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A collaboration between a queer poet and queer musician, exploring 'the complexities of living in a damaged world'.  

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A collaboration between a queer poet and queer musician, exploring 'the complexities of living in a damaged world'.  

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"Carola Luther's new book On the Way to Jerusalem Farm explores the complexities of living in a damaged world. How, it asks, does such a world live in us, and we in it?

"At the centre of the collection are three sequences, 'Letters to Rasool', 'Birthday at Emily Court' and 'The Escape'. ... 'Letters to Rasool' travels onward through scarred and depleted landscapes, and searches for a lost beloved."

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3 poems from 'Letters to Rasool' by CM Luther with music sound score and video JM Molloy

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Plants aren't silent, Tel Aviv University team discovers

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The squirrel sinks its teeth into the cob. Helpless to resist the rodent's onslaught, the corn shrieks its misery into the ether. Meanwhile a petunia being assaulted by a horticulturist wails. A tree falls in the forest - but is anybody hearing?

Yes, if by anybody you include nonhuman life-forms. It's been known for years that when plants experience physiological stress that affects their water regime - being bitten, cut, dehydrating - they emit a rapid popping or clicking sound.

That popcorn sound had only been discerned when sensors were stuck on the plant's stem, or inside it. Now, scientists at Tel Aviv University armed with microphones have discovered that unhappy plants can be heard at a distance of up to 5 meters (16 feet).

Being in the ultrasonic range, we humans can't hear it. But some animals such as bats and mice can, insects can, our technology can - and so, potentially, can other plants.

That may be the most intriguing aspect in the paper called "Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative," published Thursday in the prestigious journal Cell, by Itzhak Khait, Yossi Yovel, Lilach Hadany and colleagues from Tel Aviv University.

In fact, this noise could shed light on a hitherto unrecognized aspect of evolution in plants and animals alike.

To be or not to be picked

Whether or not corn or moss or bamboo are conscious of their mortality, we do not know. They certainly have a biological agenda: survival and procreation, and some think plants thrive better when spoken to or played Beethoven. Some argue for ethical treatment of plants, on the indisputable grounds that they too fight for survival. Others think that's all poppycock.

Does the plant "mean" to do speak, so to speak? There is a school of thought that even bacteria evince "intelligence" so obviously plants do too; others would say microbes and magnolias react to stimuli and do not make "decisions." On plant motivations, Hadany has an open mind.

"We can't say whether it's inadvertent," she says about the clicks and pops of dismay. The sounds are affected by the nature and intensity of the stress, so if one can hear them and learns this "language," one is gaining information. But the team cannot say whether the sounds are passive or are actively regulated.

So we will not dwell on botanic will: whether they want to or not, know it or not, stressed plants make noise.

Technically, the popping sound is caused by cavitation: change in the water regime of a plant for any reason creates air bubbles in the tissues, Yovel explains. The creation of the air bubbles and their subsequent collapse causes vibration, which is what makes the sound - which, the team now finds, can be heard as much as 5 meters from the unhappy plant. Hence, "airborne."

But, informative to who? Everybody who can hear the ultrasonic boomlets: animals and also other plants.

Let us be clear that interplant communication is known and acknowledged. Plants in trouble may change in color and shape - a visual signal that won't affect other plants but could impress animals: would you pick and eat a blackened, shriveled corn cob or a pretty, water-fat yellow one? But scent also changes: traumatized plants emit volatile compounds that can cause reactions in other plants.

As for popping madly, whether or not the plant "means" to, it is communicating: I am being eaten, I am drying out, I have a disease.

Whether this communication is effective has not been proven yet, but the team suspects it probably is. You are a moth seeking a nice berth to lay your eggs. Will you avoid a noisy tomato leaf on the grounds that it's sick and will be a lousy place for the kids?

As for other plants, sound is vibration and vibration has been shown to affect plant behaviors - for instance, affecting gene expression, sugar production and more, Yovel says. They don't need ears to "hear."

A plant hearing a mate drying out could close its leaf pores to slow water loss, for example, which is an intriguing possibility, Hadany points out.

The bottom line is that sound now joins other cues plants produce - visual (color change, wilting); chemical; and tactile. Making noise may be an aspect of survival of the fittest that hadn't been realized until now: in the sense of, I am dying and telling you so may help you brace to better overcome the problem. The noisier I evolve to be, the more effectively I could communicate my difficulties for the greater good of my kind.

Yovel doesn't think intentionality is involved in interplant communication, but the sound clearly conveys information, he says. The more stressed the plant - for instance, from aridification - the more sound it emits. And, he adds, flowers have been shown to react to the sound of insects.

They do? "We measured it with lasers and showed the plant oscillates - vibrates - at the frequency of the insect wings," he says.

Finally, using machine learning models, the team could distinguish with a high degree of accuracy between drought-stressed, cut and control plants, based only on the sounds they emit. This could theoretically be of assistance to farmers one day, before their eyes tell them that a plant is dehydrating, turning black or being eaten by worms.

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Plants aren't silent, Tel Aviv University team discovers

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The squirrel sinks its teeth into the cob. Helpless to resist the rodent's onslaught, the corn shrieks its misery into the ether. Meanwhile a petunia being assaulted by a horticulturist wails. A tree falls in the forest - but is anybody hearing?

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An animal/imp/pet that would do the witch's bidding. Intrinsically connected to the witch themselves, they carry the witch's spirit and were 'sent out' to do their work. The role of the familiar is to serve – and even protect – their witch and assist in spellcasting and other magic workings.
https://wayfindertarot.com/witch-familiar/

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Description Name: Huldra, Hulder, Tallemaja, “Pine Tree Mary”, Ulda Area of Origin: Scandinavian cultures; Norway, Sweden, Denmark The Huldra is a seductive forest creature found in Scandinavian folklore, resembling a young, beautiful naked woman with long, flaxen hair and an animal’s tail, usually that of a fox or cow. In addition, variations exist in which the Huldra’s back is covered in a tree-bark like skin, and is hollowed out in the middle like a rotting tree trunk. Though the females are said to be incredibly attractive, the males are often described as hideous and grotesque, almost troll-like. Though some Huldra are malicious in their intent and prey upon men, many respond to the treatment they receive. If treated with kindness, the Huldra is said to grant those they interact with much luck in their endeavors.

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The Scientists Fighting for Parasite Conservation (article)- Rachel Nuwer

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The Scientists Fighting for Parasite Conservation (article)- Rachel Nuwer

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"Parasites are organisms that live in an intimate, lasting and costly relationship with their hosts, and scientists estimate that fully 40 to 50 percent of all animal species fall into this group. Just about every free-living species on the planet has at least one parasite specially evolved to exploit it. The broadest definition of “parasite” includes pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoans. But many parasitologists like Wood focus on multicellular metazoans: animals that encompass hundreds of thousands of species, including up to 300,000 different types of worms that parasitize vertebrates alone.

Metazoan parasites are as diverse as they are abundant. They span 15 phyla, ranging from microscopic, barely multicellular blobs to 130-foot-long tapeworms snuggly coiled inside whale guts—species as phylogenetically different from one another as humans are from insects and jellyfish. They live in every habitat on every continent and in every orifice, organ and body part of their hosts. And they are some of the world’s most extreme specialists, with wildly intricate life cycles sometimes requiring up to five different hosts to allow them to get from egg to larva to adult. “It’s just such a beautiful expression of the complexity of nature and its interconnectedness,” Wood says.

Yet relatively few biologists—and hardly anyone else—are more than faintly aware of parasites beyond the tiny sliver of species such as tapeworms, pinworms and hookworms that are irksome or harmful to humans. As a result, nearly everything we know about parasites today comes from studying how to kill them. “The depth of our ignorance is really unforgivable,” Wood says."

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I was preparing dinner, portioning a piece of cod, when a small, pink blemish appeared in the pristine white muscle of fish. Removing the splotch with a knife tip, I realized something was very wrong. What had looked like a bulbous vein began unfurling into a thin squiggle the length of my pinky finger-and it was moving.

Like a scene from a horror movie, I watched, entranced, as the serpentine creature swayed its body, dismayed, it seemed, at finding itself ripped from the embrace of fish flesh. Before putting it in the compost bin, I snapped a few photos. I knew exactly who to send them to for identification help: Chelsea Wood, a parasite ecologist at the University of Washington-and perhaps the world's only person who uses words like "beautiful" to describe bloodsucking worms.

Wood's answer arrived the next morning: Anisakidae, she wrote-probably Anisakis simplex or Pseudoterranova decipiens -a common nematode that spends its larval stage in fish or squid. Wood went on to congratulate me: "What better way to start off the new year than to find a real live worm in your cod fillet?"

Given that Wood had told me about the abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea and bloody stool I would have experienced had the live worm managed to find its way into my esophagus, stomach wall or intestines, the congratulations seemed odd. In her enthusiastic manner she explained why such a discovery was positive: the typical hosts of this parasite are whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions-animals at the top of the food chain. "The presence of the worms in the fish is actually a sign that the ecosystem it came from is healthy and that there is a healthy population of marine mammals nearby," Wood wrote. "Celebrate that squirmy harbinger of good news!"

Parasites are organisms that live in an intimate, lasting and costly relationship with their hosts, and scientists estimate that fully 40 to 50 percent of all animal species fall into this group. Just about every free-living species on the planet has at least one parasite specially evolved to exploit it. The broadest definition of "parasite" includes pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoans. But many parasitologists like Wood focus on multicellular metazoans: animals that encompass hundreds of thousands of species, including up to 300,000 different types of worms that parasitize vertebrates alone.

Metazoan parasites are as diverse as they are abundant. They span 15 phyla, ranging from microscopic, barely multicellular blobs to 130-foot-long tapeworms snuggly coiled inside whale guts-species as phylogenetically different from one another as humans are from insects and jellyfish. They live in every habitat on every continent and in every orifice, organ and body part of their hosts. And they are some of the world's most extreme specialists, with wildly intricate life cycles sometimes requiring up to five different hosts to allow them to get from egg to larva to adult. "It's just such a beautiful expression of the complexity of nature and its interconnectedness," Wood says.

Yet relatively few biologists-and hardly anyone else-are more than faintly aware of parasites beyond the tiny sliver of species such as tapeworms, pinworms and hookworms that are irksome or harmful to humans. As a result, nearly everything we know about parasites today comes from studying how to kill them. "The depth of our ignorance is really unforgivable," Wood says.

That's beginning to change. "Disease ecology and parasite ecology is the now fastest-growing subset of the ecological sciences," says Skylar Hopkins, a parasite ecologist at North Carolina State University. With a recent influx of early-career researchers, "we have this critical mass of scientists and practitioners." As the field grows, more evidence is emerging that points to parasites playing an outsized role in nature. One new study reveals that parasites account for 75 percent of the links in food webs; another study shows that they provide us with valuable ecosystem services, including pest control estimated to be worth billions of dollars.

Like predators, parasites can exert an effect on populations of other organisms in their habitat, which shapes everything from nutrient cycling to the types of plants that grow there to the abundance of top predators. In other words, parasites "play a major role in the natural world that was previously just overlooked," says Armand Kuris, a parasite ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "Their top-down control of populations operates differently than predation-it's slower-but their effect can, frankly, be just as massive."

Just as parasites' critical roles are being revealed, pioneering work conducted by Wood and others is beginning to show that many of these important animals are in trouble. They are contending with the same threats as better-known species: climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, and more. Because their fate is tied to their hosts-many of which are also in decline-they are often doubly vulnerable, particularly if they are specialists that live on or in only one species. "Every species you can think of that's endangered has parasites that rely on it," Hopkins explains. "If those species go extinct, then their parasites can also go extinct."

But parasite conservation is a hard sell. Saving certain parasites-and, in turn, preserving their roles in nature-will depend on convincing policy makers, the public and a wider community of scientists that protecting them is worthwhile.

Not all body invaders are bad

Ask a parasite ecologist how they got into parasites, and they'll likely tell you it was by accident. Wood grew up on New York's Long Island and dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. She imagined a career spent swimming with dolphins. In college, however, there were no opportunities for undergraduate marine biology research. The closest thing she could find to get on the water was an internship collecting marine snails infected with trematodes in New Hampshire and Maine. The parasites interested her "in no way, shape or form," she says. "I wasn't there for them."

Wood's mindset shifted slowly, then completely. In parasites, she began to discover an unseen world operating in parallel to the one of free-living species. Her undergraduate courses had hardly mentioned those animals. "It's possible to get a degree in biology and never learn anything about parasites," she says, citing a 2011 study that found that 72 percent of 77 conservation biology textbooks either did not mention parasites at all or only portrayed them as threats to the hosts they occupy. As Wood learned more, she felt as though she were waking up out of the Matrix: she could suddenly see a hidden layer of intricacy and connection in every part of life. She also sensed an opportunity for scientific exploration. Fewer than 10 percent of parasite species have even been given names, much less studied in any detail.

Wood now leads her own parasitology laboratory at the University of Washington-"a 24-hour dissection machine," as she calls it. Her team of technicians, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are all women. "I can't explain why women like parasites so much," Wood says. "There was no gender selection on my part, other than picking the very best people."

Wood's lab tackles a single question from different angles: How do the things people do to ecosystems influence parasites? One project is comparing parasite transmission in coral reefs that experience varying levels of human impacts. Another is looking into how the ecology of rivers, lakes and ponds that serve as access points for water collection affect the burden of schistosomiasis infection for people in West Africa. But what excites Wood most is investigating the ways that parasites have changed over time.

Understanding the past tells ecologists what was normal before humans started meddling with the environment and what baseline conditions conservationists should aspire to preserve or restore. Unlike well-studied, charismatic animals such as elephants or tigers, wildlife parasites represent a data void: scientists have no idea how, if at all, their populations have changed over time. Yet Wood had observed that both scientists and the media tended to promote the idea that parasite populations are growing out of control, driven by human impacts to the environment.

Wood refers to this as the "sky is falling" narrative. In a 2015 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, for example, researchers wrote that because "host diversity inhibits parasite abundance ... anthropogenic declines in biodiversity could increase human and wildlife diseases." This is based on an assumption, however, that parasites are always bad. "The knee-jerk expectation is that as environments have degraded, parasites will increase because they are seen as yet another stress on the system," says Kevin Lafferty, a disease ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. That prediction, he says, belies "a strong ignorance" of parasite ecology in general.

Wood agrees that the story is probably more complex. Like any other wildlife facing environmental change, she hypothesizes, over time there would be parasite winners and parasite losers. The only way to test this hypothesis would be to compare present parasitism rates with those from the past.

For nearly a decade Wood pondered unconventional resources that might help fill the void of historical data. She eventually found a portal to the past in an unlikely and convenient place: the University of Washington Fish Collection at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, located just one building over from her office. In this unexceptional basement room, the remains of some 13 million marine specimens are preserved and suspended in 40,000 ethanol-filled jars. It is the largest fish collection in North America. But the scaly souls stored here are vastly outnumbered by parasites, tens of millions of which are clamped to the fishes' skin, gills, muscles and guts. The fish are like "parasite time capsules," Wood says. All she needed to do was peek inside.

Katherine Maslenikov, the museum's ichthyology collections manager, was hesitant when Wood first approached her with the idea. "We were sort of nervous, like, 'You want to do what to our specimens?'" Maslenikov recalls. Many conversations later, she came around. Wood's project, Maslenikov realized, "is a whole new avenue of research"-a chance to fulfill the museum's mission of aiding cutting-edge scientific studies. As Maslenikov put it, "This is not dead storage. A collection is meant to be used."

Historical Ecology

Katie Leslie is sorting through ribbons of intestines belonging to a rockfish that's been dead for 41 years. So far Leslie, a research technologist in Wood's lab, has found only the remnants of the animal's last meal. Rockfish are notoriously wormy, but this specimen is proving to be exceptionally parasite-free, until

"Oh, wait, yes!" Leslie calls out. "Here's an acanthocephalan!"

Under the microscope is the first parasite of the day, a thorny-headed worm. Leslie goes on to tally seven more parasites, including flatworms and nematodes. She then carefully places the fish, along with its neatly labeled vial of organs, back into its jar, and reaches for the next one.

To begin investigating the question of winners and losers, Wood chose eight common Puget Sound fish species from the collection. Maslenikov helped her identify up to 15 specimens per species per decade, starting as far back as the 1880s. In the lab, each fish undergoes a full physical, inside and out, first for sea lice attached to the animal's skin and then for parasitic worms in its organs and gills. Technologically speaking, the method, Wood admits, is "like banging two rocks together."

Finding the parasites is just the first step. Worms can be incredibly difficult to tell apart, with visual differences coming down to the number of teensy spines or hooks on a microscopic appendage. Species identification is therefore an exercise in patience and meticulous taxonomic expertise. "Our work supports the value of morphological taxonomy," says Rachel Welicky, a former postdoctoral researcher in Wood's lab, now working as an assistant professor at Neumann University in Pennsylvania. "It's really becoming a lost art form."

In July 2021 the Wood lab reported findings in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment from its first analysis, on English sole collected from 1930 to 2019. In more than 100 specimens, the researchers identified nearly 2,500 parasites representing at least 23 taxa, of which 12 were prevalent enough to analyze their population trends over time. Of those 12, nine did not change in abundance across the decades; two, a trematode and a thorny-headed worm, decreased; and another, a trematode, increased. In another study that spun out from the same analysis of English sole, published in 2018 in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the team also found that a nematode called Clavinema mariae -a bloodworm that creates unsightly lesions on its host's skin-underwent an eightfold increase over the 86-year period.

According to Lafferty, who was not involved in the research, those results "demonstrate a new value for the millions of pickled fish in jars on museum shelves across the world." The findings themselves are notable, he continues, because they add an important data point about how parasites respond differently to environmental change. English sole parasites have been surprisingly stable over time, but for those whose populations did shift, not all went up. "Just like for free-living species, some parasite species do well under stress, and others don't," Lafferty says. Wood and her colleagues are preparing another study for publication with even greater power to test the "winners and losers" hypothesis.

As the team meticulously works through museum specimens, the scientists are also turning to other resources. Although there are few long-term data sets on any parasite species, there are one-off studies that document the abundance of parasitism at a particular place and time. In a 2020 Global Change Biology paper, Wood and her group synthesized these results for two types of common parasites found in raw fish often used in sushi and ceviche. One of the worms, they found, is just as prevalent today as it was in the past, but the other worm underwent an incredible 283-fold increase since the 1970s.

Wormy sushi can lead to a bad case of vomiting and diarrhea when consumed by people, but Wood is concerned about marine mammals-the worm's intended targets. Typically a single worm does not extract much energy from its host. But if the number of worms is skyrocketing, they could pose a problem for marine mammals, especially for populations that are already stressed. The Puget Sound's endangered pod of resident killer whales, for example, suffers from pollution, noisy ships and a lack of Chinook salmon to eat. In 2018 an emaciated killer whale calf turned up in the sound. Authorities launched an unsuccessful effort to save her, and before the calf died, scientists found that her scat was loaded with parasite eggs of the same sushi worm family identified in Wood's study.

This does not prove that parasites played a role in the calf's death. But it does hint at the possibility that parasites might be making life harder for an already beleaguered population, Wood says. To learn more, Natalie Mastick, a doctoral student in Wood's lab, is using several approaches to understand whether whales are facing a greater threat of intestinal parasitism today than they did in the past-such as collecting whale poop found by sniffer dogs on boats and analyzing it for hormones, diet and parasite load. "If parasites turn out to be this huge stressor we didn't know about, at least that's a treatable ailment," Mastick says. Wildlife managers can tuck anthelmintic drugs inside the salmon they feed to worm-stricken marine mammals ("like hiding your dog's pill in a blob of peanut butter," Wood says) or use darts to administer the pharmaceuticals from a distance.

In addition to the possible impacts on health for humans and wildlife, spikes in parasite populations can harm certain industries. The Puget Sound, for example, is famous for producing Pacific oysters with pearly, unblemished shells. But in 2017 a colleague dropped a shell on Wood's desk marked with squiggly canals and dark, ugly spots-signs of a shell-boring oyster pest called Polydora. Although the parasites themselves are not dangerous for people to consume, they form blisters on the oyster shells filled with mud and worm feces and scar them with their voracious tunneling. It's not something diners want on their plates. Since the 1860s Polydora outbreaks have devastated oyster industries in Australia, Hawaii and the U.S. East Coast, but Washington State-the U.S.'s largest producer of farmed bivalves-had long been spared. In March 2020, however, Julieta Martinelli, one of Wood's postdocs, and her colleagues wrote in the journal Scientific Reports that one notorious species, Polydora websteri, had indeed invaded the Puget Sound.

Martinelli is now studying the ecology of the parasite in hopes of finding ways to help oyster growers treat and contain it. She and Wood are also trying to untangle the history of Polydora and other shell-boring polychaetes. An accidental introduction seems like the obvious answer, but the story may be more complex. Martinelli is turning to oyster middens-essentially, piles of shells left over from ancient oyster feasts-to unravel Polydora's history in the Pacific Northwest. She confirmed that 1,000-year-old native Olympia oyster shells recovered from Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe middens bear signs of some type of burrowing worm. Martinelli guesses that this is a different species-but it could also be that Polydora has been lying in wait in very low numbers and only now has been unleashed by some as yet unknown environmental trigger.

Martinelli plans to excavate more recent oyster middens to see if she can pinpoint the parasite's introduction into local bivalve populations. "The tricky thing about paleo work," she says, "is we'll never have the definite answer. But we do have traces of the past that are comparable to the present."

Save the parasites

Parasite increases still get most of the attention-which is why Wood is attuned to parasite decreases and their implications for humans and wildlife. Some are to be celebrated, such as the effort to eradicate the Guinea worm, a spaghettilike parasite that grows up to 2.5 feet long inside an infected person's digestive system before migrating to and eventually breaking through their skin. But for parasites that do not impact humans-the vast majority of species-some of the losses are concerning. One 2017 Science Advances paper estimated that up to 30 percent of parasitic worms may go extinct in the coming decades because of climate change and other pressures, and we're only just beginning to learn how such a staggering loss of biodiversity will reverberate.

Take, for instance, the phenomenon of parasitic puppet mastery that occurs in many species. "Parasites shunt energy from lower to higher trophic levels by making prey reckless," Wood says. Euhaplorchis californiensis, for one, is a trematode flatworm that, in its larval stage, looks a bit like a sperm, with a big head and long tail. The flatworm begins its life in a snail, then moves into a California killifish, then to its final destination in the gut of a predatory water bird, such as a heron or egret. Killifish typically spend their days hiding, however, which runs counter to the flatworm's agenda. So the parasite creates cysts on its host's brain, causing the hapless killifish to splash around on the surface of the water and flash its shiny belly, baiting the birds. Infected killifish, researchers have found, are 10 to 30 times more likely to be eaten by a bird than noninfected ones. Collectively, trematodes make a significant proportion of killifish populations more readily available as meals for birds-effectively subsidizing those predators' diets. If certain parasite species are in decline or even disappear, it's possible that "it could be way harder to conserve predators," Wood explains.

Likewise, in Japan a 15-inch-long nematomorph worm causes infected crickets to dive into streams, where the adult worms burst out of their hosts to partake in a parasitic orgy. Meanwhile the doomed crickets become food for endangered Japanese char, providing up to 60 percent of the fish's calories. Not only does the nematomorph worm help feed an endangered species, but by relieving pressure on other invertebrate species the fish eat, it also changes the stream's overall ecology.

As scientists learn more about parasites' roles in ecosystems, a small but growing cadre is beginning to think seriously about the need for targeted parasite conservation. In August 2020 parasite ecologist Colin Carlson of Georgetown University, along with Wood, Hopkins and nine others, published a 12-point plan for conserving parasites over the next decade. For starters, they wrote in the journal Biological Conservation, we cannot care about or conserve what we do not know exists. They challenged the scientific community to shine a light on parasite diversity by describing more than 50 percent of parasite species by 2030. "We basically have barely scratched the surface," Hopkins says.

Once descriptions and data about each species' ecology and life cycle start rolling in, the authors suggest, parasites in need of conservation could be identified, then integrated into existing species-protection schemes fairly simply. Parasite conservation can simply piggyback on existing efforts to save imperiled free-living species. Threatened parasites can likewise be added to various inventories for tallying and protecting endangered plants and animals. Only one animal parasite, the pygmy hog-sucking louse, is currently included on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species, and none are included on the U.S. Endangered Species List.

Hopkins, Wood and their peers know that parasites have a serious image problem but are hopeful they can be rebranded. They liken the state of parasite conservation to where the field of predator conservation was just a few decades ago. At the time, many researchers and the public thought of bears, wolves and other meat eaters as damaging to the environment and dangerous to humans and livestock. Those assumptions proved not only false but harmful. Scientists now know that predators are keystone species-ones on which entire ecosystems depend. Removing them can cause cascades of negative impacts, from disease outbreaks and disruption of nutrient cycling to shifts to entirely different habitat types. As researchers realized the importance of predators, the public warmed to them, too.

"My hope is that people are willing to peer into this black box we've put parasites into," Wood says. "Parasites aren't this monolithic threat."

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The Scientists Fighting for Parasite Conservation

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I was preparing dinner, portioning a piece of cod, when a small, pink blemish appeared in the pristine white muscle of fish. Removing the splotch with a knife tip, I realized something was very wrong. What had looked like a bulbous vein began unfurling into a thin squiggle the length of my pinky finger-and it was moving.

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How Scientists Are Using AI to Talk to Animals (Article/interview) - Sophie Bushwick/Karen Bakker (2023)

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How Scientists Are Using AI to Talk to Animals (Article/interview) - Sophie Bushwick/Karen Bakker (2023)

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"“There’s one set of researchers that’s keen on finding out whether animals can engage in symbolic communication and another set that says, ‘That is anthropomorphizing. We need to ... understand nonhuman communication on its own terms,’” says Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Now scientists are using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods. This field of “digital bioacoustics” is the subject of Bakker’s new book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.

"Scientific American spoke with Bakker about how technology can help humans communicate with creatures such as bats and honeybees—and how these conversations are forcing us to rethink our relationship with other species."

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In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that "learned" to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were "saying"-and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile.

"There's one set of researchers that's keen on finding out whether animals can engage in symbolic communication and another set that says, 'That is anthropomorphizing. We need to understand nonhuman communication on its own terms,'" says Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Now scientists are using improved sensors and artificial-intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own methods. This field of "digital bioacoustics" is the subject of Bakker's 2022 book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants (Princeton University Press).

Scientific American spoke with Bakker about how technology can help humans communicate with creatures such as bats and honeybees -and how these conversations are forcing us to rethink our relationship with other species.

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Can you give us a brief history of humans attempting to communicate with animals?
There were numerous attempts in the mid-20th century to try to teach human language to nonhumans, primates such as Koko. And those efforts were somewhat controversial. As we look back, one view we have now (that may not have been so prevalent then) is that we were too anthropocentric in our approaches. The desire then was to assess nonhuman intelligence by teaching nonhumans to speak like we do-when in fact we should have been thinking about their abilities to engage in complex communication on their own terms, in their own embodied way, in their own worldview.

One of the terms used in the book is the notion of umwelt, which is this idea of the lived experience of organisms. If we are attentive to the umwelt of another organism, we wouldn't expect a honeybee to speak human language, but we would become very interested in the fascinating language of honeybees, which is vibrational and positional. It's sensitive to nuances such as the polarization of sunlight that we can't even begin to convey with our bodies. That is where the science is today. The field of digital bioacoustics-which is accelerating exponentially and unveiling fascinating findings about communication across the tree of life-is now approaching these animals and asking not "Can they speak like humans?" but "Can they communicate complex information to one another? How are they doing so? What is significant to them?" I would say that's a more biocentric approach, or at the very least it's less anthropocentric.

Taking a bigger view, I think it's also important to acknowledge that listening to nature, "deep listening," has a long and venerable tradition. It's an ancient art that is still practiced in an unmediated form. There are long-standing Indigenous traditions of deep listening that are deeply attuned to nonhuman sounds. So if we combine digital listening-which is opening up vast new worlds of nonhuman sound and decoding that sound with artificial intelligence-with deep listening, I believe that we are on the brink of two important discoveries. The first is language in nonhumans. And that's a very controversial statement, which we can dig into. The second is: I believe we're at the brink of interspecies communication.
What kind of technology is enabling these breakthroughs?
Digital bioacoustics relies on very small, portable, lightweight digital recorders, which are like miniature microphones that scientists are installing everywhere from the Arctic to the Amazon. You can put these microphones on the backs of turtles or whales. You can put them deep in the ocean or on the highest mountaintop or attach them to birds. They can record continuously, 24/7, in remote places scientists cannot easily reach, even in the dark, and without the disruption that comes from introducing human observers in an ecosystem.

That instrumentation creates a data deluge, and that is where artificial intelligence comes in-because the same natural-language-processing algorithms that we are using to such great effect in tools such as Google Translate can also be used to detect patterns in nonhuman communication.
What's an example of these communication patterns?
In the bat chapter where I discuss the research of Yossi Yovel of Tel Aviv University, there's a particular study in which his team monitored [nearly two] dozen Egyptian fruit bats for two and a half months and recorded their vocalizations. They then adapted a voice-recognition program to analyze [15,000 of] the sounds, and the algorithm correlated specific sounds with specific social interactions captured via videos-such as when two bats fought over food. Using this, the researchers were able to classify the majority of bats' sounds. That is how Yovel and other researchers such as Gerry Carter of the Ohio State University have been able to determine that bats have much more complex language than we previously understood. Bats argue over food; they distinguish between genders when they communicate with one another; they have individual names, or "signature calls." Mother bats speak to their babies in an equivalent of " motherese." But whereas human mothers raise the pitch of their voices when talking to babies, mother bats lower the pitch-which elicits a babble response in the babies that learn to "speak" specific words or referential signals as they grow up. So bats engage in vocal learning.

