Narrator: They are four of the most common plants we know.
We've always thought that we controlled them.
But what if, in fact, they have been shaping us?
Man: We don't give nearly enough credit to plants.
They've been working on us,
They've been using us, for their own purposes.
Narrator: Four plants that have traveled the road to success,
By satisfying human desires.
Man: The tulip,
By gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty,
Has gotten us
To take it from its origins in central asia
And disperse it around the world.
Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness,
Has gotten people to risk their lives,
Their freedom, in order to
Grow more of it and plant more of it.
The potato -- by gratifying our desire for control,
Control over nature, so that we can feed ourselves,
Has gotten itself out of south america
And expanded its range
Far beyond where it was 500 years ago.
And the apple,
By gratifying our desire for sweetness --
Begins in the forests of kazakhstan
And is now the universal fruit.
These are great winners
In the dance of domestication.
Narrator: A look at nature
The way you've never seen it before,
With best-selling author michael pollan.
Man: And this relationship of the plants,
Learning how to gratify our desires,
And our working for them in exchange for this,
Is what I call "the botany of desire."
Man: It was that very special week in may,
When the apple trees are in spectacular bloom,
And they're just vibrating with the attention of bees.
And I was planting potatoes,
Making my little rows,
And putting in my chunks,
And the bees were working above me.
And it occurred to me --
You know, what did I have in common with those bees?
And when you think about it,
Quite a bit.
The bee assumes
It's getting the best of this deal
With the apple blossom.
It's breaking in,
It's getting the nectar.
And has no idea that it's picked up this pollen
On the hairs of its thighs
And is transporting it to another tree
In the garden or down the street,
Or anywhere else.
So for the bee to think it's in charge of this relationship
Is really just a failure of bee imagination.
And I realized I had the same failure of imagination.
I was working for these potatoes in some sense.
I was planting them, I was giving them
A little bit more habitat than they had before.
And yet I thought I was kind of calling the shots.
So that's when I had this thought
That, wouldn't it be interesting
To look at our relationship to domesticated plants
From the plant's point of view?
Of course, plants don't have consciousness or intention,
But the act of using our consciousness
To put ourselves in their "roots,"
Or shoes, or whatever,
Helps us to see things from their vantage point.
And when you do that,
Nature suddenly looks very different.
We realize we're in the web of nature,
Not standing outside it.
These plants are mirrors
In which we can see ourselves in a slightly different way.
And as much as this is a story about plants,
It's a story about human desire.
Good morning, my name is brian,
Welcome to poverty lane orchards.
First thing we're gonna do
Is we're gonna head up into the orchard,
And when we get up there,
I wanna tell you a little bit about the apples,
And the trees, and how to pick apples.
Mcdormand: For children in new England,
It's an autumn ritual --
An apple picking expedition to the local orchard.
Brian: Okay, when you guys are picking the apples,
You want to pick out nice ripe apples.
And the way to tell the ripe ones is they're red.
Mcdormand: But these children might never have
Had a chance to taste apples
Had the apple not found a way to get us to do its bidding.
Thousands of years ago, the apple put us to work --
Transporting its genes
From its native ground in central asia
To the far corners of the earth.
Pollan: For a plant to do that,
It has to be awfully enterprising, willing to adapt
To a great many different environments,
Willing to experiment with
A great many different forms and flavors.
Is there a really good red one up there? What do you see?
Pollan: Today, it's a fruit iconic
And beloved and used in a great many different ways.
Mcdormand: But the apple has not always been regarded as
The wholesome fruit we think of today.
Pollan: The apple tree was the great evil plant,
Because people took these apples and made hard cider,
Which was the main source of alcohol
In rural america for many, many years.
The strategy -- the evolutionary strategy
That got it from there to here --
Involved producing ever more sweetness.
Woman: Okay, here's cup four.
There you go.
If you think it tastes bad or yucky,
I want you to give it to oscar the grouch.
Oscar, okay.
So here's cup two.
And if tastes good, I want you to give it to big bird,
Because he likes things that taste good.
Mcdormand: These children are doing taste tests --
Part of research being done on sweetness
At the monell chemical senses center in philadelphia.
It specializes in the study of taste and smell.
Good job! You're doing great.
All right, so I'm going to give you another one.
Man: Some of the fundamental things we've discovered are,
The desire for sweetness is hardwired in human beings.
It's built-in, it's innate.
It's not because we feed babies
High levels of sweet when they're young,
It's part of their biology.
Presumably, our response to sweet evolved
When sweet things were rare in the environment,
They were there in small amounts,
And our biggest problem was to make sure
We got enough calories and didn't starve to death.
If a plant was sweet,
That meant it wasn't bitter and poison,
It meant it was reasonably high in calories,
Because sugars are calorie-rich,
And so sweetness is the signal
For something that's good for us.
Pollan: Sweetness in nature is very rare, very special --
It's really limited to ripe fruit,
And honey, if you're willing to risk
Going into a beehive.
And apples are a particularly big, portable,
Long-lasting vessel for sweetness.
Mcdormand: It was here in
The ancient forests of central asia
That our own pursuit of sweetness
First brought us into contact with the apple.
This, scientists say,
Is the apple's genetic home --
The place where it originated.
These high forests in what is now the nation of kazakhstan
Gave rise to thousands of different varieties,
Many of which still grow here today.
Man: You land in almaty, the capital of kazakhstan,
And there are apple seedlings
Pushing up through the broken pavement.
You go up into the hills,
And there are thousands of different kinds of apples.
Great big red apples
That look like large macintosh --
And you'd find these sort of knotty little green things
That even a rat wouldn't eat.
Pollan: To see these wild apples in all their diversity
Is to realize that, in these forests, this is, you know,
These are god's first drafts of what an apple could be.
Mcdormand: One way the apple could secure its future
Was by expanding its habitat --
But that's a hard thing to do if you're a plant.
Pollan: You know, the apple has the same existential predicament
Of any plant -- it's stuck in place, it's rooted down.
So you had the apple beginning its life
In these kazakh forests in central asia,
But they would be stuck there
If not for mammals, that they evolved to appeal to.
If you're a bear in a forest and you're hungry,
You don't pick the little blueberry sized apples,
You pick the biggest ones you can get.
If you find a particularly sweet one,
You're going to eat more of that one
Than a sour one.
And in their case,
They eat the whole apple and excrete the seeds,
And that's how apples spread their genes.
And sweetness was the ticket out of that forest.
Mcdormand: But to move farther than bears could take it,
The apple would need a new ally --
And found one...In us.
Pollan: Part of the apple's genius
Has been to insinuate itself into our culture,
And art and religion, as well.
It's kind of a botanical zelig --
I mean, it just kind of shows up everywhere.
Even when it wasn't really there.
Mcdormand: One of the best known images
Of people and apples together
Comes from the story of the garden of eden.
Pollan: Though the bible doesn't specify what the fruit is,
We have always imagined it to be apples.
And that's because the northern renaissance painters,
When they thought of a fruit,
A desirable fruit that you would put in a garden,
They immediately thought "apple."
But it wasn't an apple.
Probably was a pomegranate,
Because apples don't do very well
In the lands where the bible is thought to have taken place.
Mcdormand: One place where apples did grow
Was ancient china.
They'd been brought there from central asia
On the trade route called the silk road.
The apple also traveled west,
Reaching europe and eventually the new world.
In america, the apple found a partner,
Someone whose love for it would become the stuff of legend --
Johnny appleseed.
[ man whistling ]
? the lord is good to me ?
? and so I thank the lord ?
Woman: Behind johnny appleseed the myth,
There is a real person -- john chapman.
But the myth is so powerful,
So compelling, so fascinating,
That it has completely obscured the real person who's behind it.
Mcdormand: John chapman was born in 1774 in massachusetts.
In his early 20s, he headed west.
He traveled through the ohio river valley,
Which was then the american frontier,
Planting and selling apple trees.
Pollan: He is said to have likened himself to a bee --
That he had some sense that he, like a bee,
Was spreading these plants around.
Browning: Johnny appleseed was --
Not to make a terrible pun --
A pretty "seedy" fellow, you know?
Travelling around, often barefoot,
You know, in a burlap sack sometimes,
Sleeping in barns.
But terribly engaging.
People took him in,
And he planted the orchards,
And he told them how to prune.
But he was, um...
He was a bum.
This is doubly odd,
Because he was actually fairly well off.
Mcdormand: Chapman could easily have afforded
Much better clothes --
All those apple trees he planted made him a prosperous man.
Pollan: He wasn't just
Sprinkling apple seeds where he went --
He was a nursery man.
He understood that,
Wherever the next wave of settlers would land,
They would want apple trees.
By law, you were required to plant some fruit,
Because that was a symbol you were going to stay put.
So he would find a piece of land,
He would clear it,
And he would plant apples from seeds,
And start a nursery a few years before the settlers got there,
So by the time they showed up,
He had saplings for sale for a few cents apiece.
It was a very good business.
But when I started learning about the botany of apples,
Suddenly there was a problem with his story --
Why would he be planting them from seed?
Mcdormand: The mystery stems from a curious fact
Of the apple's own biology --
Its taste and even its appearance
Are rarely passed on through its seeds.
Pollan: In every apple you will find a few little seeds,
Each in their own little chamber.
Well, every one of those seeds, if planted,
Will produce a completely different apple,
Looking very little, if at all, like its parent.
They tend to be sour, bitter,
All these other different flavors.
Mcdormand: That's because each apple seed
Carries genes for a wide variety of traits --
And there's no telling which of those genes
Will be turned on when the seed starts to grow.
