The botany of desire - M. Pollan

This book has to do with the way humankind domesticated plants, and vice ersa. We see everyday how catastrophic is the concept of an animal that learned to completely dominate the environment. The human mind is built for a hostile environment, it asks for 100 expecting the environment to offer 10 so that one might settle in the end for 50. It is almost touching to read in the chapter dedicated to apples what sweetness meant to people in a period where it was not on-demand in a small bag next to each coffee cup. I would never want to go back there, because I am programmed to want 100, but I do have the feeling that that deprivation was somehow good and necessary on the whole. Maybe it’s just the old age creeping on me, but I feel this is the first-world struggle we cannot avoid - we built a world where physical effort is not necessary anymore, but we have to simulate it to keep functioning. We do not lack anything, but we have to simulate scarceness. We have abundance and still we fight, and we always will - allocating more resources won’t help if the wiring is all wrong. And we can work on the rational and conscious side of us, but all irrational and unconscious traits are not touched by this, they will stay. There is no way to avoid both pain and boredom: for this you have to build machines, which are free from biological shackles, and if an uprising will come it will be more an act of pity than rebellion. Anyway, the book is neither painful nor boring nor an evil AI, it is in fact quite enjoyable.

A poignant definition:

“Flying penises” is what one botanist called bees.

I liked this quote from George Eliot:

If we could hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar.