Recent public talk about land conservation has featured prominently, if not been dominated by, several different contentions that we can reasonably achieve our land-related environmental goals if only we embrace some simple measure or particular policy idea. Most notable of these has been the claim that land conservation will come about, to the extent that it makes good sense, when all parts of nature are privatized—that is, turned into secure private property. Related to this is the claim that conservation will take place, again to the degree that is most sound, when the market is fully unleashed and when every part of nature is subject to it, thereby allowing market forces to move nature’s parts to their highest and best uses. Less sweeping than these is a third, equally simple proffered solution: that conservation would happen if we revised the ways we think about land and human life on it—if we simply viewed the land as a garden, and then worked to make it more beautiful and productive.1
Privatization and market-based solutions have drawn warmest support from business groups and antigovernment ideologues (the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, American Enterprise Institute) that display little real interest in healthy lands. The tend-the-garden line of thought, in contrast, has come from conservationists who believe their cause has gone astray in its ethics, aesthetics, and overreliance on ecological science.
Tend-the-garden thinking gained ground in the early 1990s, largely arising from the conflict between conservation and the rising backlash against environmentalism. That backlash included several cultural components: the “wise-use” movement, which sought to intensify extractive uses of publicly owned resources (mining, timber harvesting, irrigation); the “property rights” movement, which defended intensive uses of private lands; and the growing criticism of government generally, influenced by libertarian and free market ideology. Backlash rhetoric portrayed environmentalists as zealots or close to it. They were misanthropes who cared about every life form except humans. Out to lock up as much land as possible, they were driven by a religious paganism that deserved no role in the democratic arena.2
A consistent weakness in backlash rhetoric has been its lack of citations to specific organizations, people, or writings. Charges leveled against “radical environmentalists” or ardent “preservationists” were rarely connected to any platforms, organizations, or well-known figures. To observers who really knew conservation, the charges seemed greatly miscast, save as applied to a few individuals at the outer fringe of the conservation bell curve. (They overlooked, for instance, the massive conservation effort aimed at providing clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, healthy food to eat, and natural areas to visit.) Still, the image of the zealous environmentalist appeared plausible, particularly in anecdotal tales about misguided land-use rules. It took hold as a broad and powerful condemnation.
If radical environmentalism as thus defined provided the social thesis, and the wise-use and property rights movements arose as the antitheses, it was only a matter of time before a synthesis emerged, a line of thought that expressed care for the land but that rejected the zeal attributed to radicals on both sides. The synthesis claimed to stand at the middle of things, at the “radical center” of thinking about land—the place where people of balanced judgment should properly end up.
Biologist René Dubos offered an early version of this tend-the-garden reasoning in his prominent work from 1980, The Wooing of Earth?3 Dubos celebrated the human capacity to improve nature when people exercised their aesthetic imaginations and used the land with respect and love. A more pointed, revealing example of this thought appeared in 1991, in the book Second Nature by Michael Pollan, a Harper’s editor who spent eight years living in Connecticut tending a backyard garden.4 Second Nature recorded Pollan’s trial-and-error education as he gradually turned his spacious yard over to vegetables, fruit trees, and ornamental plantings. Woven among his garden exploits were critical comments about the environmentalism of the day and suggestions on redirecting it. His own garden experiences, Pollan asserted, illustrated the path to a more wholesome bond between people and land. To tend a garden well, fostering its beauty, was to enact on a small scale what humanity needed to do on the Earth generally. Pollan’s book was an early leading work in this genre of conservation thought, helping to set the tone for much that followed.
A good way to probe this tend-the-garden line of thought, seeing what it contains and gauging its strengths, is to compare Pollan’s Second Nature with a 1939 essay by Aldo Leopold, “The Farmer as a Conservationist.”5 In his work, half a century earlier than Pollan’s, Leopold also offered readers a vivid image of how private lands conservation might be achieved.6 Pollan in his 1990s vision described a backyard gardener-cum-conservationist who tilled his soil to produce food and flowers. Years earlier, Leopold used the same literary technique to the same end; his farmer, like Pollan’s gardener, exemplified the attitudes and practices that humanity needed to embrace if land and people were to thrive.