There is, however, a very simple way
To perpetuate the traits of an apple,
An ancient technique called "grafting."
You take a bud from a tree
That produced fruit that you liked
And insert it into a young, developing tree.
The result?
An exact copy --
Or clone -- of the apple you started with.
Many american settlers grew their apples exactly that way.
But not johnny appleseed.
Chaplin: He tended to grow seedlings
And then just let them grow wild.
He might have done this, we think,
Because of his religious beliefs --
He was a swedenborgian.
Mcdormand: The 18th-century christian theologian,
Emanuel swedenborg,
Preached that the natural world is imbued with god's spirit.
Chaplin: Swedenborg had taught that
Everything that was here on earth,
That you could see, feel, taste, touch,
Had a counterpart in the spiritual world beyond.
For chapman, this seemed to indicate that
He should not tamper with all of the natural things
That he could see in the world around him.
And this seems to be one reason why
He grows apples from their seeds,
And not from grafting.
Mcdormand: Whatever his reasons, chapman's botanical practices
Gave the apple a golden opportunity
To adapt to a new environment.
Pollan: By going back to seed,
You are going back to the biodiversity of your genes.
So all of those apple seeds
Produced hundreds of different kinds of apples
With very different qualities.
And so the apple,
Just like the englishmen who came over,
Remade itself as americans.
Mcdormand: Most of these new varieties,
Because they were grown from seed,
Turned out to be bitter...
But the settlers had a very good use for them -- cider.
Hard cider.
Pollan: Now, when we use the word "cider,"
We picture something very sweet.
But of course, it only stays sweet
If you have refrigeration.
So all the cider they made went into barrels and fermented
And became what we call "hard cider," alcoholic cider.
So johnny appleseed, who we think of as
The most benign, wholesome kind of character,
Turns out was
Bringing hard drink to the frontier.
Browning: That's what people drank.
Colonial america was terrified of water!
You know, they knew about
All the diseases of water in europe,
And so they didn't drink it.
Chaplin: Cider, however, because it had been fermented,
Had killed, in the process,
Anything that might make you ill.
Pollan: That was the beer of its time, the wine of its time,
That's what everybody drank -- and I mean everybody.
Mcdormand: Everyone from paupers to presidents consumed cider.
John adams liked to drink it for breakfast.
But over time, cider and the apple
Became victims of their own success.
Chaplin: Alcohol consumption
Started to rise in about the 1830s.
And there's some public outrage over that,
That people seemed to be too interested in drinking,
Or are drunk,
So all forms of alcoholic beverage
Begin to be criticized, and cider is among them.
Pollan: People went after apple trees.
Suddenly the apple,
Which had been celebrated for much of american history,
Is vilified as the evil fruit.
It's back in the garden of eden, in a sense.
The hatchet wielded by the famous prohibitionist
Carrie nation, was not just about
Breaking down saloon doors,
It was also about chopping down this evil tree
That was getting americans drunk.
Mcdormand: But the apple would be rescued from infamy
By the sweeter side of its nature.
Pollan: Even though cider was what happened to most apples,
Apples were also eaten as a food.
And whenever you were lucky enough to find a sweet one,
That's what you did with it.
Mcdormand: So with cider in disrepute,
The race to find sweet new varieties intensified.
Pollan: Everyone who had a cider orchard had his eye out
For that one good edible apple.
It was really well understood
That one of the tickets
To great success and great wealth in america
Was to find a good edible apple.
And all the famous apples that we know --
The delicious, the macintosh,
The baldwin, the northern spy --
These had all begun in cider orchards.
They were the stars.
Before 1900, the fate of, like, 99% of apples was to be drunk.
After 1900, it becomes the fruit that we now know.
Mcdormand: For 20th-century americans,
Apples became a symbol of wholesomeness.
Pollan: The apple growers came up with this campaign --
"an apple a day keeps the doctor away" --
And essentially rebranded the apple as a health food.
That's all well and good,
But what it meant is that,
As soon as you're eating apples,
You focus on those few varieties
That are really tasty and popular,
And the industry shrank down the number of apples
Over the course of the 20th century.
So that, by the time I was a boy in the early '60s,
There were very few apples in commerce.
There was the red delicious, the golden delicious,
And the macintosh.
That was, you know,
Easy for marketers to get their head around,
It was all the public seemed to want.
But for the apple, it wasn't very good news --
Because as soon as you kind of freeze its evolution,
The apple is kind of a sitting duck for its pests.
Mcdormand: Apples were increasingly being grown
In what scientists call "monocultures,"
Which churned out just a single variety.
Pollan: Once you rely on the genetic uniformity
That comes with cloning
Rather than planting from seed,
You restrict the species' natural ability to evolve.
So you have your plants, with their genetic combination,
Staying still, while the pests --
I'm talking about insects or diseases,
Viruses or bacteria --
Are always trying to pick the lock.
And sooner or later,
They will be able to get not just one of your plants,
But all of your plants, 'cause they're the same.
Mcdormand: To defend them from insects and diseases,
Most apples are routinely sprayed with chemicals.
Browning: The bugs are clearly
Well ahead of the human controls.
If you're talking about a large grower,
With a couple of hundred acres,
They're probably spending
A half-million to three-quarters of a million dollars a year
In chemical costs.
Pollan: One of the biggest consumers of pesticide now
Is the apple crop.
It's the fate of monocultures.
Man: We'll have to check the records
To see what the resistances are in these,
Because these could be real useful
In breeding right now, I think.
Mcdormand: In geneva, new york, scientist herb aldwinckle
And phil forsline are looking for
Another way to help the apple --
By harnessing the defenses that lie hidden in its genes.
So think what it would be like
If it was grafted on a dwarfing rootstock.
Probably double the size and even more color.
Mcdormand: Aldwinckle and forsline
Collaborate at this apple research center,
Which is run by the u.S. Department of agriculture.
It's a botanical version of noah's ark.
Pollan: To walk into this orchard is to --
At first, it looks like kind of a normal orchard...
And then you realize as you look down the rows
That, my god, every one of these trees is different.
There are yellow ones and there are red ones,
And there are green ones, and there are purplish ones,
And there are small and large
And every shape of tree and fruit.
It is just this vast library.
Mcdormand: Here, there are more than 5,000 different kinds
Of apple trees -- each with its own distinct set of genes.
Man: A mechanic has a wide variety of tools
Which he hopes he'll be able to use
To fix problems with machines he's working on --
It's a similar situation with apples.
We need to have a tool chest,
And the genes are what provide the tool chest.
Mcdormand: In 1989, aldwinckle and forsline
Got an unexpected opportunity to add to their tool chest
Some of the most valuable apple genes in the world --
The genes from kazakhstan.
Aldwinckle: We regard the kazakh apple forests
As the gene bank of the domestic apple.
Wild forests were being chopped down,
The trees were being destroyed,
They just wouldn't be there anymore
Unless someone went there and collected them
And grew them somewhere else.
We had some jeeps we traveled around in,
And so we were able to visit true apple forests.
Forsline: It was a bit of a culture shock
To be in central asia for the first time.
My first impressions were, this was in
The middle of nowhere -- what am I doing here?
But, uh... To just see
The diversity in those apples
Is just amazing.
Aldwinckle: Once an apple tree is chopped down,
It's gone forever.
But if we can take the seed from that tree
And store the seed,
We can preserve the genes that were present in that tree,
And essentially we can preserve that tree forever.
Mcdormand: Aldwinckle and forsline
Made several trips to the kazakh forests.
They brought seeds back and planted them.
Forsline: We're standing in the middle of what I call
"kazakhstan re-created in geneva, new york."
But we're not only just saving it,
We're developing a library of information
On every one of these trees.
Browning: The notion of conservation of seed
Is to conserve it -- because you don't know
What you might need it for at some future time --
Maybe nothing.
Why do we have museums?
Well, because it's a good idea to conserve things --
That's the primary value.
Then there's a secondary value,
And that is to u t as genetic breeding stock
To solve problems --
To solve problems that might enable growers
To use fewer pesticides.
Mcdormand: In his lab,
Aldwinckle is trying to do just that,
By moving genes that provide disease resistance
From a wild kazakh apple into a commercial variety.
Aldwinckle: These are pieces of leaves of fuji apple.
And what we've got here is an experiment
To try and transfer some genes
For resistance to apple scab
Into fuji, and therefore make fuji resistant to apple scab.
Pollan: In the 19th century,
The repository of all the genetic diversity
Of the apple in america was in the cider orchard.
Today it's in these collections
That are maintained by some visionary individuals
Who understand the importance of preserving this biodiversity.
There's a vicious circle
That we get into, which is, we have monocultures
In the field, and monocultures on the plate.
Monocultures of taste.
Fruit now has to compete with soda.
So it has got to be super-sweet,
And the modern apples all are very sweet --
We have apples that, as one critic said of the delicious,
It has "sweetness without dimension."
The problem is, it's boring,
Sweetness -- if that's all you get.
Mcdormand: In lebanon, new hampshire,
One grower is trying to solve that problem
By reaching back into the apple's past.
Stephen wood is the owner of poverty lane orchards.
He used to grow mostly standard varieties,
Like macs and cortlands --
But found he couldn't match the prices
Of the big commercial growers.
Wood: We realized in the late '80s
That what we'd always done
Wasn't going to work any longer,
And that we either had to change quite dramatically
What we were doing, or stop growing apples altogether.
Mcdormand: But for wood,
Giving up on his orchard seemed inconceivable.
You know, some people adore antique clocks,
I adore apple trees.
How are we doing on water core?
We started some grafting trials
Of what I guess you could call "antique" varieties --
Varieties that are not commonly grown anymore,
But once were.
