I've been reading a lot of nonfiction lately. A fair bit of it food-related, which isn't surprising. I think I'm ready to dive back into fiction for a change, though; in some ways, it's decidedly less disturbing.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Krakauer's first-person account of the 1996 disaster atop Mount Everest. Aside from the general terrors accompanying the trip - frostbite, seracs1, all manner of hypoxia-induced problems - there's the storm that strands several mountaineers on top of the world. Which, as one might imagine, is generally fatal. One man - Beck Weathers - manages to survive, long after being thought dead, though not without horrific frostbite and multiple amputations. Another, mountaineering guide Rob Hall, slowly freezes to death, in radio contact but beyond rescue, on the very top of the mountain. It takes more than a full day, and it's gut-wrenching to read.
What disturbs me the most isn't any of this, perhaps because I harbor no visions of dragging myself to Everest's peak. What gets me is the unreliability of Krakauer's account, a fact he is more than careful to point out. He makes this a central focus of the book, telling his story and later dissecting it with the actual facts. In the instance with the deepest ramifications, he confuses two hikers - two men hardly alike in any way - and gives rise to a confusing explanation as to how one died atop the mountain. Other clues seem to back it up, but fall apart under closer inspection. It isn't until much later that the mistake is realized, through a chance comment in conversation, and Krakauer is left to try to make amends.
He doesn't succeed, not entirely. His writings - he's a journalist, and his expedition was funded in exchange for his story - make enemies. The truth, the actual events on the mountaintop, sits beyond reach, and speculation takes the place of the memories of the dead. At times, it swerves closer to fiction, as the line between memory and imagination becomes blurred. Fuzzy. Perforated.
Not being a mountaineer, it's hard to take too much from Krakauer's account, but I suspect the same is true for climbers, too. It's a snapshot, slightly out of focus, of a brief period when nature overwhelmed a group of alpinists, some well-prepared, some not. Bad luck played a key factor, as did a growing cascade of decisions that seem poor in retrospect. In context, especially given the deleterious effects of extremely high altitude, it seems like tragic misfortune. Our understanding, as fragmented as it is, serves to remind us of our own individual unreliability. It's not particularly heartening, but a worthwhile consideration.
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
Banned in Illinois! In some rationality-challenged suburban Chicago school district, at least, as I overheard on WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station, one morning. Why? Because it discusses marijuana.2 Also plant sex. Kinky, kinky plant sex.
Of course, being banned might get more kids to read it, and that's not a bad thing.3 It's an excellent book, a study of how plants - four in particular - have used us to further their evolution and range about the planet. Pollan selects these four based on their gratification of certain human desires, in much the same way that many flowering plants gratify honeybees (or bumblebees, who have a slightly different ideal of beauty).
Those desires - sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control - have some excellent corresponding examples: apple, tulip, marijuana and potato. And our current understanding of what each of those is - the notion of the apple that accompanies the word - is because of what humans have done to help the plants evolve. A wild apple growing in the Kazakh mountains, it seems, isn't the sort of thing you'd want to put in your mouth. The plant we imagine to be the wild precursor to the potato isn't even edible.
All of this is fascinating enough, but Pollan approaches from what, at first, seems a bizarre angle: this plant evolution is not a product of our mastery of agriculture. Rather, the plants have been using us to further their own ends. We're honeybees, as far as they're concerned, animals enthusiastically spreading their genes further than they could alone. Agriculture may not be man dominating nature; it may be the grasses and their ingenious plan to dominate the trees, using us a tool in that effort.
Of course, he doesn't say it quite like that. Not without qualifiers. There's no intelligent, focused effort by corn and soybeans to dominate the North American continent, but their ability to gratify our needs has pushed them there. By selecting for preferred traits, and by making room for these plants, we've really helped them be everywhere. If someone hadn't noticed the proto-tulip in what is modern-day Turkey, it would still be a nearly unremarkable wildflower.
In addition to this fascinating discussion of our influence on plants, he weaves in all sorts of information about the lengths we'll go to in order to get what we want:
- Stretched to its limits, the apple is beginning to lose the battle against pests and disease. Being an example of extreme heterozygosity - the offspring being different from the parents - apples can't be directly seeded. Not unless you want an orchard of mostly inedible apples, with every tree unique. Every once in a while this produces something great, and those trees are continually grafted to new rootstocks to maintain that fruit.
Every Granny Smith apple comes from a grafting of the one original Granny Smith tree in Australia. Or from a grafting of a grafting, etc. Plant those seeds, and the one thing you won't get is another Granny Smith tree.
