>This is pretty much in line with what I know of biology and ecology.
>You may have a single species dominating a particular niche in an
>ecosystem, but a big plot years of one species for years and nothing
>else -- not even insects -- just doesn't happen.
>
>----------------
>
>I took a long break here, and was planning on continuing in a similar
>vein, showing how Pollan could get where he goes by rational means.
>But it dawned on me that that might be beside your point: whatever
>Pollan's reasoning, his summaries still echo the themes of
>Romanticism. I see how you think that, though I'm uncomfortable with
>the device, as I'll explain. I'll continue with this if you think
>it's useful.
>
>--
>Andy
Yeah, it would be useful.
But one question: I'm not sure what reasoning or rational means have to do with this? I don't see Pollan as opposed to reason or rational means at all. For instance, he draws on the work of ($*&%@ have to get off my lazy ass and grump grump grump look it up) Sir Albert Howard, "an English agronomist" who "provided the philosophical foundations for organic agriculture." He's been "lionized" by Wendell Berry and Howard's 1940 _An Agricultural Testament_ has been "absorbed" by readers of Rodale's _Organic Gardening and Farming_. (This is the other place where Pollan devotes a big chunk of his work reproducing the ideas from a literature he very bluntly describes this way:
"Like many works of social and environmental criticism, _An Agricultural Testament_ is in broad outline the story of a Fall. In Howard's case, the serpent in question is a nineteenth-century German chemist by the name of Baron Justus von Liebig, his tempting fruit a set of initials: NPK. It was Liebig... who set agriculture on its industrial path when he broke down the quasi-mystical concept of fertility in soil into a straightfoward inventory of the chemical elemtns plants rrquire forgrowth. At a stroke, soil biology gave way to soil chemistry, and specifically to the three chemical nutrients Liebig highlighted as crucial to plant growsth: nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium ... N-P-K. ... Much of Howard's work is an attempt to demolish what he called the "NPK mentality." (146)
We learn later that this NPK mentality is "the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualityes are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry."
Where I think I'm going with this is how does Pollan jump from human industry as following a natural logic to one that is a reductionist industrial logic. I have no doubt thatwe can create industrial ecology.
I simply think that it's all rather sloppy. Where is the magic moment crossed. And more troubling still, since I have been reading the Botany of Desire on and off, in that book he was trying to make the case that, while a gardener thinks of herself as master of her garden, cultivating and creating certain breeds, etc. etc., she is not really. Maybe it's best to think of the potato as doing its utmost to get the human to do what the potato wants. (Like cats :)
Did he choose to plant the potato or did the potato choose him?
But what struck me is this:
"The dogs, cats, and horses of the plant world, these domesticated species are familiar to everyone, so deeply woven into the fabric of our everyday lives that we scarcely think of them as 'species' or parts of 'nature' at all. But why is that? I suspect it's at least partly the fault of the word. 'Domestic' implies that these species come in or been brought under civilization's roof, which is true enough. Yet the house-y metaphor encourages us to think that by doing so they have, like us, somehow *left* nature, as if nature were something that only happens outside.
This is simply another failure of imagination: nature is not only to be found "out there"l it is also "in here," in the apple and the potato, in the garden and the kichen, even in the brain of man beholding the beauty of a tulip or inhaling the smoke from a burning cannabis flower. My wager is that when we can find nature in these sorts of places as readily as we now find it in the wild, we'll have traveled a considerable distance toward understanding our place in the world in the fullness of its complexity and ambiguity.(p xxiii - xxiv)
I bolted upright on the porch bench as I read that: Oh wow! Pollan is espousing more what I'd like to hear.
But it turns out, and I haven't sat down and read this book as carefully, there is, throughout the book, a tendency to forget that plot. He'll repeatedly pull up some metaphor in his words that reveals that he's slipped right into the dichotomous thinking that he *said* he was going to throw into question.
And that's one of my complaints with TOD. Put bluntly: if in TBOD nature is in the cultivated garden and the epicure's kitchen, if it's "in here" under the roof of civilization, then how does it happen that our human cognitive talents continuously slip into something that isn't natural? Instead, reductionist science embodied in industrial logic is not natural.
