Book a week: week 4: Michael Pollan's Second Nature

This is Michael Pollan fifteen years before The Omnivore's Dilemma, and his topic is both smaller and larger here.  It is the story of one garden, "a gardener's education" as the subtitle puts it; it's also the story of the entire history of humankind's interactions with and struggles to find a place in nature. Pollan's argument is that culture versus nature is a false dichotomy; nature and human culture are inextricably linked, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.  This isn't an especially radical idea (I remember writing a paper arguing pretty much the same thing for a science class my freshman year of college), but in Pollan's hands it is always smart and often fascinating and takes some unexpected turns (as when he rather abruptly launches into a comparison between "the wilderness ethic" and free market capitalism--blind faith in nature and blind faith in the market with the belief that any human interference into either can only cause harm).

Second Nature is ostensibly about Pollan's experiences gardening on his land, an old dairy farm in Connecticut.  I expected more of a straightforward narrative--a relatively linear story, perhaps with bumbling first attempts and beginner's mistakes giving way to confidence and gardening wisdom.  Instead, Pollan's gardening anecdotes exist here as pegs on which  to hang lengthy philosophical musings.  At one point he describes the process of planting a tree on his property.  "Digging the hole took the better part of a day, but, taking frequent rests as I did, I had plenty of time to lean on my shovel and muse," he writes, giving an analogy that so perfectly describes the narrative structure of the book that I think it must surely have been an intentional one.  As such, it took me awhile to get into it. I came to appreciate the musings, but for awhile I was longing for more tales of battle with woodchucks (involving rotten eggs, dead animals, and, eventually, gasoline) and less philosophy.

Pollan argues compellingly that the garden and gardeners have much to teach us about how to live with nature without destroying it.  He is very down on Thoreau and the notion that humans have no right to alter nature for our own purposes at all and argues that this idea that our only choices are to conquer nature or to leave it alone altogether are both wrong (what does "nature" look like without human intervention?  How can we disentangle culture from nature when the two have been together for so many millenia?) and useless.

"All or nothing," says the wilderness ethic, and in fact we've ended up with a landscape in America that conforms to that injunction remarkably well. Thanks to exactly this kind of either/or thinking, Americans have done an admirable job of drawing lines around certain sacred areas (we did invent the wilderness area) and a terrible job of managing the rest of our land. The reason is not hard to find: the only environmental ethic we have has nothing to useful to say about those areas outside the line. Once a landscape is no longer "virgin" it is typically written off as fallen, lost to nature, irredeemable.