A plantseye view Michael Pollan
it’s a simple idea about nature and I
want to I want to say a word for nature
because we haven’t talked that much
about it the last couple days I want to
say a word for the soil and the bees the
plants and the animals and tell you
about a tool a very simple tool that I
have found although it’s really nothing
more than a literary conceit it’s not a
technology is very powerful for I think
changing our relationship to the natural
world and to the other species on whom
we depend and that tool is very simply
as Chris suggested looking at us and the
world from the plants or the animals
point of view it’s not my idea other
peoples have hit on it but I’ve tried to
take it to some new places let me tell
you where I got it like a lot of my
ideas like a lot of the tools I use I
found it in the garden I’m a very
devoted gardener and there was a day
about seven years ago I was planting
potatoes it was the first week of May
this is New England when the apple trees
are just vibrating with bloom they’re
just white clouds above I was here
planting my chunks cutting up potatoes
and planting it and the bees were
working on this tree bumblebees just
making this thing vibrate and one of the
things I really like about gardening is
that it doesn’t take all your
concentration you really can’t get hurt
it’s not like woodworking and you can
you have plenty of kind of mental space
for speculation and the question I asked
myself that afternoon in the garden was
working alongside that bumblebee was
what did I and that bumblebee have in
common how was our role in this garden
similar and different and I realized we
actually had quite a bit in common both
of us were disseminating the genes of
one species and not another and both of
us probably if I can imagine the bees
point of view thought we were calling
the shots I had decided what kind of
potato I wanted to plant I picked my
Yukon gold or yellow fin or whatever it
was
and I had some in those jeans from a
seed catalog across the country brought
it and I was planting it and that’d be
no doubt assumed that it had decided I’m
going for that apple tree
I’m going for that blossom I’m going to
get the nectar and I’m going to leave we
have a grammar that suggests that’s who
we are that we are sovereign subjects in
nature the bee as well as me I plant the
potatoes I weed the garden I domesticate
the species but that day it occurred to
me what if that grammar is nothing more
than a self-serving conceit because of
course the bee thinks he’s in charge or
she’s in charge and but we know better
we know that what’s going on between the
B and that flower is that B has been
cleverly manipulated by that flower and
when I say manipulated I’m talking about
in Darwinian sense right I mean it has
evolved a very specific set of traits
color scent flavor pattern that has
lured that B in and the B has been
cleverly fooled into taking the nectar
and also picking up some powder on its
leg and going off to the next blossom B
is not calling the shots and I realized
then I wasn’t either I had been seduced
by that potato and not another into
planting its into spreading its genes
give me a little bit more habitat and
that’s when I got the idea which was
what would it be what would happen if we
kind of looked at us from this point of
view of these other species who were
working on us and agriculture suddenly
appeared to me not as an invention not
as a human technology but as a
co-evolutionary development in which a
group of very clever species mostly
edible grasses had exploited us figured
out how to get us to basically DeForest
the world the competition of grasses
right and suddenly everything looked
different
and suddenly mowing the lawn that day
was a completely different experience I
had thought always and in fact had
written this in my first book was a book
about gardening that lawns were nature
under cultures but– that they were
totalitarian landscapes and that when we
mowed them we were
cruelly suppressing this species and
never letting it set seed or die or have
sex and and that’s what the lawn was but
then I realize no this is exactly what
the grasses want us to do I’m a dupe I’m
a dupe of the lawns whose goal in life
is to out-compete the trees who it
competes with who they compete with for
sunlight and so by getting us to mow the
lawn we keep the trees from coming back
which in in New England happens very
very quickly so I started looking at
things this way and wrote a whole book
about it called the bottom desire and I
realized that in the same way you can
look at a flower and deduce all sorts of
interesting things about the tastes and
the desires of bees that they like
sweetness that they like this color and
not that color that they like symmetry
what could we find out about ourselves
by doing the same thing that a certain
kind of potato a certain kind of drug a
sativa indica cannabis cross has
something to say about us and that
wouldn’t this be kind of an interesting
way to look at the world now the test of
any idea I said it was a literary
conceit is what does it get us and when
you’re talking about nature which is
really my subject as a writer how does
