The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the WorldRandom House Publishing Group, 12.06.2001 - 304 Seiten The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in America In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam. Three and a half centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant—though this time the obsessions revolves around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visual beauty of the tulip. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin? In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankinds’s most basic yearnings—and by doing so made themselves indispensable. For, just as we’ve benefited from these plants, the plants, in the grand co-evolutionary scheme that Pollan evokes so brilliantly, have done well by us. The sweetness of apples, for example, induced the early Americans to spread the species, giving the tree a whole new continent in which to blossom. So who is really domesticating whom? Weaving fascinating anecdotes and accessible science into gorgeous prose, Pollan takes us on an absorbing journey that will change the way we think about our place in nature. |
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... John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) showed up and began planting apple trees. Yet even the dream of such a space has become hard to sustain in a time of global warming, ozone holes, and technologies that allow us to modify life at the ...
... John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) showed up and began planting apple trees. Yet even the dream of such a space has become hard to sustain in a time of global warming, ozone holes, and technologies that allow us to modify life at the ...
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... Johnny Appleseed. Hoping to render our relationships with these four species in all their complexity, I look at them, by turns, through a variety of lenses: social and natural history, science, journalism, biography, mythology ...
... Johnny Appleseed. Hoping to render our relationships with these four species in all their complexity, I look at them, by turns, through a variety of lenses: social and natural history, science, journalism, biography, mythology ...
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... John Chapman, already well known to people in Ohio by his nickname: Johnny Appleseed. He was on his way to Marietta, where the Muskingum River pokes a big hole into the Ohio's northern bank, pointing straight into the heart of the ...
... John Chapman, already well known to people in Ohio by his nickname: Johnny Appleseed. He was on his way to Marietta, where the Muskingum River pokes a big hole into the Ohio's northern bank, pointing straight into the heart of the ...
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... John Chapman is thought to have set foot in the Northwest Territory for the first time. I'd come here to look for him, or at least that's what I thought I was doing. I wanted to find out what I could about the “real” Johnny Appleseed ...
... John Chapman is thought to have set foot in the Northwest Territory for the first time. I'd come here to look for him, or at least that's what I thought I was doing. I wanted to find out what I could about the “real” Johnny Appleseed ...
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... John Chapman, a man who by now has been composted beneath a deep sift of myth and legend and wishful thinking. I did find another Johnny Appleseed, however, as well as another apple, both of which had been lost. Actually, the apples and ...
... John Chapman, a man who by now has been composted beneath a deep sift of myth and legend and wishful thinking. I did find another Johnny Appleseed, however, as well as another apple, both of which had been lost. Actually, the apples and ...
Inhalt
Beauty Plant The Tulip | |
Intoxication Plant Marijuana | |
Control Plant The Potato | |
Epilogue | |
Acknowledgments | |
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agriculture American animals Apollonian apple trees apple’s artificial selection beauty bees bloom brain bulb called cannabinoid cannabis century chemical cider civilization clones color Colorado potato beetle consciousness crop culture Dionysian Dionysus discovered domesticated drug Dutch evolutionary experience fact farm farmers field flowers Forsline Forsyth frontier fruit garden genes genetic engineering genetically modified green grow growers happened hashish Heath human desire hybrids imagination indica insects intoxication John Chapman Johnny Appleseed landscape least look magic marijuana McDonald’s Mechoulam memes metaphor MICHAEL POLLAN Mike Heath monoculture Monsanto natural selection nature’s never NewLeafs Ohio one’s orchard peony pesticide petals pollen potato probably psychoactive plants Queen of Night Raphael Mechoulam rose Russet Burbanks scientists seedling seeds Semper Augustus sense sexual simply sinsemilla soil species spuds Steve Young story sweetness taste there’s things tulip tulipomania turn wild apples wilderness