The most significant downside of this is that while we've been propagating clones, the various apple pests have been evolving their way around the plant's natural defenses. When plants can continue to evolve, it becomes a back-and-forth dance between competing species. When one can't evolve, it's just waiting to get clobbered. Apples are at that point. Only increasing quantities of chemical pesticides are able to hold back devastation, and the pests are evolving past those.
One of these days, not far off, the Golden Delicious may just be a memory - just like the Black Gilliflower or the Hay's Winter Wine. - Tulips, in Holland in the mid-1630s, drove humans to near insanity. Bulbs, and eventually pieces of paper promising futures in tulip bulbs, nearly destroyed the Dutch economy. Tulipomania. If you were lucky enough to have a very special tulip "break," you could trade a single bulb for an absolute fortune.
Though none of these amazing flowers still exist, the Dutch commissioned paintings of flowers they couldn't afford, so we can see some examples. The most expensive tulip ever was the Semper Augustus, and it's indeed a very pretty flower. Worth trading your house for? It seems that some thought so.
Mania, indeed. - Oh, marijuana. What had been a fairly gentle drug in the sixties is now far more powerful. While it's still not anything particularly dangerous - since it doesn't affect the brainstem, the control center for basic life functions like heartbeats, you can't overdose - it's definitely not the same drug. That extra horsepower is due in no small part to the war on drugs, which has accelerated the development of cannabis along the same sort of lines that the apple took over thousands of years.
But in a few decades.
Where the apple was selected for sweetness - for eating and cider - and enjoyed, year after year, marijuana couldn't do that. Plant a big ol' garden of illegal plants, and the authorities'll put an end to that, right quick. Plus, it's a tropical plant, which makes growing it in most of the US and Europe less than ideal. For the plant, remember - this is a book from the plant's perspective. So it needed to adapt to grow faster, to be more potent, and to be smaller. Those were the human desires, and the plant rose to meet those challenges.
What's very interesting is how Pollan points out that all human societies have had plant-derived intoxicants. Well, except the Eskimos, but that's only because of the complete lack of plants. Along with intoxicants come taboos, applied with an odd sort of complicated and inconsistent logic. And it's those taboos that have allowed the marijuana flower - ugly beast that it is - to end up worth more than its weight in gold. - Monsanto, in its - in my opinion, dangerously misguided - quest to dominate the plant world through poison production and genetic engineering, has combined the two efforts. The NewLeaf4 potato, for example, produces its own Bt toxin - a poison to the Colorado potato beetle that's normally produced by a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis. So now, it seems, agribusiness monoculture operations are no longer satisfied by planting acres and acres genetically identical potatoes waiting for the blight to come along. They're upping the ante and helping pests evolve an immunity to one of the organic farmer's best last-ditch pest control tools.
Note that any good organic farmer doesn't really have to use Bt very often. Just when an infestation is getting out of hand. But it's really useful, and there's no organic backup. When Monsanto inadvertently breeds a superbeetle, the options get pretty limited.
The potato, of course, is all about control. We feel like we're completely in charge, until something - like the Irish potato blight - pulls the rug out from under us. Plant a monoculture across an entire country, and you're just waiting for disaster. The pests are busy evolving, and if our plants aren't doing the same, they're bound to lose out.
Other books I'd meant to get to, but are just going to have to wait:
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
* * * * *
1Teetering columns of glacial ice, "some as large as office buildings," as Krakauer puts it. The climbers need to weave through a massive labyrinth of these ice spires, any of which could topple at any time. And, in the process of acclimatizing to the altitude, the climbers go back and forth through this section of the Khumbu Icefall over and over.
2Yes, the conservative Christian fundies are behind this. Has the woman spearheading this latest effort at ideological censorship actually read the book? Or any of the others on the list she's demanding be banned? Of course not! (Silly question.) She googled it. Anything to do with sex, drugs or anything else controversial, it seems, must be eliminated. Open, educated discussion and critical thinking, apparently, aren't the sort of things we should be teaching kids.
I'm hardly the first to mention this fact: high school kids are already having sex and doing drugs. Nobody's going to read Pollan's discussion of the evolution of marijuana over the past forty years and think, "Hey, I should start smoking weed!"
3I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. Not that I want to see The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn banned, or Slaughterhouse-Five, but it does get some folks reading a little more critically, with more interest.
4They no longer produce this little monstrosity, thankfully. What's replaced it, though, I don't know. Chances are that I don't like that, either.
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