Michael Pollan's Second Nature - A Gardener's Education

Dwells on the sterile opposition in modern American culture of Nature on the one hand and culture on the other, and never the twain shall meet.  Which leads to such wasteful travesties as the story of Cathedral Pines, a (partially human-engendered) dense stand of 200-year-old white pines at Cornwall, Connecticut; when most were knocked down by a devastating storm (tornado?) and some argued to salvage the valuable lumber, some to clean the place up, or replant, or leave it alone, the owner (The Nature Conservancy) decreed that all was to be left to “nature” (in this case, weeds and brambles).  More degradation brought on ourselves by the power of the current metaphor.

Pollan wants a new “garden” metaphor for nature, i.e. we do have a place in the system.

To our Puritan/pioneer forebearers, the tree/forest was satanic wilderness.  To the English Enlightenment (after Europe lost most of its trees) it changed.  And for post-Thoreau America it continues so, worship of nature as opposed to humankind.  Just as opposed as it had been for the Puritans, only in the opposite extreme, i.e. we bad, nature good rather than vice versa.  Axe and saw and development are now demons; former heroes fallen low.

p. 73.  “Faced with the question of what to do with the land, we always seem to come up with the same crude alternatives:  to virtually subdue it in the name of “progress”, or to place it strictly off-limits in “wilderness areas”, hallowed places we go seeking an antidote to city life.”

In his own city-bred naivete, Michael Pollan had to learn the hard way about weeds and woodchucks.

Makes a good point of a common mistake on the part of the half-educated:  confusing rampant exotics and weeds for “nature” or “wilderness”.

Likes straight lines in gardens, and other such anathemas.  I ??  (Hooray—a blow struck against that hateful “nouveau-natural” habit of designing subdivisions on winding streets on perfectly flat ground.)

Large, slow-growing, quality trees have a way of being planted in eras of confidence and optimism about the future.  In uncertain, pinched times we content ourselves with smallness and instant gratification.

p. 188  “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 . . . and a terrible job of managing the rest of the land.  The reason is not hard to find:  the only environmental ethic we have has nothing 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.  We hand it over to the jurisdiction of that other sacrosanct American ethic:  laissez-faire economics . . . .  Indeed the wilderness ethic and laissez-faire economics, antithetical as they might at first appear, are really mirror images of one another.  Each proposes a quasi-divine force—what’s best for a place . . . worshippers of either share a deep, Puritan distrust of man, taking it on faith that human tinkering with the natural or economic order can only pervert it.

Essentially, we have divided our country in two, the kingdom of wilderness, which rules about 8% of America’s land, and the kingdom of the market, which rules the rest.  Perhaps we should be grateful for secure borders.  But what do those of who care about nature do when we’re on the marked side, which is most of the time?  How do we behave?  What are our goals?  . . . No, the wilderness ethic won’t be of much help over here.  Its politics are bound to be hopelessly romantic . . . or nihilistic . . .

This old idea may have taught us how to worship nature, but it didn’t tell us how to live with her.  It told us more than we needed to know about virginity and rape, and almost nothing about marriage.  The metaphor of divine nature can admit only two roles for man:  as worshipper (the naturalist’s role) or temple destroyer (the developer’s).”

Goes on to propose a “garden ethic” in our dealings with nature, given that any view of nature is going to be filtered by the metaphor of the time (and the person) anyway.