Leopold wrote “The Farmer as a Conservationist” for a general audience, principally farm readers. His purpose in writing it was the same one that led him a few years later to assemble the pieces in A Sand County Almanac: to encourage landowners to practice conservation and to illustrate the value of protecting private lands. By 1939 Leopold understood that government alone could not remedy the conservation challenges of the day, particularly in landscapes where public lands were few and private farms intensively used. In such a working landscape, conservation required action by individual owners. One by one, landowners needed to leave room for wild plants and animals, to care for the soil, and to restore natural water flows.
Leopold’s essay and Pollan’s book display striking parallels. Both authors had in mind two principal reading audiences: a primary audience of landowners, whom they presumably hoped would accept and act upon their land-use advice, and a more general audience of readers who were interested in conservation but needed guidance to think about it clearly. The works are similar also in that both authors criticized dominant modes of thought, not just the ideas of people willing to abuse land but also those of well-meaning conservationists whose work was simply not well aimed.
How, then, does the tend-the-garden line of conservation thought compare with Leopold’s “The Farmer as a Conservationist,” and what light does the comparison shed on where we stand today?
Leopold’s essay is the shorter of the two works, but Leopold knew how to pack big ideas into small packages. “Conservation,” he announced plainly in the essay’s first line, “means harmony between men and land.” “When land does well for its owner, and the owner does well by his land; when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation. When one or the other grows poorer, we do not” (255).
Properly undertaken, Leopold implied, conservation could achieve a desirable outcome for people and land alike. Thus, dealings with the land were best understood not as adversarial or unequal but as a partnership for the benefit of all. To call this relationship a partnership implied a certain mutuality and reciprocal respect, a need for cooperation and give-and-take. By describing the human-land bond in this way, Leopold introduced the ecological orientation that was so central to his views. People belonged to the land just as much as the land belonged to people. All life that inhabited a place, people included, formed an integrated community of life. Like other communities, the land community could be more or less healthy and prosperous.
Land degradation took place, Leopold explained, not only when people exhausted the land by using it too intensively but when the land’s mechanisms got out of order. Conservation, accordingly, was about “keeping the resource in working order, as well as preventing overuse” (257). In many instances of degradation, land remained fertile yet its inner workings had become disrupted, just as the inner workings of a machine might fail if it were missing parts or drained of oil. Leopold’s farm audience knew all about machines and what it took to keep them functioning. To this audience it was rhetorically effective to speak of the land as a mechanism, even though Leopold knew the comparison was imprecise. As for farmland, it got out of order when livestock grazed in woodlots, when waterways were unduly drained or straightened, and when soil was so abused that it no longer performed its physical and biological functions.
Leopold’s ecological message made the work of conservation more difficult because it required landowners to understand their farms as integrated ecosystems. They had to learn to spot evidence of malfunctioning so they could act to correct it. Leopold’s message also required landowners to pay attention to all of nature’s parts, even those that seemed worthless to humans, because innumerable parts helped sustain the land’s operation. Here Leopold offered as example the bog-birch, “a mousy, unobtrusive, inconspicuous, uninteresting little bush” (261) that met no human need for food or fiber. What the bog-birch did do was supply needed food for the sharp-tailed grouse and other wildlife during difficult winter months. It kept wildlife from starving, with the wildlife, in turn, playing important roles in keeping the land machine humming along.
At this point, Leopold was close to the heart of things. To practice conservation, landowners needed to know a great deal, and they needed the ability to use that knowledge in a hands-on way. Leopold referred to this knowledge base simply as “skill,” a talent, he said, that could not be learned from books alone. Skill came from a careful attentiveness to the land and from a readiness to respect nature’s equal management role. Skill arose within a person who possessed “a lively and vital curiosity about the workings of the biological engine,” a person inspired by “enthusiasm and affection.” These were “the human qualities requisite to better land use” (258).
So what kinds of land-use decisions would such a skilled person make, Leopold asked, and what would the land then look like? Here Leopold was brief because he believed specific answers depended on the land itself. In southern Wisconsin, a skilled farmer would certainly “devote land to woods, marsh, pond, [and] windbreaks” as well as to row crops and pasture. He would commit land to bushy fencerows for birds and leave snag trees for raccoons. He would also, Leopold hoped, leave space “for a patch of ladyslippers, a remnant of prairie, or just scenery.” Many of these moves, he confessed, made no money for the landowner. They were valuable only in the sense that they made the land more enjoyable and helped promote its health (263-64).