This is wickson.
This apple originated in the pacific northwest
In the late 19th century.
[ crunch ]
It's got a beautiful acidity.
This is pomme grise.
It has very low acid, high sugar,
And a sort of... A sort of nutty flavor.
This apple is calville blanc d'hiver.
It's got a little bit of sweetness behind the acid.
You look at 17th-century french still-lifes,
This is the apple you see
Beside the dead pheasant and the bottle of wine.
There's a huge number of apple varieties --
It's almost infinite.
Mcdormand: But it's tough to make a living
Selling only antique eating apples.
So wood turned his attention to
Another lost chapter in apple history --
Most of his orchard is now producing apples...
For hard cider.
Wood: It is a gamble to plant
Acres and acres of inedible apples...
Many of the best cider apples are disgusting --
Bitter, astringent apples.
The decision to plant
Not just a few trees,
But thousands and thousands of those trees,
Could be quite a good joke if the cider doesn't make it,
Because these apples are not going to wind up
In a kid's lunch box --
There's no secondary market for this stuff.
[ pop ]
Wonderful breakfast drink.
We are trying, with a few other colleagues,
Basically to create a category in the u.S. Wine trade
Of "fine ciders."
I think we're doing quite well in that,
But the jury is still out.
[ crunch ]
Pollan: There are a lot of fruits
That have gotten ahead in life
By being sweet and gratifying the sweet tooth
Of mammals like us,
But there's something about the apple,
You know -- it's so iconic
In western civilization,
And so enduring in its relationship,
And its ability, really, to gratify our changing desires --
For alcohol, and for a wonderfully sweet food --
That my guess is, it will succeed for many years to come.
Pollan: The mystery is,
Why things that bees regard as beautiful,
We also regard as beautiful --
I mean, what are the odds that we would have the same taste
As this little bug?
When I say the bee has a concept of beauty,
I mean, I'm being metaphorical.
But the bee and ourselves have a lot in common.
We really like symmetry,
We like certain patterns
Of color, and certain scents -- we agree about scent, as well.
The bee loves this flower and moves toward it,
And this flower has evolved to attract it.
Well, this plant has also evolved to attract us.
To the extent that a flower can gratify
Our ideas of a beautiful color,
A beautiful shape, a beautiful smell,
It will dominate the landscape,
Dominate the flower industry,
Get many more copies of itself made,
And take over the world.
Mcdormand: And few flowers
Have traveled the road from obscurity to fame
More spectacularly than the tulip.
Man: 59 years ago,
I saw first tulip in my life.
And that was in the garden of my father.
And now my whole life is with tulips.
Mcdormand: Nobody knows tulips better than the dutch --
And few dutchmen know them better than joop zonneveld,
But he has a curious way of describing their effect on him.
Zonneveld: You look after every tulip, step by step,
You get the tulip fever --
It becomes worse, worse, and worse.
For me, it was something, it's in me, it never stops.
Mcdormand: Zonneveld's been a tulip buyer, a salesman,
And now he's conservator
Of one of the most famous tulip gardens in the world --
Hortus bulborum in the netherlands,
A showplace for the remarkable diversity
Of this sometimes underappreciated flower.
Zonneveld: In this garden,
We have 2,300 varieties.
You have dark purple colors,
You have almost black tulips,
You have lily flowering tulips,
There's a tulip that has the shape like this,
Like a lily flower.
You have yellow, red,
Pink, orange, bicolored,
Single earlies, single late, double late --
So there are so many things in the tulips
That once you start,
You discover every day -- even myself, I discover
Every day new things.
Mcdormand: Today, zonneveld is giving a tour
To photographer ruth dundas and writer justin spring --
Two americans who have
Come to hortus to gather material for a new book.
This is a lovely viridiflora.
Tulips are about the last subject they thought
Would ever capture their interest.
Dundas: I have to say, honestly,
That when I first started to photograph,
The last thing I wanted to photograph was tulips.
It's pretty boring,
It's a lollipop on top of a stick,
You know, you get different colors, but that's it.
It's only once you come to gardens
Such as the hortus bulborum here
That you start to understand
That this is a very varied flower,
And it's adapted and mutated
Into many different forms.
It's a lot of fun to photograph,
That there's a constant challenge
To look into this flower
And be able to see new color, new light.
You can take a bouquet of tulips
And photograph it every hour of the day.
And it's something quite different each time.
[ shutter clicks ]
Perfect, gorgeous.
It just seems so amazing that you have
This extraordinary variety that's been cultivated
Over centuries, and somehow you grew up
Not knowing a thing about it.
Mcdormand: Flowers began flaunting their beauty
Long before there were people.
It was more than 100 million years ago
When the class of plants that flowers belong to --
The angiosperms -- first appeared on the earth.
Pollan: The great revolution in natural history
Is the rise of the angiosperms.
This is the class of plants that makes conspicuous flowers,
Forms fruit and seed.
This was a new way of doing business in nature.
Mcdormand: The flower of an angiosperm
Has a male part, the stamen, which produces pollen.
Whether transported by wind, bees, or humans,
When pollen lands on the flower's female part,
The pistil, it gets fertilized,
And gives rise to seeds.
The seeds contain a mix of genes
From both the mother and the father.
Before that, you had this greener, sleepier world
Where things reproduce usually by cloning,
By spores that were genetically identical to their parents.
Evolution proceeded in a kind of pokey pace,
Because you didn't have as much variation.
And then you have this incredible explosion
Of diversity that happens with this new strategy.
[ bee buzzing ]
It was incredibly successful strategy.
It allowed you to move your genes around,
It allowed you to evolve much quicker,
Because sex creates variation.
And the more new combinations you try,
The quicker you can adapt to whatever the environment is.
And one particular group of these angiosperms
Came up with a really, really clever strategy --
And that was
To appeal not to, you know,
Bugs or birds or bees,
But appeal to us.
Mcdormand: The first wild tulips, scientists think,
Sprang up in the same place where the apple originated --
The mountains of central asia.
Pollan: It was typically kind of more open than our tulip,
So it had a kind of hourglassy shape.
Often had a scent,
Often had a slightly different color inside.
[ horse neighs ]
Mcdormand: Drawn by the beauty of these wild flowers,
People learned how to cultivate them.
Pollan: Under our attention, the flower got bigger,
The colors very often got brighter,
And then we started experimenting with variation.
Mcdormand: From central asia,
The tulip made its way to turkey.
It was there that this beautiful flower
Bewitched one of the most powerful men in the world,
The sultan of the ottoman empire.
Pollan: The turks at various times in history
Revered tulips.
Sultan ahmed iii was famous
For his love of tulips,
And when they were in bloom every year,
There was a festival.
Every night there would be some sort of performance
To celebrate tulips.
It was so extravagant, in fact,
That this helped bring down the sultan.
Mcdormand: For his spending on tulips
And other perceived failings,
The sultan was toppled from his throne.
But it wasn't only royalty
That got seduced by the tulip.
In the early 17th century,
The flower caused a whole country to go mad.
It was completely irrational.
And I don't think you can explain it
According to any logical scheme
That this entire society went nuts.
Mcdormand: Between 1634 and 1637,
Tulips swept the dutch into a collective frenzy
That has become known as "tulip mania."
Their passion for the flower
Spurred one of the biggest investment bubbles in history,
And for a brief time,
Made the tulip one of the most valuable commodities
In the world.
Pollan: It was a pure financial
Speculative bubble --
And it was about a flower! I mean, how amazing is that?
Mcdormand: It was a time when the dutch dominated world trade.
And a lot of them were getting rich.
It became fashionable to grow flower gardens --
And nothing said "success" like a tulip.
Zonneveld: In the beginning,
The rich people in holland,
They have big houses,
And they want to show they're wealthy.
At that time, were tulips.
Pollan: It really was about the display of
The extraordinary, the gem.
And you picture, you know, kind of a gray, cloudy,
Dutch spring afternoon,
And that color against that steel sky
Is a powerful thing.
Mcdormand: For the tulip, the dutch flower gardens
Offered a chance to strut its stuff --
And no tulips did so more dramatically
Than the type known as broken tulips.
They were extremely rare,
But, back then, no one knew why.
Pollan: A break was when
The background color, the solid, matte,
Saturated color of a tulip
Gets a kind of flame of a second color;
And when this happened,
This was considered, you know, the most beautiful tulip.
Mcdormand: The most prized of all the broken tulips
Was one of the rarest -- the semper augustus.
Pollan: It was a big, white tulip
With a splash of carmine red on it,
Which was really, by general account,
Considered the greatest tulip ever found.
This was the epitome of tulip beauty
In the eye of the dutch.
Mcdormand: If you wanted a semper augustus
To bloom in your garden,
You'd need to get your hands on a semper augustus bulb.
That's the part of the tulip that lives beneath the soil --
And planting a bulb is the only way
To make sure a tulip offspring
Will look the same as its parent.
But in 17th-century holland,
Semper augustus bulbs were very scarce.
Man: At that time, only one merchant in amsterdam
Had examples of this bulb.
Eventually one man prevailed upon him to sell a single bulb,
Which was valued at the time at 10,000 florins.
This was at a time when the average dutch worker
Would survive with his family for a year on about 300.
And the fact that such sales were being made
And for such colossal sums of money
Gradually became more widely known,
And this really was the foundation stone
Of what became the tulip mania.
Pollan: At the height of the tulip mania,
One tulip sold for an amount equivalent to the price
Of one of the grandest canal houses in amsterdam.
Now, just to put it in contemporary terms,
This is equivalent to, say, a townhouse on 5th avenue.
