M. 폴란의 『세컨 내이처』와 『욕망의 식물학』을 통해 본 ‘사회적 자연’의 실현 가능성

Abstract

This paper examines how Michael Pollan tries to realize the ‘social nature’ overcoming the border between man and nature through his gardening in Second Nature and The Botany of Desire, and the limitations of social nature as well. Pollan seems to advocate the ecocriticism concepts of Frederick and Noel Castree that nature and culture have a close relationship. He doesn't support modern technology as a cure for ecological destruction, nor does he want current nature to be restored into a primitive one. Pollan regards weeding in his garden as a positive performance to protect the garden against the wilderness of the forest. He thinks of lawn mower as civilization's knife and his lawn as a hospitable place carved out of the wilderness, which is a part of nature made fit for human habitation. Pollan calls grasses as nature's ambulance-chasers, carpet-baggers, and confidence men and beetles as airborne invasion troopers, and so he tries everything he can think of to eliminate dandelions and to repulse rodent woodchucks in his garden. This means that it is very difficult for nature and man to have a friendly relation with each other. Like this, even though Pollan hesitates to become a ‘developer’ or ‘naturalist’ at every moment during his gardening and farming, he feels a lot more relaxed at times while rambling in the newly fenced garden and watching mantises on the tops of his tomatoes and ladybugs creeping up and down eggplants, since he came to know the effect of a ‘biological control’ - a preventing method of nature in itself against harmful insects. Pollan holds the belief that he can realize both a ‘cultured or civilized and natured garden’ at the same time overcoming the boundary between culture and nature. Pollan classifies apple, tulip, marijuana and potato as the plants which can meet the desires of mankind, and describes their historical, cultural and aesthetical features. According to Pollan, there can be no civilization without wilderness, and nature and man have a ‘miraculous symbiosis of desire'. In addition, transcendence owes to molecules that flow not only through man's brain but also through the plants in the garden, and so all domesticated plants are in some sense artificial, living archives of both cultural and natural information designed by man. In this respect, Pollan seems to have tried to realize the world of social nature through a kind of interbreeding or hybridization between nature and man or culture. Pollan's genuineness and sincerity can be perceived in the sense that he refers to the last sentence in “Epilogue” saying that “Man and Nature are in this boat together.”