On Friday August 8th, Michael Pollan gave a talk entitled “Taking the Plant’s Point of View” at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York. Taking a leaf from the subjects of his books The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he told stories to re-orient us in our place in the natural world. Specifically he spoke about the relationship between human beings and plants, which need other species to help spread their genes. One example he gave was the lawn, something that he has written widely about. Now, though, it was no longer a totalitarian landscape in his reckoning, no longer just a place where we’d forced our will on plants.
“Suddenly I understood the lawn from a different perspective, when I adopted the plant’s point of view. And that was, in mowing the lawn we’re doing exactly what the grass wants us to do, without knowing it. That those of us who mow lawns are the greatest dupes in nature. Because what does grass want? Grass wants what all things want: lots of habitat. In the case of grass it wants sunlight. It wants freedom from the trees.”
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