That's a great example of how deep learning is able to derive these patterns from this instrumentation, all of these sensors and microphones, and reveal to us something that we could not access with the naked human ear. Because most of bat communication is in the ultrasonic, above our hearing range, and because bats speak much faster than we do, we have to slow it down to listen to it, as well as reduce the frequency. So we cannot listen like a bat, but our computers can. The next insight is that our computers can also speak back to the bat. The software produces specific patterns and uses those to communicate back to the bat colony or to the beehive, and that is what researchers are now doing.
How are researchers talking to bees?
The honeybee research is fascinating. A researcher named Tim Landgraf of Freie Universität Berlin studies bee communication, which, as I mentioned earlier, is vibrational and positional. When honeybees "speak" to one another, it's their body movements, as well as the sounds, that matter. Now computers, and particularly deep-learning algorithms, are able to follow this because you can use computer vision, combined with natural-language processing. They have now perfected these algorithms to the point where they're actually able to track individual bees, and they're able to determine what impact the communication of an individual might have on another bee. From that emerges the ability to decode honeybee language. We found that they have specific signals. Researchers have given these signals funny names. Bees toot; they quack. There's a "hush" or "stop" signal, a whooping "danger" signal. They've got piping [signals related to swarming] and begging and shaking signals, and those all direct collective and individual behavior.

The next step for Landgraf was to encode this information into a robot that he called RoboBee. Eventually, after seven or eight prototypes, he came up with a "bee" that could enter the hive, and it would essentially emit commands that the honeybees would obey. So Landgraf's honeybee robot can tell the other bees to stop, and they do. It can also do something more complicated, which is the very famous waggle dance-it's the communication pattern they use to convey the location of a nectar source to other honeybees. This is a very easy experiment to run, in a way, because you put a nectar source in a place where no honeybees from the hive have visited. You then instruct the robot to tell the honeybees where the nectar source is, and then you check whether the bees fly there successfully. And indeed, they do. This result happened only once, and scientists are not sure why it worked or how to replicate it. But it is still an astounding result.

This raises a lot of philosophical and ethical questions. You could imagine such a system being used to protect honeybees-you could tell honeybees to fly to safe nectar sources and not polluted ones that had, let's say, high levels of pesticides. You could also imagine this could be a tool to domesticate a previously wild species that we have only imperfectly domesticated or to attempt to control the behavior of other wild species. The insights about the level of sophistication and the degree of complex communication in nonhumans raise some very important philosophical questions about the uniqueness of language as a human capacity.
What impact is this technology having on our understanding of the natural world?
The invention of digital bioacoustics is analogous to the invention of the microscope. When Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek started looking through his microscopes, he discovered the microbial world, and that laid the foundation for countless future breakthroughs. So the microscope enabled humans to see anew with both our eyes and our imaginations. The analogy here is that digital bioacoustics, combined with artificial intelligence, is like a planetary-scale hearing aid that enables us to listen anew with both our prosthetically enhanced ears and our imagination. This is slowly opening our minds not only to the wonderful sounds that nonhumans make but to a fundamental set of questions about the so-called divide between humans and nonhumans, our relationship to other species. It's also opening up new ways to think about conservation and our relationship to the planet. It's pretty profound.

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How Scientists Are Using AI to Talk to Animals

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Portable sensors and artificial intelligence are helping researchers decode animal communication-and begin to talk back to nonhumans

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The Intelligent Plant (Article) - Michael Pollon 

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The Intelligent Plant (Article) - Michael Pollon 

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"Depending on whom you talk to in the plant sciences today, the field of plant neurobiology represents either a radical new paradigm in our understanding of life or a slide back down into the murky scientific waters last stirred up by “The Secret Life of Plants.” Its proponents believe that we must stop regarding plants as passive objects—the mute, immobile furniture of our world—and begin to treat them as protagonists in their own dramas, highly skilled in the ways of contending in nature. They would challenge contemporary biology’s reductive focus on cells and genes and return our attention to the organism and its behavior in the environment. It is only human arrogance, and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time, that keep us from appreciating their intelligence and consequent success. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, “just traces.”"

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Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora.

In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. "The Secret Life of Plants," by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, presented a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream. The most memorable passages described the experiments of a former C.I.A. polygraph expert named Cleve Backster, who, in 1966, on a whim, hooked up a galvanometer to the leaf of a dracaena, a houseplant that he kept in his office. To his astonishment, Backster found that simply by imagining the dracaena being set on fire he could make it rouse the needle of the polygraph machine, registering a surge of electrical activity suggesting that the plant felt stress. "Could the plant have been reading his mind?" the authors ask. "Backster felt like running into the street and shouting to the world, 'Plants can think!' "

Backster and his collaborators went on to hook up polygraph machines to dozens of plants, including lettuces, onions, oranges, and bananas. He claimed that plants reacted to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance. In one experiment designed to test plant memory, Backster found that a plant that had witnessed the murder (by stomping) of another plant could pick out the killer from a lineup of six suspects, registering a surge of electrical activity when the murderer was brought before it. Backster's plants also displayed a strong aversion to interspecies violence. Some had a stressful response when an egg was cracked in their presence, or when live shrimp were dropped into boiling water, an experiment that Backster wrote up for the International Journal of Parapsychology, in 1968.

In the ensuing years, several legitimate plant scientists tried to reproduce the "Backster effect" without success. Much of the science in "The Secret Life of Plants" has been discredited. But the book had made its mark on the culture. Americans began talking to their plants and playing Mozart for them, and no doubt many still do. This might seem harmless enough; there will probably always be a strain of romanticism running through our thinking about plants. (Luther Burbank and George Washington Carver both reputedly talked to, and listened to, the plants they did such brilliant work with.) But in the view of many plant scientists "The Secret Life of Plants" has done lasting damage to their field. According to Daniel Chamovitz, an Israeli biologist who is the author of the recent book "What a Plant Knows," Tompkins and Bird "stymied important research on plant behavior as scientists became wary of any studies that hinted at parallels between animal senses and plant senses." Others contend that "The Secret Life of Plants" led to "self-censorship" among researchers seeking to explore the "possible homologies between neurobiology and phytobiology"; that is, the possibility that plants are much more intelligent and much more like us than most people think-capable of cognition, communication, information processing, computation, learning, and memory.

The quotation about self-censorship appeared in a controversial 2006 article in Trends in Plant Science proposing a new field of inquiry that the authors, perhaps somewhat recklessly, elected to call "plant neurobiology." The six authors-among them Eric D. Brenner, an American plant molecular biologist; Stefano Mancuso, an Italian plant physiologist; František Baluška, a Slovak cell biologist; and Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh, an American plant biologist-argued that the sophisticated behaviors observed in plants cannot at present be completely explained by familiar genetic and biochemical mechanisms. Plants are able to sense and optimally respond to so many environmental variables-light, water, gravity, temperature, soil structure, nutrients, toxins, microbes, herbivores, chemical signals from other plants-that there may exist some brainlike information-processing system to integrate the data and coördinate a plant's behavioral response. The authors pointed out that electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants which are homologous to those found in the nervous systems of animals. They also noted that neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate have been found in plants, though their role remains unclear.

Hence the need for plant neurobiology, a new field "aimed at understanding how plants perceive their circumstances and respond to environmental input in an integrated fashion." The article argued that plants exhibit intelligence, defined by the authors as "an intrinsic ability to process information from both abiotic and biotic stimuli that allows optimal decisions about future activities in a given environment." Shortly before the article's publication, the Society for Plant Neurobiology held its first meeting, in Florence, in 2005. A new scientific journal, with the less tendentious title Plant Signaling & Behavior, appeared the following year.

Depending on whom you talk to in the plant sciences today, the field of plant neurobiology represents either a radical new paradigm in our understanding of life or a slide back down into the murky scientific waters last stirred up by "The Secret Life of Plants." Its proponents believe that we must stop regarding plants as passive objects-the mute, immobile furniture of our world-and begin to treat them as protagonists in their own dramas, highly skilled in the ways of contending in nature. They would challenge contemporary biology's reductive focus on cells and genes and return our attention to the organism and its behavior in the environment. It is only human arrogance, and the fact that the lives of plants unfold in what amounts to a much slower dimension of time, that keep us from appreciating their intelligence and consequent success. Plants dominate every terrestrial environment, composing ninety-nine per cent of the biomass on earth. By comparison, humans and all the other animals are, in the words of one plant neurobiologist, "just traces."

Many plant scientists have pushed back hard against the nascent field, beginning with a tart, dismissive letter in response to the Brenner manifesto, signed by thirty-six prominent plant scientists (Alpi et al., in the literature) and published in Trends in Plant Science. "We begin by stating simply that there is no evidence for structures such as neurons, synapses or a brain in plants," the authors wrote. No such claim had actually been made-the manifesto had spoken only of "homologous" structures-but the use of the word "neurobiology" in the absence of actual neurons was apparently more than many scientists could bear.

"Yes, plants have both short- and long-term electrical signalling, and they use some neurotransmitter-like chemicals as chemical signals," Lincoln Taiz, an emeritus professor of plant physiology at U.C. Santa Cruz and one of the signers of the Alpi letter, told me. "But the mechanisms are quite different from those of true nervous systems." Taiz says that the writings of the plant neurobiologists suffer from "over-interpretation of data, teleology, anthropomorphizing, philosophizing, and wild speculations." He is confident that eventually the plant behaviors we can't yet account for will be explained by the action of chemical or electrical pathways, without recourse to "animism." Clifford Slayman, a professor of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale, who also signed the Alpi letter (and who helped discredit Tompkins and Bird), was even more blunt. " 'Plant intelligence' is a foolish distraction, not a new paradigm," he wrote in a recent e-mail. Slayman has referred to the Alpi letter as "the last serious confrontation between the scientific community and the nuthouse on these issues." Scientists seldom use such language when talking about their colleagues to a journalist, but this issue generates strong feelings, perhaps because it smudges the sharp line separating the animal kingdom from the plant kingdom. The controversy is less about the remarkable discoveries of recent plant science than about how to interpret and name them: whether behaviors observed in plants which look very much like learning, memory, decision-making, and intelligence deserve to be called by those terms or whether those words should be reserved exclusively for creatures with brains.

No one I spoke to in the loose, interdisciplinary group of scientists working on plant intelligence claims that plants have telekinetic powers or feel emotions. Nor does anyone believe that we will locate a walnut-shaped organ somewhere in plants which processes sensory data and directs plant behavior. More likely, in the scientists' view, intelligence in plants resembles that exhibited in insect colonies, where it is thought to be an emergent property of a great many mindless individuals organized in a network. Much of the research on plant intelligence has been inspired by the new science of networks, distributed computing, and swarm behavior, which has demonstrated some of the ways in which remarkably brainy behavior can emerge in the absence of actual brains.

"If you are a plant, having a brain is not an advantage," Stefano Mancuso points out. Mancuso is perhaps the field's most impassioned spokesman for the plant point of view. A slight, bearded Calabrian in his late forties, he comes across more like a humanities professor than like a scientist. When I visited him earlier this year at the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, at the University of Florence, he told me that his conviction that humans grossly underestimate plants has its origins in a science-fiction story he remembers reading as a teen-ager. A race of aliens living in a radically sped-up dimension of time arrive on Earth and, unable to detect any movement in humans, come to the logical conclusion that we are "inert material" with which they may do as they please. The aliens proceed ruthlessly to exploit us. (Mancuso subsequently wrote to say that the story he recounted was actually a mangled recollection of an early "Star Trek" episode called "Wink of an Eye.")

In Mancuso's view, our "fetishization" of neurons, as well as our tendency to equate behavior with mobility, keeps us from appreciating what plants can do. For instance, since plants can't run away and frequently get eaten, it serves them well not to have any irreplaceable organs. "A plant has a modular design, so it can lose up to ninety per cent of its body without being killed," he said. "There's nothing like that in the animal world. It creates a resilience."

Indeed, many of the most impressive capabilities of plants can be traced to their unique existential predicament as beings rooted to the ground and therefore unable to pick up and move when they need something or when conditions turn unfavorable. The "sessile life style," as plant biologists term it, calls for an extensive and nuanced understanding of one's immediate environment, since the plant has to find everything it needs, and has to defend itself, while remaining fixed in place. A highly developed sensory apparatus is required to locate food and identify threats. Plants have evolved between fifteen and twenty distinct senses, including analogues of our five: smell and taste (they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or on their bodies); sight (they react differently to various wavelengths of light as well as to shadow); touch (a vine or a root "knows" when it encounters a solid object); and, it has been discovered, sound. In a recent experiment, Heidi Appel, a chemical ecologist at the University of Missouri, found that, when she played a recording of a caterpillar chomping a leaf for a plant that hadn't been touched, the sound primed the plant's genetic machinery to produce defense chemicals. Another experiment, done in Mancuso's lab and not yet published, found that plant roots would seek out a buried pipe through which water was flowing even if the exterior of the pipe was dry, which suggested that plants somehow "hear" the sound of flowing water.

The sensory capabilities of plant roots fascinated Charles Darwin, who in his later years became increasingly passionate about plants; he and his son Francis performed scores of ingenious experiments on plants. Many involved the root, or radicle, of young plants, which the Darwins demonstrated could sense light, moisture, gravity, pressure, and several other environmental qualities, and then determine the optimal trajectory for the root's growth. The last sentence of Darwin's 1880 book, "The Power of Movement in Plants," has assumed scriptural authority for some plant neurobiologists: "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle . . . having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs and directing the several movements." Darwin was asking us to think of the plant as a kind of upside-down animal, with its main sensory organs and "brain" on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top.

Scientists have since found that the tips of plant roots, in addition to sensing gravity, moisture, light, pressure, and hardness, can also sense volume, nitrogen, phosphorus, salt, various toxins, microbes, and chemical signals from neighboring plants. Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it. Roots can tell whether nearby roots are self or other and, if other, kin or stranger. Normally, plants compete for root space with strangers, but, when researchers put four closely related Great Lakes sea-rocket plants ( Cakile edentula) in the same pot, the plants restrained their usual competitive behaviors and shared resources.

Somehow, a plant gathers and integrates all this information about its environment, and then "decides"-some scientists deploy the quotation marks, indicating metaphor at work; others drop them-in precisely what direction to deploy its roots or its leaves. Once the definition of "behavior" expands to include such things as a shift in the trajectory of a root, a reallocation of resources, or the emission of a powerful chemical, plants begin to look like much more active agents, responding to environmental cues in ways more subtle or adaptive than the word "instinct" would suggest. "Plants perceive competitors and grow away from them," Rick Karban, a plant ecologist at U.C. Davis, explained, when I asked him for an example of plant decision-making. "They are more leery of actual vegetation than they are of inanimate objects, and they respond to potential competitors before actually being shaded by them." These are sophisticated behaviors, but, like most plant behaviors, to an animal they're either invisible or really, really slow.

The sessile life style also helps account for plants' extraordinary gift for biochemistry, which far exceeds that of animals and, arguably, of human chemists. (Many drugs, from aspirin to opiates, derive from compounds designed by plants.) Unable to run away, plants deploy a complex molecular vocabulary to signal distress, deter or poison enemies, and recruit animals to perform various services for them. A recent study in Science found that the caffeine produced by many plants may function not only as a defense chemical, as had previously been thought, but in some cases as a psychoactive drug in their nectar. The caffeine encourages bees to remember a particular plant and return to it, making them more faithful and effective pollinators.

One of the most productive areas of plant research in recent years has been plant signalling. Since the early nineteen-eighties, it has been known that when a plant's leaves are infected or chewed by insects they emit volatile chemicals that signal other leaves to mount a defense. Sometimes this warning signal contains information about the identity of the insect, gleaned from the taste of its saliva. Depending on the plant and the attacker, the defense might involve altering the leaf's flavor or texture, or producing toxins or other compounds that render the plant's flesh less digestible to herbivores. When antelopes browse acacia trees, the leaves produce tannins that make them unappetizing and difficult to digest. When food is scarce and acacias are overbrowsed, it has been reported, the trees produce sufficient amounts of toxin to kill the animals.

Perhaps the cleverest instance of plant signalling involves two insect species, the first in the role of pest and the second as its exterminator. Several species, including corn and lima beans, emit a chemical distress call when attacked by caterpillars. Parasitic wasps some distance away lock in on that scent, follow it to the afflicted plant, and proceed to slowly destroy the caterpillars. Scientists call these insects "plant bodyguards."

Plants speak in a chemical vocabulary we can't directly perceive or comprehend. The first important discoveries in plant communication were made in the lab in the nineteen-eighties, by isolating plants and their chemical emissions in Plexiglas chambers, but Rick Karban, the U.C. Davis ecologist, and others have set themselves the messier task of studying how plants exchange chemical signals outdoors, in a natural setting. Recently, I visited Karban's study plot at the University of California's Sagehen Creek Field Station, a few miles outside Truckee. On a sun-flooded hillside high in the Sierras, he introduced me to the ninety-nine sagebrush plants-low, slow-growing gray-green shrubs marked with plastic flags-that he and his colleagues have kept under close surveillance for more than a decade.

Karban, a fifty-nine-year-old former New Yorker, is slender, with a thatch of white curls barely contained by a floppy hat. He has shown that when sagebrush leaves are clipped in the spring-simulating an insect attack that triggers the release of volatile chemicals-both the clipped plant and its unclipped neighbors suffer significantly less insect damage over the season. Karban believes that the plant is alerting all its leaves to the presence of a pest, but its neighbors pick up the signal, too, and gird themselves against attack. "We think the sagebrush are basically eavesdropping on one another," Karban said. He found that the more closely related the plants the more likely they are to respond to the chemical signal, suggesting that plants may display a form of kin recognition. Helping out your relatives is a good way to improve the odds that your genes will survive.

The field work and data collection that go into making these discoveries are painstaking in the extreme. At the bottom of a meadow raked by the slanted light of late summer, two collaborators from Japan, Kaori Shiojiri and Satomi Ishizaki, worked in the shade of a small pine, squatting over branches of sagebrush that Karban had tagged and cut. Using clickers, they counted every trident-shaped leaf on every branch, and then counted and recorded every instance of leaf damage, one column for insect bites, another for disease. At the top of the meadow, another collaborator, James Blande, a chemical ecologist from England, tied plastic bags around sagebrush stems and inflated the bags with filtered air. After waiting twenty minutes for the leaves to emit their volatiles, he pumped the air through a metal cylinder containing an absorbent material that collected the chemical emissions. At the lab, a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer would yield a list of the compounds collected-more than a hundred in all. Blande offered to let me put my nose in one of the bags; the air was powerfully aromatic, with a scent closer to aftershave than to perfume. Gazing across the meadow of sagebrush, I found it difficult to imagine the invisible chemical chatter, including the calls of distress, going on all around-or that these motionless plants were engaged in any kind of "behavior" at all.

Research on plant communication may someday benefit farmers and their crops. Plant-distress chemicals could be used to prime plant defenses, reducing the need for pesticides. Jack Schultz, a chemical ecologist at the University of Missouri, who did some of the pioneering work on plant signalling in the early nineteen-eighties, is helping to develop a mechanical "nose" that, attached to a tractor and driven through a field, could help farmers identify plants under insect attack, allowing them to spray pesticides only when and where they are needed.

Karban told me that, in the nineteen-eighties, people working on plant communication faced some of the same outrage that scientists working on plant intelligence (a term he cautiously accepts) do today. "This stuff has been enormously contentious," he says, referring to the early days of research into plant communication, work that is now generally accepted. "It took me years to get some of these papers published. People would literally be screaming at one another at scientific meetings." He added, "Plant scientists in general are incredibly conservative. We all think we want to hear novel ideas, but we don't, not really."

I first met Karban at a scientific meeting in Vancouver last July, when he presented a paper titled "Plant Communication and Kin Recognition in Sagebrush." The meeting would have been the sixth gathering of the Society for Plant Neurobiology, if not for the fact that, under pressure from certain quarters of the scientific establishment, the group's name had been changed four years earlier to the less provocative Society for Plant Signaling and Behavior. The plant biologist Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh, of the University of Washington, who was one of the founders of the society, told me that the name had been changed after a lively internal debate; she felt that jettisoning "neurobiology" was probably for the best. "I was told by someone at the National Science Foundation that the N.S.F. would never fund anything with the words 'plant neurobiology' in it. He said, and I quote, ' "Neuro" belongs to animals.' " (An N.S.F. spokesperson said that, while the society is not eligible for funding by the foundation's neurobiology program, "the N.S.F. does not have a boycott of any sort against the society.") Two of the society's co-founders, Stefano Mancuso and František Baluška, argued strenuously against the name change, and continue to use the term "plant neurobiology" in their own work and in the names of their labs.

The meeting consisted of three days of PowerPoint presentations delivered in a large, modern lecture hall at the University of British Columbia before a hundred or so scientists. Most of the papers were highly technical presentations on plant signalling-the kind of incremental science that takes place comfortably within the confines of an established scientific paradigm, which plant signalling has become. But a handful of speakers presented work very much within the new paradigm of plant intelligence, and they elicited strong reactions.

The most controversial presentation was "Animal-Like Learning in Mimosa Pudica," an unpublished paper by Monica Gagliano, a thirty-seven-year-old animal ecologist at the University of Western Australia who was working in Mancuso's lab in Florence. Gagliano, who is tall, with long brown hair parted in the middle, based her experiment on a set of protocols commonly used to test learning in animals. She focussed on an elementary type of learning called "habituation," in which an experimental subject is taught to ignore an irrelevant stimulus. "Habituation enables an organism to focus on the important information, while filtering out the rubbish," Gagliano explained to the audience of plant scientists. How long does it take the animal to recognize that a stimulus is "rubbish," and then how long will it remember what it has learned? Gagliano's experimental question was bracing: Could the same thing be done with a plant?

Mimosa pudica, also called the "sensitive plant," is that rare plant species with a behavior so speedy and visible that animals can observe it; the Venus flytrap is another. When the fernlike leaves of the mimosa are touched, they instantly fold up, presumably to frighten insects. The mimosa also collapses its leaves when the plant is dropped or jostled. Gagliano potted fifty-six mimosa plants and rigged a system to drop them from a height of fifteen centimetres every five seconds. Each "training session" involved sixty drops. She reported that some of the mimosas started to reopen their leaves after just four, five, or six drops, as if they had concluded that the stimulus could be safely ignored. "By the end, they were completely open," Gagliano said to the audience. "They couldn't care less anymore."

Was it just fatigue? Apparently not: when the plants were shaken, they again closed up. " 'Oh, this is something new,' " Gagliano said, imagining these events from the plants' point of view. "You see, you want to be attuned to something new coming in. Then we went back to the drops, and they didn't respond." Gagliano reported that she retested her plants after a week and found that they continued to disregard the drop stimulus, indicating that they "remembered" what they had learned. Even after twenty-eight days, the lesson had not been forgotten. She reminded her colleagues that, in similar experiments with bees, the insects forgot what they had learned after just forty-eight hours. Gagliano concluded by suggesting that "brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning," and that there is "some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn."

A lively exchange followed. Someone objected that dropping a plant was not a relevant trigger, since that doesn't happen in nature. Gagliano pointed out that electric shock, an equally artificial trigger, is often used in animal-learning experiments. Another scientist suggested that perhaps her plants were not habituated, just tuckered out. She argued that twenty-eight days would be plenty of time to rebuild their energy reserves.

On my way out of the lecture hall, I bumped into Fred Sack, a prominent botanist at the University of British Columbia. I asked him what he thought of Gagliano's presentation. "Bullshit," he replied. He explained that the word "learning" implied a brain and should be reserved for animals: "Animals can exhibit learning, but plants evolve adaptations." He was making a distinction between behavioral changes that occur within the lifetime of an organism and those which arise across generations. At lunch, I sat with a Russian scientist, who was equally dismissive. "It's not learning," he said. "So there's nothing to discuss."

Later that afternoon, Gagliano seemed both stung by some of the reactions to her presentation and defiant. Adaptation is far too slow a process to explain the behavior she had observed, she told me. "How can they be adapted to something they have never experienced in their real world?" She noted that some of her plants learned faster than others, evidence that "this is not an innate or programmed response." Many of the scientists in her audience were just getting used to the ideas of plant "behavior" and "memory" (terms that even Fred Sack said he was willing to accept); using words like "learning" and "intelligence" in plants struck them, in Sack's words, as "inappropriate" and "just weird." When I described the experiment to Lincoln Taiz, he suggested the words "habituation" or "desensitization" would be more appropriate than "learning." Gagliano said that her mimosa paper had been rejected by ten journals: "None of the reviewers had problems with the data." Instead, they balked at the language she used to describe the data. But she didn't want to change it. "Unless we use the same language to describe the same behavior"-exhibited by plants and animals-"we can't compare it," she said.

Rick Karban consoled Gagliano after her talk. "I went through the same thing, just getting totally hammered," he told her. "But you're doing good work. The system is just not ready." When I asked him what he thought of Gagliano's paper, he said, "I don't know if she's got everything nailed down, but it's a very cool idea that deserves to get out there and be discussed. I hope she doesn't get discouraged."

Scientists are often uncomfortable talking about the role of metaphor and imagination in their work, yet scientific progress often depends on both. "Metaphors help stimulate the investigative imagination of good scientists," the British plant scientist Anthony Trewavas wrote in a spirited response to the Alpi letter denouncing plant neurobiology. "Plant neurobiology" is obviously a metaphor-plants don't possess the type of excitable, communicative cells we call neurons. Yet the introduction of the term has raised a series of questions and inspired a set of experiments that promise to deepen our understanding not only of plants but potentially also of brains. If there are other ways of processing information, other kinds of cells and cell networks that can somehow give rise to intelligent behavior, then we may be more inclined to ask, with Mancuso, "What's so special about neurons?"

Mancuso is the poet-philosopher of the movement, determined to win for plants the recognition they deserve and, perhaps, bring humans down a peg in the process. His somewhat grandly named International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, a few miles outside Florence, occupies a modest suite of labs and offices in a low-slung modern building. Here a handful of collaborators and graduate students work on the experiments Mancuso devises to test the intelligence of plants. Giving a tour of the labs, he showed me maize plants, grown under lights, that were being taught to ignore shadows; a poplar sapling hooked up to a galvanometer to measure its response to air pollution; and a chamber in which a PTR-TOF machine-an advanced kind of mass spectrometer-continuously read all the volatiles emitted by a succession of plants, from poplars and tobacco plants to peppers and olive trees. "We are making a dictionary of each species' entire chemical vocabulary," he explained. He estimates that a plant has three thousand chemicals in its vocabulary, while, he said with a smile, "the average student has only seven hundred words."

Mancuso is fiercely devoted to plants-a scientist needs to "love" his subject in order to do it justice, he says. He is also gentle and unassuming, even when what he is saying is outrageous. In the corner of his office sits a forlorn Ficus benjamina, or weeping fig, and on the walls are photographs of Mancuso in an astronaut's jumpsuit floating in the cabin of a zero-gravity aircraft; he has collaborated with the European Space Agency, which has supported his research on plant behavior in micro- and hyper-gravity. (One of his experiments was carried on board the last flight of the space shuttle Endeavor, in May of 2011.) A decade ago, Mancuso persuaded a Florentine bank foundation to underwrite much of his research and help launch the Society for Plant Neurobiology; his lab also receives grants from the European Union.

Early in our conversation, I asked Mancuso for his definition of "intelligence." Spending so much time with the plant neurobiologists, I could feel my grasp on the word getting less sure. It turns out that I am not alone: philosophers and psychologists have been arguing over the definition of intelligence for at least a century, and whatever consensus there may once have been has been rapidly slipping away. Most definitions of intelligence fall into one of two categories. The first is worded so that intelligence requires a brain; the definition refers to intrinsic mental qualities such as reason, judgment, and abstract thought. The second category, less brain-bound and metaphysical, stresses behavior, defining intelligence as the ability to respond in optimal ways to the challenges presented by one's environment and circumstances. Not surprisingly, the plant neurobiologists jump into this second camp.

"I define it very simply," Mancuso said. "Intelligence is the ability to solve problems." In place of a brain, "what I am looking for is a distributed sort of intelligence, as we see in the swarming of birds." In a flock, each bird has only to follow a few simple rules, such as maintaining a prescribed distance from its neighbor, yet the collective effect of a great many birds executing a simple algorithm is a complex and supremely well-coördinated behavior. Mancuso's hypothesis is that something similar is at work in plants, with their thousands of root tips playing the role of the individual birds-gathering and assessing data from the environment and responding in local but coördinated ways that benefit the entire organism.

"Neurons perhaps are overrated," Mancuso said. "They're really just excitable cells." Plants have their own excitable cells, many of them in a region just behind the root tip. Here Mancuso and his frequent collaborator, František Baluška, have detected unusually high levels of electrical activity and oxygen consumption. They've hypothesized in a series of papers that this so-called "transition zone" may be the locus of the "root brain" first proposed by Darwin. The idea remains unproved and controversial. "What's going on there is not well understood," Lincoln Taiz told me, "but there is no evidence it is a command center."

How plants do what they do without a brain-what Anthony Trewavas has called their "mindless mastery"-raises questions about how our brains do what they do. When I asked Mancuso about the function and location of memory in plants, he speculated about the possible role of calcium channels and other mechanisms, but then he reminded me that mystery still surrounds where and how our memories are stored: "It could be the same kind of machinery, and figuring it out in plants may help us figure it out in humans."

