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Flowers. Trees. Plants. We've always thought that we controlled them.
But what if, in fact, they have been shaping us? Using this provocative
question as a jumping off point, The Botany of Desire, a two-hour PBS
documentary based on the best-selling book by Michael Pollan, takes us
on an eye-opening exploration of our relationship with the plant world –
seen from the plants' point of view.
Every schoolchild learns
about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: to make
their honey, the bees collect nectar, and in the process spread pollen,
which contains the flowers' genes. The Botany of Desire proposes that
people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal
relationship. "We don't give nearly enough credit to plants," says
Pollan. "They've been working on us – they've been using us – for their
own purposes."
The Botany of Desire examines this unique
relationship through the stories of four familiar species, telling how
each of them evolved to satisfy one of our most basic yearnings. Linking
our fundamental desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control
with the plants that gratify them – the apple, the tulip, marijuana,
and the potato – The Botany of Desire shows that we humans are
intricately woven into the web of nature, not standing outside it.
Shot
in stunning high definition photography, the program begins with
Michael Pollan in a California garden and sets off to roam the world:
from the potato fields of Idaho and Peru to the apple orchards of New
England; from a medical marijuana hot house to the tulip mecca of
Amsterdam, where in 1637, one Dutchman, crazed with "tulipmania," paid
as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price for a town house. How
could flowers, with no real practical value to humans, become so
desperately desired that they drove many to financial ruin?
The
Botany of Desire argues that the answer lies in the powerful but often
overlooked relationship between people and plants. With Pollan as our
on-screen guide to this frankly sensuous natural world, The Botany of
Desire explores the dance of domestication between humans and plants.
Through the history of these four familiar plants, the film seeks to
answer the question: Who has really been domesticating whom?
Source :
http://www.pbs.org/thebotanyofdesire/about.php
