A Plant's-Eye View

Goal: After this lesson you can explain the plant's-eye-view reframe and why it changes how you see these commodities. Subject: English Language Arts | Run time: about 6 minutes

Quick recall

Last time we read the season's stories. Two quick questions. One: what do the origin myths share beneath their forms? The plant gives a gift and asks something in return (Lebot et al., 1992). Two: how is sugar's literature different? It is first-person witness testimony, not myth (Equiano, 1789).

Why this matters

Here is a flip that can rearrange your whole sense of this season. We have been telling the story as if humans found these plants and used them. The writer Michael Pollan asks: what if the plants have been using us (Pollan, 2001)?

The idea

Pollan's idea, in his book The Botany of Desire, is simple and strange. A plant cannot move, so to spread across the world it has to make itself wanted (Pollan, 2001). The plants that figured out how to satisfy a human desire, for sweetness, for a lift, for calm, got something priceless in return: humans to plant them, protect them, and carry them across oceans. From the plant's point of view, coffee did not get enslaved by people. Coffee got people to spread it to 70 countries. Look back at the season through that lens. Sugar offered sweetness, and in exchange humans cleared whole islands to grow it. Coffee and tea and kava offered a change in how we feel, and in exchange we built ceremonies, economies, and empires around them. Cacao offered a taste the Maya called the food of the gods, and it rode that desire from Mesoamerica to the whole world. The plants are not just passive victims of human history. They are players in it, and our desires were their strategy. This is not an excuse for what people did to each other over these plants. The slavery and the biopiracy were human choices, and humans are responsible for them. But the plant's-eye view adds humility. It reminds us that we are tangled up with these species, that we need them as much as they need us, and that a little respect for the plant is also self-respect.

Picture it

Picture a coffee plant looking back at you across ten thousand years. From its point of view, it made a deal. It offered you a brighter morning, and in return you carried its children to every warm mountain on Earth and tended them with care. Who, exactly, domesticated whom?

Remember this

The fact to carry out: Pollan's plant's-eye view flips the story, asking how these plants used human desire to spread, which adds humility to how we see them (Pollan, 2001). We did not simply take these plants. We made a bargain with them, and the bargain is still running.

Quick check

Quick check. What is the core question of the plant's-eye view? Whether we domesticated the plants, or the plants used our desires to get us to spread them (Pollan, 2001).

Key Takeaways

• Michael Pollan's plant's-eye view asks how plants use human desire to spread, since they cannot move themselves (Pollan, 2001).
• The plants that satisfied a desire, for sweetness, energy, or calm, got humans to plant and spread them worldwide (Pollan, 2001).
• The reframe does not excuse human cruelty over these plants, but it adds humility about how tangled we are with them.
• We made a bargain with these species, and it is still running.

Sources

• Pollan, M. (2001). The botany of desire: A plant's-eye view of the world. Random House.