But this, I do not understand. If we as humans are nature, then how is that something we do is not of nature? I mean, it'd be one thing if he simply wants to say, nature here, culture there and a fuzzy blurred line between them (which is the metaphor he used in TOD). But he doesn't. He wants to avoid that.
And yet, even in TBOD, when he's writing about apples, he decides when something we've done goes to far, and that is always when we don't follow the "logic of nature." (it's on p. 52 where h e writes, "the domestication of the apple has gone too far, to the point where the species' fitness for life in nature (where it still has to live, after all) has been dangerously compromised. Reduced to the handful of genetically identical clones that suit our taste and agricultural practice, the apple has lost the crucial variability -- the wildness -- that sexual reproduction confers."
I am intrigued by this line that gets crossed, from something natural to something that is not; from something that is natural within the natural house of civilization (which would be your industrial ecology) to something that is unnatural within the house of civilization.
It is, as I've thought since I reached p 135 and wrote to Dwayne about Zizek's insights,the same problem that the pomos are interested in when they ask about the line drawn between nature and culture in the work of social constructionists.
While the social constructions want to say that gender is all social and reach deeply into all that we take for granted as natural to expose the social factors at play, what Judith Butler did was ask why they needed this line at all. What did the activity of separating sex from gender, where sex was nature and gender social do, how did it perform a way of thinking that seemed radical but wasn't quite as radial as supposed. How did they unwittingly import into their thinking the same dualisms that they ostensibly deride?
But there is one other thing that fascinates me about Pollan. The whoop-dee-do-da fator.
I mentioned Rodale at the outset of this ridiculously convoluted revery. The Rodale's thing -- that it was some special resource for organic farming -- was interesting news to me. I grew up in a household that kept a huge vegetable garden. I asked mom and she said it was 30x100 feet. Naturally, I did the same wherever I lived, country, suburb or city. I didn't in FL because I can identify with Pollan's confusion upon moving to Berkeley from the NE. After living in the seasons of upstate gardening, I had no idea what to do in FL. I think people from the old pulp culture list will recall me bitching because I couldn't even fathom how you'd garden in sand. The utter joy of gardening had been and will always be for me: dirt. Rich, loamy, humus-laden dirt. In upstate NY, that dirt includes rocks, lots of them, which is why the joke is usually that gardening involves digging up rocks year after year. So, rocks, I was happy to do without in FL, but even so: no black dirt?
And OK, so I don't plant in the spring but in the late fall? I just... I was... It was unnatural. :)
About 15 years ago, when I moved to be in closer commuting distance to uni, the plan was raised bed gardening. I bought the posts to form two sides, since the other two sides were made out of the steep 6 foot terrace of earth. Then, b/c I was so cheap living as I did on a grad stud's/adjunct's salary, I carted bucketloads of soil from the rural residence to the new urban res 30 miles away, my car heaving with the load.
As I was digging it up, the neighbor watched and she thought I was either burying or digging up something, since who would imagine that I just wanted some dirt which, of course, I'd been tending for years with my compost pile[1] -- I was just too cheap to buy it.
The relevance of this story is only that I had no idea I had been special and unique reading Rodale's books which were available in the farm stores or were easily discovered once you'd lent your name to mailing lists. Or hell, just perused the back section ads of a Family Circle -- or whatever ladies' mags I read back then and checked the tear out card as indicating interest in the catalogs for whatever they were hawking.
Companion planting was just a cheap and pretty way to keep the pests away: there's nothing like a huge veggie garden surrounded by marigolds, narcissus. Where the vegetable rows alternated every third row with an insect/nematode/grub-killing or insect/nematode/grub-irritating plant.
Of course, I supplemented with granny's recipe which involved dish soap and Listerene and perhaps ammonia? Can't recall. And anyway, I don't know if this was organic. There was also a recipe for garden pest control that involved nicotine that I never tried, though gramps told me everyone swore by it. ISTR, it has something to do with saving cigarette butts in coffee cans in order to create some kind of sticky nicotine concoction that you could spray around to repell the pests. I never tried as I think I read that nasturtiums contained the nicotine that irritated garden pests.
There was the infamous other pest, Chuck, with whom the wasband had an ever-present war that might be the stuff of Chevy Chase flick like Funny Farm.
