Hi everybody,

Perhaps by now folks are wondering why I'm bothering to post these somewhat
longish excerpts from Pollan's book to the list.  Those who are already
familiar with the book are likely well aware of just how delightful a work
it is.  Recall that the original mention of Pollan's book was in response
to Ted M.'s thinking about the term "unethical preservation," as used by
Chris Perley.  Pollan addresses many of the issues that Perley is involved
with in the NZ environmental arena.  In my opinion ("imho"), Pollan's
*Second Nature* is one of the most important books in environmental ethics
published in the last ten years.  Few authors get to the heart of our
ambiguous relationship with nature as well as Pollan does.  He writes with
great style, with great wit, and with great insight.  Plus I think he's
right--well, at least most of the time.  (I wouldn't follow his original
woodchuck control strategy.)  I encourage everyone here to rush out and buy
it, if you don't already own the book.  (How's *that* for an endorsement?)
:-)

Here's the conclusion to "Pollan and the Woodchuck" .  .  .  .

Jim T.

=============

Pollan writes:

	"Well, if fences are out of place in the American garden, where
exactly do gasoline fires fit in?  Fortunately, my brush with general
conflagration among the vegetables shocked me out of my Vietnam approach to
garden pests before I'd had a chance to defoliate my property or poison the
ground water.  But my fury at the woodchuck put me in touch with a few of
our darker attitudes toward nature: the way her intransigence can make us
crazy, and how willing we are to poison her in the single-minded pursuit of
some short-term objective.  You think you know better until you've been
beset by cabbage worms or aphids and then seen just how fast a shot of some
state-of-the-art petrochemical can wipe them out.  But after the firefight
I resolved to keep my head and think more in terms of containment than
victory."

 .  .  .
	"What was the right approach to pests in the garden?  How could I
halt the advance of Dudleytown [an abandoned and overgrown nineteenth
century settlement nearby] without turning my garden into a toxic waste
site?  I was beginning to see that these questions quickly led to larger
ones about how we choose to confront the natural landscape.  Domination or
acquiescence?  As developers or naturalists?  I no longer think the choice
is so obvious.

	"Domination, translated into suburban or rural terms, means lawn.
A few acres of Kentucky bluegrass arranged in a buffer zone between house
and landscape, a no-man's-land patrolled weekly with a rotary blade.  The
lawn holds great appeal, especially to Americans.  It looks sort of
natural--it's green; it grows--but in fact it represents a subjugation of
the forest as utter and complete as a parking lot.  Every species is
forcibly excluded from the landscape but one, and this is forbidden to grow
longer than the owner's little finger.  A lawn is nature under totalitarian
rule.

	"On the other side is acquiescence: the benign gaze of the
naturalist.  Certainly his ethic sounds nice and responsible, but have you
ever noticed that the naturalist never tells you where he lives?  Unless
you live in the city or a tent, the benign gaze is totally
impractical--sooner or later it leads to Dudleytown.

	"The trick, I realize now, is somehow to find a middle ground
between these two positions.  And that is what a garden is, or should be: a
midspace between Dudleytown and the parking lot, a place that admits of
both nature and human habitation.  But it is not, as I imagined, a
harmonious compromise between the two, nor is it stable; from what I can
see, it requires continual human intervention or else it will collapse.
The question for the gardener--and in a way it's a question for all of
us--is, What is the proper characteristic of that intervention?

	"Even my limited experience in the garden suggests that finding a
good answer to that question will involve a much more complicated set of
choices than the usual American alternatives, which seem to consist of
either raping the land or sealing it away in a preserve where no one can
touch it.  That the first approach is bankrupt goes without saying.  Yet,
right as it sounds, the second one may be a dead end too.  Gardening
quickly teaches you to distrust all such absolutes, to frame the questions
a little differently.  Must we *always* shrink before our own power in
nature?  We are one of only a handful of creatures with the capacity to
deliberately alter our environment.  To simply renounce that power--isn't
that in some sense to renounce our humanity?  *Our* nature?  And is that
nature any less real than the nature we seem to think exists only *out
there*?  The poet and critic Frederick Turner, in a *Harper's Magazine*
essay that seeks to break us of our habit of seeing nature and culture as
opposed, asks why it is we can't see ourselves, and what we make and do, as
part and parcel of nature.  He cites the reply of Shakespeare's Polixenes,
in *The Winter's Tale*, to Perdita, who spurns the hybridized flower
because it is 'unnatural':  'This is an art / Which does mend Nature --
change it rather; but / The art itself is nature.'