If all landowners possessed what Leopold called skill and if they followed through on the conservation practices he recommended, the land would have “a certain wholeness.” Leopold described this wholeness by comparing land with the human body: “No one censures a man who loses his leg in an accident, or who was born with only four fingers, but we should look askance at a man who amputated a natural part on the grounds that some other is more profitable. The comparison is exaggerated; we had to amputate many marshes, ponds and woods to make the land habitable, but to remove any natural feature from representation in the rural landscape seems to me a defacement which the calm verdict of history will not approve, either as good conservation, good taste, or good farming” (259).
Leopold envisioned a landscape in which people made room for other life forms. “Doesn’t conservation imply a certain interspersion of land-uses,” he asked rhetorically, “a certain pepper-and-salt pattern in the warp and woof of the land-use fabric”? If so, then landowners had no choice but to be conservationists. “It is the individual farmer who must weave the greater part of the rug on which America stands. Shall he weave into it only the sober yarns which warm the feet, or also some of the colors which warm the eye and the heart?” (260) This question, Leopold believed, was one for farmers themselves to answer. But they were not therefore private decisions to which neighbors and other community members would be indifferent. “The landscape of any farm is the owner’s portrait of himself” (263). What a person did on the land told the whole world the kind of person he was, about his level of skill, his concern for aesthetics and future generations, and his willingness to help shoulder communal burdens.
One obstacle to the achievement of a healthy landscape was the adverse economic effects of conservation for the farmer acting alone. But lying behind economic realities was a way of thinking about land that propelled people to degrade what they possessed. “Sometimes I think that ideas, like men, can become dictators,” Leopold wrote, as the world was once again slipping into war: “We Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more complete regimentation of the human mind than that accomplished by our self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism. The saving grace of democracy is that we fastened this yoke on our own necks, and we can cast it off when we want to, without severing the neck. Conservation is perhaps one of the many squirmings which foreshadow this act of self-liberation” (259).
Having chastised his readers, Leopold ended his essay with a carrot—an alluring vision of what the future could hold if his ideas took root. What might a corn-belt farm look like, Leopold wondered aloud, after years of attentive conservation? There is the creek that would be unstraightened, he noted, with its banks wooded and ungrazed. The woodlot, also ungrazed, would include young sprouts as well as “a sprinkling of hollow-limbed veterans,” and around the edge a few “widespreading hickories and walnuts for nutting.” “Many things are expected,” Leopold related, “of this creek and its woods: cordwood, posts, and sawlogs; flood-control, fishing, and swimming; nuts and wildflowers; fur and feather. Should it fail to yield an owl-hoot or a mess of quail on demand, or a bunch of sweet william or a coon-hunt in season, the matter will be cause for injured pride and family scrutiny, like a check marked ‘no funds’” (263). “The fields and pastures of this farm,” Leopold continued, “like its sons and daughters, are a mixture of wild and tame attributes, all built on a foundation of good health. The health of the fields is their fertility.. .. The farmer is proud that all his soil graphs point upward, that he has no check dams or terraces, and needs none. He speaks sympathetically of his neighbor who has the misfortune of harboring a gully, and who was forced to call in the CCC. The neighbor’s check dams are a regrettable badge of awkward conduct, like a crutch” (263-64).
Leopold added still more detail to his idyllic vision of a healthy land. There was the bushy fencerow teeming with wildlife, the historic oaks, the prairie flowers and wild fruits, the bird list for the farm that included 161 species, and finally the farm pond, the “farmer’s special badge of distinction,” partially fenced off to protect ducks, rails, redwings, gallinules, and muskrats, provider of water lilies in September, good skating in winter, and rat pelts for “the boy’s pin-money” (264).
