Rigorously Local

A current theory holds that dogs were not domesticated; rather, it was they who inserted themselves into human society. How did they do this? By being cute, endearing and ingratiating, as well as useful and loyal. (Here is a good use of the passive voice, by the way, a construction that keeps the topic of interest, dogs, first and foremost in the reader's attention.)

This idea leads me to think that perhaps something similar happened with plants. Of course, on this Michael Pollan has already given us so much in The Botany of Desire, and I might come back to some of his thoughts later.

What interests me now is to consider how the rigorous localness of plants might have inspired human beings who by nature were always on the move. Might they have looked at a tree, perhaps while resting beneath it, and wondered how they too might be able to stay in one place? If trees are able to do it, why not humans?

Of course, there is nothing less at stake in this discussion than a deeper understanding of the origins of agriculture, which through its place-based productivity permitted the stasis that lies at the base of civilization, at least in one conception. I agree with scholars such as Vilem Flusser who claim that nomadic societies were far more sophisticated than the 'agriculture = culture' model allows. Migrant people have always been the world's first cosmopolitans.

So, following the theme of my opening point, perhaps it was not that humans domesticated plants, but that plants, again alla Pollan, not only inserted themselves into human society, but introduced and facilitated the development of a new mode of living, a model of civilization, or at least the framework for a place-based and static culture, a new genre de vie.

I am not thinking so much that a wild wheat stalk suggested the idea of the cultivation of a wheat field, but that the permanency of the forest, as mutable as it was and is, and the static resilience of an individual tree, might have planted, in what I imagine were mobile and frenetic societies, the idea of being similarly static and similarly resilient.