Michael Pollan: evaluation

Transcript context

…I do. Whatever space I felt between myself as someone operating in nature but not quite feeling of nature closed down on this experience. I had an experience of feeling like one among the plants in my garden, that I had a sense that they had a benign affect toward me, and that we were all in this garden together in this really profound way. For me, the nature-culture divide completely closed down for a period of time. Is this illusory? What’s the status of that experience? I can’t tell you. I’m always alert. Nature is my big subject as a writer. I’m just endlessly fascinated by it and our attitudes toward it and the complexity of this relationship that we’re in with other species. Here was this mushroom with the power to change what was going on in my mind in a profound way, change my attitude toward it and other plants. It’s not a plant. It’s a fungi. I think that’s really interesting. There are people who go further and say that these molecules are bringing us a message from nature. I think that’s fanciful notion. But the fact that these plants and fungi would fundamentally change one’s sense of the natural world . . . To the extent we objectify nature, we can extract from it, we can exploit it, we can do lots of negative things to it. We can put animals in tiny little crates, have brutal animal agriculture because we’ve objectified it. If you have an experience that doesn’t allow you to objectify it and suddenly you realize, “Oh my God, there are multiple subjectivities in nature. Consciousness is spread more democratically than I thought,” I think it makes it harder to do that. A few questions about food. Where is the second-best place to eat in Berkeley?…

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