_Botany of Desire_ notes

Many shorter chapters would have been more engaging.

Xerces Society.

We've also coevolved with infectious agents? Or predators? Behaviorally, yes: choice of habitat, cats to catch rats which carry diseases, avoiding mosquitoes.

P. 7: "If you could read the genome of the dog like a book, you would learn a great deal about who we are and what makes us tick. We don't ordinarily give plants as much credit as animals, but the same would be true of the genetic books of the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato. . . . plants have, at the same time, been going about the business of remaking us."

P. 8: "My premise is that these human desires form a part of natural history in the same way the hummingbird's love of red does, or the ant's taste for the aphid's honeydew." Words for pink in every language. "I don't think we can begin to understand beauty's gravitational pull without first understanding the flower," Beauty and sexual reproduction are inseparable.

P. 9 : 'Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have, have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say that one of us is the more "advanced" really depends on how you define that term, on what "advances" you value.' Even truer of microrganisms, or older technologies that aren't less sophisticated, but simply solve different problems. "we value abilities such as consciousness, toolmaking, and language, if only because these have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey thus far." Part of the reason climate change and wildfires are hard is that we value controlling nature, and we must now allow nature to contol us. _Radical Indigenism_: in some ways, native technologies are more sophisticated and better adapted to new challenges.

P. 13: "the Mohawks and Delawares had left their marks on the Ohio wilderness long before John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) showed up and began planting apple trees." Not to mention Ice Age extinctions. "all of nature is now in the process of being domesticated" -- or dtiven to extinction. '"Domestic" implies that these species have 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.' More problematically, we think of ourselves as outside of nature.

p. 21: 'Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible—"sour enough," Thoreau once wrote, "to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream." Thoreau claimed to like the taste of such apples, but most of his countrymen judged them good for little but hard cider—and hard cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until Prohibition.'

P. 30: "Anthropologists have found that cultures vary enormously in their liking for bitter, sour, and salty flavors, but a taste for sweetness appears to be universal."

P. 31: "Since the time of the New England Puritans, apples have symbolized, and contributed to, a settled and productive landscape." Ghost-towns with apple orchards, VT and NH.

Seedless grapes at Sutter County Historical Museum. P. 57: "Befitting the American success story, the botany of the apple—the fact that the one thing it won't do is come true from seed—meant that its history would be a history of heroic individuals, rather than groups or types or lines. There is, or at least there was, a single Golden Delicious tree,"

P. 48: apple, like cannabis, is about intoxication. Sweetness is valued for fermentation, not in its own right. Pollan book about psilocybin more recently.

P. 50: "I imagine that pioneers struggling to get by in the wilderness regarded Appleseed as a welcome contrast gainer." What?

P. 51: "biological settlement of the West often went on beneath the notice of the settlers themselves, who brought along weed seeds in the cracks of their boot soles, grass seeds in the feed bags of their horses, and microbes in their blood and gut."

P. 55: "no other fruit in history has produced so many household names", except for grapes!

Apples chapter has little to do with theme of coevolution in the intro? Did apples change US history? Certainly US culture.

P. 64: "The best technology in the world can't create a new gene or re-create one that's been lost." Transfer genes from other species.

P. 65: "There can be no civilization without wildness"

P. 73: "Flowers have always had important things to teach us about time."

Why are flowers beautiful? = Why so many words for pink?

P. 75: "the flowering garden is a place you immediately sense is thick with information, thick as a metropolis, in fact. It's an oddly sociable, public sort of place, in which species seem eager to give one another the time of day; they dress up, flirt, flit, visit. By comparison, the surrounding forests and fields are much sleepier boroughs," Ignores birdsong, ants, etc.

P. 78: "flowers do choose their mates on the basis of health, using the bees as their proxies."

P. 79: "Honeybees favor the radial symmetry of daisies and clover and sunflowers, while bumblebees prefer the bilateral symmetry of orchids, peas, and foxgloves." Bilaterally symmetric flowers may go extinct.

P. 80: "And then into this great dance of plants and pollinators step us, " Step WE!

P. 81: "the rose, the orchid, and the tulip are capable of prodigies, reinventing themselves again and again to suit every change in the aesthetic or political weather." Just so apples.

Dogs, horses and cats, like tulips and apples, are highly mutable. Do we prize mutability for its own sake, or because it permits achievement of desired result?

Tulip virus impeded ability to widely propagate the varieties due to fewer offsets, despite fanciers' wishes to do so. Maybe seeds were infected and would also have worked?