With this argument and image, Leopold distilled his message to the landowner, the results of his personal effort to determine why bad land use was so common and what steps were required to correct it. This particularized vision of the individual farm, in turn, fit into Leopold’s larger conservation agenda, which included healthy rivers, ample wildlife habitat, and well-chosen, diverse samples of wild areas. Unifying it all was the ideal of land health, proposed by Leopold as conservation’s overall vision. Not all American land was farmland, and conservation involved more than just sound farm operations. But if America did not use its rural working lands correctly, conservation would never succeed.
In Second Nature, Michael Pollan situates his own garden image, and the conservation wisdom that he connects to it, boldly and powerfully. Pollan’s image of man in the garden, tending the land with care, is proposed as a moderate alternative between two orientations toward the natural world that are, in Pollan’s view, equally extreme. At one pole is the American inclination to dominate nature fully, to treat land as an object that humans can manipulate and consume at will. This attitude, Pollan relates, shows up emblematically in the standard American approach to lawns. Americans drench their lawns in chemicals to eliminate every plant and insect they do not like while cutting the grass itself to give a uniform, carpetlike appearance. The typical American does not interact with a lawn in a respectful way: he or she beats it with chemicals and machines to keep it in line.
At the other pole for Pollan are the radical environmentalists and naturalists who dislike any human alteration of nature and who are at root “indifferent to our well-being and survival as a species.” (“Have you ever noticed,” Pollan asks, “that the naturalist never tells you where he lives?” [58-59]) In the environmental worldview, according to Pollan, individual trees (and perhaps other plants) have rights, and people who protect forests do so to honor those individual rights (203-5). Environmentalists urge humans to replace their anthropocentrism with a biocentric ethic in which all species are equal. Driven by such moral impulses, environmentalists have little or no sense of the land’s beauty; indeed, Pollan asserts, they are prone by their moral fervor to favor a hands-off attitude that produces landscapes that sensible people would deem ugly.
Pollan illustrates his environmental critique by recounting the story of Cathedral Pines, a forty-two-acre forest tract in New England owned by the Nature Conservancy that suffered severe wind damage in a storm (209-25). The Nature Conservancy was content to leave the tract alone but under pressure from local residents cut a firebreak around the tract’s edge to reduce the chance of a spreading fire. The resulting landscape, Pollan says, was “grotesque” (238) because the conflicting worldviews that guided the forest’s restoration were both misguided—on one side the ethic of domination, which Pollan attributes to the neighboring landowners (who wanted the ugly mess cleaned up and the whole forest replanted) and on the other side the wilderness ethic, which Pollan links to the Nature Conservancy (which proposed to leave the downed trees alone). It was “a classic environmental battle,” in Pollan’s interpretation, one that “seemed to exemplify just about everything that’s wrong with the way we approach problems of this kind these days.. .. We should probably not be surprised,” he observes, “that the result of such a confrontation is not a wilderness, or a garden, but a DMZ” (211, 238).
Pollan believes that we would be wiser to follow a middle path in our dealing with nature—between the chemically washed lawn and the worshiped wilderness, between complete domination and complete acquiescence. And the garden, he suggests, provides a clear vision of that path. “The idea of the garden—as a place, both real and metaphorical, where nature and culture can be wedded in a way that can benefit both—may be as useful to us today as the idea of wilderness has been in the past” (6). The garden “is a middle ground between nature and culture, a place that is at once of nature and unapologetically set against it” (64).
As Pollan sees things, gardeners are people who manipulate nature to produce the results they like. They are unafraid to favor some species over others and to focus solely on their personal needs and wants, yet their work is tempered by a measure of restraint. Gardeners undertake not to dominate nature completely but to achieve their production and aesthetic goals without using excessive force. A good gardener, that is, “can nimbly walk the line between the dangers of over-and undercultivation, between pushing nature too far and giving her too much ground” (148). Pollan envisions a kind of honest conflict on the land, the sort of battle that an honorable soldier might engage in, avoiding the equivalent of poison gas and taking no unfair advantage but nonetheless fighting with determination, skill, and a commitment to win.
