Plants and People: Who's Cultivating Whom?

Award winning journalist for the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World, takes a fresh perspective on the co-evolution of people and plants. Was the development of agriculture a human triumph or might it have been the great domestication of the human by the grasses? 

Bio: 

Michael Pollan, contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine; former Executive Editor and current Contributing Editor at Harper's; is author most recently of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World and previously of Second Nature: A Gardener's Education and A Place of My Own: The Education of An Amateur Builder. His essays and articles have appeared in numerous periodicals and his writings have won numerous awards and been translated into many languages. His 1999 article for the Times, "Playing God in the Garden," won the first Reuters-I.U.C.N. Global Environmental Journalism Award. 

Bioneers Series III includes the following programs: 

• BN301 Part 1: The Duh Principle: Better Safe Than Sorry
• BN302 Part 2: Energy Security: the Growth of Soft Energy
• BN303 Part 3: Light At The Edge of The World: Reinventing The Poetry of Diversity
• BN304 Part 4: Greening Medicine: the Mainstreaming of Herbs
• BN305 Part 5: Soil and Soul: The Future of Farming
• BN306 Part 6: I Heard the Voice Of A Porkchop: The Theoretical Promise Versus The Actual Perils Of Genetically Modified Organisms
• BN307 Part 7: Less Is More : Toward A Zero Discharge Industry
• BN308 Part 8: Daughters of Thoreau: Not Too Well Behaved
• BN309 Part 9: Plants and People: Who's Cultivating Who?
• BN310 Part 10: Getting the Real Story: Bypassing Corporate Media
• BN311 Part 11: Nature As Healer: Restoring Life As Community
• BN312 Part 12: The Wonders of Gaia: Nature is Symbiotic
• BN313 Part 13: Nature and Spirit: It's All Connected 

The Bioneers series consists of three sets of 13 programs each:

Bioneers Series I The Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature
Bioneers Series II Improving Environment By Changing The World
Bioneers Series III 

Inspired by the philosophies of the Deep Ecology movement, the Bioneers are heroic examples of people living as if nature mattered. Join us as we look deeply into the magic and mystery of the convergence between leading-edge science and ancient wisdom for a Declaration of Interdependence for the new millennium. Though these programs were produced in the 1990s the contents of this series are timelessly relevant. 

HOST: Michael Toms     INTERVIEW DATE: 2002            PROGRAM NUMBER: BN309