The hypothesis that intelligent behavior in plants may be an emergent property of cells exchanging signals in a network might sound far-fetched, yet the way that intelligence emerges from a network of neurons may not be very different. Most neuroscientists would agree that, while brains considered as a whole function as centralized command centers for most animals, within the brain there doesn't appear to be any command post; rather, one finds a leaderless network. That sense we get when we think about what might govern a plant-that there is no there there, no wizard behind the curtain pulling the levers-may apply equally well to our brains.

In Martin Amis's 1995 novel, "The Information," we meet a character who aspires to write "The History of Increasing Humiliation," a treatise chronicling the gradual dethronement of humankind from its position at the center of the universe, beginning with Copernicus. "Every century we get smaller," Amis writes. Next came Darwin, who brought the humbling news that we are the product of the same natural laws that created animals. In the last century, the formerly sharp lines separating humans from animals-our monopolies on language, reason, toolmaking, culture, even self-consciousness-have been blurred, one after another, as science has granted these capabilities to other animals.

Mancuso and his colleagues are writing the next chapter in "The History of Increasing Humiliation." Their project entails breaking down the walls between the kingdoms of plants and animals, and it is proceeding not only experiment by experiment but also word by word. Start with that slippery word "intelligence." Particularly when there is no dominant definition (and when measurements of intelligence, such as I.Q., have been shown to be culturally biased), it is possible to define intelligence in a way that either reinforces the boundary between animals and plants (say, one that entails abstract thought) or undermines it. Plant neurobiologists have chosen to define intelligence democratically, as an ability to solve problems or, more precisely, to respond adaptively to circumstances, including ones unforeseen in the genome.

"I agree that humans are special," Mancuso says. "We are the first species able to argue about what intelligence is. But it's the quantity, not the quality" of intelligence that sets us apart. We exist on a continuum with the acacia, the radish, and the bacterium. "Intelligence is a property of life," he says. I asked him why he thinks people have an easier time granting intelligence to computers than to plants. (Fred Sack told me that he can abide the term "artificial intelligence," because the intelligence in this case is modified by the word "artificial," but not "plant intelligence." He offered no argument, except to say, "I'm in the majority in saying it's a little weird.") Mancuso thinks we're willing to accept artificial intelligence because computers are our creations, and so reflect our own intelligence back at us. They are also our dependents, unlike plants: "If we were to vanish tomorrow, the plants would be fine, but if the plants vanished . . ." Our dependence on plants breeds a contempt for them, Mancuso believes. In his somewhat topsy-turvy view, plants "remind us of our weakness."

"Memory" may be an even thornier word to apply across kingdoms, perhaps because we know so little about how it works. We tend to think of memories as immaterial, but in animal brains some forms of memory involve the laying down of new connections in a network of neurons. Yet there are ways to store information biologically that don't require neurons. Immune cells "remember" their experience of pathogens, and call on that memory in subsequent encounters. In plants, it has long been known that experiences such as stress can alter the molecular wrapping around the chromosomes; this, in turn, determines which genes will be silenced and which expressed. This so-called "epigenetic" effect can persist and sometimes be passed down to offspring. More recently, scientists have found that life events such as trauma or starvation produce epigenetic changes in animal brains (coding for high levels of cortisol, for example) that are long-lasting and can also be passed down to offspring, a form of memory much like that observed in plants.

While talking with Mancuso, I kept thinking about words like "will," "choice," and "intention," which he seemed to attribute to plants rather casually, almost as if they were acting consciously. At one point, he told me about the dodder vine, Cuscuta europaea, a parasitic white vine that winds itself around the stalk of another plant and sucks nourishment from it. A dodder vine will "choose" among several potential hosts, assessing, by scent, which offers the best potential nourishment. Having selected a target, the vine then performs a kind of cost-benefit calculation before deciding exactly how many coils it should invest-the more nutrients in the victim, the more coils it deploys. I asked Mancuso whether he was being literal or metaphorical in attributing intention to plants.

"Here, I'll show you something," he said. "Then you tell me if plants have intention." He swivelled his computer monitor around and clicked open a video.

Time-lapse photography is perhaps the best tool we have to bridge the chasm between the time scale at which plants live and our own. This example was of a young bean plant, shot in the lab over two days, one frame every ten minutes. A metal pole on a dolly stands a couple of feet away. The bean plant is "looking" for something to climb. Each spring, I witness the same process in my garden, in real time. I always assumed that the bean plants simply grow this way or that, until they eventually bump into something suitable to climb. But Mancuso's video seems to show that this bean plant "knows" exactly where the metal pole is long before it makes contact with it. Mancuso speculates that the plant could be employing a form of echolocation. There is some evidence that plants make low clicking sounds as their cells elongate; it's possible that they can sense the reflection of those sound waves bouncing off the metal pole.

The bean plant wastes no time or energy "looking"-that is, growing-anywhere but in the direction of the pole. And it is striving (there is no other word for it) to get there: reaching, stretching, throwing itself over and over like a fly rod, extending itself a few more inches with every cast, as it attempts to wrap its curling tip around the pole. As soon as contact is made, the plant appears to relax; its clenched leaves begin to flutter mildly. All this may be nothing more than an illusion of time-lapse photography. Yet to watch the video is to feel, momentarily, like one of the aliens in Mancuso's formative science-fiction story, shown a window onto a dimension of time in which these formerly inert beings come astonishingly to life, seemingly conscious individuals with intentions.

In October, I loaded the bean video onto my laptop and drove down to Santa Cruz to play it for Lincoln Taiz. He began by questioning its value as scientific data: "Maybe he has ten other videos where the bean didn't do that. You can't take one interesting variation and generalize from it." The bean's behavior was, in other words, an anecdote, not a phenomenon. Taiz also pointed out that the bean in the video was leaning toward the pole in the first frame. Mancuso then sent me another video with two perfectly upright bean plants that exhibited very similar behavior. Taiz was now intrigued. "If he sees that effect consistently, it would be exciting," he said-but it would not necessarily be evidence of plant intention. "If the phenomenon is real, it would be classified as a tropism," such as the mechanism that causes plants to bend toward light. In this case, the stimulus remains unknown, but tropisms "do not require one to postulate either intentionality or 'brainlike' conceptualization," Taiz said. "The burden of proof for the latter interpretation would clearly be on Stefano."

Perhaps the most troublesome and troubling word of all in thinking about plants is "consciousness." If consciousness is defined as inward awareness of oneself experiencing reality-"the feeling of what happens," in the words of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio-then we can (probably) safely conclude that plants don't possess it. But if we define the term simply as the state of being awake and aware of one's environment-"online," as the neuroscientists say-then plants may qualify as conscious beings, at least according to Mancuso and Baluška. "The bean knows exactly what is in the environment around it," Mancuso said. "We don't know how. But this is one of the features of consciousness: You know your position in the world. A stone does not."

In support of their contention that plants are conscious of their environment, Mancuso and Baluška point out that plants can be rendered unconscious by the same anesthetics that put animals out: drugs can induce in plants an unresponsive state resembling sleep. (A snoozing Venus flytrap won't notice an insect crossing its threshold.) What's more, when plants are injured or stressed, they produce a chemical-ethylene-that works as an anesthetic on animals. When I learned this startling fact from Baluška in Vancouver, I asked him, gingerly, if he meant to suggest that plants could feel pain. Baluška, who has a gruff mien and a large bullet-shaped head, raised one eyebrow and shot me a look that I took to mean he deemed my question impertinent or absurd. But apparently not.

"If plants are conscious, then, yes, they should feel pain," he said. "If you don't feel pain, you ignore danger and you don't survive. Pain is adaptive." I must have shown some alarm. "That's a scary idea," he acknowledged with a shrug. "We live in a world where we must eat other organisms."

Unprepared to consider the ethical implications of plant intelligence, I could feel my resistance to the whole idea stiffen. Descartes, who believed that only humans possessed self-consciousness, was unable to credit the idea that other animals could suffer from pain. So he dismissed their screams and howls as mere reflexes, as meaningless physiological noise. Could it be remotely possible that we are now making the same mistake with plants? That the perfume of jasmine or basil, or the scent of freshly mowed grass, so sweet to us, is (as the ecologist Jack Schultz likes to say) the chemical equivalent of a scream? Or have we, merely by posing such a question, fallen back into the muddied waters of "The Secret Life of Plants"?

Lincoln Taiz has little patience for the notion of plant pain, questioning what, in the absence of a brain, would be doing the feeling. He puts it succinctly: "No brain, no pain." Mancuso is more circumspect. We can never determine with certainty whether plants feel pain or whether their perception of injury is sufficiently like that of animals to be called by the same word. (He and Baluška are careful to write of "plant-specific pain perception.") "We just don't know, so we must be silent."

Mancuso believes that, because plants are sensitive and intelligent beings, we are obliged to treat them with some degree of respect. That means protecting their habitats from destruction and avoiding practices such as genetic manipulation, growing plants in monocultures, and training them in bonsai. But it does not prevent us from eating them. "Plants evolved to be eaten-it is part of their evolutionary strategy," he said. He cited their modular structure and lack of irreplaceable organs in support of this view.

The central issue dividing the plant neurobiologists from their critics would appear to be this: Do capabilities such as intelligence, pain perception, learning, and memory require the existence of a brain, as the critics contend, or can they be detached from their neurobiological moorings? The question is as much philosophical as it is scientific, since the answer depends on how these terms get defined. The proponents of plant intelligence argue that the traditional definitions of these terms are anthropocentric-a clever reply to the charges of anthropomorphism frequently thrown at them. Their attempt to broaden these definitions is made easier by the fact that the meanings of so many of these terms are up for grabs. At the same time, since these words were originally created to describe animal attributes, we shouldn't be surprised at the awkward fit with plants. It seems likely that, if the plant neurobiologists were willing to add the prefix "plant-specific" to intelligence and learning and memory and consciousness (as Mancuso and Baluška are prepared to do in the case of pain), then at least some of this "scientific controversy" might evaporate.

Indeed, I found more consensus on the underlying science than I expected. Even Clifford Slayman, the Yale biologist who signed the 2007 letter dismissing plant neurobiology, is willing to acknowledge that, although he doesn't think plants possess intelligence, he does believe they are capable of "intelligent behavior," in the same way that bees and ants are. In an e-mail exchange, Slayman made a point of underlining this distinction: "We do not know what constitutes intelligence, only what we can observe and judge as intelligent behavior." He defined "intelligent behavior" as "the ability to adapt to changing circumstances" and noted that it "must always be measured relative to a particular environment." Humans may or may not be intrinsically more intelligent than cats, he wrote, but when a cat is confronted with a mouse its behavior is likely to be demonstrably more intelligent.

Slayman went on to acknowledge that "intelligent behavior could perfectly well develop without such a nerve center or headquarters or director or brain-whatever you want to call it. Instead of 'brain,' think 'network.' It seems to be that many higher organisms are internally networked in such a way that local changes," such as the way that roots respond to a water gradient, "cause very local responses which benefit the entire organism." Seen that way, he added, the outlook of Mancuso and Trewavas is "pretty much in line with my understanding of biochemical/biological networks." He pointed out that while it is an understandable human prejudice to favor the "nerve center" model, we also have a second, autonomic nervous system governing our digestive processes, which "operates most of the time without instructions from higher up." Brains are just one of nature's ways of getting complex jobs done, for dealing intelligently with the challenges presented by the environment. But they are not the only way: "Yes, I would argue that intelligent behavior is a property of life."

To define certain words in such a way as to bring plants and animals beneath the same semantic umbrella-whether of intelligence or intention or learning-is a philosophical choice with important consequences for how we see ourselves in nature. Since "The Origin of Species," we have understood, at least intellectually, the continuities among life's kingdoms-that we are all cut from the same fabric of nature. Yet our big brains, and perhaps our experience of inwardness, allow us to feel that we must be fundamentally different-suspended above nature and other species as if by some metaphysical "skyhook," to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Plant neurobiologists are intent on taking away our skyhook, completing the revolution that Darwin started but which remains-psychologically, at least-incomplete.

"What we learned from Darwin is that competence precedes comprehension," Dennett said when I called to talk to him about plant neurobiology. Upon a foundation of the simplest competences-such as the on-off switch in a computer, or the electrical and chemical signalling of a cell-can be built higher and higher competences until you wind up with something that looks very much like intelligence. "The idea that there is a bright line, with real comprehension and real minds on the far side of the chasm, and animals or plants on the other-that's an archaic myth." To say that higher competences such as intelligence, learning, and memory "mean nothing in the absence of brains" is, in Dennett's view, "cerebrocentric."

All species face the same existential challenges-obtaining food, defending themselves, reproducing-but under wildly varying circumstances, and so they have evolved wildly different tools in order to survive. Brains come in handy for creatures that move around a lot; but they're a disadvantage for ones that are rooted in place. Impressive as it is to us, self-consciousness is just another tool for living, good for some jobs, unhelpful for others. That humans would rate this particular adaptation so highly is not surprising, since it has been the shining destination of our long evolutionary journey, along with the epiphenomenon of self-consciousness that we call "free will."

In addition to being a plant physiologist, Lincoln Taiz writes about the history of science. "Starting with Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus," he told me, "there has been a strain of teleology in the study of plant biology"-a habit of ascribing purpose or intention to the behavior of plants. I asked Taiz about the question of "choice," or decision-making, in plants, as when they must decide between two conflicting environmental signals-water and gravity, for example.

"Does the plant decide in the same way that we choose at a deli between a Reuben sandwich or lox and bagel?" Taiz asked. "No, the plant response is based entirely on the net flow of auxin and other chemical signals. The verb 'decide' is inappropriate in a plant context. It implies free will. Of course, one could argue that humans lack free will too, but that is a separate issue."

I asked Mancuso if he thought that a plant decides in the same way we might choose at a deli between a Reuben or lox and bagels.

"Yes, in the same way," Mancuso wrote back, though he indicated that he had no idea what a Reuben was. "Just put ammonium nitrate in the place of Reuben sandwich (whatever it is) and phosphate instead of salmon, and the roots will make a decision." But isn't the root responding simply to the net flow of certain chemicals? "I'm afraid our brain makes decisions in the same exact way."

"Why would a plant care about Mozart?" the late ethnobotanist Tim Plowman would reply when asked about the wonders catalogued in "The Secret Life of Plants." "And even if it did, why should that impress us? They can eat light, isn't that enough?"

One way to exalt plants is by demonstrating their animal-like capabilities. But another way is to focus on all the things plants can do that we cannot. Some scientists working on plant intelligence have questioned whether the "animal-centric" emphasis, along with the obsession with the term "neurobiology," has been a mistake and possibly an insult to the plants. "I have no interest in making plants into little animals," one scientist wrote during the dustup over what to call the society. "Plants are unique," another wrote. "There is no reason to . . . call them demi-animals."

When I met Mancuso for dinner during the conference in Vancouver, he sounded very much like a plant scientist getting over a case of "brain envy"-what Taiz had suggested was motivating the plant neurologists. If we could begin to understand plants on their own terms, he said, "it would be like being in contact with an alien culture. But we could have all the advantages of that contact without any of the problems-because it doesn't want to destroy us!" How do plants do all the amazing things they do without brains? Without locomotion? By focussing on the otherness of plants rather than on their likeness, Mancuso suggested, we stand to learn valuable things and develop important new technologies. This was to be the theme of his presentation to the conference, the following morning, on what he called "bioinspiration." How might the example of plant intelligence help us design better computers, or robots, or networks?

Mancuso was about to begin a collaboration with a prominent computer scientist to design a plant-based computer, modelled on the distributed computing performed by thousands of roots processing a vast number of environmental variables. His collaborator, Andrew Adamatzky, the director of the International Center of Unconventional Computing, at the University of the West of England, has worked extensively with slime molds, harnessing their maze-navigating and computational abilities. (Adamatzky's slime molds, which are a kind of amoeba, grow in the direction of multiple food sources simultaneously, usually oat flakes, in the process computing and remembering the shortest distance between any two of them; he has used these organisms to model transportation networks.) In an e-mail, Adamatzky said that, as a substrate for biological computing, plants offered both advantages and disadvantages over slime molds. "Plants are more robust," he wrote, and "can keep their shape for a very long time," although they are slower-growing and lack the flexibility of slime molds. But because plants are already "analog electrical computers," trafficking in electrical inputs and outputs, he is hopeful that he and Mancuso will be able to harness them for computational tasks.

Mancuso was also working with Barbara Mazzolai, a biologist-turned-engineer at the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genoa, to design what he called a "plantoid": a robot designed on plant principles. "If you look at the history of robots, they are always based on animals-they are humanoids or insectoids. If you want something swimming, you look at a fish. But what about imitating plants instead? What would that allow you to do? Explore the soil!" With a grant from the European Union's Future and Emerging Technologies program, their team is developing a "robotic root" that, using plastics that can elongate and then harden, will be able to slowly penetrate the soil, sense conditions, and alter its trajectory accordingly. "If you want to explore other planets, the best thing is to send plantoids."

The most bracing part of Mancuso's talk on bioinspiration came when he discussed underground plant networks. Citing the research of Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia, and her colleagues, Mancuso showed a slide depicting how trees in a forest organize themselves into far-flung networks, using the underground web of mycorrhizal fungi which connects their roots to exchange information and even goods. This "wood-wide web," as the title of one paper put it, allows scores of trees in a forest to convey warnings of insect attacks, and also to deliver carbon, nitrogen, and water to trees in need.

When I reached Simard by phone, she described how she and her colleagues track the flow of nutrients and chemical signals through this invisible underground network. They injected fir trees with radioactive carbon isotopes, then followed the spread of the isotopes through the forest community using a variety of sensing methods, including a Geiger counter. Within a few days, stores of radioactive carbon had been routed from tree to tree. Every tree in a plot thirty metres square was connected to the network; the oldest trees functioned as hubs, some with as many as forty-seven connections. The diagram of the forest network resembled an airline route map.

The pattern of nutrient traffic showed how "mother trees" were using the network to nourish shaded seedlings, including their offspring-which the trees can apparently recognize as kin-until they're tall enough to reach the light. And, in a striking example of interspecies coöperation, Simard found that fir trees were using the fungal web to trade nutrients with paper-bark birch trees over the course of the season. The evergreen species will tide over the deciduous one when it has sugars to spare, and then call in the debt later in the season. For the forest community, the value of this coöperative underground economy appears to be better over-all health, more total photosynthesis, and greater resilience in the face of disturbance.

In his talk, Mancuso juxtaposed a slide of the nodes and links in one of these subterranean forest networks with a diagram of the Internet, and suggested that in some respects the former was superior. "Plants are able to create scalable networks of self-maintaining, self-operating, and self-repairing units," he said. "Plants."

As I listened to Mancuso limn the marvels unfolding beneath our feet, it occurred to me that plants do have a secret life, and it is even stranger and more wonderful than the one described by Tompkins and Bird. When most of us think of plants, to the extent that we think about plants at all, we think of them as old-holdovers from a simpler, prehuman evolutionary past. But for Mancuso plants hold the key to a future that will be organized around systems and technologies that are networked, decentralized, modular, reiterated, redundant-and green, able to nourish themselves on light. "Plants are the great symbol of modernity." Or should be: their brainlessness turns out to be their strength, and perhaps the most valuable inspiration we can take from them.

At dinner in Vancouver, Mancuso said, "Since you visited me in Florence, I came across this sentence of Karl Marx, and I became obsessed with it: 'Everything that is solid melts into air.' Whenever we build anything, it is inspired by the architecture of our bodies. So it will have a solid structure and a center, but that is inherently fragile. This is the meaning of that sentence-'Everything solid melts into air.' So that's the question: Can we now imagine something completely different, something inspired instead by plants?" ♦

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Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora. In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction.

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I Listen to Color (Video, 10mins) - Neil Harbisson

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I Listen to Color (Video, 10mins) - Neil Harbisson

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Harbisson, being fully monochromatically colorblind, has developed and surgically implanted a prosthetic organ inspired by various different animals, that allows him to hear color, including colors such as ultraviolet or infrared that are out of the usual human visual range.

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Acytota: why should we be thinking with viruses? - Zia

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Acytota: why should we be thinking with viruses? - Zia

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The basic unit of life is defined in the work of Lynn Margulis as the cell. Viruses are Acytota: cell-less. In an article by Edward Rybicki attempting to outline the difficulties of a systematic ordering of viruses, they are figured as “organisms at the edge of life.” And though these liminal (non-)lifeforms continue to elude efforts at easy definitions, their status as marginal to the history of life is increasingly in question. Recent research shows they operate as mutualists as well as parasites; they are present in all ecosystems, representing the bulk of genetic diversity on the planet Earth, and; have contributed major evolutionary innovations to every known kingdom of life. Explored evocatively but glancingly in Deleuze and Guattari’s 1980 A Thousand Plateaus, viruses, by their very nature, break boundaries, fusing with other species in order to thrive. In doing so, they exchange; carry bits of genetic information, their own or their former hosts’, into a new host. Thus, foreign bits of genetic material will on occasion merge permanently with the new host’s genome, braiding the tree of life into fantastic new forms.

And yet, at a time when a plethora of Humanities disciplines are said to be going through Ecological and Posthuman Turns, with emergent work frequently placing greater focus on our multispecies, symbiotic, and microbial relationships, I was surprised to find only a small body of work on the discourse of viruses in the scientific or sociopolitical imaginary. Where discussed, viruses were almost always figured solely as pathogens rather than as evolutionary or ecological subjects in their own right. Far more prominent is work that elaborates human and non-human dynamics with microbial, animal,  fungal, and vegetal others. Such work often offers charismatic examples of coevolution, symbiosis, and symbiogenesis as models for a future politics, constitutive of the de-anthropocentrism necessary for global ecological flourishing. Typical of this symbiopolitical engagement, in Staying with the Trouble (2016) Donna Haraway identifies human overpopulation as a chief problem behind global mass biodiversity loss, and encourages us to further enmesh ourselves with stranger forms of life; to “make kin, not babies.” The various symbioses within these works can come to be read euphorically as part of the evolving beauty and complexity of biology, playing out across deep time. However, though much of this symbiopolitical philosophy is incredibly compelling, I find the experiential, practical, and material dimensions of parasitism on human scales conspicuously absent. Some of these symbioses might not be easy or desirable, implicitly involving  the ebb and flow of infection, disease, and the flutter of populations. Calls to deeper symbiotic intimacy or human depopulation warrant sober reflection, particularly when made by those who live in societies where such things can be choices; colonial and biopolitical legacies mean the present-day benefits of institutional healthcare and the burdens of disease are unevenly spread across race, gender, economic class, and geography. These inequalities could not be starker than in the last two years, as a pathogenic virus has swept across the world. Early in the pandemic the phrase “corona is the cure, humans are the disease” or  “Humans Are The Virus,” began circulating in Anglophone social media. Though symbiotic ecological flourishing appears increasingly critical to the survival of humanity and many other forms of life on the planet, figuring of humans as parasites or as a disease has troubling historical resonances.

READING LIST:

Trifonov, Edward N., and Eduard Kejnovsky. “Acytota – associated kingdom of neglected life.” Journal of biomolecular Structure & Dynamics, 2015. Researchgate,

Rybicki, Ed. “The classification of organisms at the edge of life, or problems with virus systematics.” South African Journal of Science, vol. 86, 1990, pp. 182-186. Researchgate,

Pradeu, Thomas. “Mutualistic viruses and the heteronomy of life.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 59, 2016, pp. 80-88. ScienceDirect

French, Rebecca K., and Edward C. Holmes. “An Ecosystems Perspective on Virus Evolution and Emergence.” Trends in Microbiology, Cell, 2019

Villarreal, Luis P. “The Widespread Evolutionary Significance of Viruses.” Origin and Evolution of Viruses, 2 ed., Academic Press, 2008, pp. 477-516. NCBI

Helmreich, Stefan. “HOMO MICROBIS: THE HUMAN MICROBIOME, FIGURAL, LITERAL, POLITICAL.” Thresholds, vol. 42, no. 12, 2014, pp. 52-59.

Lorimer, Jamie. “Gut Buddies Multispecies Studies and the Microbiome.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 8, pp. 57-76

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think. University of California Press, 2013.

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Shrink (Radiolab podcast, 45mins) Giant Viruses - rethinking viruses and the nature of life 

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Shrink (Radiolab podcast, 45mins) Giant Viruses - rethinking viruses and the nature of life 

# data[].attributes.body
"The definition of life is in flux, complexity is overrated, and humans are shrinking.

Viruses are supposed to be sleek, pared-down, dead-eyed machines. But when one microbiologist stumbled upon a GIANT virus, hundreds of times bigger than any seen before, all that went out the window.  The discovery opened the door not only to a new cast of microscopic characters with names like Mimivirus, Mamavirus, and Megavirus, but also to basic questions: How did we miss these until now? Have they been around since the beginning? What if evolution could go … backwards?

Join Jad and Robert as they grill Radiolab regular Carl Zimmer on these paradoxical viruses – they’re so big that they can get their own viruses! - and what they can tell us about the nature of life.

"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The definition of life is in flux, complexity is overrated, and humans are shrinking.

Viruses are supposed to be sleek, pared-down, dead-eyed machines. But when one microbiologist stumbled upon a GIANT virus, hundreds of times bigger than any seen before, all that went out the window. The discovery opened the door not only to a new cast of microscopic characters with names like Mimivirus, Mamavirus, and Megavirus, but also to basic questions: How did we miss these until now? Have they been around since the beginning? What if evolution could go ... backwards?

Join Jad and Robert as they grill Radiolab regular Carl Zimmer on these paradoxical viruses - they're so big that they can get their own viruses! - and what they can tell us about the nature of life.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The definition of life is in flux, complexity is overrated, and humans are shrinking. Viruses are supposed to be sleek, pared-down, dead-eyed machines. But when one microbiologist stumbled upon a GIANT virus, hundreds of times bigger than any seen before, all that went out the window.

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"Viruses are being redefined as more than just pathogens. They are also critical symbiotic partners in the health of their hosts. In some cases, viruses have fused with their hosts in symbiogenetic relationships. Mutualistic interactions are found in plant, insect, and mammalian viruses, as well as with eukaryotic and prokaryotic microbes, and some interactions involve multiple players of the holobiont. With increased virus discovery, more mutualistic interactions are being described and more will undoubtedly be discovered."

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"The species name is a fundamental unit. However, for Indigenous Peoples, the name in its vernacular form may also embody history, a sense of place and a right to belong. Like the Latin binomial, indigenous names for plants and animals can also be knowledge conduits. When Europeans colonised ‘new’ lands, they often claimed possession merely by a proclamation of discovery and deposed local geographic place names with new ones. In a similar way, biologists have introduced new species names with nomenclature publications that often set aside long-standing indigenous names. There are, however, exceptions, and examples of indigenous names having been used in the binomial include among trees; Beilschmiedia tawa, (A.Cunn.) Benth. et Hook.f. ex Kirk in New Zealand, Couratari tauari Berg. in Amazonia and Colophospermum mopane (Kirk ex Benth.) Kirk ex J. Leonard in southern Africa. More generally, authorities in many countries are reinstating indigenous names for localities and geographic features and the scientific community is now recognising indigenous knowledge particularly for ecosystem management1,2. Taxonomists are also increasingly engaging in consultation with Indigenous Peoples over names and using indigenous language for newly described or assigned taxa3,4. Here, we advocate for a broader shift in practice involving changes to the rules of taxonomic codes."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The species name is a fundamental unit. However, for Indigenous Peoples, the name in its vernacular form may also embody history, a sense of place and a right to belong. Like the Latin binomial, indigenous names for plants and animals can also be knowledge conduits. When Europeans colonised 'new' lands, they often claimed possession merely by a proclamation of discovery and deposed local geographic place names with new ones. In a similar way, biologists have introduced new species names with nomenclature publications that often set aside long-standing indigenous names. There are, however, exceptions, and examples of indigenous names having been used in the binomial include among trees; Beilschmiedia tawa, (A.Cunn.) Benth. et Hook.f. ex Kirk in New Zealand, Couratari tauari Berg. in Amazonia and Colophospermum mopane (Kirk ex Benth.) Kirk ex J. Leonard in southern Africa. More generally, authorities in many countries are reinstating indigenous names for localities and geographic features and the scientific community is now recognising indigenous knowledge particularly for ecosystem management1,2. Taxonomists are also increasingly engaging in consultation with Indigenous Peoples over names and using indigenous language for newly described or assigned taxa3,4. Here, we advocate for a broader shift in practice involving changes to the rules of taxonomic codes.

Discussion

The protocols and rules for nomenclature are established and maintained by scientific societies5,6: researchers, editors, land managers, together with authors of field guides, popular publications and websites, then accommodate these rules in the form of applied usage. Fundamental to this system is priority. However, the almost ubiquitous chronological precedence of indigenous names has no standing or priority under current taxonomic codes, despite these often conveying in-depth knowledge relating to form, uses, distribution and ecology.

One value of the scientific binominal is in reducing confusion between common names. Nonetheless, ongoing taxonomic revision often results in the accumulation of many synonyms. In such cases the system does little to reduce the confusion of common names. The application of the principle of conservation under current codes has reduced the number of name changes but they still occur. This flux in nomenclature has often prevailed in the face of constancy in an indigenous vernacular name. For example, the species name for the New Zealand forest tree Prumnopitys taxifolia (D.Don) de Laub. has had five epithets (one of which includes the indigenous name of matai), whereas the indigenous vernacular name of mataī has remained unchanged for centuries. In the case of Colophospermum mopane, the long-term use of the indigenous "mopane" for the species epithet has fortunately remained stable during generic shifts in nomenclature. Additionally, there is a plethora of disparate species with the same epithet. For example, colensoi applies to at least 19 plant species, two bird species and two fungi in New Zealand. This, despite many of these species having well recognised indigenous names that could be applied and thereby help to avoid the homogenisation rendered by such duplication.