Does mutability ALWAYS prevent predictable seed propagation in absence of controlled, greenhouse pollination?

P. 92: "where else in nature has a disease rendered a living thing more lovely?" As long as unnatural thinness is considered attractive, junkies will be fashion models and some sick people will be thought fit. "beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful."

P. 97: "This is what is meant by ecstasy: to be taken out of ourselves."

Apollonian vs. Dionysian flowers seems forced. Pollan tries too hard to convince himself that tulips are beautiful. They lend color and are easy to grow. They provide a contrast to beautiful foliage.

P. 100: "It was as if the whole grid of flowers and, by extension, the grid of the city itself had been put in doubt by that one ecstatic, wayward pulse of life." NYC is overflowing with wayward pulses of life.

P. 101: "the autumn of 1635 marked a turning point. That's when the trade in actual bulbs gave way to the trade in promissory notes" A tulip stock exchange.

P. 104: "the ancient festivals of Dionysus would end in destruction and mutilation and the sacrifice of the god himself." Burning Man.

P. 105: "the abiding power of the tulip, as well as, perhaps, to the nature of beauty. The tulip is a flower that draws some of the most exquisite lines in nature and then, in spasms of extravagance, blithely oversteps them." Tulips are convenient, not powerful. Speculation occurred because they were newly introduced.

P. 106: "This prefloriferous world was a slower, simpler, sleepier world than our own. Evolution proceeded more slowly, there being so much less sex, and what sex there was took place among close-by and closely related plants." Globalization is akin. "The desires of other creatures became paramount in the evolution of plants, for the simple reason that the plants that succeeded at gratifying those desires wound up with more offspring. Beauty had emerged as a survival strategy." Beauty involves aesthetics, which humans invented.

P. 110: "There it is, right in the middle of the word intoxication, hidden in plain sight: toxic."

P. 111: "While we animals were busy nailing down things like locomotion and consciousness, the plants, without ever lifting a finger or giving it a thought, acquired an array of extraordinary and occasionally diabolical powers by discovering how to synthesize remarkably complicated molecules." Dude, locomotion needed new molecules! "Photosensitizers present in species such as the wild parsnip cause the animals that eat it to burn in the sun; chromosomes exposed to these compounds spontaneously mutate when exposed to ultraviolet light." Don't need photosensitizers to get skin cancer.

P. 114: "we may someday come to regard the contemporary garden of vegetables and flowers as a place almost Victorian in its repressions and elisions." They are simply child-safe.

P. 120: Are there still plants whose cultivation is illegal? Coca?

P. 122: "It stands as one of the richer ironies of the drug war that the creation of a powerful new taboo against marijuana led directly to the creation of a powerful new plant. . . this was what the best gardeners of my generation had been doing all these years: they had been underground, perfecting cannabis."

P. 125: "the rapid emergence of a domestic marijuana industry represents a triumph of protectionism."

p. 126: "Until the early 1980s, almost all the marijuana grown in America was grown outdoors: in the hills of California's Humboldt County, in the cornfields of the farm belt (cannabis and corn thrive under similar conditions)," before legalization depopulated those counties.

P. 127: "Most of the hybridizing needed to adapt cannabis to indoor conditions was done in the early 1980s by amateurs working in the Pacific Northwest. Cultivars with a high proportion of indica genes performed especially well indoors, it was found, and these were further bred and selected for small stature, high yield, early flowering, and increased potency. No one knew just what this plant was capable of, but by the end of the decade there were sativa X indica hybrids yielding flowers big as fists on dwarf plants no higher than your knee. During this period, cannabis genetics improved to the point where it was no longer unusual to find sinsemilla with concentrations of THC, marijuana's principal psychoactive compound, as high as 15 percent. (Before the crackdown on marijuana growers, THC levels in ordinary marijuana ranged from 2 to 3 percent . . . for sinsemilla, 5 to 8 percent.) Nowadays THC levels upward of 20 percent are not unheard of."

P. 129: "A Sea of Green garden consisting of a hundred clones, grown under a pair of thousand-watt lights in a space no bigger than a pool table, will yield three pounds of sinsemilla in two months' time."

P. 133: "Activities as different as meditation, fasting, exercise, amusement park rides, horror movies, extreme sports, sensory or sleep deprivation, chanting, music, eating spicy foods, and taking extreme risks of all kinds have the power to change the texture of our mental experience to one degree or another. We may eventually discover that what psychoactive plants do to the brain closely resembles, at a biochemical level, the effects of these other activities." Music; simply going outside. Also sugar, which is a drug.

