Thursday, March 8, 2012

five complete sets of DNA

I'm not sure what the prompt is for this DWP, but looking at the other ones already up, I'm assuming we are to write on our opinions about the reading.
Have you ever read Botany of Desire?  It's a book looking at four different plants that have influenced and been influenced by humans.  The first chapter is on apples and how Micheal Pollen, the author, goes across the country looking for the original path apples took across the U.S. and searching for apples that have been chosen for flavor, rather than the sweetness and shippability that supermarket providers look for.  Anyways, I think the most interesting thing I learned about apples from the entire section of the book is that apples have five sets of genes.  It's impossible to get the exact same apple tree from an offspring with self-pollination, much less from cross pollination (ten sets of genetics).
I'm drawn from this topic back to... I believe it was Emerson or maybe Wordsworth who said that all nature can be used as a metaphor for human nature.  I think that 'Wild Apples' is the opposite idea however.  Apples are not a symbol for humanity, but rather nature in the form of all that opposes humans.  On 295, it talks about how when a cruel person thinks of apples as nothing more than just a crop or money then the apples are heavy and hard too pull, as if they fight their very existence.  There are stories of animals starving themselves to death or crashing into walls to kill themselves if they are being farmed and suffer for it.  This occurs everywhere between cattle being killed in stressful situations release hormones that make them taste less pleasant, bears farmed for bile have mauled their cubs to keep them from suffering when they grow up, plants of the exact same type all grown together will be increasingly vulnerable to animals and diseases.  Nature fights simplification and being used without any regard to the treatment given to the used.  Unlike humans, nature will change itself to survive (see above passage about genetics).  It never produces the same species twice, as there must be a reason it didn't survive in the first place and was therefore defective.  Humans change the world around them, feeling that we are incapable of being less than perfect as we are.  True, when we look at the dominant specie of the planet, the argument can be made that we have won the battle, but I don't think that we have or ever will.  There will still be seeds dropped on bridges in their own little fertilizer bird poop and hardy new apples to grow in the barrenest of places, miniature nature bombs that eat through our toughest metals and strongest pesticides.  'Wild Apples' is about realizing that we are not in control of the Earth, but rather tied in a way that will soon result in our loss.  The best opinion is to set down the spray guns and see that only fools declare war on nature.

Apples are fascinating.

3 comments:

  1. Great, Alexa - I think you are right in some really important ways here. Thoreau does seem to grant an autonomy to non-human species in a way that neither Emerson nor Wordsworth does. His nature is not merely a stepping-stone to transcendence, but rather has its own, intrinsic meaning, that, as you point out, can be completely at odds with the human. I love the passage when he goes to visit a crab apple tree in Mississippi (p 302), because it shows the way that for Thoreau, unlike for Emerson, nature has a meaning of its own; he's not looking for a higher spiritual truth here, he's just looking for a tree.

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  2. Alexa, I wonder where you see our imminent demise in "Wild Apples," or what the nature of that demise is. When you say, "'Wild Apples' is about realizing that we are not in control of the Earth, but rather tied in a way that will soon result in our loss," what kind of loss are you talking about? Do you mean we're all going to die, or are you referring to the loss of something divine and wild, like when Thoreau sees "the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to heaven from his cart"?

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  3. I was looking at the constant battle man has with nature to keep his house free of rodents and our bridges free of decay. Not that mother nature is trying to murder us in our sleep... (but you know this, I just told you that.)

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