Which, funny, reminds of some prints I purchased to decorate the kitchen. I can't remember where I bought them suffice it to say that it couldn't have been in a store as I can remember the very first time I purchased some wall art, and it was much later. The prints were probably one of those things you obtained by buying so many cans of Del Monte vegetables, saving the labels and sending them in with postage and handling in order to obtain something 'free.' Anyway, I liked the look of them, so I purchased the vegetables, saved the labels, and sent in my P&H. One day, after years of companion planting, I was canning pickles and watched as the steam rose out of the blue black enamel canning pot. It was tinged with yellow from the tumeric in the juice that had dripped down the sides of the jars. The yellowsteam swirled to that space above the cupboards where my prints hung and I worried if they'd be damaged. As I watched, I noticed, after years!, that the images on the prints were symbolizing companion planting: tomato w/ basil, carrots w/onion, corn w/ beans, strawberry w/ spinach.
I had been sitting my ass in the grass every spring, with my book on companion planting and a pad of graph paper, drawing out my elaborate designs on my 50x100 plot -- planning how I'd companion plant that year. The whole point was to envision it as I was hoping to see it as I stood at the kitchen sink, watching the sun set over the pig farm built into a hill in the distance -- because in the foreground of the view framed by my window, would be a garden cheerfully surround by huge marigolds that would grow tall and gangly, dripping with orange red yellow blossoms, the narcissus and chrysanthemums and alyssum dividing up the veggie rows, and the entire back row of the garden a mass of sunflowers (for their seed) and four-o-clocks.
I liked the orderliness of it, the essential planning, drawing out the various veggies into rows as might be seen from above, tearing out sheets of graph paper, upon which the drawn garden I'd spoiled with a slip of the pencil into a plot of cucumber not quite as *right* as I wanted it to look. I'd rip the sheets out, disappointed with whatever I'd done to mar the ideal I'd set for that garden. And there'd I'd be with a pile of crumpled paper until a rain storm formed and chased me into the house. Inside, I'd finish, contemplating: should I try corn with onion -- ok, but what goes next to the onion after that, carrot? but Then carrot might end up next the dill, which isn't good. ^%&@) And if I put the nasturtiums near tomatoes, cabbage, and cucumbers I'll have to worry about where to put radish and cauli b/c they don't mix with nasturitums! frustrating!
But it was a joy nonetheless and it wouldn't occur to me to give it up. In the same way I wouldn't give up the frustrations involved in refinishing and building furniture, described in Speaking in Tungs, http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/19/speaking-in-tungs/
Which was really my way of explaining Aristotle as Doss recently did. :)
I don't know what all this is supposed to mean, just one of those reveries I got into prompted by the irritant of Pollan's text. I am not sure what I mean by that. Perhaps I am bothered by the whoop-de-doo made of what doesn't have to be and wasn't something I experienced as whoop-de-doo. It just was.
This may be the result of a generational gap, though Pollan is older than I.
In the other post where I was annoyed by Pollan's isistence that to eat lettuce is to engage in something that evokes our primal past, I was annoyed because of the insistence: this is what happens when we eat lettuce.
really now.
That struck me as me writing about all of the above and then saying, "This is what we experience when vegetable gardening."
really now.
No. It's not. It is what I experienced, and that experiencing is informed by all kinds of social factors, including reading books ordered from Rodale press or listening to gramps. Eating lettuces is a relatively new thing -- or at least a new thing after not being much a part of the diet until . Salads like those described by Pollan are recent to the Anglo-Am diet. They were introduced by a vegetarian in England, John Evelyn, who wrote about growing greens and how to eat them in Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets.
From, http://www.cheftalk.com/content/display.cfm?articleid=78:
"Why, we have to ask, did the author John Evelyn inflict this on his readers? Because not one of his readers was ready to try a salad. Everyone agreed with the wisdom of the ages: civilized people just didn't eat salads. They ate meat and grains. Raw greens were for animals and savages. For the civilized, they offered no nutrition. Besides, they made you sick to the stomach when they rotted in your gut, just like they rotted on the compost heap."
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad
But more later. The neighborhood art show and food festival is hollerin' "Shag get away from the computer and look at Art while eating a hot sausage sandwich slathered with greasy peppers and onions!"
:)
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)