say that his “war between species” image here is definitely an apt one if you have done much gardening or landscaping. Plants are often thought of as these docile simple beings, but in many cases plants ruthlessly try to destroy one another. If you’ve ever dealt with anything like bindweed, English ivy or blackberry, you’ll know what I mean. It may be that the “finely balanced interplay of ecologies” is often nothing more than a carefully balanced arms race between different species who have grown up together and adapted to one another’s tricks, learning how to live together and use one another’s natural tendencies to advantage.
September 9th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
http://weblife.org/humanure/default.html
September 9th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
I’m not sure I agree with this, but this video certainly does. I actually find this video kind of offensive and misguided, but I can see the thinking that lead them to this place and its worth mentioning
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4369876000541116073
September 9th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
So in other words that makes him a hypocrite, a liar or simply a man on vacation. Don’t get me wrong, what he did was important. His contributions to American culture were profound and lasting. But the proof is in the pudding, isn’t it? Also check out his struggles growing a bean garden which Pollan talks about. Thoreau eventually gave up because he couldn’t “make the earth speak beans” and as a result he waxes philosophical about how much better a swamp is than a garden - which anyone who has hung out in both will know this is nothing more than an intellectual conceit!
September 9th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
And that I think is one of the precise elements which Pollan criticizes Thoreau for: for separating the two, for perpetuating a long-standing split rather than healing it
September 9th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
Wait, wouldn’t the solution just be to re-model culture? Or in Pollan’s analogy to actively garden - to cultivate - culture?
September 9th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
What do you find offensive about it? It’s quite apt. I don’t necessarily think the video is saying that humans = cancer. Rather, civilization (especially our civilization) is cancer. And it would be hard to argue otherwise, really, given the state of affairs we find ourselves in and the usual attitudes.
Cancer cells start out as normal cells. But somehow, genetic code that checks the growth of the cell gets turned off, and the cell “forgets” its place in the ecology of the body. Somehow, human culture forgot that we live in a larger ecology, and have proliferated unchecked ever since.
I know that native americans tended their surroundings, were more like gardeners than strict “hunter/gatherers”, and did sometimes degrade their environment. Nevertheless, they seemed to understand the place of humans in a larger ecology, and did their best to keep some kind of balance. I also know we can’t go back, but we need to reacquire that sensitivity to ecological concerns or we’re doomed.
September 9th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
I’m still working that out, or else I would have posted it separately with commentary. I just feel intuitively that it is an unsound view of our state of affairs and subscribing to its viewpoints lead us to more problems than solutions.
Maybe my opposition to it is as simple as this: What’s the cure for cancer? If humans are cancer or civilization is cancer, the cure in our society is to irradiate it, to drug it, to bludgeon it into submission. It fairly cries out for a destructive response against the “disease” of humanity.
September 9th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
I think Thoreau was intergrated. He realized he had to live with the paradox and recognize the reality the savage and higher laws exist simultaneously together. Before the healing begins one has to have an awareness of the parodox. Thoreau never advocated an end to civilization.
There was a little debate at Znet between Parecon and Green Anarchy Collective
John Zerzan said
http://www.zmag.org/debateprim.htm
September 9th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
Speaking of Native Americans and gardening, the three sisters of squash, beans and corn were central to many a North American first nation’s culture. Those, combined with occasional fish or venison, mark one of the most completely balanced and naturally occurring diets in the world.
September 9th, 2006 at 5:20 pm
I would argue that that’s not integration. It is accepting an artificial split and not resolving it.
September 9th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
Well, metaphors do eventually have their breaking point. I view it as a cautionary tale: if we don’t check ourselves, Gaia will find a way to get rid of us, and Her solution may be as destructive to us as chemotherapy is to a cancer cell.
Perhaps the cartoon could have been more careful with labels and instead of calling the cells “cancer” just maybe call them “liver cells” or something: emphasizing the point that humans, in proper relationship with our environment, are a necessary and vital part of the organism. Only when the relationship becomes distorted, and we advance beyond our proper boundaries, do we become “cancer”. But then of course the message of the cartoon would have been muted and perhaps lost. Sometimes, with an allegory, you can’t address every subtlety.
September 9th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
I would argue that there are a plethora of ecological examples of memory and discrimination in Nature. These are not just human features. Even plants exhibit discrimination.
September 9th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
Well go ahead and actually argue it. Give examples and bear in mind that I am not the author of this idea, just someone interested in exploring its implications! Also bear in mind that his argument takes place across a book some 250 pages long, rather than is contained in this single line quotation.
September 10th, 2006 at 2:45 am
Tim, I’m aware that human shit is effective fertilizer and my point is that it goes unutilized in our culture. Most people eat so much processed ‘food’ that their shit is toxic, and even if they did, god forbid, swallow a seed, it plops uselessly into the toilet to be chemically treated and flushed into the ocean. It’s the same as everyone whining about the drought, but when it does rain it flows straight down our roads and drains to the ocean without nourishing a single plant. From a metabolic perspective one would conclude that such a system is doomed to extinction in short measure. I’ve said it before: there’s nothing so elegant as homeostasis. Culture certainly can, and should, follow that example.
Well that’s the classic example of not being able to solve a problem with the same thinking that caused it. Again, it’s not that culture is bad or unnatural, but that ‘ours’ certainly is (mostly anyway but it’s not all bad), and that’s a reflection of our collective mental state, not a definition of culture in general. If I wasn’t clear, let me point out that I thought the quote you posted was spot on in every respect. I guess the cancer analogy is overused and kinda alienates people, but if it quacks like a duck…
I couldn’t check the video. I’m running Win98 on a Pentium relic over a dialup modem. If I stop pedaling it powers down. I have to speak to an operator to connect me to the net, which I can’t do if one of my neighbors is already making a phone call. My monitor’s a black and white portable TV and I don’t even have a keyboard; to write this took 2 hours to make the punchcards by hand. How can you sit there and do nothing? For just a dollar a day you could hook this wretched dude up to the information superhighway. You can make a difference.
*slap* thanks, whatacharacter, I needed that. Although I did see this:
…painted on the side of a Blackhawk in Baghdad.
September 10th, 2006 at 4:55 am
Sorry for the lag… Tim said:
Yes, that’s what evolution theory suggests. But you are still just describing natural behavior, which is perhaps more aptly defined as a “finely balanced interplay of zero-sum and non-zero-sum games”– not the overwhelmingly zero-sum behavior of humanity. The “brutal limits” Pollan anthropomorphically alludes to are only brutal when unrecognized as natural functions of an intelligent environment continually “striving” to balance the two modes of interaction as described by game theory.
Capitalist society has sacralized zero-sum gaming. Culture needs to shift its ‘game plan’. We have to cultivate awareness of zero-sum behavior as a necessary modus operandi within an overarching gestalt of non-zero-sumness. We need to know our place in the world, or the world will set us straight.