_Reefer Madness_ dates to 1936.

P. 137: "No entheogenic plant or fungus ever set out to make molecules for the express purpose of inspiring visions in humans—combating pests is the far more likely motive." Nor were the antecedents of flowers aimed at pollinators, which did not exist! "Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notion of the imagination as a mental faculty that "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create," an idea whose reverberations in Western culture haven't yet been stilled, simply cannot be understood without reference to the change in consciousness wrought by opium." Means simply that concentration doe not foster creativity; mental blankness does.

P. 138: "Not just romantic poetry, but modernism, surrealism, cubism, and jazz have all been nourished by Coleridge's idea of the transforming imagination—and that idea in turn was nourished by a psychoactive plant." Meditation is as effective as drugs and does not lead to addiction.

P. 140: l find the notion that an invention like the wheel is a "meme" just as a joke is particularly ridiculous.

P. 142: Andrew Weil: "The very same mental state, minus the "physiological noise" of the drug itself, can be triggered in other ways, such as meditation or breathing exercises."

P. 145: "The sensation of pain is, curiously, one of the hardest to summon from memory." See also _Thinking Fast and Slow_.

P. 147: "Cannabis was one of the earliest plants to be domesticated (probably for fiber first, then later as a drug); it has been coevolving with humankind for more than ten thousand years, to the point where the aboriginal form of the plant may no longer exist."

P. 150: "Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn't quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember." Borges , _Fuentes the Memorious_?

P. 151: "THC is far stronger and more persistent than anandamide, which, like most neurotransmitters, is designed to break down very soon after its release." All IPC needs volatile messages, notably RNAs. "moking marijuana may overstimulate the brain's built-in forgetting faculty, exaggerating its normal operations."

P. 152: "it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment,"

P. 153: '"Cheerfulness, the good conscience, the joyful deed, confidence in the future—all of them depend . . . on one's being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember."' -- Nietzsche Nietzschean ideas similar to Czent-Mihaily "What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence—a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer. . . . It is a state that depends for its effect on losing oneself in the moment, usually by training a powerful, depthless concentration on One Big Thing. (Or, in the Eastern tradition, One Big Nothing.)" The most common misconception about Eastern religions!

P. 154: 'Boethius, the sixth-century Neoplatonist, said the goal of our spiritual striving was "to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come."' Eliot: "a lifetime present in every moment" Kahneman System 1:"My lawyer father, once complimented on his ability to see ahead three or four moves in a negotiation, explained that the reason he liked to jump to conclusions was so he could get there early and rest. . . .Seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, or tasting things as they "really are" is always difficult if not impossible (in part because doing so would overwhelm us, as George Eliot understood), so we perceive each multisensory moment through a protective screen of ideas, past experiences, or expectations."

P. 160: "The notion that spirit might turn out in some sense to be matter (and plant matter, no less!) is a threat to our sense of separateness and godliness." Compare prevalent view of researchers that AIs cannot be conscious w/o a body.

P. 167: "In 1999 a freak December windstorm, more powerful than any Europeans could remember, laid waste to many of André Lenôtre's centuries-old plantings at Versailles, crumpling in a matter of seconds that garden's perfect geometries—perhaps as potent an image of human mastery as we have." Hoover Dam is a more potent image. Gardens, like other Western systems, are designed for econic yield, not resilience.

P. 168: "Species that never cross in the wild will freely hybridize on land cleared by people." Why apples and peppers aren't "true to seed." Only recently has importance of hybrids in evolution been understood: Denisovans.

P. 170: "a potato called "NewLeaf" that has been genetically engineered (by the Monsanto corporation) to produce its own insecticide. This it does in every cell of every leaf, stem, flower, root, and—this is the unsettling part—every spud." So does broccoli, per Bruce Ames of Stanford.

P. 173: "The small print on the label also brought the disconcerting news that my potato plants were themselves registered as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Administration" Per Bruce Ames, plants that require little pesticides contain similar natural chemicals.

P. 175: "Yet the Andean potato farm represented an intricate ordering of nature that, unlike Versailles in 1999, say, or Ireland in 1845, can withstand virtually anything nature is apt to throw at it." Global warming willl wipe-out many alpine species since they can only retreat so far uphill, and jumping to other mountains is hard.