$10 million to $15 million for a single tulip bulb.
Mcdormand: The tulip bulb market hit its peak in February 1637.
There were 40 million guilders' worth
Of tulip deals outstanding,
More than six times the total amount of money
There was in circulation.
Pollan: There was an auction held in the winter of 1637,
And some great tulip was put on the market at a certain price.
And it didn't get that price.
And the auctioneer offered 1,000 guilders less,
1,000 guilders below that,
And nobody bid.
Woman: The flowers were very overvalued.
People were risking fortunes,
And of course the whole thing came crashing down at once.
Pollan: And, so very soon after that,
All these tulips were worthless,
And all these people were ruined.
They had put there fortunes in these flowers,
And now they were worthless --
They were just bulbs of plants.
And that was the end of the tulip mania.
Mcdormand: Suddenly, the flower that was loved for its beauty
Became a symbol of human folly.
Pollan: There was a period of
Tulip hatred in holland after the collapse,
Because it was blamed for this economic disaster.
There was a famous professor in leiden
Who'd run around with a stick beating tulips
And destroying them,
And there were all these pamphlets and broadsides
About the evils of the tulip mania
And the great whore goddess flora
Who was blamed for bringing the dutch down,
As if, you know, it was the flower that did it to them.
It's an extraordinary historical episode,
And we look back and we look down, and we say,
"how could they do this?" but of course we've been through
Our own speculative bubbles,
And it doesn't really matter what you're trading --
As long as the price is going up really fast, everybody wants in.
And as long as there's a greater fool,
A lot of money can be made.
You just don't want to be left
Holding the bag or the bulb at the end of it.
Mcdormand: What none of the ruined investors
Could possibly have known was that the breaks in color
They saw as the epitome of beauty
Were actually caused by a virus.
The tulip bulbs that sold for
The price of 5th avenue townhouses
Turned out to be damaged goods.
Stewart: Well, this is something
That nobody understood at the time --
I mean, no one in the 1600s and the 1700s
Had any notion of plant diseases,
Or any idea that the variation in a flower
Could be caused by something like a disease.
Mcdormand: Today, viruses like the one
That once drove the tulip's value to record heights
Are the enemy of the global tulip trade,
Because infected bulbs cannot be exported.
So plant physiologists like henk gude are working hard
To combat them.
Gude: A tulip that is infected with a virus
Is not a healthy tulip --
It costs lots of energy for the plant
To cope with the virus.
And if you replant the bulb year after year,
Then its growing potential will decline over the years.
So, in a few years, you will not have a tulip left.
Mcdormand: Gude works for
The applied plant research center
At wageningen university in the netherlands.
Gude: To find out if a plant is
Infected by a virus, we have to homogenize it,
To squeeze juice from it,
And we can detect the presence
Of the virus in the juice
With lab techniques.
When we understand how the plant grows,
We can try to make the plant do
What we want it to do --
And immediately apply it
For the benefit of growers and breeders and exporters.
Mcdormand: One of these people is jan ligthart,
Who has been growing tulips for more than 30 years
And has become one of holland's most successful breeders.
Ligthart: What you see from here to there
Is all new seedlings.
This is the first time I see them flowering.
I wanted to be a carpenter,
Just like my father, working with wood.
And when I saw the tulips, I was astonished.
I said, "ah! That's what I want to be!"
Tulip gardener.
Mcdormand: Ligthart's first step in breeding a new variety
Is to act like a human bumblebee,
Moving pollen from one place to another.
Ligthart: The process is quite simple.
We use one tulip as the father
And the other just like the mother.
And we make pollination.
Pollan: The breeders of tulips today
Are interested in new combinations.
They're sex crazy, right?
They're operating these, you know, plant brothels.
And out of that comes a great deal of variation.
And out of that variation is the future of the species.
Mcdormand: Dabbing the pollen takes just a few seconds.
But it can take years before ligthart can be sure
That his new variety will consistently produce flowers
With the qualities the market demands --
Like durability, disease resistance, and beauty.
That's enough.
Ligthart: One of the thousand seedlings
Are what I want.
The rest is not good enough.
That's the hardest part.
You have to look out
For the first, the only good one.
Mcdormand: This year, ligthart is pinning his hopes
On the bulbs from one of his latest breeding experiments.
This tulip, that is my favorite.
I give it a big future.
Just the right color.
Pure pink.
This one I started
Nine years ago with seeds.
When I saw this tulip blooming for the first time,
In my seedlings, I was just amazed.
I sat there on my knees
And looked at them for a long time.
Other tulips, you walk by
And it doesn't venture to do anything to you.
And when you see this one,
Your heart gets... Ck-ck!
This makes a difference.
Each time I look at it...
I fell in love on the tulip.
[ engine puttering ]
Mcdormand: But ligthart's love for his tulips doesn't stop him
And his family from ripping the flowers
Off their stalks every spring.
If they didn't,
The flowers would divert nutrients from the bulbs,
Which, for a breeder like ligthart,
Are what brings in the money.
Ligthart: What I want to do for a tulip
Is to create a much bigger market for the whole world.
Because a tulip must make money.
It's a business.
You can't have them for fun
Because we have to make a living.
Mcdormand: Ligthart's best tulips
Often get introduced to the rest of the world here,
At the keukenhof gardens near amsterdam.
Every spring, half a million visitors
Flock here to see the four and a half million bulbs
That make it the largest tulip garden in the world.
Pollan: The dutch have mastered the propagation of tulips.
And there are people in holland
Making great fortunes off of tulips yet again.
It's not a bubble anymore, it's a mature industry.
Mcdormand: And a very lucrative one,
Whose bustling nerve center proves
Just how hard we're willing to work
To spread flowers around the world.
One out of every three flowers bought and sold in the world
Passes through here.
This is the flower auction in the dutch town of aalsmeer.
[ bell ringing ]
Stewart: You're not allowed on the auction floor,
Because there are a million carts zipping around
At alarmingly high speeds.
And it is like a sea of flowers.
It's almost like watching paint being mixed on a palette.
You know, you watch this line
Of yellow sunflowers snaking their way
Through this ocean of red tulips.
It's just dazzling in that way.
Mcdormand: The floor of the flower auction covers
An area bigger than 200 football fields,
Making it one of the largest buildings on the planet.
Some 19 million flowers
From all over the world change hands here
Every day.
It's an extraordinarily complex system,
With a very simple purpose --
To move flowers from the field to the home
As quickly as possible.
Woman: In flower business, three things are very important,
And that's being fast, being fast, and being fast,
Because the flower that's fresh today
Will lose 15% of its value tomorrow.
Stewart: The minute you cut it, it starts to die.
There is this race on to get it to market.
Mcdormand: Once the deal is struck,
The perishable flowers are rushed to the amsterdam airport
And from there to flower shops all over the world.
Stewart: This incessant, unrelenting movement
Of flowers and money
Doesn't let up for a second.
Mcdormand: All for a product
That has absolutely no practical value.
Pollan: Flowers are exquisitely useless.
They're this great froth or extravagance in our lives.
But that there is a multi-billion-dollar trade
In these wonderfully useless,
Beautiful things is kind of great.
When you begin to look at the plant's point of view,
I suppose the greatest threat to your survival
Is people losing interest in you,
Falling out of fashion.
You know, the gillyflower or the pink --
These were important victorian flowers.
I don't even know what they look like.
So the flower has to keep us interested.
And one of the ways a flower keeps us interested is changing.
The really ingenious ones
Are the ones that figure out ways
To reengage us every generation.
Mcdormand: In the plant world,
Just like our own, not everyone can be beautiful,
Or sweet.
But even a lowly weed can get us to work for it,
And quite slavishly, at that,
If it's clever enough to cash in on a skill
That every plant is born with --
Its ability to make chemicals.
Pollan: The genius of plants
Is really the arts of biochemistry,
Creating these really interesting,
Complicated, original molecules.
Some are designed to produce flavors.
Others are designed to produce great beauty.
And then you've got this class of plants
That is producing these molecules
That, incredibly, have the power
To alter what goes on in the human mind.
Mcdormand: This plant, by making just such a molecule,
Has gotten us to spread it
All over the world.
Scientists call it cannabis.
It is better known as marijuana.
Pollan: Cannabis recognized, metaphorically speaking,
That this was its path to world domination.
Produce more of this molecule,
And there will be more marijuana plants
Given more habitat by this creature who likes
What this molecule seems to do.
Mcdormand: And by trying to figure out
Just how that molecule works,
Scientists stumbled on an amazing discovery
About the workings of our brains.
Pollan: This plant has opened up
This very fruitful path of inquiry
Into understanding how memory works,
How consciousness works, how emotion works.
We have unlocked this whole mechanism
Which we didn't know existed --
And we would not know existed, if not for this plant.
Man: Human beings are born with an innate drive
To experience other states of consciousness periodically.
I think you can see this in young kids,
Who begin spinning at early ages.
[ children giggling ]
Amusement park rides serve the same purpose.
There's an endless stream of activities
That can shift consciousness -- everything from singing,
Dancing, having sex, jumping out of airplanes.
And drugs are clearly one way of getting these experiences.
Man: People like to have that altered consciousness.
I'm not saying that's good, but it's --
Individuals seek it out.
Weil: Marijuana seems to have made
An evolutionary decision long ago that it was
Going to throw its lot in with human beings.
From the plant's point of view,
The psychoactivity is an attractive characteristic
Which has brought the plant great success.
There's a lot more marijuana being grown today,
And the reason is that humans like it.
They like it because it gets them high.
Mcdormand: But cannabis can also get them
Locked up.