An approach to nomenclature that might be described as 'colonial' was reflected in the earlier penchant for assigning surnames that were habitually erected to honour collectors, sponsors, colleagues or employers who were often distanced from the country in question. In total this previous effort currently defines a large proportion of the nomenclatural diaspora. Further, some epithets from the past are rather insensitive to place and historical circumstance such as, for example, Melidectes whitemanensis Gilliard as the binomial for a honeyeater endemic to New Britain in the heart of Melanesia. Another example derives from the colloquial and pejorative name of "kaffir" in southern Africa which has subsequently been applied to a number of edible plant species. We believe it is unfortunate that the word has also been incorporated into some binomials; for example, the edible fruit tree species, Dovyalis caffra Warb. and Harpephyllum caffrum Bernh. ex C. Krauss. Species epithets, such as the examples above, convey no morphological nor ecological information. Instead, they merely recall outdated thinking that seems rather odd in a more pluralistic contemporary setting. These are names that are now likely to have little resonance for biologists in the country of origin and that may be, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, offensive, to the resident Indigenous Peoples. By contrast, there is a latent opportunity for species epithets, and indeed for names at any taxonomic level, to reflect their importance for Indigenous People. For example, one of the most important fish genera for food among Amazonia's inhabitants is Cichla 7, with the widely recognised vernacular name 'tucunare'. Either the genus or one of the eight recognised species could carry that identity and this would affirm its importance to the Indigenous People in the region.

We envisage taxonomic rule changes to promote retrospective name changes that establish, on the basis of precedence, pre-existing indigenous names for species where possible. The first step in this process should be a general debate on the merits or otherwise of a new approach. This debate must include Indigenous Peoples and indigenous scientists as prominent stakeholders in the discussion. We hope that this letter will act as a catalyst for such debate and that support will build around the idea.

The next phase would be to submit formal proposals to the governing bodies of nomenclature for rule changes. Nomenclature is governed, among others: by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN) and proposed rule changes can be submitted via publication in Taxon, or 'from the floor' by anyone attending the nomenclature sessions3; and by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), the latter of which considers submissions for amending the code under its constitution4.

Under the ICN, article 11.4 states that "for any taxon below the rank of genus, the correct name is the combination of the final epithet of the earliest legitimate name of the taxon at the same rank ...". This clause establishes priority for earliest legitimate names but it also includes exceptions to the rule such as for the conservation of long established names. Our proposal would include a further exception whereby indigenous names can replace previously legitimate names on the basis of their actual chronological precedence, both in discovery and usage, as opposed to the priority afforded under existing nomenclature rules. Article 12.1 requires "valid publication" for a name to have status. An exception to this rule would therefore need to be included to allow indigenous names to have status under the code following submission by Indigenous Peoples. Such submissions would need to present evidence that the taxon in question has a dominantly applied indigenous vernacular name across its distribution. Additional articles would be needed to establish the criteria by which this status could be achieved. These criteria would need to include: (1) how to evaluate the relationship between the Indigenous People making the submission and the species under consideration and whether or not there are competing nomenclatural interests; (2) evidence of a consensus across the indigenous community covering a geographic area that included the whole distribution of the species under consideration. Where different groups of Indigenous Peoples are unable to form a consensus over the preferred name for a particular taxon then no indigenous name would have status and the taxon name would remain unchanged.

Under the ICZN, Article 23 sets out the principle of priority whereby the "valid name of a taxon is the oldest available name applied to it". In a similar manner proposed above for plants, Article 23 under the ICZN would need to be amended to provide an exception to allow the earlier indigenous names to indeed be deemed the oldest available name applied to a taxon (following submission by the relevant Indigenous People[s]). Again, additional articles would need to be added setting out criteria for this exception. Throughout both codes minor amendments would be required to provide alignment with the new provisions. It should be recognised that, in making these changes, any conceptual challenge to such alteration occurs in the context of a right deriving from the temporal precedence of indigenous nomenclature.

Conclusion

The number of taxa across the globe that could be considered for such retrospective name changes will be limited, but the changes we propose would herald an important step in the affirmation of Indigenous People's contribution to nomenclature and knowledge.

Thus, we envision a new order in which names such as the New Zealand forest tree species, Prumnopitys taxifolia would become Prumnopitys matai, the east African riparian tree species, Breonadia salicina (Vahl) Hepper & J. R. I. Wood would become Breonadia matumi, and the North American edible deciduous forest tree, Diospyros virginiana L. would become Diospyros pessamin. Such a legacy could become axiomatic under a new respect for indigenous precedence in nomenclature.

Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for helpful and accurate input to the review process for this manuscript and the following for providing constructive feedback and encouragement on an earlier draft of the manuscript: Leanne W. Wilson, Tarn A.W. Gillman, David R. Towns, Barbara Bollard and Keith Tudor.

Author contributions

L.N.G. and S.D.W. contributed equally to the manuscript.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Footnotes

Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

References

1. Ban NC, et al. Incorporate Indigenous perspectives for impactful research and effective management. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 2018;2:1680-1683. doi: 10.1038/s41559-018-0706-0. [[ PubMed] [ CrossRef] Google Scholar]

2. Lyver POB, et al. Key biocultural values to guide restoration action and planning in New Zealand. Restor. Ecol. 2016;24:314-323. doi: 10.1111/rec.12318. [[ CrossRef] Google Scholar]

3. Veale AJ, et al. Using te reo Māori and ta re Moriori in taxonomy. N.Z. J. Ecol. 2019;43:1-11. [ Google Scholar]

4. Nielsen SV, Bauer AM, Jackman TR, Hitchmough RA, Daugherty CH. New Zealand geckos (Diplodactylidae): cryptic diversity in a post-Gondwanan lineage with trans-Tasman affinities. Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. 2011;59:1-22. doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2010.12.007. [[ PubMed] [ CrossRef] Google Scholar]

5. Turland, N. et al. International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (Shenzhen Code) adopted by the Nineteenth International Botanical Congress Shenzhen, China, July 2017. (Koeltz Botanical Books, 2018).

6. Ride, W. D. et al. International code of zoological nomenclature. 4th edn, (International Trust for Zoological Nomenclature, The Natural History Museum, 1999).

7. van der Sleen, P. & Albert, J. S. Field Guide to the Fishes of the Amazon, Orinoco, and Guianas. (Princeton University Press, 2018).

Articles from Communications Biology are provided here courtesy of Nature Publishing Group

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The species name is a fundamental unit. However, for Indigenous Peoples, the name in its vernacular form may also embody history, a sense of place and a right to belong. Like the Latin binomial, indigenous names for plants and animals can also be knowledge conduits.

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Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? - Sylvia Wynter

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Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? - Sylvia Wynter

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A history of Western Humanism and the resultant ecological threats that monohumanism engendered, Wynter tries to theorise a new way of conceptualising humanity, as many different cultural genres of humanity.

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The Anthropocene, defined as a new geological epoch fundamentally marked by humanity's now-global influence, as seen in climate change, biodiversity, and pollution. When does it begin?  The date the working group of scientists finally decided on is the middle of the 20th C, marked by an abundance of man-made nuclear materials spread across the globe, however, there were many of contenders, including the Orbis Spike, dated to 1610. The Orbis Spike took the irreversible exchange of plant, animal, bacterial, viral, and fungal species between the New and Old Worlds, sometimes called the Columbian exchange, as one of its markers, as well as a sudden dip in global temperatures in 1610, speculated to be due to the mass genocide of indigenous north americans across a few decades by European colonisers, which led to the regrowth of many trees that suddenly captured much more carbon, thus cooling the planet.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2015/mar/epoch-defining-study-pinpoints-when-humans-came-dominate-planet-earth

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King James was on the throne, Shakespeare's Cymbeline was playing in the theatre and Galileo discovered four moons of Jupiter. In future, though, 1610 could be chiefly remembered as the geological time-point at which humans came to dominate Earth.

Scientists have argued that it is time to draw a line under the current geological epoch and usher in the start of a new one, defined by mankind's impact on the planet.

The year 1610 is a contender for marking the transition, they claim, because this is when the irreversible transfer of crops and species between the new and old worlds was starting to be acutely felt.

Simon Lewis, an ecologist at University College London and author of the paper, said: "In a hundred thousand years, scientists will look at the environmental record and know something remarkable happened in the second half of the second millennium. They will be in no doubt that these global changes to Earth were caused by their own species."

When Europeans started arriving in the Americas, he added, a cascade of events was triggered that was "as Earth-changing as a meteorite strike".

The concept of the "anthropocene" is already widely used on an informal basis by writers and environmentalists, but scientists remain divided on whether the designation of a new time period is justified.

Critics argue that the desire to redraw geological boundaries is politically motivated by those wanting to highlight the extent of human destruction on the planet. Others say that it is about 1,000 years too soon to identify the most enduring geological markers of human activity on Earth.

The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the world body that decides on geological time boundaries, is actively considering the question and a working group is due to report on the issue next year.

The central problem is identifying a permanent and global change that has been captured in natural material, such as rocks, ice or marine sediment - a so-called "golden spike".

"Global long-term changes to Earth's system ... are required to have one marker that can be precisely dated that is captured in some ancient geological material," said Lewis.

Lewis and his UCL co-author, Mark Maslin, considered and rejected the earliest use of fire, the dawn of agriculture and the industrial revolution as possible candidates.

Eventually they identified two events - the joining of the two hemispheres and nuclear testing in the 20 th century - that met the golden spike criteria.

The year 1610 marks the low-point of a dip in global carbon dioxide levels caused by a drastic reduction in farming in the Americas. This was a knock-on effect of the 50 million or so indigenous deaths that resulted from the introduction of small pox to the continent by European colonialists. A secondary marker of the colliding of worlds is the sudden appearance, in 1600, of fossil pollen maize, a Latin American species, in the European marine record.

The paper, published today in Nature, also considered the year 1964, which saw a peak in radioactive fallout following nuclear weapons testing before the test ban treaty came into force.

The authors conclude that 1610 has a stronger claim because so far the testing of nuclear weapons has not been an Earth-changing event. "I tend to go with 1610 because ... the evolutionary consequences of that are pushing Earth onto a new evolutionary trajectory," said Lewis.

Jan Zalasiewicz, chair of the ICS's Anthropocene working group, said his committee would consider the authors arguments. However, the working group is converging on nuclear testing as a more universal marker - the CO2 dip and pollen records are patchy and have fuzzier boundaries, he contends.

A potential downside of the nuclear signal is that it will have decayed away within 100,000 years - a blink of the eye in geological time. "Geologists are very pragmatic creatures though," said Zalasiewicz. "We're looking for the best signal for dividing strata now, not for geologists a million years in the future."

The arrival of the Anthropocene would mark the end of the Holocene, the epoch that we currently live in, which itself was only defined in 2008. It is marked by a signal in the Greenland ice cores indicating the end of the last ice age, 11,700 years ago.

Since epochs typically last tens of millions of years, some suggest that the Holocene should not only end, but be scrapped or downgraded. "The Holocene is supposed to last tens of millions of years and it's several orders of magnitude to short," said Lewis. "I think we'd have to call that a stage rather than an epoch."

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Was 1610 the beginning of a new human epoch?

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King James was on the throne, Shakespeare's Cymbeline was playing in the theatre and Galileo discovered four moons of Jupiter. In future, though, 1610 could be chiefly remembered as the geological time-point at which humans came to dominate Earth.

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Democracy of Species - Robin Wall Kimmerer (Quotations, and Podcast 54mins)

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Democracy of Species - Robin Wall Kimmerer (Quotations, and Podcast 54mins)

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RWK writes about plants and ecological as both an indigenous north american reclaiming their heritage and community knowledge and as a plant scientist.
There's a link to a podcast here (I've not listened to it), and some quotations from her two most famous books, Braiding Sweetgrass and Democracy of Species.
Democracy is much shorter, and as far as I can tell last time I read them, is actually just extracts from Sweetgrass

“Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow's edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.”

...

“Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.
Take only that which is given.
Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share.
Give thanks for what you have been given.
Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.”

...

"“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.”"

...

"“In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”"

...

“In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.”

...

“When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world. Tom says that even words as basic as numbers are imbued with layers of meaning. The numbers we use to count plants in the sweetgrass meadow also recall the Creation Story. Én:ska—one. This word invokes the fall of Skywoman from the world above. All alone, én:ska, she fell toward the earth. But she was not alone, for in her womb a second life was growing. Tékeni—there were two. Skywoman gave birth to a daughter, who bore twin sons and so then there were three—áhsen. Every time the Haudenosaunee count to three in their own language, they reaffirm their bond to Creation.”

...

"Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness”—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors. It’s no wonder that naming was the first job the Creator gave Nanabozho.”

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Audio unavailable for this browser.

There are so many ways humans and other beings shape each other's lives, for bad and for good, often in ways we fail to notice let alone understand. In this episode, we explore the relationship between human beings and other beings-between humans and animals, humans and plants, and humans and the earth itself. We talk to Robin Wall Kimmerer, author, scientist, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and Emma Marris, author and journalist, about the interconnections between beings and the role we play in this fluid web of relationships and responsibilities.

Show Notes

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. She tours widely and has been featured on NPR's On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of "Healing Our Relationship with Nature." Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both Indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability.

Emma Marris is the author of Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World and Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World.

She also writes about the human and nonhuman worlds, and the enduringly complex relationships between them for National Geographic, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Wired, and other publications. She lives in Oregon with her husband-with whom she occasionally co-authors environmental philosophy papers-and their two children.

Other writing and programs on environment and ecology from Oregon Humanities:

Transcript

Adam Davis: Welcome to The Detour. I'm Adam Davis.

To this point on The Detour, we've only had human beings as guests. We've only recorded, edited, and published conversations between people. This episode, called "Democracy of Species," is no different. We talk with two people, Robin Wall Kimmerer and Emma Marris. But what we explore in these conversations with Robin and Emma is the relationship between human beings and other beings, between humans and animals, humans and plants, and humans and the earth itself. We also explore human responsibilities to non-human beings.

I don't know about you, but for me, it would be difficult to imagine a day without plenty of encounters with non-human beings: the sound of little brown birds as I wake up; leaves low overhead as I walk with my eager, willful dog; ornery crews barking at us as we return home. And this is all before the sun is up-and in the pavement-filled city. And these are only the most obvious ways my life affects and is affected by other beings, mostly on an individual level. Then there are the larger systems I'm part of and also shaping, even if I'm hardly aware of it: roads, wires, cars, homes, water in and water out, and on and on.

There's so many ways human beings and other beings shape each other's lives, for bad and for good, in ways we often fail to notice, let alone understand. Robin Wall Kimmerer and Emma Marris pay a lot of careful attention to how our lives are folded in with the lives of other beings and to the interconnections between these beings. Robin and Emma help bring to light all the beings in the world and how those beings, including human beings, relate to one another.

Whether they're looking at mosses or sweet grass, rats or cats, maples or wolves or humans, Robin and Emma are really good at helping us see our world and ourselves more fully. They're also really good at challenging us to reconsider our role in this fluid and dynamic web of relationships and responsibilities.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She's the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Oregon Humanities reached out to Robin and as part of our Consider This series on the theme American Dreams, American Myths, American Hopes because of her efforts to expand how people think about nationhood and the responsibilities of citizenship-and because of the way she herself thinks, both scientifically and metaphorically, both critically and hopefully.

Given the theme, American Dreams, American Myths, American Hopes, I want to note that the titles of your books, and much of the meat of the books, are about plants: sweet grass, mosses, many other kinds of plants-maples. And yet there are words in those books like government and revolution and democracy that show up a good bit.

So as we ease into exploring the theme, I wanted to ask you right here at the start. Do you think of yourself as a political person? Is it sort of, do you think of these books as political books? Maybe that's a way to start.

Robin: That's a good question. I certainly didn't conceive of them as political books.

Um, but I understand of course that by presenting an alternative to the kind of dominant conventional Western worldview, it, it certainly challenges colonialism, challenges the status quo, and invites us to consider ourselves and how we organize one another in relationship to each other and certainly to the land in different ways.

So while I didn't intend it that way, I'm often really grateful when folks say, oh, this is a dangerous book. I feel like, oh, great.

Adam: And dangerous, politically dangerous in some ways.

Robin: Oh yes. Dangerous in, in, in, in, in challenging. Uh, dominant thought patterns.

Adam: Yeah. Great. Maybe we can stay there a little bit. I'm curious especially about dominant thought patterns. So you just mentioned Maple Nation, and in Braiding Sweetgrass, you talk about citizenship of Maple Nation. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you see citizenship of Maple Nation contrasting with, or aligning with, say, citizenship of the United States. How are those kinds of citizenship similar and how are they different?

Robin: Well, one of the challenges that comes with thinking of yourself as a citizen of Maple Nation is certainly, um, grounded in an Indigenous perspective where we view, you know, American political boundaries as imposed artificial lines that sometimes divide our homelands and often divide our homelands.

But what I really mean by being a citizen is: what are your shared values? And I think oftentimes our values fail to be rooted in the land. They're not often biocentric or life-centered values. They're more anther anthropocentric. Um, so by claiming citizenship and Maple Nation, I want to say I belong to a community bigger than humans. I love my human community, but there are way more maple trees where I live than there are people, and those maple trees are playing really important roles as community members, but to human people, they're often invisible. Well, they're just objects. They're just trees. But by claiming citizenship in Maple Nation, it gives respect to the non-human persons and recognize, you know, our interdependence.

In a way, you know, when we think about sort of American political ideals, this notion of independence, and that a hallmark of our governance system is the Bill of Rights. I think about a wonderful friend and historian, the late Chief Irving Powless, of the Onondaga Nation, who would talk about the fact that when we met with the founding fathers of the American democracy, as they did, he said they got a lot of things right, but they kind of messed up because they wrote the Bill of Rights instead of the Bill of Responsibilities. And to me, that's one of the major contrasts between being a citizen of a political entity and being a citizen of an ecological entity: that we're governed by our responsibilities to each other, not claiming individual rights.

Adam: So those are already two powerful differences. One is, I think, a declaration of independence versus a kind of recognition and declaration of interdependence. And then also a bill of rights as contrasted with a bill of responsibilities or even duties, which is another word you use.

So can I ask you-and, you know, we're maybe not that great at talking about citizen responsibilities and citizen duties here in this country. We emphasize rights. Can you like, what are, what should we be responsible for? What are the duties that we have as you see it?

Robin: Hmm. Well, duties to recognize that that nobody thrives unless everybody thrives. You know, as an ecologist, this is what the land tells you, this is what ecological science is telling you that, that we are all connected, we are all related. That there is scarcely such a thing as an I; It's all a great big we. And, so that's what I really think about is our responsibilities for sharing with each other, for respecting each other, for in a sense nurturing each other's well-being, because an individual's well-being depends on the well-being of the whole.

Adam: So I can nod at that, and then I think about how I spend my day and I wonder where I fall-where I fall very short, where I fall somewhat short, how rare it is that I'm really thinking of the whole or thinking in a fully ecological way, the way you're describing. As you go through your day, do you feel like here's where I'm living into this vision and here are some ways I fall short? I mean, concretely, how do you know?

Robin: Oh, sure. All the time. It's kind of a dance, isn't it, between those things that pull us towards efficiency and productivity and all those things that the world demands of us and to back off from that and remember our responsibilities to each other. On a daily basis, you know what really helps me to be grounded and trying to live that out is always starting the day with gratitude-with you know, naming all of those beings to whom I'm related. And not in a generic way-like, you know, when I'm standing outside and the first cardinal of the spring is singing, my thanks go directly there. And then I think, well, what's my responsibility to that cardinal? And it reminds me to fill the bird feeder, in a very tangible kind of way of reciprocity. You gave me a song this morning, and the least I can do is offer you some sunflower seeds.

That's an easy one, right? But that's, for me, kind of a model of what I hope to be able to do is to say, well, in return for the gift of being a scientist, you know, what am I going to do about that? How do I, how do I pay that back? Um, with my students, with my writing. You know, it's trying, it's trying to hold yourself accountable to the gifts and to the privileges that you have. Do I do that 24 7? Of course not. It is an aspiration at which I often fail. But the small acts-taking out the compost is my act of reciprocity with the soil that feeds me, putting solar panels on my house is an act of reciprocity. So there are big things like solar panels and little things like compost, but I hope that they all add up. When you feel like you have everything you need, you don't necessarily need to go out and buy anything.

Adam: I want to ask, on the one hand, this really feeling and naming and recognizing all that we should be grateful for. And in your example, you referred to the Onondaga for example, and there's also real injustice that's been done. And to try to-how to hold these two together, the sense of injustice on one hand and gratitude on the other.

Robin: Hmm. I'm really interested that you're putting those in tension with one another, because I don't necessarily find them so. The injustices-not only of history, but the continuing injustices associated with colonialism and the tremendous inequities-to me, they're separate things. The gratitude that we feel, for our beingness, for our relatives, for the land, is unchanging and grounds us in a way that allows us both to persevere through injustices and provides a kind of cultural identity and strength that lets you combat injustice. When you have a model of abundance, I think it gives you a platform of more courage and resilience to do the work of healing, injustices. It's a really good question. I'm sure I'm going to think about that some more.

Adam: OK, thanks. I mean, it's interesting because this series theme is on dreams, myths, and hopes that are identified with-and we put the word American in front of each of those words. Hard to hear "American dream" without thinking about nightmarish parts of this country. It's hard to think of myths without thinking of ideology. And it's hard to think of hopes without thinking of those that aren't realized. And at the same time, going back to, for example, the questions that we received from people planning to join tonight, the word hope showed up in a lot of those questions.

And just interesting to note that there-you were going to say something, please.

Robin: I was. We are in a time when we were so hungry for hope, aren't we? And we're looking for it in many, many places. Um, and so I think a lot about hope. And there's one part of me that says that, you know, I'm by nature, a really optimistic person who tends to see the positive-well, of course I'm a botanist, I hang out with plants, so that colors one's worldview-but I also have the great privilege of being a professor, of being a teacher, and I get to hang out and spend my time and energy with amazing young people who are so full of ideas and imagination and energy to, um, participate in the great turning that Joanna Macy talks about, right? Of turning away from this worldview of destruction to one of creativity. Um, so I am buoyed up by my students, for sure. But honestly, when I think about hope, I'm not really sure what that means to separate it from optimism. To me I find it hard to separate hope from love. Because I might hope for a certain kind of future, and it might be wishful thinking, but it doesn't matter because I'm just going to keep on loving the world-and maybe loving it harder in a damaged state, in a wounded state, right? I think it's love that is going to help us make the transformation that we need. And what's the connection between love and hope? It's when we act on the connection between the love that we feel.

Um, it seems to me that our great failing as a people over the last centuries is that we've really failed to love the land. And failed to love the land enough in all of its fullness as a nation of tree citizens, not land as property, and land is natural resources and those kinds of myths. Um, those are good myths for you: land as property, land as commodity. But land as family, as responsibility, as teacher, as identity, as sacred, that's a kind of, love of land that I can get behind.

Adam: And let's stay with plants a bit. Um, you just talked about, you went straight from talking about being a botanist who studies plants to being a professor buoyed up by students. And it felt to me, like you were saying, in a way, the hope that you get from mosses, let's say, is in some ways quite like the hope you get from students.

Robin: It's true.

Adam: I mean, reading Gathering Mosses, I felt like, yes, it was about mosses, but it was also about people, and about the relation between the two. While you were writing Gathering Mosses, like when you go look at moss, do you think about the mosses? Do you think about how the moss functions as a metaphor? Uh, how much is that an explicit part of what you feel like is going on inside of you?

Robin: It all happens for me at the same time. As a naturalist, as a scientist, I'm incredibly fascinated, of course, by the structure and the function and ecology of mosses-and to say nothing of how beautiful they are, right? But at the same time, the notion of plants as teachers is so much a part of the lens at which I look at the world. When I look at tiny little mosses, I can't help but think about living simply and relying on each other because that's what they're doing. That's how, that's how they're surviving. That's how they're blanketing the world with green is by relying on each other. And by not ask asking much from their environment at all, but by living within their ecological means, that's how they live. And so it's the microcosm of the mosses that you could look at through a microscope, but then there's the telescope of what it means of what would it be like to live like mosses? And what could we learn from that kind of humility?

It's just a truth that, you know, I see the world in those kinds of metaphors of what do plants have to teach us? They are themselves and they are their lessons all in the same beautiful green package.

Adam: So that phrase you just spoke, they are themselves and they are, sort of, what they mean. Uh, you know, a couple of different directions I'm hoping we can go. The first is to just follow what you see in the mosses again. And you say at one point, and I'm going to quote you back to yourself, I hope that's okay.

Robin: Only if it's good.

Adam: Well, you get to decide, but I think I'm quoting it to you because I think it's good.

"I hold tight to the vision that someday soon we will find the courage of self-restraint, the humility to live like mosses."

And you just talked about the humility. I'm curious about courage. What do you mean by the courage of self-restraint? Why courage?

Robin: I think separating our needs and our wants and saying to oneself, "I have enough," takes some courage because we're surrounded by messages that are constantly telling us that we're not good enough, we don't have enough, we need to get more. And so it does take courage to practice self-restraint against those messages. Um, there's also a kind of a courage that comes with real humility.

In the Potawatomi way of thinking about humility, we don't mean it in the same way that English does, of kind of being self-effacing or self-deprecating. What our language teachers tell us that it actually means is that we don't think of ourselves as more important than others, which doesn't mean we're not all really important, but none of us are more important than the others. It's almost an invitation to celebrate the importance of others. And so the courage to recognize that you're not the master of the universe is what I mean. It's a kind of courage associated with humility and lifting up others rather than yourself.

Adam: You're listening to The Detour With Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Adam: That brings me back to a phrase that I continue to turn over since I came across it in, I think, first in Braiding Sweetgrass. And that is "democracy of species." Let's talk about democracy, but democracy of species. I want to ask the very simple question: What is democracy of species? What do you mean?

Robin: Hmm. The way that I like to think about that is maybe with a myth, Adam, given the theme of this conversation. The myth of human exceptionalism, as if human people were at the top of this fictional pyramid, a pyramid of, of intelligence, a pyramid of entitlement, a pyramid of who is inspirited and who is not. We tend to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation and that all the rest of the beings are below us.

That, of course, is not a democracy of species. That's kind of a hierarchical dictator who thinks of all the others as below him or her and lesser than, whereas the democracy of species to me means not a fictional pyramid but like a beautiful spider web of connection or a big circle in which all the beings are relatives.

They're all equal, not the same as each other. They're all gloriously different, but they have the same claim to the wealth of the world. And they have the same rights to be that human people do. By a democracy of species, I mean living in such a way that we recognize the beingness of each other, the personhood of each other, and that we all have a right and a responsibility and a gift to bring to the whole.

And that's what democracy is to me is: doing your part, knowing that you're connected and giving back in return for everything that you've been given. To me, that's democracy of upholding each other. And I want to live in a world where salamanders have rights where, where redwoods have rights. That's what I mean by the democracy of species.

Adam: It's funny, I was going to the salamanders in my head when you mentioned them. I was going to that moment when you described being out there with your students and in a way that challenge of wanting to measure how cars are affecting the salamander population and at the same time wanting to save the salamanders that are crossing the road-and the tension between let's do the science well, which means let's not mess with what's happening, let's measure it. And on the other hand, can't we stop these cars or pick up these salamanders and move them across. And so there, I do want to ask about that felt like a metaphor as well as the tension between measuring and understanding and intervening.

Robin: Yes. Yeah. And it's partly the tension between looking at the world as oftentimes scientific method asks us to do, always ask us to do, is to consider the world as object. And the desire to intervene out of compassion for those salamanders considers the world as subject, and Western science in the form of knowledge generation to kind of asks us for that objectivity.

Um, and in the, in that, the case of those rainy night of trying to save salamanders, I think there's also the sense that there are multiple ways to save salamanders. We, we could-as we did-pick them up and carry them across the road. But I think we also save salamanders by doing good salamander science because when we talk to policy makers, and we want to have, have culverts put in or roads closed so that salamanders can safely migrate, we live in a world where they're not going to say, um, you feel badly for those, your kinfolk, the salamanders, therefore we're going to make this change. They listen to data. They listen to evidence. So there is a way in which doing that science saves salamanders in the long run. And so I respect both of those, but they are, but they're really different impulses.

And I think we have to do both. It's not a matter of either/or, but we have to do both, and we have to do them with as much respect and compassion as we can.

Adam: And thinking about the word reciprocity that you used before. I want to ask the crude question about, sort of, what about salamanders' orientation toward us?

Like, I'm thinking about this idea of the democracy and species and, um, if we want to either save, help, measure-and I think I know where you might go with this, but I'm curious-do you have a sense of how salamanders might regard or should regard humans?

Robin: Hmm, what an interesting question.

Oh, it's just launching this wonderful imagining of what that would be to be a salamander crossing the road and saying, "Who in the world interrupted our soft bed of leaves with asphalt? Where did that come from?" Do they even know us? Do they even know us? Are our worlds so different that they scarcely imagine us?