it meet the Aldo Leopold test which is
does it make us better citizens of the
biotic community get us to do things
that leads to the support and
perpetuation of the biota rather than
its destruction and I would submit that
this idea does this so let me go through
what you gain when you look at the world
this way besides some you know
entertaining insights about about human
desire as an intellectual matter looking
at the world from other species points
of view helps us deal with this weird
anomaly which is intellection this is in
the realm of intellectual history which
is that we had this Darwinian revolution
150 years ago
mini-me
we have this intellectual referal this
Darwinian revolution in which thanks to
Darwin we figured out we are just one
species among many evolutions working on
us the same way it’s working on all the
others we are acted upon as well as
acting we are really in the fiber of the
fabric of life but the weird thing is we
don’t we have not absorbed this lesson
150 years later none of us really
believes this we are still Cartesians
the children of Descartes who believe
that subjectivity consciousness sets us
apart that the world is divided into
subjects and objects that there is
nature on one side culture on another as
soon as you start seeing things from the
plan’s point of view or the animals
point of view you realize that the real
literary conceit is that is this the
idea that nature is opposed to culture
the idea that that that consciousness is
everything and that’s another very
important thing it does looking at the
world from other species points of view
is a cure for the disease of human
self-importance you suddenly realize
that consciousness which we value and we
consider the you know the crown of the
crowning achievement of nature human
consciousness is really just another set
of tools for getting along in the world
and it’s kind of natural that we would
think it was the best tool but you know
there’s a comedian who said well who’s
telling me that consciousness is so good
and so important well
consciousness so when you look at the
plants you realize that there are other
tools and they’re just as interesting
I’ll give you two examples also from the
garden lima beans you know what a lima
bean does when it’s attacked by spider
mites it releases this volatile chemical
that goes out into the world and summons
another species of mic that comes in and
attacks the spider mite defending the
lima bean
so what plants have while we have
consciousness tool-making language they
have biochemistry and they have
perfected that to a degree far beyond
can imagine and their complexity their
sophistication is something to really
marvel at and I think it’s really the
scandal of the human genome project you
know we went into it thinking forty or
fifty thousand human genes we came out
with the only twenty three thousand just
to give you a grounds for comparison
rice 35,000 genes so who’s the more
sophisticated species well we’re all
equally sophisticated we’ve been
involving evolving just as long just
along different paths so cure for
self-importance weight of sort of make
us feel the Darwinian idea and that’s
really what I do as a writer as a
storyteller is try to make people kind
of feel what we know and tell stories
that actually make us help us think
ecologically now the other use of this
is practical and I’m in tucked I’m going
to take you to a farm right now as I use
this idea to develop my understanding of
the food system and what I learned in
fact is that we are all now being
manipulated by corn and the talk you
heard about ethanol earlier today to me
is the final triumph of corn over good
sense
it is part of corns corn scheme for
world domination and you will see the
amount of corn planted this year will be
up dramatically from last year and there
will be that much more habitat because
we’ve decided ethanol is going to help
us so but let me so it helped me
understand industrial agriculture which
of course is a Cartesian system it’s
based on this idea that we Bend other
species to our will and that we are in
charge and then we create these
factories and we have these
technological inputs and we get the food
out of it or the fuel or whatever we
want let me take you to a very different
kind of farm this is farm in the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia I went
looking for a farm where these ideas
about looking at things from the species
point of view are actually implemented
and I found it in a man the farmers name
is Joel Salatin and I spent a week as an
apprentice on his farm and I took away
from this some of the most hopeful news
about our relationship to nature that
I’ve ever come across in 25 years of
writing about nature and that is this
the farm is called Polyface which means
the idea is he’s got six different
species of animals as well as some
plants growing in this very elaborate
symbiotic arrangement it’s permaculture
those of you know a little bit about
this such that the cows and the pigs and
the em and the sheep and the turkeys and
the what else what else does he have all
the six different species rabbits
actually are all performing ecological
