Subjects and objects

"We're prone to overestimate our own agency in nature. Many of the activities humans like to think they undertake for their own good purposes - inventing agriculture, outlawing certain plants, writing books in praise of others - are mere contingencies as far as nature is concerned. Our desires are simply more grist for evolution's mill, no different from a change in the weather: a peril for some species, an opportunity for others. Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject." (Pollan 2001, The Botany of Desire, p. xxi)