This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan. Caffeine

After hearing Michael Pollan interviewed recently I acquired a copy of his book This is Your Mind on Plants. Pollan describes three substances that have had profound impacts on culture and ideology: opium, caffeine and mescaline. I didn’t think I’d end up writing about it here. Perhaps it should come as no surprise though. Since researching my book Wildlife in the Balance, I’ve begun to think entirely through the lens of animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More. There are some amazing parallels when it comes to caffeine. I should also say, I laughed out loud quite a few times – oh the irony of reading a book about caffeine while sitting in cafés.

Last July I wrote a piece about caffeine and bees so Pollan’s work gave me pause to reflect on that subject once again. At that time I described how they drink our equivalent of 200 cups of coffee a day, mentioning:

While plant caffeine limits overconsumption, it also attracts animals. The plants wouldn’t contain it if they weren’t grazed. It seems to have no other use and is even stored in areas separate from the rest of the plant.

It’s this part of what I wrote that got me thinking again: ‘Plant caffeine limits overconsumption [but] it also attracts animals’. This is the bit that relates to animal impact.

Caffeine as a lever for animals to build ecosystems

Caffeine creates a chemical architecture for all life on Earth. I hadn’t realised how widespread and omnipotent it is until reading This is Your Mind on Plants. It’s a lever for the creation of whole ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More.

Ninety-percent of people regularly consume caffeine. It’s easy to imagine plants driving this process, after all, they make it. The real story is more fascinating as it involves animals, ecosystems and the whole foundation for our society. Let me explain.

As I write, I’m looking at the noisy miners outside feeding on nectar from flowers that contain caffeine. The thornbills in my neighbouring park feeding on the insects that eat the nectar. Maybe they are all a bit high on caffeine. Does this create a level of fastidiousness that has speeded up adaptation? Do we have natural caffeine to thank for our own evolution as a species? It’s distinctly possible.

As humans we ‘sense’ and react to caffeine. It’s not dissimilar to the way we might react to light or sound. Caffeine is a psychoactive drug and almost all of us are affected. It binds with the very chemicals in our mitochondria, responsible for turning food into energy.

Caffeine is not only ubiquitous among animals it is found in almost all our cells. Is there any plant-based ‘drug’ more widespread in the natural world? Pollan’s work suggests there isn’t and I believe it. I wonder, will the type of scientist to which Jacqui Higgins refers in her wonderful book Sentient, eventually find a receptor specifically related to caffeine?

Everything in moderation

Michael Pollan mentions a study by Margaret J Couvillon about how plants could ‘trick’ bees into coming back time and time again to the same flowers. The over-consumption of caffeine though, would make the bees’ behaviour erratic, and the colony collapse. Have plants also tricked us into becoming addicted to caffeine too, and is this leading to the collapse of our species?

Pollan leaves this point hanging as he embarks on a description of the growth of coffee houses in France and London. From wars to philosophy and every day work, our whole society now runs on addiction to caffeine.

‘Caffeine improves our focus and ability to concentrate, which surely enhances linear and abstract thinking, but creativity works very differently. It may depend on the loss of a certain kind of focus, and the freedom to let the mind off the leash of linear thought’.

Michael Pollan This is Your Mind on Plants

Isn’t it a classic case of everything in moderation being good for you? Isn’t it another example of where we can look to animal behaviour and learn? If bees do well on caffeine to a point, but their society collapses after that, what does that say about us?

Naturally, caffeine cannot dominate

In a natural ecosystem there is such diversity that it would be impossible for caffeine to dominate. Couvillon’s study wasn’t a real situation it was a computer simulation. In nature, one species or strategy can’t dominate, unless the ecosystem is disrupted. This is exactly what we have done by farming caffeine.

Naturally, such disruptionThe result of an action that creates a sudden change in the stability of an ecosystem or process. This tends to create a gap where there is free surplus energy and organisms will move in to fill the space. Disruption might be a tree fall, or the application of pesticide to farmland. Disruption is important to maintain dynamics in ecosystems More is temporary, otherwise the chaos(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More that ensues would ensure the species / strategy’s eventual demise. Over many tens of thousands of years ecosystems have forced animals into a life where they consume just enough caffeine. Neither plants or animals are in control. The forces of nature that determine this are overwhelmingly powerful.