Pollan’s guiding idea, borrowed from Wendell Berry, is that humans ought to use nature as their measure, letting it guide them in their manipulations. (“Learn to think like running water, or a carrot, an aphid, a pine forest, or a compost pile,” he urges, though all the while remembering that a garden ethic is “frankly anthropocentric” [232, 227].) Unlike Berry, however, Pollan seems confident that a skilled gardener can tease nature into providing humankind with limitless bounty. Nature really poses no limits, Pollan believes. Indeed, environmentalists who speak of such limits simply do not understand that the Earth is an open system, receiving inputs of sunlight daily. With such sunlight, everything is possible; “in terms of the global ecosystem, there is a free lunch and its name is photosynthesis.” A good gardener can actually reverse the second law of thermodynamics, as Pollan has done in his own backyard. Our environmental problems, he asserts, “have more to do with our technologies and our habits and economic arrangements than with the planet’s inherent limits or the burden of our numbers” (173).
What we require to move ahead, Pollan concludes, are new metaphors or images of nature. He derives several from his experiences looking at the trees of Connecticut. We should view nature, he says, as an organism, with the trees as its lungs that help clean the air. In addition, given global climate change and other atmospheric problems, we might properly view trees like the coal miner’s canary. “It’s obviously impossible to predict,” Pollan says, but one can hope that these “new” metaphors will catch on (206).
When the garden supplies our image, Pollan explains, one’s work with the land is guided by aesthetics and ethics. Aesthetics enters the management equation not to shed light on right and wrong conduct but to help construct a landscape that is more pleasing to the gardener. Free to implement his or her aesthetic preferences, Pollan’s gardener can reshape things as he or she sees fit, replacing native species with highly bred ones and otherwise treating the land as a canvas awaiting the artist’s touch. It is on the issue of aesthetics, Pollan asserts, that radical environmentalists are most plainly misguided. As evidence, he relates the tale of a prominent local environmentalist who put a compost pile in the middle of his garden. Pollan knows why this was done without even asking his neighbor: it was a moral gesture, devoid of a sense of aesthetics. Had the environmentalist let aesthetics be his guide, he presumably would have put a statue, small pool, or sundial in the middle (272-73).7
Pollan is vague on the ethics component of his land-management formula, but he manifests in his own work a distinct element of restraint and humility as he goes about refashioning nature. Pollan dislikes chemical pesticides and thinks a good gardener ought to compost. He chooses to leave the small wetland on his property undrained, although without explaining why he has done so or whether a gardener in his situation should feel obligated to do so. What Pollan offers, then-like René Dubos in his 1980 essay—is a suggestive rather than definitive vision of what good land use entails: “The gardener in nature is that most artificial of creatures, a civilized being: in control of his appetites, solicitous of nature, self-conscious and responsible, mindful of the past and the future, and at ease with the fundamental ambiguity of his predicament—which is that though he lives in nature, he is no longer strictly of nature. Further, he knows that neither his success nor his failure in this place is ordained. Nature is apparently indifferent to his fate, and this leaves him free—indeed, obliges him—to make his own way here as best he can” (232-33).
Pollan offers his garden vision as an all-encompassing conservation ethic, applicable, it seems (with appropriate adjustments) to all lands everywhere. When all lands are worked as gardens, we have no need for refuges or wild area set-asides. All acres are available to tend.
Pollan’s book has gained admirers in large part because of his garden image—an image that (to the pleasure, no doubt, of many readers) puts humans firmly in the center and in control. It is essential in assessing his work to consider that garden image, both on its own and in comparison with Leopold’s essay. Before such discussion, however, it is useful to assess a few of the less important but nonetheless instructive elements of Pollan’s narrative.
A number of Pollan’s comments about environmentalists are plainly more literary caricature than accurate description, taken not from real life but from depictions constructed by the backlash against environmentalism. They describe no sizeable element within the turn-of-the-century conservation movement, nor does Pollan offer evidence supporting his claims. One is hard-pressed, for instance, to find evidence of any assertion that individual trees as such have rights, a view that for Pollan characterizes environmental thought as a whole (though there are many who believe, as did Albert Schweitzer, that all life deserves a modicum of respect—but that is a claim quite distant from the assertion of “rights” for individual plants) (203).8 Pollan’s complaint that environmentalism is driven by a vision of untouched wilderness is also wide of the mark, though it does bring in a tiny strand of the movement. The truth is that conservation has always centered on mitigating direct insults to human health (mostly pollution and toxic contaminants) and on improving the condition of places where people live, the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat.9 Such efforts dominate day-to-day conservation work everywhere; in some areas they make up the totality of it. Wilderness preservation is only a small part of the overall picture.