	"For the gardener, breaking free of the notion that art always
negates nature is liberating.  Fresh aesthetic prospects open up, of
course, but more to the point, a promising strategy against pests can begin
to take shape.  For starters, one can now reexamine the American taboo
against fences.  Fences may offend American ideas about democracy,
limitlessness, and the landscape's sanctity, but perhaps we need to
consider the possibility that their absence offends the idea of a garden.
For most of history people have been making gardens and most of their
gardens have been walled or fenced.  The word *garden* derives from the old
German word for enclosure, and the *O.E.D.'s* definition begins, 'An
enclosed piece of ground.  .  .  .' (Compare that to *Webster's*, which
makes no mention of the idea of enclosure.)  Writing in 1914, George
Washington Cable pointed out that 'a gard, yard, garth, garden, used to
mean an enclosure, a close, and implied a privacy to its owner superior to
any he enjoyed outside of it.  .  .  .  Our public spirit and our
imperturbability are flattered by {fencelessness}, but our gardens .  .  .
have become American by ceasing to be gardens.'  The long history of
gardens, which traverses so many different cultures, suggests that perhaps
there is something about erecting a wall against the landscape on one side
and society's gaze on the other.  We number the beaver damn among nature's
creations; why not also the garden wall?"

***
	"The time had come for me to put up a fence.  I went with five feet
of galvanized steel mesh stretched across posts that had been treated with
arsenic to resist rot and then sunk three feet into the earth.  The bottom
edge of the fence runs a foot underground, to deter the tunnelers.  It
doesn't look at all bad, and even though the wire mesh is invisible at a
distance, when I close the garden gate behind me I feel as though I've
entered a privileged space.

	"But much more important is the fact that, so far, the woodchuck
respects the fence; the cabbages have reached softball size unmolested.
The woodchuck doesn't appear to have abandoned his burrow, however, and I
picture him jealously pacing the garden perimeter at dawn, scheming,
looking for an angle.  I remain on alert.

	"Now, four feet of fence won't impede a doe with snap beans on her
mind, but I can take care of her, too.  Six inches above the top of the
fence, I'll string a wire that pulses every three seconds with a hundred
volts of electric current.  I've been told to smear the wire with peanut
butter in order to introduce the deer to the unprecedented and memorable
sensation of electric shock, after which they should be gone for good.  The
electricity will run off a solar panel that sits atop one of the posts,
reaching toward the sun like some gigantic hight-tech blossom.  This last
touch strikes me as a nice bit of jujitsu, turning nature's power against a
few of her own."

	"Intervening against the insects is not quite so straightforward,
but here, too, there may be an art that 'itself is nature.'  The key to
eliminating an insect from the garden is knowledge: about its babits,
preferences, and vulnerabilities.  Most chemical pesticides represent a
very crude form of knowledge about insects: that, for example, a powerful
chemical such as malathion somehow cripples the nervous systems of most
organisms, so a little of the stuff should kill bugs but not (presumably)
any bigger creatures.  Even though this knowledge has been produced by Homo
sapiens wearing lab coats, it is not nearly as sophisticated or precise as
the knowledge a ladybug, say, possesses on the subject of aphids.  The
ladybug is not smart, but she knows one thing exceedingly well: how to
catch forty or fifty aphids every day without hurting anybody else.  If you
think of evolution as a three-and-a-half-billion-year-long laboratory
experiment, and the gene pool as the store of information accumulated
during the course of that experiment, you begin to appreciate that nature
has far more extensive knowledge about her operations than we do.  The
trick is to put her knowledge to our purpose in the garden."

.  .  .
	"Biological controls won't solve every pest problem--there are
still too few of them, for one thing.  But the approach holds promise, and
suggests what can be accomplished when we learn to exploit nature's
self-knowledge, and stop thinking that our art and technology as being
necessarily opposed to nature.  For how are we to characterize milky spore
disease as a form of human intervention in the landscape?  Is it
technological, or natural?  The categories are no longer much help, at
least in the garden.

	"I won't know for a while whether I've completely solved my pest
problem.  But, puttering in my newly fenced garden, watching the mantises
standing sentry on the tops of my tomatoes and the ladybugs running
search-and-destroy missions among the eggplants, I'm starting to feel a lot
more relaxed about it.  Though Dudleytown remains over the next hill, I
know I can still stall its advance as long as I continue to put my thought
and sweat into this patch of land.  I still have much to learn, and there
are going to be setbacks, I'm sure; gardening is not a once-and-for-all
thing.  Yet I think I've drawn a workable border between me and the forest.
Might it prove to be a Maginot Line?  That's possible, but I think
unlikely.  Because it doesn't depend on technological invincibility.  Nor
does it depend on the benignity of nature.  It depends on me acting like a
sane and civilized human, which is to say, as a creature whose nature it is
to remake his surroundings, and whose culture can guide him on questions of
aesthetics and ethics.  What I'm making here is a middle ground between
nature and culture, a place that is at once of nature and unapologetically
set against it; what I'm making is a garden."

--Michael Pollan, *Second Nature: A Gardener's Education*, NY: Dell, 1991,
pp. 53-64.

Jim T.

p.s. mindful of fair use issues, I once again urge everyone to rush out and
buy a copy for yourself.  Only $12.55 US at amazon.com (paperback).  Check
out the purchaser reviews once you get there--I just found out about that
first one myself!  :-)  jt



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