The fact that humans have a caffeine problem stems from our abuse of caffeine, not the plant’s strategy. We are prolonging disruption by allowing our society to fuel its own addiction. Sure, the plant chemicals underpin this, but ultimately it is an animal that is making it happen – driving it.

The chaos and collapse this causes doesn’t have to be fast. It can be a slow demise through the gradual decline into chaos, rather than a drug-induced coma or poisoning. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing by the way. What if our caffeine consumption actually leads more quickly to a stabilisation of our world? That’s also possible.

After collapsing, the bees in the aforementioned study, would be replaced by another colony that consumed from many different types of flower. Everything would end up okay. This is the natural state of things. The power of nature is to inevitably force animals into submission.

A free energy perspective

I hadn’t previously considered how plants might be purveyors of another source of ‘free energy’ other than nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More. As I’ve explained before, free energy creates chaos, which undermines ecosystems. This is what leads to collapse.

‘The widespread use of caffeine is, arguably, one of those developments in human history, like the control of fire or the domestication of plants and animals, that helped lift us out of the state of nature, providing a new degree of control over biology, in this case our own. But is this an absolutely good or bad thing?’

Michael Pollan This is Your Mind on Plants

If you pour too much fertiliser on a field, it creates a monoculture of one type of grass. The resulting system looks ordered but it’s actually the most chaotic it could be. A single species creates too much of its own waste. Living in its own pollution it cannot survive and eventually gives way to more diversity to absorb the waste. It simply cannot outdo the unyielding power of nature.

Caffeine-induced behaviour is a type of energy. Not in the sense of nutritional energy, though it’s entirely related, as it binds to the chemicals in our body that literally convert food to energy. Over-consumed and the caffeine creates too much energy … a surplus. The user (bee or human) might think themselves quite productive but it makes their minds like a barren field of grass. While we’re focused on the grass and designing ways to make more, we break the complex life support systems we can’t understand by thinking linearly.

For a population of bees or humans to survive, minds have to be freer … to think less, not more.

Overthinking isn’t the best way to survive

The birds outside my window right now aren’t thinking about why they are eating. They are doing what comes naturally. If birds began to think too hard they might forget to follow their instincts and start to procrastinate. By overthinking where the next meal is coming from the patterns of food consumption would break down. The philosophy of why they are eating would take over from simply eating without thinking.

‘Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits’.

A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

It may not simply be a matter of becoming more ‘creative’ by consuming less caffeine, it’s also about becoming less addicted to linear thinking and doing less procrastinating.

Does this mean the less we think, the more likely we are to survive as a species? Is the fact our whole world literally runs on a caffeine-fuelled discourse (like writing this blog) contributing to such chaos? Does this mean we think we are more clever than we really are? I suppose so. I can’t really ‘un-see’ that now.

Plants are not what we think they are

This is Your Mind on Plants has reinforced my view that plants are not what we think they are. Plants are primary producers. They are the purveyors of sources of energy, free for us to consume, and on which life on Earth revolves. Not just nutrients but also caffeine.

Left to their own devices plants will collapse ecosystems. The only thing that can moderate the threat of free energy is an ecosystem and that can only be driven by animals. Not one animal consuming all the caffeine but lots of animals consuming just enough.

As Pollan points out: ‘Coffee plants have ‘assisted in the construction of precisely the kind of civilisation in which they could best thrive: a world ringed by global trade, driven by consumer capitalism’.

By allowing caffeine to dominate our world we have been able to build one-directional skyscrapers at the expense of complex ecosystems.

Which is why Pollan’s section on mescaline is so poignant. The way Indigenous people used plant-based medicine was not to get high but to remind the community of its place in nature. Mecaline was used observe nature’s complexity just enough to be in awe but not so much to think it can be controlled.

‘ … [there is] no higher plane of meaning to which nature refers … nature [to Native Americans] is also complete in itself, embodying rather than signifying spirit … nature can offer redemption, serve as a means of transience. But either way, what nature does in our culture is point. It is unencumbered by the meanings we put on it.’

Michael Pollan This is Your Mind on Plants