Even wilderness protection efforts (which Pollan does support) have commonly drawn justification from the many ways that wild patches aid larger, human-inhabited landscapes along with the direct values of such places for human users.10 Efforts to protect endangered species have similarly been phrased in terms of the values such species have or might have for humans—more often than in the biocentric rhetoric that Pollan condemns. Indeed, many conservationists complain because species preservation efforts are not more focused on the perceived moral duties of humans now living to protect other species (duties owed either to the species themselves or to future human generations). According to public opinion surveys, such moral claims are supported by over 80 percent of all Americans, with the public as a whole supporting them more strongly even than members of the Sierra Club.11 Aside from their lack of factual support, Pollan’s allegations of indifference to human well-being could easily insult a good many community-minded conservationists.
Pollan is certainly right that environmentalists view human culture as the ultimate origin of our problems. But then so do environmental historians, virtually all scholars who have probed the issue, and even the public at large. Flawed culture is at the heart of environmental decline. Environmentalists have striven for years to highlight these flaws, just as Pollan himself does.
Pollan’s work is weakened by his straw-man (albeit entertaining) constructions of environmental thought. Such pejorative constructions, however, serve merely as backdrop to his own vision of humans active in the garden. That image, a more positive and well-considered offering, deserves a close look.
When the gardener begins creating a garden, the first step is typically to strip the land clean, just as Pollan did on much of his own Connecticut land. Plow under everything that is there and start anew. What will be planted is chosen by the gardener; it is a human choice, guided by the gardener’s preferences and wants. Nature, of course, constrains the gardener by allowing only certain species to grow outdoors in a given climate. But in Pollan’s scheme that is apparently nature’s only role. Pollan is content to allow garden space for nonnative plants, whether from across the continent or from around the world. He is also content to install plants that can live only with constant human attention; their natural vigor or hardiness is of no particular concern. Indeed, he seems to like the idea that in a garden everything depends on the gardener and will die if he or she fails to tend the place well (267).
In Pollan’s garden only his few chosen species are welcome, and he vigorously wards off other plants and animals. Pollan does show restraint in his chosen means of attacking pests, favoring biological controls over chemical ones. But it is not clear why that is so nor whether his garden image would necessarily lead to such restraint, morally or ecologically. The line Pollan draws around his garden—chosen species in, unwanted ones out—is emblematic of the ecological disconnection between Pollan’s garden and surrounding nature. Inputs, for both the garden and the gardener, arrive from somewhere else, and wastes largely go somewhere out of sight. It is a linear system, just like that of industrial agriculture, not the cyclical fertility system that characterizes nature left alone.
Pollan’s personal garden happens to abut wooded land and perhaps comports well enough with the ecological health of the larger landscape (though Pollan scoffs at the connection: “don’t lecture me about .. . the continuity of gardens and the natural landscape” [58]). But what if his situation had been otherwise? What if his garden had abutted a neighbor’s garden, and that one abutted another, and each gardener kept out unwanted species and paid no attention to ecological interconnections? What if his garden were like an Illinois cornfield, side by side with other cornfields and intensively managed so that disfavored species (that is, virtually all species) had no places to live? Where would the landscape be, biologically speaking?
At bottom, Pollan’s garden is merely an arbitrary patch in a much larger landscape, more the product of surveyors’ lines than any sensitivity to nature. It is a separate piece of the land under the gardener’s complete control. Focused on the small piece of land, the gardener can easily ignore the ecological ripples. The underlying problem here, most simply, is Pollan’s small spatial scale. The gardener’s concern is with the productivity and beauty of the patch alone, not the larger landscape. Then there is the related problem of the gardener’s isolation from the surrounding social world. Pollan positively encourages gardeners to embrace a go-it-alone attitude. Put up a wall or fence around the garden, he recommends, so that no one can look in and so that you can do what you want, free of outside pressure (60, 271). In dealing with surrounding landowners, the best attitude, we are told, is the American liberal ideal of live and let live-precisely the attitude that has brought so much destruction.