I don't know. I've honestly not done the exercise of trying to think like a salamander, but I know that they see very clearly the impacts that we have had on their lives. Whether they attribute it to the same beings who were there in a raincoat and a flashlight, trying to carry them across the road, I don't know.

I don't know, but more broadly speaking, I think there's an important philosophical construct of saying that we are nonetheless responsible for each other. And that just as we view them as, as kinfolk, you know, deeply other, you know, uh, salamanders are deeply different than we are, but can we still have compassion for them and respect for them?

I guess I would want them to have compassion and respect for us. And you know, the other thing, I hope that they have for us forgiveness.

Adam: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It's I think it's because this phrase democracy of species got in my head and then I was-and then you say at one point "the dictates of the real government, the democracy of species, the laws of nature."

And then, so I was trying to think about the differences between human laws and the laws of nature, and how it would be easier if they aligned in practice more, but, but like the laws of-human laws in democracy, especially, I think it's a law we try to give to ourselves and the laws of nature feel like they're from a larger place.

And so when you say the dictates of the real government. Can I just push you to elaborate on that a little bit?

Robin: Yeah. And in that phrasing, what I really mean are the laws of nature, right? Um, and absolutely that's a call for an alignment of human constructed governance and economies to align with the natural laws.

And, and you know, maybe one of the easiest examples of natural law, um, that we are so out of balance with in social and economic institutions is this idea of unlimited growth. Right? Every day you hear, oh, well we, in order to be successful, the economy has to grow. Well that's not a law of nature. In natural systems things can't grow indefinitely. They can't. There's finite limits on resources and space and light. Unlimited growth is, uh, is a construct of being human-centric. We want things to grow so we can have more. Why we need more, never always clear. But, but in natural systems, systems fall apart if they try to grow infinitely.

And so why do we model our economy after something which violates the laws of thermodynamics, in a sense? Um, and there are regenerative economies, circular economies that, that are much more aligned with the laws of nature that, that don't demand endless growth and therefore endless extraction and exploitation.

Adam: So I feel like thinking about stories that illustrate larger truth. Now I think we're moving in the direction of the Wendigo, the story of the Wendigo and just as you were talking, I was thinking, where does, where does the Wendigo come from? Where does, where does, uh, being that is so out of step with the laws of nature, come from? what I'm asking is where do we, who build these roads and then need to try to save salamanders from our own cars?

Where do we come from, given that we seem to come from nature in some way? How did that rupture seem to develop?

Robin: There's so many dimensions to your question. Let me start with the last letter, part of your questions are where did we get this exploitive mindset? I think that is a direct response to human exceptionalism, to thinking that human beings are different and superior from all other beings.

That of course we can build roads through wetlands because those wetlands belong to us. We're in charge here and it's up to us to do as we wish-those are some of the direct ideas from the Abrahamic religions, right? Of dominion over land. And the idea that that humans are at the top of some pyramid, that we alone are sacred beings, as opposed to the notion that we're all sacred beings, salamanders and cattails and, you know, maple trees alike. So where did it come from? I think it comes from that religious tradition quite honestly, of a separation of humans from the rest of our kinfolk.

Adam: I think, as you're talking, I'm thinking about the complexity of reigning in-how hard it is to do something other than the biological imperative. I love your pointing to culture and stories and law as the way we try to do that. And I wonder, do you see that sort of reigning in, in other beings as well? Or is it something we, most of all, we, we strange humans, most of all have to try to do?

Robin: I think that there must be reigning in because all beings subject to evolution by natural selection would be manifesting this, this will to live right? This will to continue and pass on our genes. But how do we explain things like Suzanne Simard's wonderful discoveries about the sharing networks that trees have-that trees who have plenty are sharing with those who don't have enough, um, they're sharing with their offspring.

It still manifests the evolutionary imperative to pass on your genes to the next generation, but they don't have to be passed on in your own physical self. They could be passed on in the well-being of your relatives as well. So I can think about mycorrhizal networks and forest networks as a kind of self-restraint.

Or maybe it's more a dissolution of the self-that it's not the self that matters; it's the we that matters. Um, and, and, and that's, that's what a lot of ethics and culture suggest too. That's why we have those Wendigo stories to say, you're not alone here. It's not just you that matters. We all need to survive here.

And if we share and where we're not that greedy cannibal Wendigo, then we have a shot at it.

Adam: Thank you. So, Robin, we are moving towards closing this part of the program. I like the expression you just made. Um, and you know, we invited people who were going to watch this to share questions. And I wanted to ask you actually, if you, lately, these days, whatever these days means. Do you feel like you've had a persistent question or two in your head, some question that has recurred?

Robin: Yes. Yes. And, you know, this is a question that, if I might, I would love to share with your thoughtful audience, and it grows out of the beginning of Braiding Sweetgrass with the story of Sky Woman, where your readers will remember in this creation story, she falls from the Sky World to the new world, what becomes Turtle Island, right? And brings her gifts there. And so the world unfolds, you know, there are a number of different stories about how she came to fall. There are some stories in which she just slipped. There are some stories in which shall we say she was helped along, because she had work to do, but was reluctant to do it. The question that has been on my mind, knowing strong Native women, I don't guess it was an accident. What if she jumped? My question is what if she jumped to a new world-and metaphorically, what do we need to do to jump to a new world?

You know, so much of the environmental movement to my mind has been driven by fear, by looking over our shoulders and saying, "Wow, something really bad is coming toward us." And they're not wrong. And so you jumped to a new world because you're afraid of what's coming and afraid of what you've created. But the world that I want to live in is a world that is so beautiful and whole that you want to jump to it so that you jump because of love, not because of fear. And the question that I have for readers is what do we need from each other to jump?

Adam: Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Emma Marris is the author of Wild Souls and Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. She writes about the human and non-human worlds in the enduringly complex relationships between them for National Geographic, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Wired, and other publications.

Emma wrote a piece that we excerpted in the 2022 spring edition of Oregon Humanities magazine, on the theme "Care," that inspired us to reach out to her.

Adam: Towards the end of Wild Souls, when you talk about the tension between caring for, being responsible to, an individual animal and individual non-human being and the larger flow, the species, or the larger system. I don't know if that analogy holds up for you, but how present as you go through your day is the choice or the tension between this creature right here and ecosystem writ large?

Emma: I do think that American culture is very hung up on individualism. Um, and so I think that there's a needed correction in terms of pushing us towards more collectivist thinking and more cooperative modes of trying to instantiate the world that we want to see. But at the same time, sometimes we can lose sight of the individuality of non-humans. We just think of a wolf as a member, a unit, in a population that we're trying to preserve. And we don't think about the day-to-day experience of that one wolf, you know-what she smelled when she woke up in the morning and what her goals were for the day and whether she was hungry when she went to bed.

So I think getting the balance right, in any given situation, between an individual framework and a collective framework, it's just one of the trickiest things. And one of the most interesting things, it's just a tension I just keep coming back to over and over again. And I think that's natural when your focus is the environment, right? Because the environment is-it's really just a kind of a boring way of saying this web of relationships that we're all in all the time. And navigating that web and trying to sort of do right by the whole web while at the same time, trying to sort of love and care for specific nodes in that web.

Adam: I wanted to give you back a sentence from right by the end of your book, where you say, "This template for decision-making should ideally be undertaken collectively by all the interested parties, perhaps including non-humans in the form of appointed representatives." And there's so much in that sentence. So when you hear that sentence a years back, what do you must go to?

Emma: Perhaps naively, I wanted to leave the reader with some precepts to guide their actions if they wanted to do right by non-humans in a changing world, how ought they proceed. Um, but I found that some of these ethical conundrums were just-I couldn't give them a simple answer. There were, there are no simple answers. You know, should you kill a fox that is eating endangered species? I can't give you an ethical answer. You know, I can't tell you the answer to that, cause it's not a math problem. It depends on whether you think the individual life of the fox is more important or the lives of the endangered species are more important. And whether, you know, what kind of value you place on the endangerment as, as a modifier of all of that.

But the process is really framed somewhat individualistically uh, ironically enough. That you, Adam, would go through as you were trying to figure out what you thought about one of these issues. But in the real world, we don't make these kinds of decisions individually-unless you are, you know-it's rare the situation where a single individual gets to make these kinds of decisions usually.

And ideally these would be collective decisions. You know, should we institute-should we kill the feral cats in our ecosystem here in Australia, because they're eating endangered animals. We'd, we'd have to make that decision with a huge number of participants: the Aboriginal people, the local people, the scientists, the people who love cats, the people love endangered species. They all would have to have a seat at the table to try to come up with some answer. Or as I say, the cats and the endangered species should ideally have a seat at that table as well, somehow.

And there are already kind of, you know, there are, are moves in, in some legal systems towards this idea of having of non-humans having rights, and if they have rights and they're going to need lawyers. So what we're talking about here, when you read that sentence back to me, what I think about is a world-a just world is a world with a lot of meetings in it. And I have never yet figured out a way to get around that fact.

Adam: Interesting. And also maybe a lot of lawyers. I mean, it's interesting-

Emma: Or advocates anyway.

Adam: Okay, advocates. That seems like a somewhat gentler word. In a way, you're making me think. I used to work seasonally for the forest service and the parks service doing trail work. And one summer I worked in Haleakalā National Park in Hawaii, and I was just doing trail work, but I lived with a couple people who were doing, who were working on native species stuff, and they were studying the Argentine ant and invasive species, but then they got pulled into working with feral cats. And when I say working with feral cats, I mean, eradicating feral cats. And what that ended up being-so I asked them, how do you do this? And what they had done, they had realized that what they thought was the least cruel, most effective and efficient way to do this. Once they had trapped the cats was that they had created a little mini guillotine, and they would behead the feral cats in order to preserve, especially, native birds.

And I think for me, that was a real awakening to what some of this, what conservation work can look like.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. And for listeners who are more familiar with sort of continental conservation work, anytime you get on an island, even an island as large as Australia, a lot of your conservation work suddenly becomes around this, about this kind of thing, which is dealing with these non-native predators, who are often the most immediate threat, along with habitat loss, to to native animals.

And so you very suddenly have this incredibly difficult decision to make between, you know, signing up to kill animals as part of your environmental practice or watching those introduced animals kill the animals that you love and care about as well.

Adam: And then while you were describing the beings that are the non-native threats, it's hard not to think. Huh? That's us.

Emma: So, okay. People will say the real invasive species is humans. And I can see where they're coming from, because what they're trying to point out here is the hypocrisy of us vilifying introduced animals and sort of saying, "Hey, it's all your fault. You bad cat, or you bad fox, or you bad rat," when really was humans who moved them there in the first place. And I get that and I totally understand wanting to expose that hypocrisy. But I don't think that the solution is to then just vilify people. I think the solution is to really look at this assumption that every species has one place alone that it should stay in and never leave-and that all non-native species are problematic and need to go home.

And I don't think that's how ecology actually works in the long run. The species move around over long periods of time. Now, obviously the rate of species movement over the last thousand years is massively increased because of humans, because of our incredible busy, busy ways-because of the way like dogs, we're over here, we're over there, we're kind of moving around. We're very restless and we move other species. So the rates are vastly different.

But long-distance species movement, we're not-you know, that's how Hawaii got all its species in the first place. You know, Hawaii was just rocks when it first was born out of the ocean. All of the species that are native species that we love and care about so much, that your roommates were trying to save from extinction, they all got there somehow, too. So species movements are not bad. They are part of the engine of that creates biodiversity.

Um, so saying that, you know, all species movements are bad doesn't work for me. Saying that all species that humans moved are is bad doesn't work for me either because humans are also animals. We are also natural. We're not aliens from another planet.

To me, it becomes a question of, okay, we've got these species here now, how are we gonna, how are we gonna live together? How can we structure these relationships so that, you know, that we get the results we want, that we reach our goals, that we protect the species we need to protect?That's my starting place; I really just don't like the "invasive species" frame.

Adam: Yeah, no, I that's really clear and powerfully put, and I think the challenge-and maybe this is where we can move towards a close-the challenge is that, in a way, it feels like us thinking about our role, us thinking about our relationship-whether we're coming from somewhere else or not, here we are. And so that's one of the things in that sentence of yours that I read where you say, perhaps, including non-humans in the form of appointed representatives, that it feels like this is the burden of the responsibility that comes with our power. We're sorta making all these decisions. It sort of feels like, and we're the ones that are trying to repair decisions we've been making for many, many, many years, and that's, that's challenging and it's hard to be too hopeful about. Anything you want to push back on in that somewhat bleak characterization?

Emma: Yeah, actually.

Adam: Good. That's what I was hoping.

Emma: Yeah. I mean, I do think that that human activity has been massively disruptive-not in the sense of, you know, maybe that's not the best word- human activity has radically changed the planet in the last thousand years and in the last 10,000 years. And even beyond that. Humans have just turned out to be an incredibly influential species, making big waves for, for good and for ill.

We do have a very strong responsibility as creatures who can have these kind of abstract conversations, who can work together and form goals, goals that might not even be achievable in our own lifetimes, that can have that kind of long-range thinking. We have an absolute responsibility to try to use our influence, our power, our technologies, all of this stuff, for the betterment of not just ourselves, but for the species that we share the planet with.

Having said that, we are not by any means smart enough or clever enough or powerful enough to actually dictate what goes on on every corner of the planet. All the other species are very busy, busy, too, living their lives, making their choices, pursuing their own goals. And often we are completely helpless to control them.

So I did a story for National Geographic a couple of years ago about rats. I got really interested in rats because of the conservation concerns around rats on islands. But my story follows them also in New York City and other places where, where humans have been desperately trying to get rid of them for generations with total failure. Like there's more rats than ever in New York. And there's probably more rats in Portland than there used to be too.

We are not in charge in any kind of way. We are massively influential on planet Earth, and our blundering around has changed a lot for all the other species, but we are by no means masterminds who can sort of dictate what's going to go on. All these other species are having their say too.

The real move, the power move here, is to figure out how to live with them, all of us mutually. The epigraph from the book comes from Robin Wall Kimmerer's work and it says "All flourishing is mutual." And I take that so, so literally. We cannot flourish without the other species, and I don't think they can flourish without us. We're in this together.

Adam: Emma Marris is the author of Wild Souls and Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. The Detour is made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I'm Adam Davis. Our producer is Keiren Bond. Our editor and engineer is Dave Friedlander. Our assistant producers are Alexandra Powell Bugden, Karina Briski, and Ben Waterhouse. Thank you for being with us. See you next time.

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There are so many ways humans and other beings shape each other's lives, for bad and for good, often in ways we fail to notice let alone understand. In this episode, we explore the relationship between human beings and other beings-between humans and animals, humans and plants, and humans and the earth itself.

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The Probiotic Planet (2020, Introduction, 34 pages) - Jamie Lorimer

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The Probiotic Planet (2020, Introduction, 34 pages) - Jamie Lorimer

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"The Antibiotic Anthropocene

"In 1983, ecologists working for the Dutch government introduced herds of back-bred cattle and horses into a nature reserve just north of Amsterdam. The animals were left to de-domesticate themselves in the hope
that they would restore the naturalistic grazing that had been missing since the rise of modern agriculture. The aim was to simulate the ecological conditions that would have characterized Northern Europe at the end of the last ice age, with the cattle and horses standing in for the extinct aurochs and tarpan. The project was promoted as an act of rewilding, and it has inspired a wider movement for rewilding Europe with large herbivores, predators, and other ecologically significant species.

"In 2004, a British immunologist deliberately infected himself with Necator americanus, a species of human hookworm. He wanted to explore the old friends hypothesis, which proposes that the rise in autoimmune, allergic, and inflammatory disease in the West is caused by the absence
of some microbes with which humans coevolved. Having demonstrated that it was safe to host the worms, which remain common in tropical areas, he began a clinical trial to test their therapeutic potential for training and exercising the human immune system. Popular interest in the human microbiome and this ecoimmunology has inspired a network of DIY helminth users, who raise, share, sell, and host a variety of worms for the purposes of biome restoration.
Rewilding and biome restoration are exemplary of a probiotic turn that is underway in the management of life in some parts of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) world. I use the adjective “probiotic” in an expansive sense to describe human interventions that use life to manage life, working with biological and geomorphic processes to deliver forms of human, environmental, and even planetary health. Going probiotic goes well beyond a preference for live yogurt; it links a range of efforts that aim to change the composition of biophysical systems to modulate the rhythms and intensities of their ecological interactions. These projects look for tipping points within
these ecologies and manage their dynamics so that they stay within desired boundaries. They control, restore, and enhance the functioning of ecosystems to secure a desired set of systemic properties—in these two cases,
biodiversity and immunity."

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There is a long history to seeing humans as antithetical to the natural world, and as inherently damaging to it, both on the political left and right. This potential-misanthropy can sometimes veer to such extremes that it becomes what gets called Eco-Fascism.

When trying to figure out what is a responsible and ethical relationship we have with the rest of life and the world, its important not to forget the ethical responsibility we have to other humans, and how sometimes the best of intentions might have unforeseen consequences.

also -- what is a virus? Are they necessarily evil? more on that later!

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Fire is Medicine: Indigenous American Fire Land Management Practices

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Fire is Medicine: Indigenous American Fire Land Management Practices

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Western Colonisers both in Australia and in the Americas put a stop to Indigenous Fire Land Management practices, as colonisers saw fire as inherently destructive and indigenous peoples as savages who did not actively cultivate the land. Raging forest and bush fires centuries on are the consequence of ignoring or suppressing local understandings of ecology.

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Facing massive blazes, record-breaking devastation and seemingly never-ending wildfire seasons, some local fire agencies and communities in Western states are looking back to methods that Indigenous North Americans have used for millennia.

"Government agencies have realized their dire mistake in trying to exclude fire from the forest and unfortunately it's taken these raging wildfires that happen year after year to realize the terrible mistake," said Margo Robbins, a member of the Yurok tribe who heads the Cultural Fire Management Council, a collective of tribes in Northern California that lead prescribed burns on their lands. "They're looking for answers and seeking out Native people as to what should be done and how to go about it."

By setting relatively small, contained fires, Indigenous tribes like the Yurok traditionally would create breaks in the sprawling forests and grasslands that wildfires couldn't cross, since the fuel - the vegetation - had already burned. These techniques are resurfacing in local fire management collaborations between tribes, U.S. Forest Service and non-governmental organizations to help prevent now-common calamities.

"It's a whole different frame of mind to purposely light fire, rather than fight fire."

Forest scientist Frank Lake is a descendant of the Karuk Tribe and a "holder" of traditional knowledge.

"I'm trying to spread the idea that fire is medicine," said Lake, a researcher at the U.S. Forest Service, a federal agency that manages America's 154 national forests, as well as grasslands.

2020 was a record year for wildfires in America, when almost 9 million acres burned, double the number from the year before. Researchers like Lake see that the risk is only getting higher for more devastating wildfires, as climate change exacerbates conditions on the ground and development expands deeper into the wilderness. The fires killed dozens of people directly, with possibly thousands more dying due to smoke inhalation, as well as causing hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the area where undeveloped wildland meets human development grows by about 2 million acres a year, with California leading in the number of houses on those lands.

Lake and the Cultural Fire Management Council are trying to revive the intrinsic knowledge that long guided Indigenous life in a natural fire zone.

"It's important to recognize there was a fire system in place that was culturally influenced," Lake said, referring to the Indigenous fire management he has researched and participated in for the last several decades. "We have to question the narrative of history that has demonized fire, coming from a colonial perspective," he added.

Lake was talking about a deliberate decision made in 1911 by the Forest Service's first director, Gifford Pinchot, to champion the idea that all fires sparked on the landscape were bad and had to be extinguished as soon as possible. This idea came in the aftermath of a series of forest fires called the "Big Blowup" that burned 3 million acres and killed around 85 people the year before. Several key elements led to this huge wildfire: a very dry year leaving fuel in the forests, small fires sparked by lightning and locomotives, and extreme, hurricane-force winds that fanned those smaller flames into burning millions of acres.

Pinchot deliberately discredited and quashed other perspectives that fire was a natural part of the American habitat and needed to burn in some way. This led to decades of federal policy that prescribed extinguishing the majority of fires, and letting forest landscapes grow denser and denser across the U.S. until, in many places, they did not resemble their pre-colonial environments.

"We coexist with fire, we need fire and fire needs us. It's a different way of looking at the forest," said Amy Cardinal Christianson, an Indigenous fire expert in Canada.

Now, driven in part by prolonged droughts and extreme weather, the dense and dry underbrush can light quickly, spreading fire through tall tree tops that are close enough for flames to jump. It doesn't have to be this way, according to Lake. In countering longstanding federal fire suppression policy, "we need to change the story, show that there is good fire and scale it up in a bigger strategy," he said.

The story is beginning to change. CALFIRE, the state's department of forestry and fire protection, has a plan with the U.S. Forest Service to each burn 500,000 acres by 2025 for a total of 1 million acres burned in California, in hopes of enduring fewer devastating fires, like the 2018 Camp Fire. In that example, it wasn't just vegetation but homes, cars and commercial buildings that went up in flames and produced toxic smoke that spread for miles.

"I don't think there was one person in California who wasn't affected by wildfire smoke last year, and that woke people up to what the smoke damage can be," said Christine McMorrow, CALFIRE communications officer. "Last year made people really aware of how bad things could be and the need for preventing that type of catastrophic wildfire."

"We have to question the narrative of history that has demonized fire, coming from a colonial perspective."

Lake, like Robbins, grew up in forests with rivers that flow into the Pacific Ocean, where he learned how to hunt and use elements from the land for the traditional basket weaving of his culture. He followed those passions into his career, consumed every day with work like convincing a federal agency more funding is needed for prescribed burns, or group dinners to discuss how certain trees react to those burns. Lake said that "fire-dependent" cultures like the Karuk and Yurok need more resources to light prescribed fires. Those resources could, in part, come from more inclusive engagement between the tribes, their cultural practices and the science that helps set policy.

"I feel like Indigenous people have an inherent right and responsibility to steward the forest for our cultural needs, but agencies feel they have that right," Christianson said.

That push and pull is what led Lake and Christianson to work on educating others on how diverse fire management, including Indigenous methods, can be a larger part of the forest management conversation. Christianson is a member of the Métis Nation in Western Canada.

When fire suppression was codified into law, much of the knowledge and wisdom of Indigenous fire management was lost for a century, and still has not been fully recovered. "We piece together what we can with the knowledge from our elderly members and other tribes," said Yurok member Robbins.

Robbins, her council and tribe prescribe burns for fire management like doctors prescribe medicine. Each individual fire is tailored to and harnesses - the specific landscape and weather. That could mean using a road as a natural fire break, or feeling for the winds that come up the river reliably every day at 2 p.m. Robbins called it a mosaic of burning, and Lake said research has proven this type of fire management works.

WATCH: Americans who lost homes to devastating wildfires brace for an even worse season

Robbins, who has written a children's book about how fire can be "good," works with state agencies like CALFIRE to spread the word that cultural methods can be utilized to help stem wildfires.

"CALFIRE is a fire suppression agency, so they teach their people how to put out fires, that's their primary focus. For many of the firefighters, it's the first time they have actually experienced purposely putting fire on the land to restore the land," Robbins said. "It's a whole different frame of mind to purposely light fire, rather than fight fire. They learn about how to control fire on the land so it doesn't escape."

Robbins said it's time agencies in charge of national and state forests listen to what her ancestors had learned across thousands of years inhabiting the land that is now Northern California. She says the council is seeing some success.

Considering how to better use ecological knowledge and experience to fight wildfires "has become more standard practice," CALFIRE's McMorrow said. "It's an opportunity to educate us, to show us that things can be successful in a different way than what we're used to."

Robbins said that government agencies' interest in these methods is not "just to say they asked and then go on with the status quo. They are actually making changes within organizations." A California bill passed by the state senate would remove financial liability if, under certain circumstances, a prescribed burn caused unexpected damage.

McMorrow said the agency's goals in fiscal year 2020 was to burn 30,000 acres in controlled burns. But because CALFIRE was stretched so thin fighting other, record-breaking wildfires, the early projected numbers are likely to fall short.

But she said CALFIRE has been working to increase the use of prescribed fires and wants to do more training, as well as to break down other barriers standing in the way of empowering private landowners - who hold most of the forests CALFIRE manages - to do their own prescribed burning.

Prescribed burns are used in several states, like Arizona, where wildfire threatens growing development close to wildfire-prone habitats. Tribes like the Apache in Arizona have their own agencies for fire management, as well as forest restoration. Those tribal agencies work in tandem with the state and federal resources available.

Christianson said the collaborations between state, federal and Indigenous organizations are an important step toward a sustainable, national, fire management solution.

"I hope it's the future of fire," Christianson said. "The best thing about the Indigenous approach to fire is it really takes a holistic look at the local environment and it's really variable depending on the cultural values. That will impact how fires are managed and that there's no one-size-fits-all approach."

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'Fire is medicine': How Indigenous practices could help curb wildfires

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Facing massive blazes, record-breaking devastation and seemingly never-ending wildfire seasons, some local fire agencies and communities in Western states are looking back to methods that Indigenous North Americans have used for millennia.

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Indigenous Australian Fire Land Management Practices

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Indigenous Australian Fire Land Management Practices

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Western Colonisers both in Australia and in the Americas put a stop to Indigenous Fire Land Management practices, as colonisers saw fire as inherently destructive and indigenous peoples as savages who did not actively cultivate the land. Raging forest and bush fires centuries on are the consequence of ignoring or suppressing local understandings of ecology.

"Australia has always had bushfires, the result of being the driest inhabited continent on earth combined with high temperatures. Its indigenous people, who predate European colonization by some 40,000 years, learned to manage and mitigate fire risk through specific knowledge of local ecosystems and carefully controlled burnings. As Australia suffers through drought, heatwaves and devastating bushfires this summer, practitioners of indigenous fire management report greater interest in their work than ever before.

"Australia was colonized by the British in 1788, with settlers systematically working to decimate the existing indigenous population through violence. Those who survived found themselves herded onto Christian mission compounds and forced to adopt a more Western lifestyle, with the result being the loss of traditional knowledge systems, based on many thousands of generations of observing nature. The recent surge in interest in indigenous fire management is an implicit sign that many Australians recognize the value of what was very nearly lost."

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How Australia's Indigenous Experts Could Help Australia Deal With Devastating Wildfires

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As Australia fights devastating bushfires, there's been a recent surge in interest in indigenous fire management.

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Linguistic Diversity Linked to Biodiversity (1 page)

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Linguistic Diversity Linked to Biodiversity (1 page)

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"Interdisciplinary researchers report that areas with high biological diversity, such as biodiversity hot spots and high biodiversity wilderness areas, are also home to about 70 percent of the world’s languages. The report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, geographically links the endangered species to endangered languages."https://www.languagemagazine.com/linguistic-diversity-linked-to-biodiversity/

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Interdisciplinary researchers report that areas with high biological diversity, such as biodiversity hot spots and high biodiversity wilderness areas, are also home to about 70 percent of the world's languages. The report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, geographically links the endangered species to endangered languages.

"We looked at regions important for biodiversity conservation and measured their linguistic diversity in an effort to understand an important part of the human dimension of these regions," said Professor Larry J. Gorenflo of Penn State University.

Hot spots, or regions with an exceptionally high number of species unique to that location and habitat loss of at least 70 percent, comprise 2.3 percent of the Earth's surface and hold almost half of the world's vascular plants and terrestrial vertebrate species as well as 3,202 languages, which are almost half of all the world's languages. Many of these languages are unique to the area and are spoken by few people, leaving them vulnerable to extinction.

The researchers also examined five high biodiversity wilderness areas. These regions cover 6.1 percent of the Earth's surface and hold 17 percent of plant species and 6 percent of terrestrial vertebrates. The high biodiversity wilderness areas are home to an astounding 1,622 languages.

"What ends up happening when we lose linguistic diversity is we lose a bunch of small groups with traditional economics," explained Gorenflo. "Indigenous languages tend to be replaced by those associated with a modern industrial economy accompanied by other changes such as the introduction of chain saws. In terms of biodiversity conservation, all bets are off."

The extinction of these languages would mean the loss of information about rare and fragile environment, as the people living in hot spots and high biodiversity wilderness areas are knowledgeable about the plant and animal life around them. The conservation and protection of these habitats depend greatly on the cultural and linguistic conservation of human inhabitants, while the survival of the people living in these regions depends greatly on the conservation of the environment.

"I think it argues for concerted conservation efforts that are integrated and try to maintain biodiversity and cultural diversity," remarked Gorenflo.

The researchers do not know why endangered cultures and languages coincide with endangered species, but they hypothesize that the indigenous cultures and languages make wildlife and ecosystemic preservation possible. The researchers intend to continue their exploration of the relationship between biodiversity and linguistic-cultural diversity in hopes that their findings will lead to developing strategies for preserving both.

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Linguistic Diversity Linked to Biodiversity - Language Magazine

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Interdisciplinary researchers report that areas with high biological diversity, such as biodiversity hot spots and high biodiversity wilderness areas, are also home to about 70 percent of the world's languages. The report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, geographically links the endangered species to endangered languages.

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Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (Book Review, 5000 words, 2017)

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Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (Book Review, 5000 words, 2017)

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"The octopus threatens boundaries. Its body, a boneless mass of soft tissue, has no fixed shape. Even large octopuses – the largest species, the Giant Pacific, has an arm span of more than six metres and weighs a hundred pounds – can fit through an opening an inch wide, or about the size of its eye. This, combined with their considerable strength – a mature male Giant Pacific can lift thirty pounds with each of its 1600 suckers – means that octopuses are difficult to keep in captivity. Many octopuses have escaped their aquarium tanks through small holes; some have been known to lift the lid of their tank, making their way, sometimes across stretches of dry floor, to a neighbouring tank for a snack, or to the nearest drain, and maybe from there back home to the sea.

