I’m reading some early Michael Pollan right now. It’s like listening to Michael Pollan on vinyl. It’s his book Second Nature, published in 1991, when I was in eighth grade and first hearing scary reports about global warming, which then inspired me to write frantic articles on the youth page of the local newspaper. (How far I have come.)
Had I been reading Michael Pollan at the time, I may have had a more nuanced view.
One thing you gotta love about the guy is the way he can talk to environmentalists without adopting some of our more annoying pieties. He’s really interested in the intersection of human culture with nature, and he doesn’t see the two as separate kingdoms. We’re heading into a new year, which (here comes the frantic) will be as crucial a moment in that nature/culture intersection as we’ve ever seen. In honor of that, and the nuanced thinking it’ll require, here’s a little excerpt from Pollan on vinyl.
"It’s hard to imagine the American landscape without St.-John’s-wort, daisies, dandelions, crabgrass, timothy, clover, pigweed, lamb’s-quarters, buttercup, mullein, Queen Anne’s lace, lantain, or yarrow, but not one of these species grew here before the Puritans landed. America in fact had few indigenous weeds, for the simple reason taht it had little disturbed ground. The Indians lived so lightly on the land that they created few habitats for weeds to take hold in. No plow, no bindweed. But by as early as 1663, when John Josselyn compiled a list ‘of such plantes as have sprung up since the English planted and kept cattle in New England,’ he found, among others, couch grass, dandelion, sow thistle, shepherd’s purse, groundsel, dock, mullein, plantain, and chickweed.
"Some of these weeds were brought over deliberately; the colonists prized dandelion as a salad green, and used plantain (which is millet) to make bread. Other weed seeds, though came by accident—in forage, in the earth used for shipboard ballast, even in pants cuffs and cracked boot soles. Once here, the weeds spread like wildfire. According to Alfred W. Crosby, the ecological historian, the Indians considered the Englishman a botanical Midas, able to change the flora with his touch…Though most weeds traveled with white men, some, like the dandelion, raced west of their own accord (or possibly with the help of the Indians, who quickly discovered the plant’s virtues), arriving well ahead of the pioneers. Thus the supposedly virgin landscape upon which the westward settlers gazed had already been marked by their civilization."
Happy 2009, folks. In the new year, let’s not take anything for granted.