Man: There are about
750,000 arrests a year for cannabis possession.
Makes it about third among all crimes.
And so you've got 25,000 or 30,000
People behind bars at any one time
For cannabis offenses.
Mcdormand: But marijuana still entices
Nearly 15 million americans
To smoke it every month.
And nearly 100 million have tried it.
To keep up with that demand,
Cannabis growers cater to the plant's every whim...
Man: We're going to lose that tap, aren't we?
Mcdormand: Pampering it like a spoiled child.
Nice and healthy.
Man: We do anything it tells us to.
If the plant says it wants something,
We listen and we give it to it.
And that's the whole thing --
Listening carefully -- and we're listening all the time
And observing all the time.
We work for them.
Mcdormand: This man and woman live in a state
Where growing marijuana for medical use is legal.
We agreed to conceal their identities,
Because they still risk prosecution under federal law.
Woman: Yeah, that's a beauty.
Mcdormand: But whatever the legal risks,
The horticultural challenges they face
Would be familiar to any farmer or gardener.
Woman: It's a daily effort,
And there are things like,
"oh, did we over-nutriate the water?
Did we under-nutriate the water?"
Everything has really tight parameters,
And we try to keep as tight as control as possible,
But it's -- it's a battle.
Man: My associate is really the green thumb
In this enterprise.
And I've noticed that when she's
Not around for a couple of days,
The plants know it.
I mean, I'm not making that up.
They literally know it.
I mean, I almost hear them whispering, "where is she?"
They don't do as well, you know,
They don't seem as happy.
Mcdormand: Strange as it may seem, these cannabis growers
Are part of a very long tradition.
Weil: In every culture and in every age of history,
An enormous amount of human energy has gone into
The production, distribution, and consumption
Of psychoactive plants.
Man: The only society that we know of
For whom there is no native intoxicant
Are the inuits, and that's simply because
Nothing grows up there that they could use.
Weil: In almost every society,
One or two or a small number of intoxicants
Are accepted -- and not only accepted,
But their use is actively promoted --
And the rest are condemned.
But there's no agreement from culture to culture
As to which are the good ones and which are the bad ones.
Pollan: So you have alcohol,
Which is an everyday drug used in our society --
That has a taboo on it in islamic society.
Mcdormand: And though cannabis is illegal in most places today,
Many cultures throughout history have tolerated it.
From the time the plant was first discovered
In india and china thousands of years ago,
People have seen it as more than just an intoxicant.
Long before the discovery of aspirin,
Cannabis was used as a medical treatment
For relieving pain.
Dealing with pain -- you know,
That's a tremendous part of human life.
And it was a bigger part before modern times.
We all did physical labor.
We didn't have many painkillers.
We didn't have antibiotics.
And a lot of intoxicants, even if they don't
Diminish pain, the way opium does,
They take your mind off it.
And that's very, very important.
Mcdormand: In 19th-century america,
Cannabis was a popular treatment for conditions
Such as labor pains, asthma, and rheumatism.
Pollan: You could walk into any drug store
In america and buy tinctures of cannabis.
Cannabis was included in all sorts of medical preparations.
And it was legal.
Mcdormand: But everything would change in the 20th century,
When the plant got its new name, marijuana.
The name came from mexico,
Where cannabis was a popular intoxicant.
In fact, pancho villa's rebel army
Sang a marching song about a cockroach
Who fueled himself with marijuana.
During the 1920s, many mexicans
Immigrated to the United States.
And some brought the custom
Of marijuana smoking with them.
Man: Cannabis was certainly
More common among mexican americans,
And to some extent, among african americans
In the '20s and '30s than it was among whites.
I mean, you'd find it, you know, very popular
In the music scene in new orleans,
Very popular among african american musicians.
The jazz world was really soaked in cannabis.
Mcdormand: The great louis armstrong
Felt marijuana enhanced his ability to improvise.
[ playing jazz ]
Pollan: Cannabis proposes this idea
Of time stopping, being able to explore
The present moment -- forget the past, forget the future,
Just be there and see what you can come up with.
Even if it's a song you've played
A million times before, it becomes new,
Strange, wonderful.
You see new possibilities in it that weren't there before.
Mcdormand: In the 1960s, use of marijuana soared.
The drug had been illegal for more than 20 years.
But that didn't stop an entire generation from embracing it.
Pollan: It was well suited
To the spirit of that time.
You know, every drug has its character,
And cannabis's character
Is not about being hyper and working really hard.
It is a drug that makes you not want to strive.
It's about kicking back, listening to music.
So it just kind of fit the spirit of the '60s.
Man: Marijuana seems to second the motion,
No matter what the motion is.
Mcdormand: To many americans,
The fact that millions of young people
Were smoking marijuana
Threatened the very fabric of society.
Those fears prompted the government
To take action.
Narrator: Operation intercept is designed to make it
More difficult to bring marijuana
Into the country.
Mcdormand: Most of the marijuana was coming in from mexico,
And the plant soon found itself under attack.
The weapon -- a toxic chemical called paraquat.
Pollan: We have to remember that in the evolution of a species,
Everything counts as a factor of natural selection,
Including things like, oh, the decision
By the United States government in the '70s
To pressure mexico to spray
Herbicide on their pot fields.
Mcdormand: From 1975 to 1983, mexican pilots
Doused the country's cannabis fields with the poison.
Pollan: There was some concern that it would
Get into the product coming north
If it was cut right after it was sprayed,
And that, as people inhaled this, it probably
Wasn't very good for you.
Man: This is a drug-testing lab
In palo alto, california.
The people here are receiving
300 samples of marijuana a day from smokers
Who want to know if their pot is contaminated.
Man: People are extremely
Anxious about this problem,
And frankly, I don't blame them.
Mcdormand: Mexican marijuana
Began to develop a very bad name.
Pollan: This had the unintended consequence
Of creating a domestic marijuana industry
That hadn't really existed before.
Mcdormand: It was concentrated
In california, hawaii, and other states
Whose climate was favorable for the tropical plant.
Pollan: Once this american marijuana agriculture
Got started, it was very, very successful,
And the government was kind of shocked to find one year
That the total amount seized
Exceeded their estimate of the total size of the crop.
And they realized, "ooh, I think we're missing something.
There must be a lot more marijuana out there."
And indeed, there was, all over the west coast.
Mcdormand: The government dispatched helicopters
To find the fields and force e ers out of business.
Man: When local and federal agents raided
This marijuana field in northern california today,
They found more than $50,000 worth
Of marijuana ready to be harvested.
A task force is waging an all-out war against pot.
Pollan: So, with the rise of the drug war, in a way,
You've got a threat to this plant.
And it's very interesting to see
How the plant coped.
Mcdormand: Cannabis, as plants so often do,
Found a way not only to survive the threat,
But to come out ahead.
Pollan: And what happened?
Well, the growers and the plant
Adapted -- they moved indoors.
The problem with moving indoors is,
This is a 12-foot-tall plant.
So what they needed were
The genes of a shorter cannabis plant
To breed with their tall plant.
Mcdormand: So the pioneers of indoor growing
Cross-bred the tall warm-weather species, cannabis sativa,
With a low-growing mountain species found mostly in asia,
Cannabis indica.
Pollan: They brought together these two great strains
In the marijuana family
And created a plant that was short, fast, and strong.
Lenson: The plant, which had once
Been a skinny little piece of ditch weed,
Is now a pampered, spectacularly good-looking,
Multi-colored, rich, resinous being.
Hardly the species it was before at all.
It's turned completely into something else.
Mcdormand: Nurtured by creative indoor gardeners,
Cannabis is now a far more potent plant
Than it was a generation ago.
The key to that transformation was stripping away
The rule of nature and replacing it with our own.
Man: It's an artificial environment,
Completely artificial.
Everything about our natural world
Is unnatural, everything.
Woman: It's really like a super-plant.
Man: In the natural world, the plants here would be
Six to nine months from seed to harvest.
That's just simply inefficient.
You couldn't justify an operation
With such a slow turnaround.
So, instead of six to nine months, in my world,
These plants live their entire life cycle in 90 days.
Mcdormand: To get them to do that,
The plants are subjected
To precisely controlled amounts of nutrients, water,
And light.
Pollan: They're under lights that are blindingly bright,
Thousands of watts, 24 hours a day.
And these plants are just, like,
Soaking up this light -- they love it.
I mean, they're just bathing in light and growing so fast,
You can almost hear the creak of their cells
As they stretch and divide.
Mcdormand: All that light generates
A tremendous amount of heat.
Man: If I didn't have air conditioning
And air circulation and ventilation fans
Moving the heat out of that room,
These plants would cook in a matter of hours.
It's so complicated, we're not smart enough to do it.
We have to have a full-time electronic nanny
Watching the plants all the time.
So these aren't normal plants.
These are super-hyper plants
That are right on the edge at all times.
Mcdormand: It's not just a quicker harvest
The growers are after,
But a bigger bud and a stronger high.
To achieve that,
They interfere with the natural process.
Female marijuana plants produce a sticky resin
That catches the pollen that male plants produce.
That resin is highly psychoactive.
To trick the females into making more of it,
The growers keep male plants exiled from the grow room.
Man: So, in essence, what you're seeing
Is extreme sexual frustration.
This is a room full of women
Who are looking for some guy to come by
And give them some pollen so they can create seeds.
And they try harder and harder as time passes,
And the more unsuccessful they are,
The more the production of the resins
That is intended to attract pollen
Increase, and that increases
The psychoactive elements of the plant.
Pollan: They are the best gardeners of my generation,
I realized at a certain point.