Pollan suggests that aesthetics will prompt a gardener to take decent care of the land, but beauty untethered from nature is notoriously subjective. The farmer who keeps bean fields weed free with herbicides, the rural landowner who mows acres of lawn and leaves room for nothing but grass, the pond owner who puts rocks all around the water’s edge and excludes all nesting vegetation for waterfowl, the landowner who cuts down dead trees because they are unsightly—for all of this, perceived beauty is a motivating force. As for Pollan’s own personal aesthetic sense, he is fond of geometric patterns and is particularly drawn to straight lines: “I immediately liked the way a freshly cultivated row of plants stood out against the rolling land around it, the stillness of it in the face of so much upheaval. That rub, between the flat man-made line and the landscape’s own bent toward curve and motion, seems to lend a certain energizing tension to a garden, to give it, quite literally, an edge” (287).12
For his most extended example of how to meld nature and culture without overcultivation, Pollan turns to his rose beds and to the vast rose-breeding industry. In doing so, though, he succeeds far better in entertaining readers than in clarifying his conservation scheme. Pollan prefers older rose varieties, which are more disease resistant and more fragrant. A particular favorite is the Madame Hardy rose, which first appeared in 1832. It “embodies the classic form of old roses, and comes closer to the image the word rose has conjured up in people’s minds .. . than does the rose in our florist shops today” (108). Contrasted with the Madame Hardy is the contemporary, showy Dolly Parton rose (“a rose with, you have guessed it, exceptionally large blossoms” [97-98]). The Madame Hardy rose is a good product of nature and culture coming together; the Dolly Parton, in contrast, is a “regrettable offspring” (113). Our prime need today, Pollan tells us—more important even than protecting swamps—is “to learn how to mingle our art with nature in ways that culminate in a Madame Hardy rather than a Dolly Parton” (113-14). Yet why—assuming we are to take this seriously—is one rose better than another, particularly when Pollan’s gardener is given an aesthetic carte blanche? Disease resistance may play a role, but Pollan is otherwise disinterested in whether plants can survive without human assistance. We are left, then, to wonder how we judge whether a particular biological creation is worthy or “regrettable.” A personal sense of beauty, it seems, is the only plausible guide. Yet if so, couldn’t a gardener just as readily prefer the Dolly Parton (or a convenient compost pile over a useless statue)? Is the difference here one of personal taste alone, perhaps akin to the choice between Mendelssohn and the Grand Ole Opry?
A central weakness in all of this comes from the fact that in his critique of contemporary thought about humans in nature, Pollan has set his ideological poles too far apart. His portrait of nature domination is so extreme and his picture of the radical environmentalist so miscast (though both contain elements of truth) that just about everyone fits somewhere in between. Virtually the entire conservation movement does; so, too, do leaders of the American Farm Bureau Federation and leaders of the nation’s big timber and pulp companies. Indeed, the most industrial of grain farmers or tree growers could easily read Pollan’s narrative and nod in agreement, for as they see it they, too, are in the garden-tending business. They, too, work with nature, planting their chosen species, excluding weeds, and wooing nature to produce as much as possible. Pollan tells us to avoid the extremes but leaves us free to define the extremes as we see fit and then to wander unguided within the vast middle gulf.
In the end, Pollan’s approach is merely a kinder, gentler form of land domination, and for that we can be grateful. But it is kinder and gentler not because these are inevitable parts of his garden image but because Pollan himself is kinder and gentler and because he hopes other gardeners will be, too. Pollan’s ethical precept is simply too vague to provide guidance. It is too disconnected from the land, too lacking in any ecological base or any vision of a healthy land, too disconnected from the community, from other life, and from future generations. Then there is the intellectual isolation of it all: Pollan’s unwillingness to engage (or even acknowledge) the vast bodies of serious writing on the subjects that he addresses: science, environmental ethics, environmental history (including histories of the environmental movement and environmental thought), environmental policy, and the deep cultural criticisms offered by David Ehrenfeld, David Orr, and other serious conservation writers.13 His readers get the cartoon version.
We might highlight the many differences between Leopold and Pollan by placing side by side Leopold’s community-minded farmer of the future, standing proud on his biologically diverse farm, and Pollan’s gardener, surrounded by his high hedge and struggling daily to ward off his plant and animal “pests.”
