ToW #4 - IRB by Michael Pollan: "The Botany of Desire", Chapter 1

        Michael Pollan has been educated in Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University and is an author of four agriculturally-rooted New York Times bestsellers. He begins the core content of his book on the causal relationship between human desire and the success of plants with a chapter on the sweet-tooth-gratifying apple. He primarily investigates the story of John Chapman, commonly known as Johnny Appleseed, in order to explain how the desires of early American colonists led to the biological success of the apple tree in North America. Pollan writes this chapter assumedly after he takes a trip along Chapman's path from Pennsylvania to Illinois and visits an apple orchard in Geneva, New York that houses some 2,500 varieties of apple.
        The most evident goal of the first chapter of Pollan's The Botany of Desire is to illustrate the marriage between the success of Americans and the success of apples. In order to accomplish this goal, Pollan transports his readers to early 1800s America, where he notes that John Chapman made it his business to plant orchards of apple trees so he could sell them to frontiersmen looking to establish new towns. When explaining this history, Pollan often employs primary source accounts, theories from established historians, and completely logical arguments to get his points across, constituting both appeals to ethos and logos. Appealing to pathos, he also reasons about the fear of starting a settlement in the 1800s and the comfort that the ownership of an apple tree brought. Given that Botany of Desire contains a fair amount of science, Pollan makes it very understandable to people of most levels of education by explaining any and all complex concepts that he presents (for example, the extreme heterozygosity of apple seeds). In other words, his audience ranges from the hardworking farmer of Tennessee to the scholarly biology professor of Harvard. With his combination of a large audience, credibly written arguments, and plenty of examples of the mutually beneficial American-apple relationship, Pollan is very successful in convincing his readers to view botany as a projection of human desire.

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