"Octopuses do not have any stable colour or texture, changing at will to match their surroundings: a camouflaged octopus can be invisible from just a few feet away. Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus’s neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelligently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting. (Octopuses have arms, not tentacles: tentacles have suckers only at their tips. Squid and cuttlefish have a combination of arms and tentacles.) In evolutionary terms, the intelligence of octopuses is an anomaly. The last common ancestor between octopuses on the one hand, and humans and other intelligent animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, crows) on the other, was probably a primitive, blind worm-like creature that existed six hundred million years ago. Other creatures that are so evolutionarily distant from humans – lobsters, snails, slugs, clams – rate pretty low on the cognitive scale. But octopuses – and to some extent their cephalopod cousins, cuttlefish and squid – frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. They are sophisticated problem solvers; they learn, and can use tools; and they show a capacity for mimicry, deception and, some think, humour. Just how refined their abilities are is a matter of scientific debate: their very strangeness makes octopuses hard to study. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens."

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I n​ 1815, 15 years before he made his most famous print, The Great Wave, Hokusai published three volumes of erotic art. In one of them there is a woodcut print known in English as 'The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife' and in Japanese as ' Tako to ama', 'Octopus and Shell Diver'. It depicts a naked woman lying on her back, legs spread and eyes closed, while a huge red octopus performs cunnilingus on her. The octopus's slit eyes bulge between the woman's legs and its suckered limbs wrap around her writhing body. A second, smaller octopus inserts its beak into the woman's mouth while curling the thin tip of an arm around her left nipple. In Europe, the print was interpreted as a scene of rape, but the critics didn't read Japanese. In the text arranged in the space around the three entwined bodies, the shell diver exclaims: 'You hateful octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me gasp for breath! Ah! Yes ... it's ... there! With the sucker, the sucker! ... There, there! ... Until now it was I that men called an octopus! An octopus! ... How are you able? ... Oh! Boundaries and borders gone! I've vanished!'

The octopus threatens boundaries. Its body, a boneless mass of soft tissue, has no fixed shape. Even large octopuses - the largest species, the Giant Pacific, has an arm span of more than six metres and weighs a hundred pounds - can fit through an opening an inch wide, or about the size of its eye. This, combined with their considerable strength - a mature male Giant Pacific can lift thirty pounds with each of its 1600 suckers - means that octopuses are difficult to keep in captivity. Many octopuses have escaped their aquarium tanks through small holes; some have been known to lift the lid of their tank, making their way, sometimes across stretches of dry floor, to a neighbouring tank for a snack, or to the nearest drain, and maybe from there back home to the sea.

Octopuses do not have any stable colour or texture, changing at will to match their surroundings: a camouflaged octopus can be invisible from just a few feet away. Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus's neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelligently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting. (Octopuses have arms, not tentacles: tentacles have suckers only at their tips. Squid and cuttlefish have a combination of arms and tentacles.) In evolutionary terms, the intelligence of octopuses is an anomaly. The last common ancestor between octopuses on the one hand, and humans and other intelligent animals (monkeys, dolphins, dogs, crows) on the other, was probably a primitive, blind worm-like creature that existed six hundred million years ago. Other creatures that are so evolutionarily distant from humans - lobsters, snails, slugs, clams - rate pretty low on the cognitive scale. But octopuses - and to some extent their cephalopod cousins, cuttlefish and squid - frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. They are sophisticated problem solvers; they learn, and can use tools; and they show a capacity for mimicry, deception and, some think, humour. Just how refined their abilities are is a matter of scientific debate: their very strangeness makes octopuses hard to study. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and diver who has been studying octopuses and other cephalopods in the wild, mostly off the coast of his native Sydney, for years. The alienness of octopuses, in his view, provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of cognition and consciousness without simply projecting from the human example. Because of their evolutionary distance from us, octopuses are an 'independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behaviour'. Insofar as we are able to make intelligent contact with them - to understand octopuses and have them understand us - it is 'not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over'. The potential worry is that the evolutionary chasm between us and the octopus is too great to make mutual intelligibility possible. In that case the octopus will have something to teach us about the limits of our own understanding.

An octopus is an eight-armed, soft-bodied mollusc. Its arms are covered in suckers and arranged radially around a sharp-beaked mouth. It eats by catching prey with one of its arms and moving it through a conveyer belt of undulating suckers to its mouth - in that sense an octopus's arms can also be thought of as its lips. On top of its arms rests its head, which contains its brain and features two large eyes with horizontal, dash-shaped pupils, like a cat's eyes turned on their side. Behind the head is the octopus's mantle, a large bulbous structure that contains its vital organs, including three hearts which pump blue-green blood. A tubular siphon is attached to the mantle, which the octopus uses variously for jet propulsion, respiration, excretion and inking predators. A full-grown octopus can range in size from the Giant Pacific, with its six-metre arm span, to the 2.5 centimetre-long Octopus wolfi, which weighs less than a gram.

Linnaeus called the octopus singulare monstrum, 'a unique monster'. Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, in his Natural History of Norway (1752), wrote about the Kraken, a giant octopus-like sea monster capable of dragging down 'the largest man of war' in its arms, or sucking it down in the whirlpool of its wake. A similar creature, the Akkorokamui, with huge eyes and the ability to amputate and regenerate its limbs, features in Ainu folklore, and is worshipped in Shinto shrines throughout Japan. Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea includes a long description of the octopus or 'devil-fish':

If terror were the object of ... creation, nothing could be imagined more perfect than the devil-fish ... This irregular mass advances slowly towards you. Suddenly it opens, and eight radii issue abruptly from around a face with two eyes. These radii are alive: their undulation is like lambent flames ... A terrible expansion! ... Its folds strangle, its contact paralyses. It has an aspect like gangrened or scabrous flesh. It is a monstrous embodiment of disease ... Underneath each of [its] feelers range two rows of pustules, decreasing in size ... They are cartilaginous substances, cylindrical, horny and livid ... A glutinous mass, endowed with a malignant will, what can be more horrible?

Octopuses are indeed glutinous; according to Sy Montgomery, author of the splendid Soul of an Octopus, the slime on an octopus's skin feels like a cross between drool and snot. But the octopus's will is far from malignant, at least when it comes to humans. Octopuses do occasionally attack people, giving a venomous nip or stealing an underwater camera when threatened or annoyed, but in general they are gentle, inquisitive creatures. (Fishermen, by contrast, often kill octopuses by biting out their brains, and in many countries they are eaten alive.) Octopuses encountering divers in the wild will frequently meet them with a probing arm or two, and sometimes lead them by the hand on a tour of the neighbourhood. Aristotle, mistaking curiosity for a lack of intelligence, called the octopus a 'stupid creature' because of its willingness to approach an extended human hand. Octopuses can recognise individual humans, and will respond differently to different people, greeting some with a caress of the arms, spraying others with their siphons. This is striking behaviour in an animal whose natural life cycle is deeply antisocial. Octopuses live solitary lives in single dens and die soon after their young hatch. Many male octopuses, to avoid being eaten during mating, will keep their bodies as far removed from the female as possible, extending a single arm with a sperm packet towards her siphon, a manoeuvre known as 'the reach'.

Just how clever are octopuses? An octopus has half a billion neurons, about as many as a dog. (A human has a hundred billion neurons.) Octopuses also have a high ratio of brain to body size, a sign of the 'investment' the animal makes in its own cognition. But these metrics are only a very rough guide to animal intelligence; the number and complexity of synaptic connections between neurons are also a factor. (Crows and parrots have small brains, but have recently been shown to be highly intelligent.) And the brain-to-body ratio does not take into account the majority of the octopus's neurons that exist outside its brain. What's more, the octopus's brain has a structure completely distinct from that of our own. Even birds and fish have brains which exhibit a one-to-one correspondence with parts of the human brain. But the octopus's brain is built on a different model entirely.

Since a comparison with the human brain tells us so little, scientists turn to the octopus's behaviour as the best indicator of its cognitive power. But here researchers are often frustrated by what Godfrey-Smith describes as a 'mismatch' between anecdotal reports and experimental studies. In the lab, octopuses do fairly well: they can navigate mazes, use memory to solve simple puzzles and unscrew jars and child-proof bottles to get food (octopuses have also been filmed opening jam jars from the inside). Yet it can take octopuses a surprisingly long time to be trained in new behaviours, which some researchers have taken as a sign of their cognitive limitations. Much of the early work on octopus intelligence was done at the Naples Zoological Station. In 1959, Peter Dews, a Harvard scientist, trained three octopuses there to pull a lever to obtain a chunk of sardine. Two of the octopuses, Albert and Bertram, pulled the lever in a 'reasonably consistent' manner. But the third, Charles, would anchor his arms on the side of the tank and apply great force to the lever, eventually breaking it and bringing the experiment to a premature end. Dews also reported that Charles repeatedly pulled a lamp into his tank, and that he 'had a high tendency to direct jets of water out of the tank; specifically ... in the direction of the experimenter'. 'This behaviour,' Dews wrote, 'interfered materially with the smooth conduct of the experiments, and is ... clearly incompatible with lever-pulling.' He concluded that his experiment was a partial failure. Godfrey-Smith says this 'encapsulates much of the story with octopus behaviour'. Octopuses have a high curiosity drive, and a knack for repurposing things around them for their own ends. Perhaps there are tasks that octopuses find it hard to learn. Or perhaps they just have better things to do.

Captive octopuses appear to be aware of their captivity; they adapt to it but also resist it. When they try to escape, which is often, they tend to wait for a moment they aren't being watched. Octopuses have flooded laboratories by deliberately plugging valves in their tanks with their arms. At the University of Otago, an octopus short-circuited the electricity supply - by shooting jets of water at the aquarium lightbulbs - so often that it had to be released back into the wild. Jean Boal, a cephalopod researcher at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, reported feeding octopuses in a row of tanks with thawed squid, not an octopus's favourite food. Returning to the first tank, Boal found that the octopus in it hadn't eaten the squid, but was instead holding it out in its arm; watching Boal, it slowly made its way across the tank and shoved the squid down the drain. (The third-century Roman rhetorician Claudius Aelianus, a more sympathetic observer than Aristotle, identified the octopus's main characteristic as 'mischief and craft'.)

What does it feel like to be an octopus? Does it feel like anything at all? Or are octopuses, as Godfrey-Smith puts it, 'just biochemical machines for which all is dark inside'? This form of question - 'what is it like to be a bat?' Thomas Nagel asked in a hugely influential paper in 1974 - is philosophical shorthand for asking whether a creature is conscious. Many philosophers think consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon: you either have it or you don't. Humans have it, as do perhaps chimps and dolphins. Mice, ants and amoebas presumably do not. Part of the motivation for the all or nothing view is that it is difficult to imagine consciousness being possessed in degrees. Other cognitive attributes - like memory, linguistic capacity and problem-solving ability - are the sorts of thing that can and do vary in degree from creature to creature, and species to species. But it is harder to see how consciousness can vary in that way. As Godfrey-Smith puts it, 'how can an animal be halfway to having it feel like something to be that animal?' Yet, if consciousness is a natural thing, something that evolved over time, it seems unlikely that it just popped up at some point in evolutionary history, fully formed.

Godfrey-Smith starts with the conviction that consciousness is an evolved thing, and accepts the conclusion that it has more primitive precursors: that it comes in degrees after all. Consciousness - the possession of an 'inner' model of the 'outer' world, or the sense of having an integrated, subjective perspective on the world - is, on his view, just a highly evolved form of what he calls 'subjective experience'. Many animals, Godfrey-Smith thinks, have some degree of subjective experience, even if it falls short of full-blown consciousness. He points to what the physiologist Derek Denton called the 'primordial emotions': thirst, lack of air, physical pain. These sensations intrude on our more complex mental processes, refusing to be dismissed. They hark back to a more rudimentary form of experiencing the world - a form, Godfrey-Smith thinks, that does not require a sophisticated inner model of the world. 'Do you think,' he asks, that pain, thirst or shortness of breath ' only feel like something because of sophisticated cognitive processing in mammals that has arisen late in evolution? I doubt it.'

The case of animal pain underscores Godfrey-Smith's point. Simple animals respond to physical harm with what appears to be distress, and there is experimental evidence that suggests that they feel pain, that physical harm feels bad for them. Zebrafish, injected with what is assumed to be a painful chemical, will prefer an otherwise less desirable environment if a painkiller is dissolved in the water. Similarly, chickens with leg injuries will choose a feed they don't normally favour if it is laced with a painkiller. Insects do not appear to feel pain, carrying on as usual even after major injuries. But shrimp and crabs groom their injured parts, and do so less when they are given an anaesthetic. None of this is dispositive evidence that animals feel pain - but then it isn't clear what would be. As Godfrey-Smith puts it, 'you can still doubt that these animals feel anything, yes. But you can doubt that about your next-door neighbour.' If even simple animals have rudimentary forms of consciousness or subjective experience, what might that feel like? What does it feel like to be an injured crab? Here Godfrey-Smith reaches for a metaphor proposed by the evolutionary theorists Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka: white noise. Primitive consciousness, he writes, might be like 'a crackle of metabolic electricity', an 'inchoate buzz' that grows, with evolutionary time, in complexity and clarity.

If consciousness comes in degrees, then where on the spectrum is the octopus? Octopuses almost certainly feel pain. They nurse and protect injured body parts, and don't like to be touched near wounds. (Until recently, researchers operated on octopuses without anaesthetic, and much early work on them involved electric shocks. A 2010 EU directive on animal testing classifies cephalopods together with vertebrates because of their 'ability to experience pain, suffering, distress and lasting harm'.) As well as feeling pain, octopuses have sophisticated sensory capacities: excellent eyesight, and acute senses of taste and smell. This, together with their large nervous systems and complex behaviour, makes it all but certain, in Godfrey-Smith's view, that octopuses have rich subjective experience. But they may have even more than this. According to some theorists, notably Stanislas Dehaene, a particular kind of mental processing, the sort that involves completing novel tasks extended over time, not only goes hand in hand with human consciousness, but helps explain why humans are conscious. The octopus's curiosity and adaptability to novel circumstances are, Godfrey-Smith suggests, 'reminiscent' of these paradigmatically human forms of cognition. If so, then being an octopus might be more like being a human than we have tended to think.

The question of what subjective experience might be like for an octopus is complicated by the odd relationship between its brain and its body. An octopus's arms have more neurons than its brain, about ten thousand neurons per sucker; the arms can taste and smell, and exhibit short-term memory. Each arm acts with considerable independence from the brain; even a surgically detached arm can reach and grasp, avoid painful stimuli, and change colour. (In The Soul of an Octopus, Montgomery imagines an octopus testing human intelligence by seeing how many colour patterns our severed arms can produce in one second.) Yet an octopus's brain can exert executive control, 'pulling itself together' when it needs to, for example when an octopus puts out only a single inquisitive arm to inspect a stranger.

Godfrey-Smith suggests that the octopus is, phenomenologically speaking, in a hybrid situation: its arms are partly self, and partly other. Because of this, the octopus is sometimes held up as a mascot for the 'embodied cognition' movement in psychology, according to which the physical body, by constraining and making possible certain actions, is itself 'intelligent'. The human ability to walk, for example, is not simply a matter of top-down brain control, but also a function of the angles of our joints; in this sense, our bodies encode information vital for intelligent action. There can be little doubt that an octopus's embodiment is radically different from our own, and that understanding an octopus's mind requires us to grasp its particular form of embodiment. But thinking about the octopus in terms of embodied cognition may undersell its strangeness. While it makes sense to think of our own bodies in terms of the constraints and opportunities they afford, the octopus's body, as Godfrey-Smith says, is 'protean, all possibility'. Even asking how much the body contributes to intelligent action presupposes a division between brain and body that seems not to apply to the octopus. The octopus's body is pervaded by nervousness: it is not a thing controlled by the animal's thinking part, but itself a thinking thing.

A further oddity in thinking about octopus experience has to do with the creature's relationship to colour. An octopus's skin is a layered screen of pixel-like sacs of colour called chromatophores, which make it possible for an octopus to change its colour at will to match its surroundings or threaten an aggressor. The so-called mimic octopus can impersonate more than 15 different animals, including flounder, lionfish and sea snakes, by changing its colour and shape. An octopus's colour also seems to indicate its mood - some octopuses turn white after being caressed for a long time by humans, as well as after mating. The chromatic displays produced by octopuses can include elaborate patterns of stripes and spots, flashing rings and waves of rippling colour. Yet octopuses - like most cephalopods - appear to be colour-blind. Their eyes lack the variety of photoreceptors required to see colour, and octopuses are unable to distinguish between differently coloured objects in experimental tests. Researchers have recently discovered that octopuses have photoreceptors not only in their eyes but also in their skin, which suggests that the skin can see (as well as taste and smell), either by sending the visual information it receives to the octopus's brain, or by processing the information itself. Both options are weird: either the skin as a whole becomes an eye, or the octopus's body sees independently of the octopus's brain. Even this isn't the whole story, since the photoreceptors found in an octopus's skin are, like those in its eyes, insufficient to detect colour. The best working hypothesis is that some complex interaction between the skin's photoreceptors and chromatophores allows the octopus to adopt colours it cannot see.

Octopuses use their colour displays mainly for camouflage and signalling. But sometimes they produce elaborate colour displays for no apparent reason, in the absence of predators or other octopuses. Godfrey-Smith calls such purposeless displays 'chromatic chatter', suggesting they may just be an involuntary, metabolic effect. Could they be more intentionally expressive? Do octopuses talk to themselves? The problem with this thought is that octopuses appear not to have any language at all, and so presumably can no more talk to themselves than to others. (Wittgenstein famously argued for the conceptual impossibility of a 'purely private language', meaningful only to one person. Whether or not a private language is conceptually possible, it is evolutionarily unlikely, since the ability to talk to oneself appears to be a later internalisation of the ability to talk to others.) The megapixel screen of the octopus's body means that theoretically it could telegraph information of almost infinite complexity - the sort of expressive bandwidth of which a chimp or baboon can only dream. Yet most of the chromatic signals produced by an octopus appear not to have any consistent effect on other octopuses, suggesting that they are signs without meaning, words with no sense.

Most species of octopus live for only a year or two; the Giant Pacific, the species that lives longest, dies after four years at most. Both female and male octopuses mate only once, and enter a swift and sudden decline into senescence soon after, developing white lesions on their skin, losing interest in food, and becoming unco-ordinated and confused. The females die from starvation while they tend their eggs, and the males are typically preyed on as they wander the ocean aimlessly. Most highly intelligent animals live significantly longer than octopuses, as do some other molluscs. Why is the octopus's life so short? Ageing in general is explained by evolutionary theorists in terms of what is known as the Medawar effect: natural selection tends to weed out mutations whose harmful effects appear early in an animal's life, but it is less likely to weed out mutations whose harmful effects manifest later on. This is because most animals succumb to death by predation, disease or accident before they reach the age where late-acting mutations could take effect. Late-acting mutations therefore accumulate in animal populations, eventually producing the appearance of a preprogrammed lifespan. In the octopus, the Medawar effect, coupled with an unusual body plan, has resulted in its uncommonly short lifespan. In its early evolutionary history, the octopus gave up its protective, molluscan shell in order to embrace a life of unboundaried potential. But the cost was an increased vulnerability to toothy and bony predators. An animal with a soft body and no shell cannot expect to live long, and so harmful mutations that take effect only once it has been alive for a couple of years will soon spread through the population. The result is a life that is experientially rich but conspicuously brief.

E arlier​ this summer, on a drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I went to see the octopuses at Monterey Bay Aquarium. At the time Monterey's permanent octopus exhibit housed two Giant Pacifics, though there were more octopuses in its temporary show Tentacles, the largest ever exhibition of cephalopods. This was my second encounter with a live octopus. (I have had more encounters with dead octopuses at the dinner table than I care to recall. They make excellent carpaccio. Never again.) The first was off a beach in Mykonos, where I was snorkelling. There wasn't much on the sea floor, just small crustaceans and darting silver fish, until I saw a red mass a few feet away, about the size of a cat, watching me with a single eye. I stayed still, watching it back. The octopus made small, unhurried movements, curling and uncurling its arms, snuffling along the floor. Eventually it crawled to a sunken rope some feet away and wrapped itself around it. Its body became a brown, barnacled coil, and then there was only a single white eye with a black dash of pupil. The eye closed, and the octopus vanished.

At Monterey the two Giant Pacifics were in adjacent tanks, each a few metres wide. The first octopus was energetic, unfurling its huge body and then compressing it, uncoiling its arms and pushing its suckers against the tank walls, boiling and jetting its way back and forth through the water. Tourists took flash photographs despite the sign warning that octopuses dislike bright lights. Children expressed admiration and disgust. When you're looking at an octopus, your attention is naturally drawn to its rows of suckers, coiling arms and bulging body. Its eyes look sleepy, half-closed. You have to know what you're looking for to see that they are open, and staring straight at you. I looked the octopus in the eyes and found it looking back at me, fixedly, as its body ballooned and hollowed behind it. The second octopus was quieter, bundled up at the top of her tank. A few thin strands of translucent, pearl-shaped eggs - laid and then painstakingly braided together with the thin tips of her arms - hung nearby, remnants of the clutch that had been removed by the aquarium keepers. Her skin was dull and white. She was dying.

The logic of aquariums, as with zoos, is the logic of conservation: individual animals must sacrifice their freedom so that the species as a whole can be protected. (As the philosopher Robert Nozick put it, 'utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for humans.') The conservationist logic is at its most compelling at an aquarium like Monterey, with its state of the art research centre, environmental policy unit, and public education programmes. Plenty of its creatures seem delighted to be there, as far as one can tell, and others seem perfectly unaware of where they are. No doubt many of these animals live longer and healthier lives than they would in the ocean. Yet ethical questions remain, raised by creatures, like the octopus, which so clearly yearn for freedom. Perhaps from our perspective the life of a wild octopus is already a tragic thing: sociality without society, speaking without being heard, a life-world without longevity. An alien. If only the octopus were more like us, we might be better at leaving it alone.

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Amia Srinivasan · The Sucker, the Sucker! What's it like to be an octopus? · LRB 6 September 2017

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I n​ 1815, 15 years before he made his most famous print, The Great Wave, Hokusai published three volumes of erotic art. In one of them there is a woodcut print known in English as 'The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife' and in Japanese as ' Tako to ama', 'Octopus and Shell Diver'.

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Staying with the Trouble (313 pages) - Donna Haraway (2016)

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Staying with the Trouble (313 pages) - Donna Haraway (2016)

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In this collection of essays, Haraway has shifted her gaze firmly away from the technological, and is squarely focussed on trying to craft a politics of interspecies empathy and human responsibility regarding the future ecology of Earth. She is primarily thinking with and against the concept of the Anthropocene, the idea that human impact on planetary systems has been so significant we have entered a new geological epoch, one defined by human activity, most obviously seen with regards to climate change, mass biodiversity loss, and pollution: a dysbiosis not just of one ecosystem but the entirety of the planetary ecosystem.

One difficult conclusion she argues for is that human population is out of control, and needs to be curbed. Her slogan, thinking about our intimacy with other non-human species, is "Make Kin, Not Babies." Her argument, though it raises important ideas/questions about how we value some kinds of life over others and what constitutes responsible use of the environment, ignores or side-steps the fact white Western (or heavily industrialised) nations are presently some of the chief drivers of climate change and biodiversity loss through resource consumption despite the fact they largely have stable-or-decreasing population sizes, and it is non-white, so-called "3rd world" developing nations whose populations continue to grow but still only contribute minimally (comparatively) to climate change. Haraway was criticised for these blindspots in the book, and engaged in dialogue with many of her critics, but outside of her work the spectre of population growth anxieties and paternalistic-neocolonial-sounding solutions still crops up not infrequently in other quarters.

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The Companion Species Manifesto - Donna Haraway (2003)

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The Companion Species Manifesto - Donna Haraway (2003)

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"This manifesto explores two questions flowing
from this aberration and legacy: 1) how might an
ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of
significant otherness he learned from taking dog-human relationships seriously; and 2) how might
stories about dog-human worlds finally convince
brain-damaged US Americans, and maybe other less
historically challenged people, that history matters in
nature-cultures?"

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A Cyborg Manifesto (88 pages) - Donna Haraway (1985)

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A Cyborg Manifesto (88 pages) - Donna Haraway (1985)

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Donna Haraway was one of the first Western philosophers to think keenly and playfully about how humans don't exist as singular, unique, and separate species, but exist as strange, prosthetic hybrids of technology, culture, and other living things- she articulates in this manifesto a reframing of the Western Humanist subject, thinking about bacteria, animals, viruses, economics, society, machinery, class, race, and gender-- how we are all mutually constituted and how that thinking of us not as individuals, but as collective assemblages might be the path towards our liberations.

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Biophilia: When Björk Met Attenborough (47mins)

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Biophilia: When Björk Met Attenborough (47mins)

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This is a documentary about Björk's highly collaborative multimedia art project, Biophilia, which tries to explore the intersections between nature, technology, and music; the project didn't see these things as antithetical, but intimately linked to how we might relearn our relationship to/embeddness in nature. Aside from this documetary, there are documentaries of her live performance, an app, and ofc an album.

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Collective Body Possum - by Jess Arnt, performed by the Knife

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Collective Body Possum - by Jess Arnt, performed by the Knife

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I want a body that I can live in
I want a body with two dicks, five pouches, and fifteen holes
A body with no internal and no external
I want a body that no one can kick out of bathrooms
And then, I want no bathrooms
I want a body that screams, “Yes”
I want a body that says, “Yes, I’m hot for you”
I want a body with healthy organs
A body that sweats medical marijuana and golden dandruff flakes
I want a body in every color
I want a body that turns seas into land sculpture
An anti-toxin, a counter agent, to every shade of sex abuse slinking back from generations
I want a body that’s not afraid to fuck, and to be fucked
That can take it, that begs for it, that makes you beg for it
I want a body that spurts fountains
A body that dentists write fan mail to
I want a body with no “neos” or “isms”
A high-rise, free body
A low-rent body, a no-rent body
An unfriskable body
I want a body that I can offer up to you wherever and whenever you need me
A tocottie body, a body with no history, no plastic, and no dread
I want a Baywatch body, in tight red shorts, and someone to rescue it
I want your body
A body to play possum with when it’s too lonely out here
A nocturnal, musk filled body
I want a body that no matter how dead we seem always wakes up, clawing

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The Knife - Collective Body Possum Live At Terminal Five

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A Mutant Manifesto

Becoming Mutant, monstrous, chimerical;

Bodies that move seamlessly or awkward, but move, from disability to hyperability; an aesthetics and politics and science that makes notions of the ugly, the freak, the malformed and unphotographable its centre and celebration; looking forward to future bodies, smashing the marble statues and celluloid quality controls with which we have been eternally policed. Bodies that fuck with a thousand orifices or none. Becoming cyborg. An infinite architecture of the warping body, sightless or 9-limbed, looking for fun. bizarro. Bodies with no inside and no out.  Let our thoughts bleed out, our words, our grimaces, non-words, our garbled:

we are dyslexic, living outside the language and logic through which you have constructed the world as a prison. We know the story you are telling, but we can no longer read it,

or,

we are no longer willing to try.

As mutants,

we misunderstand:

You say the human, and weigh; count brains and fingers and teeth and sexes, tongues labour colour limbs pounds.

We see human and we dream Mutant;

a creature that plugs endlessly into and out of itself--

into nature flora machine sidewalk pavingstoned;

Martian mountains paisley weather patterns poetry flight--

If we are to Abolish the Normal,

We must first Gorgonize the Masses.

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Oldish article but it flags up the relationship between gut, microbiome and brain.

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Oldish article but it flags up the relationship between gut, microbiome and brain.

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https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/312734

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Although the interaction between our brain and gut has been studied for years, its complexities run deeper than initially thought. It seems that our minds are, in some part, controlled by the bacteria in our bowels.

How much sway can a microbe hold?
The gut has defenses against pathogens, but, at the same time, it encourages the survival and growth of "healthy" gut bacteria.

The vast majority of these single-celled visitors are based in the colon, where no less than reside in each gram of intestinal content.

Estimating the number of bacterial guests in our gut is challenging; to date, the best guess is that 40 trillion bacteria call our intestines home - partially dependent on the size of your last bowel movement (poop's major ingredient is bacteria).

To put that unwieldy number into perspective, our bodies consist of roughly 30 trillion cells. So, in a very real sense, we are more bacteria than man.

Most of our gut bacteria belong to 30 or 40 species, but there can be up to 1,000 different species in all. Collectively, they are termed the microbiome.

Of course, bacteria do benefit from the warmth and nutrition in our bowels, but it is not a one-way relationship - they also give back.

Some species benefit us by breaking dietary fiber down into short-chain fatty acids that we can then absorb and use. They metabolize a number of compounds on our behalf and play a role in the synthesis of vitamins B and K.

On the other side of the fence, recent research infers that dysregulation of gut bacteria might be an important factor in inflammatory and autoimmune conditions.

The microbiome's role in health and disease is only slowly giving up its secrets. The latest and perhaps most remarkable finding is the ability that gut bacteria have to moderate our brain and behavior.

The goings on in our guts are a matter of life or death. If the gut is empty, our brain must be told; if there is a problem with our gut that will hinder food processing and therefore nutrition absorption, the brain will need to be informed. If our gut is facing a pathogen attack, our brain should be kept in the loop.