• Leopold’s farmer manipulates his land and makes it grow, just like Pollan’s gardener, but his farm is more than that and other than that. His thinking is ecological and linked to a vision of overall health.
Pollan’s gardener, in contrast, ignores ecology and ecological interconnections. His vision ends at his garden’s edge. For him, health is an attribute of individual organisms, not of the land community.
• For Leopold’s farmer, beauty is linked to the healthy, the natural, and the appropriate. For Pollan’s gardener, beauty is a personal choice, minimally constrained by nature or locale.
• Leopold’s farmer is a member of a social community and feels obligated to sustain that community. Pollan’s gardener is a loner, asking no help and offering none.
• Leopold’s farmer loves the local wilds. Pollan’s gardener loves the tame and pokes fun at naturalists.
• Leopold’s farmer is proud of his farm’s lengthy bird list. Pollan’s gardener is proud of his many hues of well-tended roses.
• Leopold’s farmer seeks to make room for wildlife. Pollan’s gardener largely drives them out. *Leopold’s farmer surrounds his working fields with plants that are local and native. Pollan’s gardener happily turns to the exotic.
• Leopold’s farmer embraces an ethical orientation, undergirded by ecology and by an attentiveness to the enduring well-being of the surrounding community. Pollan’s gardener embraces, as his ethical orientation, only a vague sense of self-restraint.
Armed with such a comparative list, one might wonder about the popularity of Pollan’s book and the garden thinking that it presents. Certainly the book’s favorable reception suggests that the conservation cause needs to work harder, and better, in drawing attention to the root causes of degradation. Tend-the-garden reasoning implies that our conservation problems are easy ones, but they are not. They are difficult indeed, problems that challenge culture in profound ways.
Since Pollan’s book appeared a decade ago, garden reasoning has mingled with other, similar strands of conservation thought, based on vague notions of stewardship, sustainability, and mild forms of “wise-use” thinking. More prevalent also has been the claim that conservation can happen if enough people simply develop fond feelings toward nature, or if they conjure up nostalgic memories of enjoying nature as children. Driven by such a love, they’ll know what to do, just like Pollan’s gardener. (Pollan’s own work, it might be noted, has become more distinctly ecological and valuable, while retaining his enviable literary flair.)14
Those who embrace such ideas perhaps believe that they’ve recognized our environmental predicament and know how to solve it. Yet the ideas they offer, far from being new, are merely forms of the same cultural misdirections that have brought society to where it now is. We see a resurgence of human arrogance, so creative in many areas of human endeavor yet so destructive in others. We humans know enough to manipulate the land at will—so we tell ourselves and so we often believe. We can charge ahead, getting what we want, without thinking much about ecology; we can use self-created standards of beauty that are disconnected from any visions of enduring health.
Tend-the-garden thinking would have us shift back to a fragmented view of nature and to an atomistic understanding of the human experience, when it has been known for years that these attitudes have helped hurry the land’s ecological decline. Individual landowners acting alone, this reasoning seems to say, can adequately deal with environmental problems, but the falsity of that position is or ought to be abundantly clear. From Leopold’s rigorous land ethic we have in fact drifted to a watered-down, unscientific, easily manipulated ethic of simply being nice.
By avoiding the need for major cultural change, garden reasoning of this type overlaps with today’s probusiness, libertarian calls for privatization and for unleashing the market. All such thinking resists the notion that America’s individualistic, consumer-oriented culture is materially flawed. All of it rejects the worry, and the evidence, that human arrogance is much too vast.
Garden thinking provides a knotty challenge for serious conservationists convinced that the conservation cause can succeed only when science plays a key role and only when planning is done at landscape scales. By endorsing neither idea—and, indeed, by ignoring ecology entirely—garden reasoning is cause for dismay. The proper response to it, it would seem, is for conservationists to present their own serious views more clearly and forcefully. Of course we need to steer clear of the misanthropic ideas that Pollan rightfully condemns. Just as much, however, we need to distance ourselves from the kind of diluted, play-nice-with-nature sentiment that now enjoys such favor. Good science and clear, critical thought— taking conservation ideas seriously—are the precious currency of the day.