The Implication Of Technology In The Botany Of Desire By Michael Pollan

Technology is an unavoidable aspect of today’s society. From getting up at precisely seven o’clock for that early morning meeting, to falling asleep to the drone of the eleven o’clock news anchor, people do not even think about how much technology impacts their everyday lives as humans. However, there are also more specific applications of advancing technology, such as improving research capabilities for agriculture and medicine, reinventing the way people or groups communicate, especially in terms of advocating for political or societal change, and even revolutionizing the way that students learn in school. Today, classrooms and laboratories are looking more foreign to those who went to college a couple of decades ago due to the influx

This is particularly evident in the field of agriculture. Michael Pollan, Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, studied the effect the human race had on certain plants and their well-being. One of his several written works, The Botany of Desire is about these particular studies. Pollan talks about four traits individuals desire in life, which are sweetness, beauty, control, and intoxication. He finds that humans have manipulated many crops to acquire these attributes, but four profound examples were attaining sweetness from apples, beauty from tulips, control from potatoes, and intoxication from Cannabis or marijuana. But procuring these qualities meant manipulating them with tools, chemicals, and interfering with the natural biological process. Pollan said, “plants are so unlike people that it’s very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication” (Pollan xix). This is key in understanding what a narrow approach to a problem could do. If a scientist does not know the specific aspects of a plant, and then tries to make a very specific change, it could go very unexpectedly. Or if the scientist did understand the plant very well, but he only thought of problems that might arise in the near future, as opposed to also considering long-term issues, there could still be disastrous results. This advanced thinking might have been gained through a broader education, notably consisting of problem-solving skills. Nonetheless, some information cannot always be gained through ethical