You know, the best gardeners of my generation
Are not hybridizing roses, are not, you know,
Working with orchids.
They're working with this incredibly valuable,
Incredibly interesting plant called cannabis.
Woman: If this turns into anything good,
Though, look at it, I mean,
This is how thick the stalk is
When it's just gone to bloom.
It's got a beautiful shape. It is nice.
Pollan: I mean, think about it.
This thing's a weed. It's a weed.
It's a weed that's worth, you know, in the open market,
Like, you know, $6,000, $7,000 a pound.
Pretty good for a weed, huh?
Mcdormand: But cannabis only fetches that price
Because of that one particular molecule it makes
That gets people high.
Its name is thc, and it was discovered
Back in 1964
In a lab in jerusalem by chemist raphael mechoulam.
Man: Cannabis had not been well investigated,
Which was strange -- after all, it was being used
Illegally or legally by millions of people.
And yet we didn't know that much about it.
So I thought, it's a good idea to look at it again
From a modern point of view.
Mcdormand: In the lab, mechoulam and his colleagues
Broke cannabis down and zeroed in
On the chemical components that might be causing its effects.
Mechoulam: We isolated about 10 compounds.
Surprisingly, out of the 10 compounds we isolated,
Only one --
Which now is known as
Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, in short, thc --
Only one causes the well-known high.
We tested it in humans -- many of my friends.
And we saw that the compound is effective,
As we expected it to be.
Mcdormand: The identification of thc answered one question,
But raised another -- just what did it do
To the brain?
Woman: I had always assumed
That people knew how marijuana worked.
It surprised me, actually, when I began
Looking in the research literature, that --
That it was really clear
That no one really knew how it worked.
Mcdormand: In 1988, allyn howlett found the answer.
She discovered that, deep inside the brain,
Thc molecules activate a previously unknown network
Of specialized chemical receptors.
Man: So that was proof that there is
A receptor protein in the brain
That combined to the thc like a key in a lock.
It was very exciting, because what that meant to us was,
We had a tool that could be used for studying,
And other researchers could use it, as well.
And people could study where the receptor was in the brain.
Mcdormand: Howlett and other scientists found the receptors
In the hippocampus, which forms memories;
The cerebellum, which controls movement;
And the frontal cortex, where we think.
Pollan: Here were these receptors that this chemical
Produced by a plant out in the world
Just so happened to have
The precise combination to unlock.
What an extraordinary thing that is.
Is that why that receptor network existed,
So that people could get high?
We don't have those receptors
Just so that people can get high smoking pot.
Receptors are developed
In neurons so that they can communicate
With a chemical that the body makes.
So that was the logic behind going in
And trying to extract a compound in the brain
That would act just like marijuana did.
Mcdormand: And in 1992, proof came that the brain
Does make a compound very much like thc.
It was discovered by none other than raphael mechoulam,
Who named it anandamide.
We call it "the brain's own marijuana" because the compound
That is made by the brain -- anandamide --
Shares all the properties,
In terms of at the receptor level and cellular level,
That thc has.
Mcdormand: It turns out that when anandamide
Is released in the brain, like marijuana,
It affects such basic things as appetite, pain, and memory.
And it plays a critical role
In a sometimes underappreciated mental function --
Forgetting.
Pollan: When I first heard that,
It didn't seem adaptive to me, to have a drug for forgetting.
Memory, we understand, has great survival utility.
You know, you learn that that's a poisonous mushroom
Or that's a dangerous animal,
And you stay away and you remember that.
But why would forgetting be adaptive?
And I asked mechoulam this question.
And he said, "well, tell me, do you really want to remember
All the faces you saw on the subway this morning?"
Forgetting well is almost
As important as remembering well.
Forgetting is about editing.
It's about taking the flood, the ocean
Of sense information coming at you
And forgetting everything but what's important.
So life is not just about accumulating new memories.
Memory can cripple us, too.
[ man yelling ]
Pollan: You have soldiers
Returning from war zones,
That are traumatized by experiences
That in effect they can't unlearn.
So if you could help them unlearn that --
Essentially, a productive kind of forgetting,
Either with a drug or some other kind of regime --
That would be incredibly useful.
Mcdormand: And that's exactly
What aron lichtman is trying to do.
He's studying how mice remember -- and forget.
First, he trains them to find an underwater platform.
Man: The mice are natural swimmers,
But they're looking for a way out.
They swim all around the perimeter of the tank.
They're swimming, swimming, swimming.
Sometimes they bump into the platform by mistake
And they climb onto it.
Other times, they never find it.
Man: So at this point,
It's been at it for a while.
And the experimenter has to gently guide them to it
Or place them on the platform.
Mcdormand: Then, lichtman takes the platform away.
A normal mouse quickly realizes the platform is gone.
But a mouse whose anandamide receptors have been blocked
Is unable to forget.
Lichtman: They don't learn
To give up.
They keep on looking for that platform,
Even though it's gone.
Mcdormand: Scientists like lichtman hope
That learning how to regulate anandamide may one day
Lead to treatments for people
Who are haunted by their memories.
Lichtman: If they can elevate
Naturally occurring anandamide in humans,
We might be able to have whole new
Therapeutic targets to treat post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Mechoulam: By using a plant that has been around
For thousands of years, we discovered
A new physiological system of immense importance.
We wouldn't have been able to get there
If we had not looked at a plant.
Pollan: These plants are constantly undergoing
This revision and this re-revision
In our cultural imagination,
Depending on what uses they're playing for us.
Are they demons or are they, you know, saviors?
We see it with the apple,
Which went from evil to wholesome to evil.
And we see it with marijuana, which also has had
These periods of evil and this period
Of being celebrated by the counterculture.
Is it more uplifting or more relaxing
For your body that you're after?
Uplifting.
Mcdormand: One place that's well known
For celebrating cannabis is amsterdam.
We have the shiva, which is lovely.
Mcdormand: Though marijuana is not fully legal here,
It can be legally sold and smoked
In licensed coffee shops,
Drawing tourists from around the world.
Fantastic, let's do that for 10.
Wonderful.
Pollan: You can walk down the street
And catch the whiff
Of marijuana smoke coming out of bars --
"cafes," as they're called --
And you can choose exactly
What kind of experience you want.
That's milder, more dreamy.
I think just the bud.
Thank you.
Okay, bye.
Enjoy.
Pollan: You look at the scene and you marvel at it.
It is no different than people sitting around,
Enjoying their glass of wine or cigarettes.
Mcdormand: Amsterdam even has special garden shops
For cannabis growers.
You repot it into a bigger pot.
Man: You put this one straight in the pot.
You don't have to break it or --
Mcdormand: Its owner, tim a'court,
Came here from new zealand,
Where his passion for growing cannabis
Had run him afoul of the law.
Man: We sell everything for the home grower here,
From the smallest set-up
To really large set-ups.
And included in that is as much of the high-tech stuff
This one's a nutrient monitor.
These are obviously for two lights,
For four lights, for six lights, eight lights.
This goes right up to 100 lights, if you so require.
That is a second timer.
Sometimes we need to have timers right down to the second.
This is a camera.
And it's the same sort of camera you would buy
From the spy shop for spying on your wife or whatever.
In this case, we're spying
On our crop and making sure people aren't coming in and out.
Pollan: You can also buy seeds.
You can buy, you know, all female seeds
Of any given strain you want.
They're out there in little six-packs,
Just like at your garden center, selling petunias.
A'court: I don't think there would be
A plant on earth that comes near to the amount
Of equipment and technology
Available to grow it to its potential.
It's more than just a hobby.
It's a whole life's work.
Some people -- that is their whole life.
They're so enthusiastic about their so-called hobby.
It's unexplainable.
It's not just something about drugs or money,
But there really is a deep fascination
With the marijuana plant.
Pollan: The way I see plants,
They're just as advanced as we are,
From an evolutionary point of view.
While we were working on
Consciousness, language, tool-making,
All these things we judge to be so wonderful and important,
They were working on different tools.
And their tools are just as sophisticated as ours.
The fact that this plant, cannabis, for example,
Can actually change the texture of consciousness -- you know,
This is ingenious.
We would not be the same, if not for cannabis.
And cannabis certainly is very different
For its relationship with us.
It's one of the great winners in this dance of domestication.
Mcdormand: Looking down at it from the air,
You might not guess that southern idaho is a desert.
The big green circles are crop fields.
They get their water from a vast irrigation system
Of underground pipes and giant sprinklers.
This is one of the most productive farm areas
In the United States,
And one of the principal sources
Of a food crop that feeds millions of people --
The potato.
Pollan: The desire, I think, that the potato
Has evolved to gratify, in large part,
Is our desire for control -- control over our fate.
It gives us that by providing
An immense amount of food per acre.
An individual with half an acre of potatoes
Can grow enough food to keep himself alive
Or his family alive for a year.
It's kind of extraordinary.
Man: When you lift up the soil and you see these
Beautiful potatoes that are so nutritious
Growing underneath them, it's just -- it's really, you know,
Exciting to see how productive and how amazing this crop is,
That it can take this little tiny plant
And produce this great food.
Pollan: The story that we've been telling so far
Is the story of the symbiotic relationship
Between humans and plants.
But with the potato, we enter
Into a very new chapter in that relationship --
The genetic modification of plants.
For the first time, we are taking
Genes from one distant species
And introducing it into another.
That represents a real quantum change
In our relationship to plants.
[ bell ringing ]
[ children playing ]
Mcdormand: Our relationship to the potato
Began in the andes mountains of south america.
In places like pisac in peru,
People have long depended
On the potato for survival.
To make sure they grow enough potatoes,
They've developed an astonishing degree
Of agricultural creativity.