The links between our gut and brain are hormonal, immunological, and neural, via the central nervous system and the enteric nervous system, which governs the function of the gut. Collectively, they are termed the gut-brain axis.

Although, at first glance, the connections between the gut and brain might seem surprising, we have all experienced it in action. The relationship between stress, anxiety, and a swift bowel movement are no stranger to anyone.

These gut-brain conversations have been studied for some time. However, a new level to this partnership has recently been glimpsed; researchers are now considering the influence of our microbiome on the gut-brain axis. In other words, researchers are asking: do the bacteria in our gut affect our psychology and behavior?

Termed, rather clumsily, the brain-gut-enteric microbiota axis or microbiome-gut-brain axis, researchers are only beginning to scratch its surface.

In humans, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is the primary responder to stresses of any kind. It is one of the major players in the limbic system and is heavily involved in emotions and memory.

Stress activates the HPA axis and eventually results in the release of cortisol - the "stress hormone" - which has a variety of effects on many organs, including the brain and gut.

In this way, the brain's response to stress has a direct influence on the cells of the gut, including epithelial and immune cells, enteric neurons, interstitial cells of Cajal (the pacemakers of the bowels), and enterochromaffin cells ( serotonin synthesizing cells).

Conversely, these cell types are also under the influence of our resident army of bacteria. Although the mechanisms by which the microbiota regulate the brain are less clear, evidence is mounting that there is, indeed, a two-way dialogue.

The first clues that microbes might have some control over our mental activity came more than 20 years ago. Patients with hepatic encephalopathy - a decline in brain function due to severe liver disease - were found to improve substantially after taking oral antibiotics.

Later studies provided further hints that the microbiome had more than a passing influence on states of mind; it was found to impact anxiety and depressive-like behaviors.

Another key observation linked dysbiosis (microbial imbalance) with autism. Children with autism often have abnormal and less diverse communities of bacteria in their gut. One researcher concluded:

"We suspect that gut microbes may alter levels of neurotransmitter-related metabolites, affecting gut-to-brain communication and/or altering brain function. [...] Correlations between gut bacteria and neurotransmitter-related metabolites are stepping stones for a better understanding of the crosstalk between gut bacteria and autism."

Researchers in 2004 noted that mice bred to have no gut bacteria had an exaggerated HPA axis response to stress. Further investigations using similar germ-free mice have demonstrated that their lack of gut bacteria alters memory function.

Germ-free mice have been a useful tool to study the microbiome-gut-brain axis. They have helped prove that something is going on, but the results are impossible to extrapolate into humans. They replicate no natural situation known to man - there is no such thing as a germ-free human.

Other studies have used different approaches; some investigated the effects of the neuroactive compounds that gut flora produce; others still have looked at the differences in the gut flora of individuals with psychiatric or neurological differences.

Research, in general, has not been conclusive. Even if changes in gut flora are seen, the eternal chicken or egg question persists: was the psychiatric condition caused by the change in gut flora, or did the psychiatric condition and its altered behavior patterns cause the gut flora to change? Or, is there a two-way interaction?

Stress is known to increase the permeability of the intestinal lining; this gives bacteria easier access to both the immune system and the neuronal cells of the enteric nervous system.

This may be one of the ways in which bacteria find a way to influence us. However, another, more direct route has also been demonstrated.

One study, using food-borne pathogens, provided evidence that bacteria in the intestines can activate stress circuits by directly activating the vagus nerve - a cranial nerve supplying a number of organs, including the upper digestive tract.

A more direct route still might involve direct contact of the microbiome with the sensory neurons of the enteric nervous system. Studies have shown that these sensory neurons are less active in germ-free mice, and, once the mice have been given probiotics to restock their microbiome, the activity levels of the neurons return to normal.

If germ-free mice show differences in behavior, the next question is whether adding gut bacteria to an animal can make similar changes. A meta-analysis, published in the Journal of Neurogastroenterology and Motility, collated the results of studies looking at the effects of probiotics on central nervous system function in both humans and animals.

They examined 25 animal and 15 human studies, most of which used Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus over a 2-4-week period. Although, as the authors mention, translating animal studies like this into human terms is a dodgy game. They concluded:

"These probiotics showed efficacy in improving psychiatric disorder-related behaviors including anxiety, depression, autism spectrum disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and memory abilities, including spatial and non-spatial memory."

Another study, published in PLOS One, found that age-related decline in memory could be reversed in rats by altering the levels of Actinobacteria and Bacterioidetes in their gut with probiotics.

The authors conclude: "The data support the notion that intestinal microbiota can be manipulated to positively impact on neuronal function."

There is a long and winding path ahead of those scientists brave enough to investigate the strange reality of the microbiome-gut-brain axis. No doubt a multitude of molecules are involved in various ways to differing degrees.

In the far-flung future, perhaps medicines specifically targeting the microbiome will be created for psychiatric conditions; the microbiome may become an early warning system for certain diseases or even a diagnostic tool.

For now, all we can do is ponder the influence that bacteria have on our everyday state of mind. We should also be amazed and amused that humans, as intelligent as we consider ourselves, are partially under the control of single-celled lifeforms.

Perhaps we would do well to remember that bacteria predate us by billions of years and are highly likely to outlive our species by billions more.

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Gut bacteria and the brain: Are we controlled by microbes?

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Although the interaction between our brain and gut has been studied for years, its complexities run deeper than initially thought. It seems that our minds are, in some part, controlled by the bacteria in our bowels. How much sway can a microbe hold?

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Dysbiosis is most commonly heard in relation to the human gut microbiome, but it's actually used much more widely. Here's dysbiosis in coral reefs.

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Dysbiosis is most commonly heard in relation to the human gut microbiome, but it's actually used much more widely. Here's dysbiosis in coral reefs.

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Introduction

Disease is a natural force in ecosystems and at low prevalence will shape species evolution over time1,2. In recent decades, stressors on ecosystems driven by climate change, habitat loss and alteration, and globalization have increased disease prevalence, in some cases leading to devastating outbreak events in wild populations. These outbreaks have reshaped entire ecosystems, both terrestrial and marine6. Marine disease outbreaks have driven foundational species to endangerment, including California abalone, West coast sea star, and elkhorn and staghorn corals in the Caribbean7,8,9,10. Disease affects populations and communities globally and quantifying the impact among species will provide predictive insight into the changing functional ecology of these ecosystems.

White plague disease (WPD) is one of the most destructive diseases in the Caribbean11,12 affecting a large number of coral species and reducing the biodiversity and function of reef ecosystems13,14,15,16. WPD has been described as affecting Caribbean corals since the 1970s and is characterized by lesions originating at the base of the colony and expanding rapidly, resulting in significant partial and total mortality to affected colonies17. WPD is a suspected bacterial infection17, though there has been considerable debate as to whether WPD represents one or more etiologies18. Recent laboratory experimentation has confirmed species-specific susceptibility in response to exposure to WPD19, however, it is unknown what is driving these species differences in susceptibility. Traits that could influence disease susceptibility include immune capacity, life-history strategies, and coral-associated microbial communities20.

As with many coral diseases, the causative agent of WPD remains unknown. Evidence among studies points to individual bacteria21, possible polymicrobial origins22, and even viral pathogens23, all of which question the traditional view of a singular pathogenic etiology24,25. In human disease studies, there is growing literature on microbiome imbalance or dysbiosis that is responsible for disease etiology26. In coral diseases, microbiome shifts or dysbiosis also may be more appropriate than the one-pathogen-one disease concept24,25,27,28,29,30,31,32,33. By measuring microbial dysbiosis, we can evaluate thresholds of microbial change before host and microbiome symbiosis break down into a diseased state, consider coral disease etiology beyond the singular pathogen hypothesis, monitor the compounding effects of multiple stress events, and predict coral species survival likelihood34,35,36,37.

To investigate the relationship between disease susceptibility and microbial community responses to WPD exposure, this study simultaneously characterized the phenotypic and microbial responses of seven Caribbean coral species when exposed to WPD in a controlled laboratory experiment. The seven species represented diverse life-history strategies and roles within Caribbean reef ecosystems38. We identified differences among coral species not only in their phenotypic responses to WPD exposure but in their microbial responses as well. We then referred to the literature for any known functional roles and relevance in coral studies of individual bacteria for their potential role as disease-associated or disease-preventing bacteria based on their abundances among treatments and the treatment outcomes. Understanding the link between microbial shifts and disease susceptibility can help identify the potential mechanisms driving disease resistance, which will assist in predicting future coral assemblages.

Results

Disease prevalence

Disease prevalence significantly differed among species (Fig. 1a) (Fisher's Exact Test: p = 0.0074) and ranged from 0 to 100% (Fig. 2a). Six of the seven species tested had fragments that exhibited progressive lesions indicative of WPD. O. faveolata was identified as the most susceptible species with 100% affected. Only M. cavernosa did not show signs of lesion development in any fragment exposed to WPD. No lesions formed under control conditions in any species. Pairwise comparisons identified significantly different disease prevalence between species pairs (Supplementary Table 1).

a Orbicella faveolata, Orbicella annularis, Orbicella franksi, Colpophyllia natans, Montastraea cavernosa, Porites astreoides, Porites porites, Siderastrea siderea. All photos by M. Brandt except M. cavernosa by T.B. Smith. Disease transmission experimental design for ( b) control and ( c) disease treatment. Note the healthy O. franksi in the center of the control and the white plague-infected O. franksi in the center of the disease treatment. There were five aquaria assigned as control treatments and five aquaria assigned as disease treatments. Every tank included one fragment from each of the seven coral species. When a coral colony was collected, it was split in two, with one fragment designated for control treatment and the other paired fragment going to a disease exposure treatment.

a Disease prevalence (percentage of replicates that contracted the disease) for each species. b Disease severity (the rate at which the disease lesion progressed across the infected coral after contracting white plague disease); only the corals that contracted the disease had their lesion progression rates graphed.

Disease severity

Disease progression rates were significantly different among species (df = 5, X 2 = 28.627, p < 0.0001). O. annularis, which had the fastest lesion progression rate had a significantly different lesion progression rate than C. natans and S. siderea (Supplementary Table 4). Corals in the genus Orbicella had the highest relative lesion progression rate (Fig. 2b), with O. annularis and O. faveolata exhibiting the first and second fastest average progression rates (15.75 cm 2 day −1 and 13.79 cm 2 day −1, respectively). C. natans and S. siderea showed slower progression rates (3.85 cm 2 day −1 and 2.60 cm 2day −1, respectively), while the only P. astreoides and P. porites colonies to exhibit disease lesions had progression rates that were considered intermediate (9.37 cm 2 day −1) or slow (2.03 cm 2 day −1), respectively.

Disease incidence

Throughout the seven-day disease exposure, O. faveolata fragments and O. annularis fragments presented lesions characteristic of WPD between days 5 and 6 of exposure (Fig. 3a). C. natans showed disease signs between 2 to 6 days of exposure, and S. siderea showed disease signs between days 4 and 5 of exposure (Fig. 3b). Both P. porites and P. astreoides had disease incidence on day 6 of exposure. None of the M. cavernosa fragments showed signs of WPD over the course of the experiment (Fig. 3c).

Survival curves showing the proportion of corals that remained healthy (i.e., did not develop lesions) over the course of the experiment for species that showed high ( a), intermediate ( b), and low ( c) incidence of disease. Shading around survival curves represents 95% confidence intervals.

Relative risk

The relative risk of developing WPD signs after being exposed to a WPD coral differed among species (Fig. 4). O. faveolata, O. annularis, and C. natans all had significant risks of infection (Fig. 4). The median risk of these three species was around a value of 9, indicating the likelihood of developing WPD was 9 times greater after exposure. S. siderea, P. porites, and P. astreoides did not exhibit significantly increased risk of disease after exposure to WPD, although their median risk values were still elevated above 1 (ranging from 3 to 8) suggesting a higher overall risk to WPD after exposure. M. cavernosa had an estimated relative risk close to 1.0, indicating no elevated disease risk from exposure to WPD.

The median relative risk the species will contract white plague disease with 95% credible intervals.

Microbiome

Bacterial community dissimilarity and dysbiosis

Microbiomes significantly differed among the seven7 coral species (PERMANOVA: F = 3.91, p < 0.001) (Fig. 5) and were also significantly different between control and disease treatments ( F = 3.3381, p = 0.0045). When fragments were grouped by treatment outcomes (i.e., control, disease-exposed, disease-infected), significant differences were also detected in the microbial communities ( F = 1.97, p = 0.0195), but pairwise comparisons showed a significant difference at p < 0.1, but not at the Bonferonni corrected p-value of p = 0.017 (Supplementary Table 5). These results indicate shifts in the relative abundances of the microbes once an individual was exposed to WPD or became diseased (Table 2). No interaction was detected between species and treatment ( F = 0.94, p = 0.5714), or between species and treatment outcome ( F = 1.1026, p = 0.235576) suggesting consistent differences among coral species. To look further into how each coral species' microbial community was changing based on treatment outcome, the overall dissimilarity was compared within species relative to the healthy control state (Table 1). Bacterial community dissimilarity was consistently higher in disease-infected fragments than in disease-exposed fragments relative to their paired controls (Table 1). Coral species that remained disease-exposed and did not contract the disease were more dissimilar to each other relative to the control condition dissimilarity (Table 2). While inversely, overall bacterial community similarity was greater in coral that became disease-infected. Notably, M. cavernosa, the only species to not exhibit disease signs, did not show overlap with any other species in the NMDS ordination (Fig. 5). All other species showed some overlap with the others regardless of treatment outcome.

Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) (Stress = 0.13) of bacterial communities from the tissue of the seven species tested organized by species and treatment outcome (control, disease-exposed, disease-infected). Ovals represent 95% confidence intervals.

Table 2 Convergent microbiome.

Treatment outcome-specific bacterial communities

Of the 7225 unique OTUs, 1243 OTUs had greater than 97% sequence similarity to reference sequences allowing for species-level classification of 1243 unique bacterial species identified in this study, 29 bacteria represented 70% of the microbiome across all samples and were identified by being in 3% abundance or higher in either control, disease-exposed, or disease-infected states. Five of these 29 bacteria significantly differed in their relative abundance between treatment outcomes. Comparisons between the control, diseased-exposed, and disease-infected among all 7 coral species combined showed large overall differences of these five bacteria (Fig. 6a). Nautella italica, Pseudoalteromonas sp., and Thalassobius mediterraneus displayed low relative abundance in the control treatment but were significantly higher in disease-infected fragments (Fig. 6c). Conversely, Endozoicomonas spp. and Burkholderia ubonesis showed the highest abundance in disease-exposed treatments and low or no abundance in the disease-infected (Fig. 6b).

a Bacteria of 3% relative abundance or higher in any treatment outcome. b Two bacteria that increased in disease-exposed fragments, ( c) Three bacteria that significantly increased in disease-infected fragments. Abbreviations correspond to the following bacterial species: "Bubo" =  Burkholderia ubonensis, "Endo" =  Endozoicomonas spp., "Nita" =  Nautella italica, "Pseu" =  Pseudoalteromonas sp., "Tme" =  Thalassobius mediterraneus. Bar plot annotations are significant p-values from the Tukey Post-hoc test, and the Dunn test for Endozoicomonas spp., omitted p-value annotations are none significant comparisons. Individual data points are represented by light gray dots and error bars represent standard error.

Species-specific commensal or beneficial bacteria

Certain microbes were consistently present among fragments within a coral species but absent or in low abundance in other species suggesting an identifiable species-specific microbiome (Fig. 7). The bacterial family Hahellaceae, consisting of Endozoicomonas sp., was notably dominant in P. astreoides, but not detectable in any great abundance in the other coral species tested. Burkholderiaceae and Spirochaetaceae were also highly abundant in M. cavernosa and O. faveolata, respectively, and not in other species. Micrococcacaea dominated the microbiomes of O. annularis and M. cavernosa ( Anthrobacter species; Supplementary Fig. 1). Within this family specifically, Anthrobacter ramosus composed a large proportion of the Micrococcacaea identified (20-92% in M. cavernosa and 49-80% in O. annularis).

Relative abundances of bacterial orders for each coral fragment exposed to either healthy O. franksi (i.e., control), or a white plague-infected O. franksi (i.e., disease treatment). Only bacterial orders with relative abundances greater than 3% were colored individually. All other bacterial orders were grouped into the category "other.sum". Paired fragments that are genotypically identical that came from the same colony are oriented vertically to visualize how the microbiome changes from control to disease treatment exposure. The red square between vertical columns represents the genotype pair that displayed an active white plague lesion (disease-infected) by the end of the experiment.

Microbial diversity and richness

Alpha and beta diversity of the bacterial community significantly differed among species and species × treatment outcome, but not between treatments, or among treatment outcome (Table 3, Fig. 8). While alpha diversity (Fig. 8a) showed no trends related to species susceptibility, beta diversity (Fig. 8b) in disease-exposed fragments was significantly different among species and was reduced in the highly affected coral species ( O. annularis, C. natans) and intermediately affected species ( S. siderea), while no change in beta diversity was observed between control and disease-exposed fragments in low susceptible species (Fig. 8c, d, Table 3).

Table 3 Microbial diversity.

a Alpha diversity (Shannon diversity) and ( b) Beta diversity (local diversity) per species and ordered by species disease susceptibility from left to right; and grouped by treatment outcome: control, exposed, and infected. c, d Alpha and Beta diversity grouped by species susceptibility ( O. faveolata, O. annularis are high susceptibility, C. natans and S. siderea are intermediate susceptibilities, P. astreoides, P. porites, and M. cavernosa are in low susceptibility).

Discussion

This study delineated surface microbial responses of seven Caribbean reef-building coral species exposed to WPD. We found a gradient of disease susceptibility that was reflective of microbial community responses. Based on their phenotypic responses to disease exposure, the seven species fell into three groups: (1) highly susceptible ( O. faveolata and O. annularis) characterized by high disease prevalence and fast lesion progression rates, (2) intermediate susceptible ( C. natans and S. siderea) characterized by high disease prevalence and slow lesion progression rates, and (3) low susceptible or tolerant ( P. astreoides, P. porites, and M. cavernosa) characterized by low to no disease prevalence and slow lesion progression rates.

As seen in the field11,39 and in experimental studies19, Orbicella species displayed the highest disease susceptibility. As major structural reef builders, the high susceptibility of orbicellids has the potential to shift the physical growth and function of coral reefs, which has already been seen in many Caribbean locales. Not only were individuals of both orbicellid species highly susceptible to disease in this study, but they also showed the highest severity of the disease. P. astreoides, P. porites, and M. cavernosa were relatively resistant to WPD. Each of these species has historically been documented as stress-tolerant or weedy38 and their relative abundances are currently increasing as overall coral cover declines42. As coral disease outbreaks become more common and severe because of continued degrading local conditions and the exacerbating effects of climate change, disease-resistant species will likely dominate Caribbean reefs.

To capture the expected disease incidence when WPD was present, the relative risk of infection was determined for each species in this study. From this, O. faveolata, O. annularis, and C. natans each showed an elevated significant risk of contracting WPD if exposed. This pattern may have been related to the phylogenetically similar O. franksi serving as the source coral for the experiments, thereby more easily transmitting to the other orbicellids. However, M. cavernosa was the least susceptible to WPD exposure yet is closest in phylogeny to the orbicellids43. In addition, the susceptibility patterns we observed in our transmission experiment corresponded with field data that show these species ( O. faveolata, O. annularis, and C. natans) clustered together because of high disease levels following 2005 and 2010 bleaching that resulted in significant mortality44. This independent relative risk calculation reiterates what we have observed from other coral diseases and that our laboratory-based experiments are consistent with field observations, making them an essential tool for predicting species assemblages in the future.

The origins of many coral diseases, including WPD, is still unknown and there are several hypotheses regarding how and why corals become diseased. For instance, the coral disease can originate from a foreign individual pathogen introduction and spread from coral to coral45,46 or from microbiome changes that cause dysbiosis in the commensal surface microbial community47. Disease phenotypes may also be the result of secondary infection following an extreme stress event or increased bacterial virulence or pathogenicity following some disturbance. Our experiment and dataset provide a unique opportunity to explore some of these hypotheses in seven species of coral to determine consistencies and identify what is unique in susceptible and resistant species.

The bacterial community in diseased fragments were consistently more similar among species relative to any other treatment outcome (as seen in Table 2). This response suggests that diseased fragments had similar microbial constituents while in the diseased state, which could reflect a community of pathogenic or opportunistic bacteria. This microbial convergence is likely the result of disease exposure rather than tank effects because diseased fragments started showing signs of tissue loss at different time points in the study and were removed from tanks based on differing fragment lesion development. In addition, the microbiomes of fragments that were exposed to disease, but stayed apparently healthy became more dissimilar than in the controlled state. To further explore the convergent microbiome in disease-infected fragments, bacteria increasing in relative abundance in this disease-infected state were identified.

N. italica, T. mediterraneus, and Pseudoalteromonas sp., showed a significant increase in abundance in fragments that displayed an active disease lesion. Interestingly, two of the species ( N. italica and T. mediteraneus) belong to the family Rhodobacteraceae. Members of this family have diverse metabolic and physiological properties in marine systems, play important roles in the formation of marine biofilms and are likely early colonizers at the first sign of deteriorating coral tissue53. The order of Rhodobacterales also has been highlighted in disease lesions of corals affected by the highly virulent stony coral tissue loss disease (SCTLD)54. SCTLD was not present on corals in the US Virgin Islands at the time of our study, and so the abundance of members of this order in our study may indicate that Rhodobacterales are consistently present as opportunistic colonizers in the landscape of microbial dysbiosis.

N. italica is known to induce bleaching in a red alga55, and this response is temperature sensitive55,56 leading to compromised host chemical defenses50. Similarly, WPD increases in prevalence in conjunction with or following thermal stress and coral bleaching events12,44,57,58. In this study, N. italica had a progressively higher relative abundance in disease-exposed and even more so in disease-infected fragments among all coral species.

T. mediterraneus is a Roseobacter, and is also directly implicated in Australian white syndrome of coral59 and in diseases of lobsters60. T. mediterraneus has been observed in other Caribbean coral diseases, including black band disease61, and is responsive to coral antibacterial activity with similar resistance as some Vibrio species62. In this study, T. mediterraneus had a significantly higher abundance in disease-infected fragments among all coral species.

Pseudoalteromonas sp., the third bacterium detected at the highest abundance in diseased fragments also has a history of disease-associated properties and has been observed in noticeable abundance in other coral disease studies63,64. This bacterium is known for its antimicrobial and bacteriolytic activity in the mucus of coral and is considered to have a protective role to the coral host65. Interestingly, the high abundance of defensive bacteria may indicate that there was bacterial antagonism occurring. In chronic Montipora white syndrome induced by Vibrio coralliilyticus the presence of Pseudoalteromonas piratica accelerated the disease because of the resistance of Vibrio bacteria to the antibacterial activity of Pseudoalteromonas sp 63 allowed undefended spread of the pathogen. This type of polymicrobial synergy with Pseudoalteromonas sp. altering the microbiome may allow for Rhodobacteraceae, like N. italica and T. mediterraneus, to become opportunistic pathogens51,53 in WPD.

Considerations of microbial dysbiosis as a cause for marine disease have been overshadowed by a focus on identifying singular or multiple pathogens as etiological agents. Because coral disease etiological agents are so elusive, this unique dataset can be leveraged to explore the broader microbial community dysbiosis, a process that may allow bacteria to become opportunistically pathogenic31. Microbial dysbiosis is a microbial community shift that has a negative impact on the host and has the capacity to induce disease phenotypes26. Dysbiosis appears as significant microbiome shifts commonly reported in coral disease studies and may actually underlie many coral diseases29,66. Microbial dysbiosis has also been reported from thermal anomalies to parrotfish bites, indicating dysbiosis as a compounding effect from everyday scenarios on the reef27,67.

In this study, the overall dissimilarity between treatment outcomes was compared within each species and was used to characterize dysbiosis. In orbicellids, the microbiome changed less in disease-infected fragments relative to control states compared with other species, possibly because orbicellids have a lower threshold for change before showing disease phenotypes, or etiological disease agents became pathogenic without statistically changing the microbiome assemblage. Microbial imbalance resulting from abiotic stressors could be a possible mechanism for increased susceptibility between stress events. Orbicellids are more susceptible to disease following thermal stress events and our results suggest that this pattern may be due to this lower threshold for microbiome dysbiosis. Contrary to this, the disease-resistant P. astreoides showed a much higher threshold for dysbiosis in our study; their microbiome changes were significant even in fragments that were exposed to the disease but did not develop lesions. In field studies, Porites spp. are known to be tolerant to both thermal stress and subsequent disease44, suggesting this species may tolerate a significant shift in their microbiome before holobiont break-down. This dichotomy emphasizes how a higher dysbiosis threshold at a time of compounding environmental stressors may be an informative measurement of understanding varying stress response outcomes among coral species27,29.

During disease exposure, stabilizing bacteria can inhibit or slow the colonization of pathogenic bacteria68, while also preventing microbial dysbiosis. In this study, Endozoicomonas sp. were highly abundant in fragments of P. astreoides, a species that remained resistant to disease, while this bacterium was notably absent in the one fragment of this species that became diseased. In addition, the microbiome of M. cavernosa was dominated by Burkholderia ubonensis and Arthrobacter spp. within the order actinomycetales. Interestingly, both Endozoicomonas sp. and B. ubonensis increased in abundance in disease-exposed fragments, but were absent in disease-infected fragments. Endozoicomonas sp. has been largely regarded as part of the core microbiome of corals and to be in phylosymbiosis with P. astreoides due to the coral's vertical transmission of bacteria through broadcast spawning72. In fact, the protective features of B. ubonensis are well known and used as a biocontrol treatment for the tropical infectious disease, meliodidosis in humans73,74 and potentially play this role in M. cavernosa, as none of the fragments became diseased upon exposure to WPD. The dominance of these bacteria in most disease-resistant fragments suggests they may play a role in the functional stabilization of the microbiome, or their commensal presence is enough to inhibit pathogenic colonization.

The increasing prevalence and severity of diseases affect coral species differently. Because the functional contributions of these species define a reef, it is integral to understand variability in disease susceptibility among coral species to predict how the disease will shape coral reefs of the future. This study characterized disease susceptibility among seven coral species representing a diversity of life-history strategies and has historically contributed to Caribbean coral reef assemblages. Less microbial change was observed in disease-susceptible coral species, suggesting low microbial dysbiosis thresholds should be further investigated as a possible coral disease etiology. Furthermore, bacteria with protective properties were more prevalent in coral species tolerant to WPD. As disease increases, disease-susceptible Orbicella species that are primary contributors to reef structure will become less abundant, negatively affecting the physical protection that reefs provide. This lost real estate within the reef may be colonized by more disease-resistant but less efficient reef-building species, making disease susceptibility an important predictor of the changing ecological function of Caribbean reefs.

Methods

Statistics and reproducibility

This study applied a coral disease transmission methodology recently developed and reported by Williams et al. (2020). Five parental colonies from each of seven Caribbean coral species, Orbicella faveolata, Colpophyllia natans, Siderastrea siderea, Porites astreoides, Porites porites, and Montastraea cavernosa, were collected from Brewers Bay (18.34403, −64.98435), St Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands on 13 June 2017 (Fig. 1a). Colony collection targeted either whole colonies (for S. siderea, P. astreoides, and P. porites) or fragments of colonies (for O. faveolata, C. natans, and M. cavernosa) that were between 20 and 30 cm maximum diameter. Although five parental colonies of Orbicella annularis were collected, one experienced mortality and was not used in experiments. Colonies were held in running seawater tables at the University of the Virgin Islands where they were fragmented into small pieces (average size 17.74 cm 2 ± 1.03 SEM) using a sterilized table saw, acclimated for nine days (allowing for tissue on fragmented edges to heal completely), and then placed in experimental conditions. Diseased ( n = 3) and healthy ( n = 5) O. franksi were collected by separate divers on two dives and kept isolated from each other and from fragments of the tested coral species until the commencement of the experiment. WPD-affected colonies of O. franksi were identified as displaying the characteristic signs of this disease, namely large (>5 cm wide) lesions that appeared to originate from the base or edge of a colony where no signs of predation or predators were found. Diseased O. franksi were targeted as the source for disease in this transmission experiment because this species is known to be consistently affected by WPD throughout the year and was also used as the source species for previous experiments19. Diseased corals were fragmented and monitored for indications of active disease (lesion enlargement >0.2 cm 2d −1, consistent with WPD) for 24 h. Only fragments showing active lesion progression were used in disease treatments.

Upon commencement of the experiment (June 2017), coral fragments were distributed among 5 treatment and 5 control 17-L sterilized containers (17-L), each equipped with individual aerators. Containers were placed among three outdoor shaded running seawater tables that served as water baths. Containers received water changes daily and their locations were also randomized each day over the course of the 7-day experimental period. Each treatment container consisted of a randomly assigned healthy fragment of each of the seven tested species that were placed at equal distances (approximately 7-8 cm) from a central diseased O. franksi fragment. Control containers were identically arranged, except that healthy O. franksi were used as the central corals (Figs. 1b, c). During the daily water changes, the locations of the fragments within each container were randomized relative to each other, while keeping the same equal distances from the central fragment. When a disease lesion appeared on a disease-exposed coral that was previously healthy it was monitored until 30% tissue loss. If the lesion enlarged over this time period, the coral and its paired control fragment were photographed, removed, flash-frozen, and stored at −80 ˚C until further 16S rRNA analysis.