P. 176: "I've read that plant breeders have developed a luminescent tobacco plant by inserting a gene from a firefly. I've yet to read why they would do this, except perhaps to prove it could be done: a demonstration of power." Students insert genes in lab exercises. Fluorescence is trivial to test.

P 177: "unrelated species in nature cannot be crossed" But they often exchange genetic material or synthesize proteins with genomic effects. "Nature has always exercised a kind of veto over what culture can do with a potato. Until now. The NewLeaf is the first potato to override that veto." First intentionally. 'Monsanto likes to depict genetic engineering as just one more chapter in the ancient history of human modifications of nature, a story going back to the discovery of fermentation. The company defines the word biotechnology so broadly as to take in the brewing of beer, cheese making, and selective breeding: all are "technologies" that involve the manipulation of life-forms.' I agree.

P. 178: "That game is the one Darwin called "artificial selection," and its rules have never been any different from the rules that govern natural selection." "For the first time, breeders can bring qualities at will from anywhere in nature into the genome of a plant: from fireflies (the quality of luminescence), from flounders (frost tolerance), from viruses (disease resistance), and, in the case of my potatoes, from the soil bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis. Never in a million years of natural or artificial selection would these species have proposed those qualities." Mammalian genomed contain bacterial sequences!

P. 181: "a diet of potatoes supplemented with cow's milk was nutritionally complete." Confirmed by Warsaw Ghetto in WWII.

P. 182: "the potato also allowed the countryside to feed northern Europe's growing and industrializing cities. Europe's center of political gravity had always been anchored firmly in the hot, sunny south, where wheat grew reliably; without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north."

P. 190: "the reliability or safety of one genetically modified plant doesn't necessarily guarantee the reliability or safety of the next." The questions of safety and viability make no sense outside a particular environment for either GMO or natural variants. Consider the harm done by introduced foreign species.

P. 192: "Harmful as chemical pollution can be, it eventually disperses and fades," Not metals. "Once a transgene introduces a new weed or a resistant pest into the environment, it can't very well be cleaned up: it will already have become part of nature." Unless the gene needs to be activated.

P. 193: "new Bt crops add so much Bt toxin to the environment on such a continuous basis that the target pests will evolve resistance to it" Also true if organic farming were ubiquitous!

P. 195: "it was precisely this attitude toward the future that encouraged us to build nuclear power plants before anybody had figured out what to do with the waste—a bridge we now badly need to cross but find we still don't have any idea how to." How to is known, but political will is lacking.

Blue River Technology

p. 200: "Set against current practices, genetically modified potatoes represent a more sustainable way of growing food."

P. 201: "Of course, what the eye failed to see was a more complex, less human order—the order, that is, of an ecosystem, one that is not so much imposed by the farmer as it is nourished and tweaked by him." And presumably irrigated? Notably manure enriches the microbiome as well as NPK.

P. 202: "On the drive back to Boise, I thought about why Mike Heath's farm remains the exception, both in Idaho and elsewhere. Here was a genuinely new paradigm—a biological paradigm." No! a genuinely old one, more like Inca. East German organic farmer: "I farm like my grandfather, not like my father."

P. 203: "it's so much easier for the farmer to buy prepackaged solutions from big companies." High Ground Organics crop fauled due to a bad decision.

P. 206: "Like the agricultural practice that goes by that name, this one too—the monoculture of global taste—is about uniformity and control. Indeed, the monocultures of the field and the monocultures of our global economy nourish each other in crucial ways." Is societal monoculture also a vulnerability? Yes, because of lost knowledge.

p. 207: "Ireland's was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly. Not only did the agriculture and diet of the Irish come to depend utterly on the potato, but they depended almost completely on one kind of potato: the Lumper."

P. 209: "viable seeds will come not from plants but from corporations." FAIF for plants. "Yet compared to the rest of the economy, farming has largely resisted the trend toward centralization and corporate control. Even today, when only a handful of big companies are left standing in most American industries, there are still some two million farmers." Corporate organic farming the greatest irony.

P. 212: "Chances are I've eaten plenty of NewLeafs already, at McDonald's or in bags of Frito-Lay chips, though without a label, there's no way of knowing for sure." Not me!

P. 218: "We too cast unconscious evolutionary votes every time we reach for the most symmetrical flower or the longest french fry." We cast a conscious vote every time we reach for an odd organic one. "genetic engineering is probably no more wicked than grafting,"