Man: We reckon that there are
More than 5,000 different potato varieties in the andean region.
There are tremendous combinations
Of colors, as well as shapes.
You find very elongated potato tubers
That don't look potatoes at all,
To very, very strange,
With very different protuberances,
That look very, very strange to you.
Mcdormand: It was in the andes that peopleces,
First domesticated the potato plant around 8,000 years ago.
To do that, they had to overcome a big obstacle.
Pollan: The potato in the wild is poisonous.
You know, it's one of those crops that produces solanine,
Which is an alkaloid which is poisonous.
And, in fact, potatoes still produce it, by the way.
If you allow your potato to get exposed to light
And it turns green, it's producing solanine,
And you shouldn't eat it.
Mcdormand: But in the plant world,
There are always exceptions to the rule.
Genes inevitably mutate, and plants change.
Pollan: People did a lot of trial and error,
Tasting potatoes and spitting them out,
Or getting sick.
And then, eventually, you find one --
Like, "hey, this one doesn't have that taste.
Maybe this one's all right."
And those would be the potatoes that we would save.
Mcdormand: Over time, the peruvians achieved
Great success as potato farmers,
Not by trying to control nature,
But by adapting to it.
Pollan: Whenever you're moving up in altitude,
You're having a radical change in climate.
And one side of a hill will have
A very different climate than another.
The way the early peruvians dealt with that
Was to grow many different varieties of potatoes
And preserve the diversity, so that on a plot
Of this kind of facing toward the sun
At this kind of altitude, you plant this one.
And on this plant -- just on the other side of the hill,
You plant this potato.
And this was a way of gaining control over their fate.
Because if something happened
On that one plot at that altitude,
They would still have other potatoes.
Roca: The andean region has many niches for growing crops.
And the potato was able to adapt to different areas.
That's why there were so many varieties
Developed for different uses and different purposes
Along the andes.
Mcdormand: Faustino pacco is 24.
His family has been growing potatoes here in the andes
For hundreds of years.
[ speaking spanish ]
[ flute playing ]
[ speaking native language ]
[ pacco speaking spanish ]
Mcdormand: These andean farmers are the descendants
Of one of the great civilizations of history --
The incas.
They presided over one of the most sophisticated
Agricultural systems on earth,
Based in large part on the potato.
But when the spanish invaded in the 16th century,
They destroyed the inca empire
And set the potato -- and our relationship with it --
On a new phase of its journey.
When the potato got to europe,
It changed the course of european history.
[ thunderclaps ]
Pollan: Before the potato,
The northern tier of europe -- the population was
Relatively small and was held back by regular famines
Caused by failures of the grain harvest.
The further north you go, the dicier it is to grow wheat.
And so the center of gravity in europe before the potato
Was the mediterranean, where you could grow grain more reliably.
The potato did very well at the more northerly areas.
It did very well in wetter areas.
And it did very well in really poor soils.
And so suddenly there was
This vast new source of calories that could underwrite
The growth of the population,
Such as never would have happened without the potato.
Since one individual can grow so much food,
You need fewer people in the fields
To support an urban population.
So it's really hard to imagine
The industrial revolution proceeding as it would
Without the potato to kind of support it.
This new world food remade the old world.
Mcdormand: The potato thrived in the soils of northern europe,
Most dramatically in ireland,
A country sorely in need of a hearty food.
Pollan: For the irish,
The potato initially was a godsend.
Mcdormand: Ireland's poor farmland and bad weather
Made it a tough place to grow crops.
But the potato plant actually prospered
In this soggy environment
And seemed to end the country's long struggle with hunger.
Pollan: If you had potatoes and cow's milk,
You had a complete diet.
You had calories, obviously,
And you had the full complement of vitamins.
So they became very dependent on the potato.
And in fact, the population grew.
The problem was, however, that the irish
Were planting almost exclusively
One kind of potato -- the potato they called "the lumper."
And they planted the lumper all over ireland.
So the irish had really made themselves
Dependent on this one strain of potato.
And in 1845, some ship from south america
Was carrying a fungus,
And it was a wind-spread spore,
And over the course
Of a very few weeks,
The spores spread across all of ireland,
And within days of infection, the fields went black
And the potatoes in the ground turned to mush.
Mcdormand: The irish potato famine lasted for three years.
In the end, the famine killed one million people --
One out of every eight people in ireland.
Pollan: So the irish famine is, in a way,
The great cautionary tale
Of putting all your eggs in one basket,
And the great cautionary tale about monocultures of all kinds.
It's a parable about the importance of biodiversity
And the dangers of monoculture.
And it's a parable we forget at our peril,
But, in fact, we're in the process of forgetting today.
Mcdormand: And what's making us forget
Is one of our favorite foods.
Each year, americans consume
About 7.5 billion pounds of french fries.
They are the most popular fast food in the country.
Pollan: We love our french fries.
We like them really long.
Mcdonald's kind of pioneered that beautiful red box
And the long french fries
That have to be tall enough to kind of sprout out of the box
Like a little bouquet of potato flowers.
Mcdormand: And to make those long french fries,
The fast food industry relies
Almost exclusively on one variety of potato --
The russet burbank.
Pollan: And that's what mcdonald's buys,
All over the world.
Because mcdonald's wants people to have the same experience --
The same beautiful, golden mcdonald's french fries,
Whether you're in prague or london
Or beijing or new york or idaho.
Mcdormand: Mcdonald's buys its french fries
From potato processing companies like the j.R. Simplot company.
This is one of its plants, in nampa, idaho.
The potato we process the most is the russet burbank.
The russet burbank gives us pretty much
The ideal quality attributes, if we're going to convert them
Into the product that our customer wants.
Pollan: So you see how monocultures
On the plate lead to monocultures on the land,
And that a desire for something like that perfect french fry
Has a whole, you know, carries a whole chain
Of consequences, all the way back to the farm.
Mcdormand: This idaho farm,
Whose fields extend for nearly 100 miles,
Is run by ryan cranney and his family.
Like most idaho potato farmers,
The cranneys sell most of their crop
To the processing companies that make
Frozen french fries.
If you want to get them in before they get frozen,
Then we need to keep digging.
Mcdormand: So, to satisfy their customers,
The cranneys grow mostly
Russet burbanks.
Man: That ought to make good french fries.
Man: I think there are other varieties
That are easier to grow,
But that's what the consumer demands, is the russet burbank,
And I'd be shot for suggesting otherwise.
Mcdormand: Despite the demand for russet burbanks,
The business of growing them is far from a sure thing.
Each year, cranney and his family
Have to shell out millions of dollars
For water, seed, fertilizer, chemicals, and labor.
But they have little control over the price
Their potatoes will sell for at harvest time.
Cranney: It's very risky, growing crops.
We had some really huge losses economically here on the farm.
I don't even like to think about it, how bad it was.
All righty.
A lot of the people in the community,
Farmers that we grew up with,
That have been here as long as we have,
No longer have their operations.
Many of us, the only way we could survive was
To re-mortgage our farms and re-mortgage our land,
And that's how we stayed in business.
You can only do -- dip into the well
For so long until the well goes dry.
And many of us have been to that point.
Well, it's not too bad here,
Because you're running enough volume.
They're flowing pretty good, but...
Mcdormand: In addition to the economic perils he faces,
Cranney must contend with biological adversaries --
The insects, fungi, and viruses that prey on his plants.
And his russet burbanks are especially vulnerable,
Because they are grown in a monoculture,
Just like the lumper potatoes were, back in ireland.
If an enemy can kill one of cranney's russet burbanks,
It can kill them all.
My role as a farmer is to help the plant
Out-compete the different pests,
Whether that be weeds or whether that be insects
Or a fungus of some sort.
It's a constant battle that we have to fight those off
And to protect against those.
It's a race to the finish line, whether the pests win
Or whether the potato plant wins.
Mcdormand: To help his potatoes win that race,
Cranney, like the great majority
Of large-scale potato growers in the United States,
Uses chemical pesticides.
The chemicals the cranneys use can be toxic,
But they follow epa guidelines
That establish levels that are considered
Safe to use.
Cranney: I don't necessarily like to apply
The insecticides -- or any chemical of any sort --
But it's something that needs to be done
In order to keep the plants healthy.
Man: We don't use a chemical unless we need to,
And it's kind of by prescription, by field.
So you just don't go in and just blanket
Excessive amounts of chemicals and fungicides on.
If that potato doesn't need any, we won't apply it.
If it does, we do.
You know, we love our children, too.
And we don't want to put anything on the food
That we eat any more -- to taint it for us, any more than you.
Pollan: You know, the control of nature is expensive.
To spray all those pesticides, to have 10 sprayings
Of fertilizer over a course of the season,
To water, to buy all that water and pump all that water,
It's enormously expensive.
These farmers are really living on, on very thin margins
And very little room for error.
And, you know, it's easy for us
To sit here and criticize them for spraying
These chemicals on our food, but the fact is,
If they were to give up on a single spraying,
They risk their livelihood.
Mcdormand: In 1995, ryan cranney and farmers like him
Welcomed the news of an agricultural breakthrough
That promised to cut down their use of sprays.
Monsanto, the world's biggest biotechnology company,
Came up with a much less toxic method
For killing one of the potato's most deadly enemies --
The colorado potato beetle,
Which can pick the leaves off a plant
Virtually overnight.
Thornton: Colorado potato beetle,
Worldwide, is probably the most serious insect pest in potatoes.
We still estimate that, you know,
Out in the western u.S.
And probably across the u.S. As a whole,
About 40% of the insecticides that were applied
Were applied for colorado potato beetle control.