services for one another such that the
manure of one is the lunch for the other
and they take care of pests for one
another and I can’t it’s a very
elaborate and beautiful dance but I’m
going to just give you a close-up on one
piece of it and that is the relationship
between his cattle and his chickens his
laying hens and I’ll show you how if you
take this approach what you get okay and
this is a lot more than growing food as
you’ll see this is a different way to
think about nature and a way to get away
from the zero-sum notion that the
Cartesian idea that either nature’s
winning or we’re winning and that for us
to get what we want
nature is diminished so one day cattle
in a pen the only technology involved
here is this cheap electric fencing
relatively new
up to a car battery even I could carry a
quarter-acre paddock set it up in 15
minutes
cows graze one day they move okay
they graze everything down intensive
intensive grazing he waits three days
and then we towed in something called
the egg mobile the egg mobile is a very
rickety contraption it looks like a
Prairie schooner made out of boards but
it houses 350 chickens he tows this into
the paddock three days later and opens
the gangplank turns them down and 350
hens come streaming down the gangplank
clucking gossiping as chickens will and
they make a beeline for the cow patties
and what they’re doing is very
interesting
they’re digging through the cow patties
for the maggots the grub the larvae of
flies and the reason he’s waited three
days is because he knows that on the
fourth day or the fifth day those larvae
will hatch and he’ll have a huge fly
problem but he waits that long to grow
them as big and juicy and tasty as he
can because they are the chickens
favorite form of protein so the chickens
do their kind of little breakdance and
there they’re pushing around the manure
to get at the grubs and in the process
they’re spreading the manure out very
useful at second echo system service and
third while they’re in this paddock
there are of course defecating madly and
and they’re very nitrogenous manure is
fertilizing this field they then move
out to the next one and in the course of
just a few weeks the grass just enters
his blaze of growth and within four or
five weeks he can do it again he can
graze again you can cut they could bring
in another species like the Lambs or he
can um make hay for the winter now I
want you to just look really close up
onto what’s happened there so it’s a
very productive system and what I need
to tell you is that on a hundred acres
he gets 40,000 pounds of beef 30,000
pounds of pork 25,000 dozen eggs 20,000
boilers a thousand turkeys a thousand
rabbits an immense amount of food you
know you here can organic feed the world
well look how much food
can produce on 100 acres if you do this
kind of again give each species what it
want let it really realize its desires
its physiological distinctiveness put
that in play but look at it from the
point of view of the grass now what
happens to the grass when you do this
when a ruminant grazes grass the grass
is cut from this height to this height
and it immediately does something very
interesting anyone of you who Gardens
knows that there is something called the
root shoot ratio and plants need to keep
the root mass in some rough balance with
the leaf mass to be happy so when they
lose a lot of leaf mass they shed roots
they kind of cauterize them and the
roots die and the species in the soil go
to work basically chewing through those
roots decomposing them the earthworms
the fungi the bacteria and the result is
new soil this is how soil is created
it’s created from the bottom up this is
how the prairies were built the
relationship between bison and grasses
and what I realized when I understood
this and if you ask Joel Salatin what he
is he’ll tell you he’s not a chicken
farmer he’s not a sheep farmer he’s not
a cattle rancher he’s a grass farmer
because grass is really the keystone
species of such a system is that if you
think about it this completely
contradicts the tragic idea of nature we
hold in our heads which is that for us
to get what we want nature is diminished
more for us less for nature here all
this food comes off this farm and at the
end of the season there is actually more
soil more fertility and more
biodiversity it’s a remarkably hopeful
thing to do there are a lot of farmers
doing this today this is well beyond
organic agriculture which is still a
Cartesian system more or less and what
it tells you is that if you begin to
take account of other species take
account of the soil that even with with
enough
more than this perspectival idea because
there is no technology involved here
except for those fences which could be
you know they’re so cheap they could be
all over Africa in no time that you can
we can take the food we need from the
earth and actually heal the earth in the
process this this is a way to reanimate
the world and that’s what’s so exciting
about this perspective when we really
begin to feel darwin’s insights in our
bones the things we can do with nothing
more than these ideas are something to
be very helpful about thank you very
much