The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world Read Free Page A

thereby leading, over time, to the emergence of new forms of life. The evolutionary rules are the same (“modification by descent”), but Darwin understood that they’d be easier to follow in the story of the tea rose than the sea turtle, in the setting of the garden than the Galápagos.
    In the years since Darwin published The Origin of Species , the crisp conceptual line that divided artificial from natural selection has blurred. Whereas once humankind exerted its will in the relatively small arena of artificial selection (the arena I think of, metaphorically, as a garden) and nature held sway everywhere else, today the force of our presence is felt everywhere. It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins. We are shaping the evolutionary weather in ways Darwin could never have foreseen; indeed, even the weather itself is in some sense an artifact now, its temperatures and storms the reflection of our actions. For a great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force. Artificial selection has become a much more important chapter in natural history as it has moved into the space once ruled exclusively by natural selection.
    That space, which is the one we often call “the wild,” was never quite as innocent of our influence as we like to think; the Mohawks and Delawares had left their marks on the Ohio wilderness long before 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 genetic level—one of the wild’s last redoubts. Partly by default, partly by design, all of nature is now in the process of being domesticated—of coming, or finding itself, under the (somewhat leaky) roof of civilization. Indeed, even the wild now depends on civilization for its survival.
    Nature’s success stories from now on are probably going to look a lot more like the apple’s than the panda’s or white leopard’s. If those last two species have a future, it will be because of human desire; strangely enough, their survival now depends on what amounts to a form of artificial selection. This is the world in which we, along with Earth’s other creatures, now must make our uncharted way.
    This book takes place in that world; consider it a set of dispatches from Darwin’s ever-expanding garden of artificial selection. Its main characters are four of that world’s success stories. The dogs, cats, and horses of the plant world, these domesticated species are familiar to everyone, so deeply woven into the fabric of our everyday lives that we scarcely think of them as “species” or parts of “nature” at all. But why is that? I suspect it’s at least partly the fault of the word. “Domestic” implies that these species have come in or been brought under civilization’s roof, which is true enough; yet the house-y metaphor encourages us to think that by doing so they have, like us, somehow left nature, as if nature were something that only happens outside.
    This is simply another failure of imagination: nature is not only to be found “out there”; it is also “in here,” in the apple and the potato, in the garden and the kitchen, even in the brain of a man beholding the beauty of a tulip or inhaling the smoke from a burning cannabis flower. My wager is that when we can find nature in these sorts of places as readily as we now find it in the wild, we’ll have traveled a considerable distance toward understanding our place in the world in the fullness of its complexity and ambiguity.
    I’ve chosen the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato for several logical-sounding reasons. One is that they represent four important classes of domesticated plants (a fruit, a flower, a drug plant, and a