Mcdormand: Monsanto's innovation was to create
A new kind of potato, called the newleaf potato.
It was the first potato to be genetically engineered
To contain genes from a different biological species.
Woman: Genetic engineering is a radically new technology,
Compared to traditional breeding.
It allows us to move genes
Without regard to species barriers.
It allows us to move a gene from a butterfly,
You know, into a corn plant,
From a starfish into a wheat plant.
Mcdormand: Monsanto's newleaf potato used a gene
From a common soil bacterium,
One that makes a protein that kills potato beetles
Without causing harm to humans.
The bacterium is called bacillus thuringiensis,
Or bt for short.
To help market its bt potato,
Monsanto hired plant physiologist michael thornton
To be one of its liaisons to farmers in idaho.
Thornton: Monsanto was able to identify
The gene in that bacterium, the bt gene
That was responsible for production of that protein.
And they could use a process to insert that gene
Into a potato variety, one that growers
Were already familiar with.
The beetle eats that leaf
And gets that bt protein inside it
And it disrupts its digestive system,
And that eventually kills the colorado potato beetle.
I came from the standpoint that technology and new improvements
Were a good thing for the potato industry,
So I was very excited to see something that was
Kind of a quantum leap in technology for the industry
Be introduced.
Pollan: The promise here was
That you could diminish spraying.
You might pay a little bit more for these potatoes,
But since they generated their own pesticide,
You could give up some of your sprayings.
And this was very attractive to a lot of potato farmers.
We were really excited about it
And thought that it was really going to take off.
Mcdormand: In 1996, the newleaf potato began making its way
Into fast food chains and supermarkets.
As time went by, millions of people
Were eating the genetically modified potatoes,
But hardly any of them realized it,
Because the government had ruled
The potatoes didn't need to be labeled.
Pollan: I realized as I did my reporting,
I'd eaten them already.
I'd been in a mcdonald's. I'd bought frito-lay chips.
And the thing I learned that iadn'bere of,
Because we hadn't been told, is that we americans
Had been eating these potatoes already for a couple of years.
Thornton: The potato was the same, nutritionally,
Had the same level of vitamins, things like that.
It just had this one additional gene that codes
For a protein that makes up less than a tenth of one-percent
Of the total protein in the plant.
And the decision by
The food and drug administration was that,
Unless it's substantially different --
Unless there's a new toxin,
Unless you've changed the nutrient profile --
It does not need to be labeled.
Now, it seems to me that the potato
Never before produced this pesticide.
So to say that potatoes producing pesticide
Are substantially equivalent to potatoes that don't
Seems to involve a certain suspension of disbelief.
Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
We don't want no gmos! Hey, hey!
Mcdormand: In the late 1990s, as the newleaf
Was making inroads into the market,
The issue of genetically modified organisms, or gmos,
Was arousing intense opposition all over the world.
We don't want no gmo!
Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
Man: I want to know what's going on
In my body and my daughter's body
When they feed corn to -- to us
That's been genetically altered.
They don't know. They can't tell you.
What do we want? Safe food!
When do we want it? Now!
Mellon: The bt potato offers farmers
Reduced cost.
It doesn't offer consumers anything.
And so a lot of consumers, if they were given a choice,
Might say, "well, it doesn't provide an advantage for me.
"and therefore, not knowing a whole lot about it,
I might -- I might simply say no."
Pollan: I do know mcdonald's was getting
A certain number of calls and letters asking them,
"is it true that you are serving genetically modified potatoes?"
This is a company, like many food companies,
Exquisitely sensitive to public opinion.
And they probably saw a potential
Public relations disaster.
They didn't want to, you know, ruin monsanto's business,
But they very quietly said that after the following year,
They would no longer be taking them.
And with that, the newleaf potato was over.
That was it.
Mcdormand: In 2001, monsanto stopped selling
The newleaf potato.
It had captured only about 5% of the market.
Both mcdonald's and monsanto
Declined to be interviewed for this program.
Thornton: I was very disappointed -- to see
This whole dream just kind of being shut down
Over relatively a short period of time
Seemed to me to be a tragedy.
I don't think it was a tragedy.
I think it was part of a very large debate
About how our society ought to respond to the use
Of a radically new technology like genetic engineering
In agriculture.
Mcdormand: But since the demise of the bt potato,
Monsanto has been very successful
Selling other genetically engineered crops --
Like corn, soybeans, and cotton.
Entomologist bruce tabashnik has been studying
The bt cotton crop in arizona.
Man: We're in a special situation in arizona right now
Where about 98% of the cotton grown is bt cotton.
It's being used as part of a program to eradicate,
Or at least greatly suppress, pink bollworm.
Mcdormand: The bollworm is as dangerous
To the cotton crop as the colorado beetle
Is to potatoes.
We have lots of damage inside the boll here.
One or more caterpillars has been feeding
On the seeds inside the boll,
Which is great for the insects,
But not good for the plant or for the farmer.
Mcdormand: Tabashnik has been investigating
One of the major concerns about bt crops --
The degree to which insects evolve resistance
To the bug-killing protein.
Some of his work is partly funded by monsanto,
Which is legally required to monitor bt resistance.
For years, organic farmers have controlled pests
With a spray form of bt.
But now that bt has been engineered
Into crops, exposing insects day in and day out,
Tabashnik has found that the bugs
Are more likely to develop resistance.
Tabashnik: In the decades of use
Of bt sprays, there's only one insect that evolved resistance.
On the other hand, after about a dozen years of bt crops,
We already have three examples
Of insects that have evolved resistance.
Mcdormand: But tabashnik still thinks
Genetically engineered crops
Do more to help the environment than to harm it.
Tabashnik: I think that ultimately
You can't be absolutely sure that no harm will come,
But when you're using bt crops,
The benefits are reduced insecticide use.
The risks are much more difficult to quantify
And much more uncertain.
Ryan: In my own mind, it seems like it makes sense
That we could go to more genetically modified
Type plants.
That would allow us not to apply these chemicals on the plants,
And they would have a natural resistance to these insects.
It seems like the logical way to go for me,
And I assume someday it will go there.
Mcdormand: But for food crops like the potato,
Genetic engineering and chemical pesticides
Are not the only choices.
Pollan: You know, as long as you're growing monocultures,
You sort of have to choose between
Lots of pesticides to keep them going,
Or genetically modified crops to keep them going.
But if you're willing to abandon monoculture,
There are other ways to do it.
Mcdormand: Mike heath, who grows potatoes in idaho
Just 60 miles from the cranneys,
Is an organic farmer.
Man: In a conventional system,
You're trying to control.
You're trying to control nature.
We're trying to work with it as best we can.
Mcdormand: While his neighbors devote most of their acreage
To the russet burbank, heath is
More of an equal-opportunity grower.
Heath: We have 16 varieties altogether this year.
So we're pretty diversified.
As far as I'm concerned,
That's our main strength, is our diversification.
Mcdormand: Heath grows norkotahs,
Red norlands, all blues, and elbas.
By planting lots of different varieties
And controlling pests with natural enemies like ladybugs,
He farms without using toxic chemicals.
Heath: The conventional farmers certainly
Know how to farm with chemicals.
I -- I myself, if I had to go back to that,
I'd -- I would quit.
Mcdormand: Heath's labor costs are high.
He doesn't cultivate as many acres
Or grow as much food as the cranneys.
But since he spends next to nothing on pesticides
And gets good prices for his organic potatoes
In specialty markets,
He usually earns more money per acre.
Heath: I used to be really pretty stupid,
You know, as far as my neighbors were concerned, pretty silly.
But I have a lot more respect now
Than I did 10, 15 years ago.
They can see that I'm still in business,
And we've got good markets,
And we grow a good product,
And I'm proud to be an organic farmer.
Pollan: You know, there are other ways to skin a cat.
And farmers are figuring it out.
And they're figuring out
How to grow food without pesticides,
And the key -- the key insight that you find
In all the creative farmers who have solved this problem
Is getting away from monoculture.
The answer to the problems of monoculture
Is not new technologies, it's not band-aids.
It's getting away from monoculture.
Mellon: I think if we could learn
From the peruvians, if we could step back
And appreciate the diversity that they've given us
In the potato
And take advantage of it in our agriculture,
That is the way forward.
Thornton: I think some of the methods
They've developed in peru to use genetic diversity
By planting a whole range of varieties within one field
Is a very good strategy,
But I just don't see how we readily adapt that
To a production system that not only
Has to feed people in the U.S.,
But feed a worldwide population
With a product that's a certain quality.
Pollan: The order we impose on nature
Is never more than temporary or illusory.
In the end, the logic of nature will win out
Over the logic of capitalism, the logic of the factory,
The logic of efficiency.
It's always been so and it always will be so.
Nature is stronger than any of our designs.
And nature resists our control.
For me, the most important lessons
To take away from these tales is that we are not simply
Standing outside the web of life,
But that we are part of that web of life
And that everything we do --
What we choose to eat,
What flowers we choose to put on our tables,
What drugs we choose to take --
These are evolutionary votes
We are casting every day in many, many different ways.
When we use these metaphors and we talk
About plants having a strategy to do this
Or wanting this or desiring this,
We're being metaphorical, obviously.
I mean, plants do not have consciousness.
But this is a fault of our own vocabulary.
We don't have a very good vocabulary to describe
What other species do to us -- because we think we're
The only species that really does anything.
But to the extent that you can put yourself
In the place of these other species
And look at the world from their point of view,
I think it frees us from our sense of alienation from nature,
And we become members of the biotic community,
One among many species, all of them together
Creating this wondrous web that we call life.