Phenotype analysis

Metrics that encompassed a susceptibility "phenotype" were calculated for each species, including: (1) total disease prevalence (% corals that became diseased) within treatment containers during the experimental period, (2) average days until lesion appearance, and (3) average lesion progression rate (cm 2 lost/day). Coral fragments exposed to a disease that did not show lesion appearance by the end of the transmission study were classified as "disease-exposed". While coral fragments that were exposed to the disease and developed expanding lesions were grouped as "disease-infected".

Disease prevalence among species was compared using Fisher's exact test in R (Supplementary Table 1). A photograph and timestamp were captured upon the appearance of lesions and then immediately before each fragment was culled around 30% tissue loss. Disease severity was measured by calculating the rate of lesion progression across the coral fragment as the amount of tissue lost between the appearance of the lesion to the time it was culled divided by that time period. Time to infection for a fragment was measured as the number of days from experiment start to the first appearance of lesions and visualized with a survival plot through a Kaplan-Meier estimate of the survivorship by using the survfit function in the R package survival 75 (Supplementary Table 2). The relative risk of each species was also calculated as:

Relative risk (RR) = Risk in exposed/Risk in non-exposed

where the risk in exposed individuals was calculated as the prevalence (diseased/total population) of those exposed to disease and risk in non-exposed individuals was calculated as the prevalence (diseased/total population) of those not exposed to the disease. To obtain an estimate of relative risk, Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations were used with Gibbs sampling in OpenBUGS (MRC Biostatistics Unit, Cambridge, UK). Ninety-five percent credible intervals were calculated for each estimate of relative risk. Credible intervals that did not include a value of one were considered significant, with a credible interval above one signifying a higher risk of disease because of exposure to the diseased coral fragment. A credible interval below one signified a lower risk of disease from exposure.

Microbiome extraction and sequencing

DNA from the coral samples was extracted at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) using the DNeasy Powersoil Isolation kits (MO BIO Laboratories, Carlsbad, CA). Roughly 0.25 g of tissue was removed from each of the coral fragments using a sterilized bone cutter (Supplementary Table 3). Tissue from healthy-state fragments ("control") was extracted from the center of the fragment. Tissue was extracted in a similar manner from fragments exposed to WPD that did not display lesions by the end of the experiment (disease-exposed). For fragments that developed a lesion(s) ("disease-infected"), tissue was extracted approximately 2 to 3 mm horizontally from the lesion margin in the apparently healthy tissue and collected parallel to the lesion margin.

Tissue samples were sent to MR DNA Molecular Research LP (Shallowater, TX) for 16S rRNA gene amplification using 515F (GTGYCAGCMGCCGCGGTAA) and 806R (GGACTACNVGGGTWTCTAAT) primers for the V4 region and DNA libraries were prepared following MR DNA protocols. Samples were sequenced on an Illumina MiSeq 2 × 250 bp PE reads and resulting sequences were bioinformatically processed through the MR DNA pipeline (MR DNA, Shallowater, TX, USA) utilizing the QIIME analysis. Barcodes, primers, and ambiguous calls are removed from sequences, as well as short sequences <150 bp. Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) are clustered at 97% similarity and taxonomically classified using BLASTn against an RDPII and NCBI database ( www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, http://rdp.cme.msu.edu) and organized into each taxonomic level as counts and percentage files based on industry standards of homology of sequences to the NCBI reference database (Supplementary Table 6). Counts are the number of sequences read while the percentage is the relative proportion of reads within each sample for each taxonomic classification.

Microbial community analysis

Differences in bacterial communities between coral species and treatment outcome levels (control, disease-exposed, disease-infected) were assessed with a two-way permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) using the R package "vegan"76. Microbial community differences were visualized using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS). Bacterial abundances that were most dissimilar between species and treatment outcome were identified using a similarities percentage analysis (SIMPER)76. These analyses were based on a Bray-Curtis dissimilarity matrix. One-hundred percent stacked bar graphs were created using raw abundance percentages of bacterial families (>3% relative abundance) to visualize shifts in the microbial composition of each individual coral and among species. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey HSD post-hoc analyses identified differentially expressed bacteria between treatment outcomes. However, a non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test was applied to Endozoicomonas spp.

The Shannon diversity index and beta diversity of the bacterial community were calculated for each sample using the R package "betapart"77. Diversity data were non-normal even with transformation, therefore differences among treatments were tested using non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis tests and relationships between diversity indices and lesion progression rates were investigated using non-parametric Spearman rank tests.

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Science Foundation (Biological Oceanography) award number 1712134 to L.D.M., 1712540 to M.B., and 1712240 to E.M.M, and VI EPSCoR (NSF #0814417). The authors thank the facilities and diving support staff at the University of the Virgin Islands Center for Marine and Environmental Studies (CMES), and Tyler Smith for field support. The authors acknowledge the support and consult from Kimberly Bowles at the UTA Life Sciences Genomics core facility and Scot Dowd at MR DNA. This is CMES contribution #232. Finally, we thank the two anonymous reviewers and Dr. Michael Sweet as the third reviewer for their comments, which improved this manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA

Nicholas J. MacKnight, Bradford Dimos, Lauren Fuess, Contessa Ricci, Caleb Butler & Laura D. Mydlarz

University of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, VI, USA

Kathryn Cobleigh, Danielle Lasseigne, Andia Chaves-Fonnegra, Alexandra Gutting, Jendahye Antoine & Marilyn Brandt

Florida Atlantic University, Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute/Harriet L.Wilkes Honors College, Fort Pierce, FL, USA

Andia Chaves-Fonnegra

The Nature Conservancy, Dallas, TX, USA

Alexandra Gutting

Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

Lauren Fuess

Mote Marine Laboratory, Sarasota, FL, USA

Erinn M. Muller

Contributions

E.M.M., L.D.M., M.B. were responsible for compiling the intellectual merit behind the research objectives, design, and acquiring funding for this original research. All authors, N.J.M., K.C., D.L., A.C.F., A.G., B.D., J.A., L.F., C.R., C.B., E.M.M., L.D.M., M.B., contributed to the experimental disease exposure. M.B. recorded phenotypic metrics, designed phenotypic analysis, and created Fig. 1a. K.C. assisted in 16S rRNA extraction and created Supplementary Fig. 1. E.M.M. designed and performed the relative risk analysis. N.J.M. designed and performed microbial analysis, performed phenotype analysis, wrote the manuscript, and created all remaining figures. N.J.M., L.D.M and M.B. had considerable editorial input during manuscript assembly with additional revisions from all authors, N.J.M., K.C., D.L., A.C.F., A.G., B.D., J.A., L.F., C.R., C.B., E.M.M., L.D.M., M.B.

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Correspondence to Marilyn Brandt.

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MacKnight, N.J., Cobleigh, K., Lasseigne, D. et al. Microbial dysbiosis reflects disease resistance in diverse coral species. Commun Biol 4, 679 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02163-5
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Microbial dysbiosis reflects disease resistance in diverse coral species - Communications Biology

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MacKnight et al. compared the phenotypic and microbial responses of seven Caribbean coral species with diverse life-history strategies after exposure to white plague disease.

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https://keywords.nyupress.org/environmental-studies/essay/queer-ecology/

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The term "queer ecology" refers to a loose, interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory. Drawing from traditions as diverse as evolutionary biology, LGBTTIQQ2SA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, intersex, queer, questioning, two-spirited, and allies) movements, and queer geography and history, feminist science studies, ecofeminism, and environmental justice, queer ecology currently highlights the complexity of contemporary biopolitics, draws important connections between the material and cultural dimensions of environmental issues, and insists on an articulatory practice in which sex and nature are understood in light of multiple trajectories of power and matter.

In , Michel Foucault lays the groundwork for much contemporary queer ecological scholarship in his observation that, beginning in the nineteenth century, modern regimes of biopower came to conceive of sex as a specific object of scientific knowledge, organized through, on the one hand, a "biology of reproduction" that considered human sexual behavior in relation to the physiologies of plant and animal reproduction, and on the other, a "medicine of sex" that conceived of human sexuality in terms of desire and identity ( 1978, 54). Although Foucault rightly notes the tenuous early connections between the two discourses, the establishment of sex as a matter of biopolitical could not help but be connected to ideas of nature, and especially to racialized, sexualized, and other anxieties over hygiene and degeneracy. In this context, the figure of the homosexual came to haunt the margins of emerging discourses in urban development, environmental health, and even wilderness preservation: the effeminate homosexual and the lesbian gender invert were not only seen increasingly as but also sometimes considered symptoms of the toxic underside of industrial, urban, and increasingly cosmopolitan modernity.

In this context, a prehistory of queer ecology must include the attempts of such authors as André Gide and Radclyffe Hall to turn these discourses on their heads (famously, of course, Oscar Wilde his position "against" nature). Specifically, the placement of sexual desire and orientation in the purview of evolutionary concern gave rise not only to the articulation of homosexuality with degeneracy but also to the possibility that a variety of sexual practices and identities could be understood as "natural" and, therefore, morally neutral; indeed, early sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote, in 1905, that "one might be tempted to expect that homosexual practices would be encouraged whenever it was necessary to keep down the population" ( 9). Drawing on the rich historical inclusion of same-sex (male) eroticism in pastoral literatures, Gide's (published in four parts from 1911 to 1920) thus pursued the idea that the homosexual activities of boy-shepherds represented a more authentic and innocent sexuality than the heterosexual conventions they needed to learn in order to enter into adult relations of (enforced) heterosexuality ( Shuttleton 2000). Similarly, Hall's (1928) painted a tragic portrait of a lesbian gender invert who was, if anything, by nature nobler and moral than any of the other characters in the book (a portrayal that caused the book to be banned in Britain, see Mortimer-Sandilands 2008b). Although both texts were thoroughly steeped in the class, racialized, and gender politics of the era and are problematic for a host of reasons associated with neopastoral literatures more broadly ( is deeply misogynist; is profoundly nationalist; both deploy nature as an agent of conservatism), they and others played an important role in setting the conceptual stage for more recent attempts to queer nature and ecology. Indeed, despite their considerable political differences, one can place in productive conversation with Gide and Hall such phenomena as the post-Stonewall emergence of gay and lesbian-feminist anti-urbanisms ( Herring 2007; Kleiner 2003; Sandilands 2002) and the more recent articulation of (some) discourses on urban cruising and public sex with organicist renderings of eroticism, freedom, and opposition to heteronormative productions of/restrictions on urban public space ( Gandy 2012; Ingram 2010).

From these roots, beginning in the mid-1990s ( Gaard 1997), a distinct body of queer ecological scholarship has emerged that has attempted to develop theoretical and activist connections between sexual and ecological politics, often drawing from ecofeminist and environmental justice perspectives and including concerted attention to the racialized, gendered, colonial, and species politics with which notions of sex and nature are articulated ( especially as influenced by the writings of Donna Haraway, e.g., 1991b). As Rachel Stein writes, "by analyzing how discourses of nature have been used to enforce heteronormativity, to police sexuality, and to punish and exclude those persons who have been deemed sexually transgressive, we can begin to understand the deep, underlying commonalities between struggles against sexual oppression and other struggles for environmental justice" ( 2004, 7). This emphasis on the intersectional politics of sexuality, race, and ecology informs the work of Dayna Scott ( 2009) and Giovanna Di Chiro ( 2010), both of whom develop critical responses to the "gender-bending" impacts of endocrine-disrupting hormones in the environment (which particularly affect racialized and indigenous communities) while simultaneously disrupting heterosexist panics about the so-called feminization of organisms and populations of organisms, human and otherwise. Beth Berila ( 2004), Stacy Alaimo ( 2010a), and Mel Chen ( 2012) likewise examine the politics of contamination as toxic affects move in, through, and gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies: as Chen writes powerfully, toxic substances and discourses organize worlds in which some biopolitical subjects are enabled and their life optimized by medical and environmental interventions at the same time as other subjects are themselves considered toxic, expellable, and expendable. And Eli Clare ( 1999) treats the intersections of class and disability in his account of (among other things) the varied exclusions of an urban environmental politics and aesthetics that pays scant critical attention to the ways in which people and in natural environments, and also to bodies and landscapes that are abjected in the production and management of the pristine.

Sharing similar roots but on a slightly different trajectory, beginning in the late 1990s ( although drawing on a longer line of inquiry, see Terry 2000), research in animal behavior by the likes of Bruce Bagemihl (1999) and Joan Roughgarden (2004) has drawn popular attention to the fact that a large array of animal species include elements of same-sex eroticism in their sexual repertoires; in so doing, this research has attempted to dislodge heterosexual reproduction from its singularly privileged place in evolutionary biology, to connect notions of sexual diversity with biological diversity ( for a critique, see McWhorter 2010), and to open the door for a nonteleological reconsideration of animal/human sociality and pleasure ( Alaimo 2010b; Johnson 2011). As homonormative popular culture has embraced so-called queer animals in the midst of a larger naturalization of same-sex marriage ( especially "gay" male penguins, see Sturgeon 2010), and as images of polymorphously perverse animal and invertebrate sex have come to populate the ideosphere in the service of sexual pluralism (), several scholars suggest ways in which this queering of the more-than-human could proceed in more critical directions. Elizabeth Wilson ( 2002) and Myra Hird ( 2004, 2008) consider the ways in which nonhuman sexual and gender diversity both calls into question human exceptionalism and destabilizes notions of identity, authenticity, and technology on which modern categories of human sexual orientation rest; Karen Barad ( 2012), deploying a notion of queer performativity to strong posthumanist ends, explores the ways in which the material world can be understood as unfolding according to a process of relational co-constitution in which materialization itself can be understood queerly (s ee also Morton 2010); and several authors call upon the queer potentialities of Deleuze and Guattari's thought in order to nudge queer and trans theory to think more ecologically, in other words, to consider sexual and gender becomings as complex biological, technological, and political assemblages rather than as either purely discursive or biologically determined processes ( Parisi 2008; MacCormack 2009; Chisholm 2010; Hayward 2008 and, for a critique, Garrard 2010).

Recent scholarship has drawn from combinations of these theoretical trajectories (and beyond) to generate a proliferating array of queer ecological possibilities, including provocative considerations of cross-species and eco-sexualities as part of an ethico-political opening of love to include more-than-human corporealities (e.g., Kuzniar 2008; Sandilands 2004; Stephens and Sprinkle 2012); of the implications of queer theorist Lee Edelman's critique of reproductive futurism for ecological politics ( Giffney 2008; Anderson 2011; Seymour 2013); and of canonical literary texts, reread and restaged in light of queer ecological concerns ( Estok 2011; Azzarello 2012). In addition, new forms of specifically ecoqueer , demonstrating interesting forms of coalitional politics in opposition to homonormative agendas, are also emerging in response to such concerns as violence, space, and food ( Hogan 2010; Sbicca 2012). In both theoretical and activist milieux, however, questions remain about the specific meaning of the term "queer," given its historically and politically unstable relations to LGBTTIQQ2SA communities and activisms; the current constellation of queer ecologies-including as it does both more conventional lgbt histories and communities and more recent challenges to these terms and political affinities-may be on the verge of something new.

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The term "queer ecology" refers to a loose, interdisciplinary constellation of practices that aim, in different ways, to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature, and also to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory.

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How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time

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How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time

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Cycles and circles present within nature and myth. We are all connected, life is fluid. If we are energy (scientifically speaking) do we ever really leave the earth, even in death? Do we feed the soil as the soil once fed us?

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Pagan chants for full moon - We are a circle

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Another body/society metaphor - very different from the Shakespeare one also shared here, but continuing the idea of the body and society reflecting each other. http://etal.hu/en/archive/terrorism-and-aesthetics-2015/derrida-and-the-immune-system/

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The concept of autoimmunity appears first in Derrida's explicitly political writings, which, after 9/11, have become thoroughly entangled with the problematics of "terror." In Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, he defines the autoimmunitary processes of democracy as follows: "As we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi- suicidal fashion, 'itself' works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its 'own' immunity." This definition is the almost word by word repetition of the earlier, more openly biological description of the term in Faith and Knowledge ( Foi et Savoir, 1996):

It is especially in the domain of biology that the lexical resources of immunity have developed their authority. The immunitary reaction protects the "indemnity" of the body proper in producing antibodies against foreign antigens. As for the process of auto-immunization, which interests us particularly here, it consists for a living organism, as is well known and in short, of protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system.

Although Derrida asserts that he wishes to "extend to life in general the figure of an autoimmunity whose meaning or origin first seemed to be limited to so-called natural life" (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 187, n7), few critics have taken the claim that the term derives from the domain of biology seriously enough to investigate how the term functions in medical discourses, and ask questions about the political stakes involved in Derrida's (mis-)reading of the medical definition of the term.

In Derrida's Politics of Autoimmunity, J. Hillis Miller avers that "Derrida uses the figure of the body's disastrous autoimmunity in certain diseases to define an absolutely universal condition of any political order or community" (my emphasis), and backs up his argument with the Wikipedia definition of autoimmunity: "the failure of an organism to recognize its own constituent parts (down to the submolecular levels) as 'self,' which results in an immune response against its own cells and tissues." However, as the Wikipedia entry also testifies, Miller fails to recognise that Derrida's definition of autoimmunity is different from its medical definition. Whereas Derrida claims that during autoimmuntary processes the protective system of the body destroys itself (i.e. the immune system), the Wikipedia definition rightly suggests that in autoimmune diseases the immune system destroys the body's cells and tissues.

In 1989, one year after the publication of Sontag's AIDS and its Metaphors, and 4 years before introducing the term autoimmunity in Spectres of Marx, Derrida, engaging for the first time with the body's immune system, is still more wary of biological metaphors. In an interview later entitled The Rhetoric of Drugs, he discusses AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) at length, and argues that the politicisation of AIDS may bring forth "the worst political violence." Thus, despite the fact that deconstruction itself has often been associated with the subversive work of a virus, Derrida, quite uncharacteristically, wishes to disentangle the literal (biological) and the metaphorical (political) uses of the term: HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) is not like deconstruction, and cannot be used as a political metaphor. However, AIDS stands in an uneasy, almost spectral relationship with autoimmune diseases. For whereas in autoimmune diseases the immune system destroys the body's own organs, during HIV infection, the immune system destroy itself, and becomes entangled in a process that inevitably leads to its total destruction. Thus, Derrida's definition of autoimmunity echoes, in fact, the medical definitions of AIDS, but unlike AIDS, autoimmunity becomes a political concept in Derrida's thinking.

The establishment of a metaphorical relationship between the human body and the body politic is widely recognised as one of the most prominent features of nationalist discourses, which conceptualise the political body as if it was a living, biological body, and thereby posit the "health" of the biological, and, therefore, the political body as the moral norm. By introducing the term "autoimmunity" Derrida seems to establish precisely such a relationship. However, the figure of autoimmunity is introduced in order to subvert the ideology of nationalism, and becomes associated with the work of deconstruction itself. As Derrida says,

autoimmunity is not an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and who comes - which means that it must remain incalculable. Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive; we would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect another, or expect any event..

Thus, instead of positing the "health" of the body politic as the moral norm, Derrida regards autoimmunity (a disease), and, therefore, the autoimmune (self-destructive) processes of democracy, as the unconditional condition of the ethical within (rather than beyond) the political. In fact, autoimmunity is intimately bound up with the concept of hospitality, with this first, ethical relationship to alterity, implying an unconditional opening to and welcoming of the Other - even if "this unconditionality is a frightening thing, it's scary." On the other hand, Derrida is equally eager to underline that it is not "out of some excessive biologistic or geneticist proclivity" on his part that he uses a biological model. For the term "political autoimmunity" concerns precisely the question of the " relationship between the politikon, physis, and bios or zoe, life-death" (Derrida, Rogues, 109, my emphasis).

Since the ways in which Derrida actually theorises, or asks questions about, the relationship between autoimmunity and democracy, or else, the way in which he posits autoimmunity as both the condition of and the consequence of democracy, is far beyond the scope of the present argument, I will restrict myself to a few introductory remarks. According to Derrida's definition of autoimmunity, the immune system, which is responsible for the body's self-protection, attacks and destroys itself, thus making the body vulnerable. Consequently, the introduction of the figure of autoimmunity in the ethico-political discourse suggests that the political body always contains within itself the possibility of its own undoing. But it is precisely democracy's self-protection against any total(ising) self-protection, that is welcomed, by Derrida, as hospitality, as an inherent openness to the possibility for the other (the "event", or "death") to arrive. At the same time, autoimmunity not only entails the potential destruction of (the protection of) the self as both the object and the subject of the suicidal event (and of the events still to come), but it is also something that has always already compromised the supposed integrity, or else, ipseity of the self. As he puts it: "Autoimmunity is more or less suicidal, but more seriously still, it threatens always to rob suicide itself from its meaning and supposed integrity" (Derrida, Rogues, 44).

In Rogues, Derrida gives two examples for the suicidal tendencies of democracy, which immediately indicate that autoimmunity, rather than necessarily being a threat, can be best understood as risk. On the one hand, there is always a potential suicide involved in democratic institutions themselves, since democratic elections may well lead to the rise to power of anti-democratic forces that thus gain the right to put an end to the very institutions that made their victory possible in the first place. On the other hand, democracy can always, temporarily, suspend itself in order to protect itself (following the logic of autoimmunity), and prevent the rise to power of such anti-democratic forces. For instance, democratic leaders in Algeria suspended the democratic elections to prevent the rise of an Islamist party that would have put an end to all democracy. As Derrida puts it: autoimmunity is " a double bind of threat and chance, not alternatively or by turns promise and/or threat but threat in the promise itself" (Derrida, Rogues, 82). However, there is no parallel between the situation in Algeria and the measures taken by the Bush administration following 9/11. For these latter, while restricting democratic freedom under the pretext of protecting democracy, have failed to recognise that the risk is always already inside, and, therefore, cannot be definitively erased. Thus, rather than facing up the challenge that "there is no absolutely reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune" (Derrida, Rogues, 150-51), the US administration has defined its own fear (resulting from the "risk" and the uncertainty) as a "threat" coming from the outside: they called it "terrorism", and waged "a war against the 'axis of evil'" (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 41).

In a plea for the unconditional renunciation of sovereignty in the democracy to come, Derrida discusses the autoimmune vulnerability of juridical performatives as follows:

I just referred in passing to the distinction between the constative (the language of descriptive and theoretical knowledge) and the performative, which is so often said to produce the event it declares. Now, just like the constative, it seems to me, the performative cannot avoid neutralizing, indeed annulling, the eventfulness of the event it is supposed to produce. A performative produces an event only by securing for itself [...] the power that an ipseity gives itself to produce the event of which it speaks - the event that it neutralizes forthwith insofar as it appropriates for itself a calculable mastery over it. If an event worthy of this name is to arrive or happen, it must, beyond all mastery, affect a passivity. It must touch an exposed vulnerability, one without absolute immunity, without indemnity; it must touch this vulnerability in its finitude and in a nonhorizontal fashion, there where it is not yet or is already no longer possible to face or face up to the unforeseeability of the other. [Derrida, Rogues, 151-52]

The above passage easily offers itself to an analysis that examines what Derrida actually "means" by "autoimmunity". Such analyses have indeed abounded, but critics have failed to notice that Derrida's term "autoimmunity" is itself a performative, which cannot avoid attempting to master the eventfulness of the event it produces. For autoimmunity is not only about vulnerability, the vulnerability of (juridical) performatives, but being itself a performative, it also stages this vulnerability: autoimmunity is an autoimmune term, subjected to autoimmune processes, that is, it can undo itself at the precise moment of its performance. In other words, if "there is no absolutely reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune" (Derrida, Rogues, 150-51), then the term "autoimmunity" is just as vulnerable as democracy, just as vulnerable as any process it describes.

How to examine, then, the autoimmunity of the term autoimmunity? And what are the unforeseeable events that it produces but, indeed, cannot master? First, I am going to show that Derrida's definition of autoimmunity, and especially his claim that during autoimmunitary processes the immune system turns against itself, is at odds with the way in which experts of immunology coming from what Derrida calls the "domain of biology" define the term. I shall push to its extremes Sontag's Aristotelian claim that the metaphorical transfer is the mental operation of "Saying a thing is or is like something-it-is- not. " Secondly, I will investigate the stakes involved in Derrida's rhetoric that posits, as a catachresis, the term autoimmunity to describe the biological workings of HIV, which will turn out to parallel, to some extent, the description he gives of the "terrorists." Thirdly, I shall ask whether it is possible to establish any kind of metaphorical relationship between the laws governing the biological body (the "is"), the laws determining the functioning of the social body (another "is"), and the ethico-political imperatives that should govern the political community (the "ought").

According to immunologists, the basic function of the immune system is to fight off foreign microorganisms but tolerate self tissues. As Kronenberg puts it, "From a teleological point of view, an ideal set of immune receptors would recognize foreign organisms but ignore all components that make up our own bodies." There are two types of autoimmunity: one comprises the various forms of autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system fails to remain tolerant towards the self and starts to destroy self-tissues, the other is called natural autoimmunity, which is necessary for the body's normal functioning.

In natural autoimmunity, the central role is played by the "immunological homunculus", the immune system's internal image or representation of essential body molecules. This allows for the recognition of those self-antigens that are necessary for the body's survival. Since any foreign pathogen attacking the body may contain elements that are the same as, or similar to, the essential molecules of the body, and these elements need to be preserved rather than destroyed, the immune system contains immune cells that can recognize self antigens without giving or generating any aggressive, destructive response to them. In other words, the non-aggressive autoimmune cells that participate in the body's natural autoimmunitary processes effectuate the recognition of the self even in the foreign other. At the same time, low level self-reactive immune cells also play a role in surveilling uncontrolled cell growth, and may thus reduce the incidence of cancer. All in all, natural autoimmunity, ensuring the tolerance of self-antigens, has a self-protective function, and plays a positive role in the regulation of the immune system as a whole.

On the other hand, autoimmune diseases are associated with high level auto-reactive immune cells and the subsequent loss of immunological tolerance towards the self. In fact, one of the tasks of the immune system is to control those immune cells that display a high level of autoimmunity, that is, to regulate those self-reactive cells that not only recognise, but may also turn against the body's own tissues, and thereby "pose an immediate threat of autoimmunity" (Kronenberg et al., Regulation of immunity...). Hence, when the immune system is healthy and natural autoimmunity is properly controlled, some immune cells recognise and tolerate the self, while others attack the non-self. In autoimmune diseases, on the other hand, normal regulatory processes fail, and self-reactive immune cells launch an aggressive attack on the body's own tissues and organs. As Cohen puts it, "[a]utoimmune disease often involves the disregulated activation of natural autoimmunity" (Cohen, The Cognitive Paradigm..., 216). Consequently, contrary to Derrida's suggestions, in autoimmune diseases, the immune system does not make itself vulnerable, it does not undermine its own protection by turning against itself. Instead, it works all too well and attacks the body's own cells.

Hence, the political implications of the medical or biological approaches to autoimmune diseases (i.e. the misrecognition of the self as a foreign other) would certainly not be welcomed by Derrida. For the metaphorical transfer between the biological and the political body would suggest that the autoimmunitary processes of democracy entail the disavowal, the misrecognition, and the subsequent destruction of certain elements proper to the community as if they were improper, foreign, "rogues", non-self. And this, as history has so often shown us (and still does so), has disastrous consequences with regard to democracy. To be more specific, it could well include the banishment, or deportation of elements considered as non-self.

The effects of natural autoimmunity, on the other hand, are somewhat similar to the effect of immuno-depressants that, according to Derrida, equally inscribe themselves in a "general logic of autoimmunisation" (Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 72-73, n27) These, as he puts it, "limit the mechanisms of rejection and facilitate the tolerance of certain organ transplants" (ibid.). Transplants are necessary for our survival, which indicates that Derridean autoimmunity, as has already been suggested, is a risk: it implies not only a potentially life-threatening, but also a potentially life-saving openness. It offers a chance to let the other in, who, as Naas puts it, is not "properly our own," but potentially saves our life (Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 31).

Yet, whereas Derrida claims that "[o]ne function of the concept of autoimmunity is to act as a third term between the classical opposition between friend and foe" (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 152), the discourse of immunology remains structured by and keeps producing binaries between inside and outside, tolerance and intolerance. It maintains that the immune system gives distinctive responses to self and non-self (unless this process is inhibited by immune-depressant drugs). Thus, biological tolerance does model indeed the way tolerance works in the existing, actual socio-political sphere. As Derrida puts it, political tolerance is the acceptance "of the foreigner, the other, the foreign body up to a certain point, and so not without restrictions", and the concomitant, "natural" rejection of immigrants "who do not share our nationality, our language, our culture, and our customs" (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 128). However, Derrida clearly rejects any idea of democracy functioning according to the binary logic of tolerance and intolerance: although tolerance is clearly preferable to intolerance, tolerance, according to Derrida, must always be conditioned by that impossible, "unconditional hospitality", which is beyond any definable politics or law. Hospitality is what must be offered to the absolute, wholly other, it is something that is "in advance open" to whoever or whatever arrives (ibid). As he puts it in Rogues:

Among the figures of unconditionality without sovereignty I have had occasion to privilege in recent years, there would be, for example, that of an unconditional hospitality that exposes itself without limit to the coming of the other, beyond rights and laws, beyond a hospitality conditioned by the right of asylum, by the right to immigration, by citizenship, and even by the right to universal hospitality [...] Only an unconditional hospitality can give meaning and practical rationality to a concept of hospitality. Unconditional hospitality exceeds juridical, political, or economic calculation. But no thing and no one happens or arrives without it. [Derrida, Rogues, 149]

Tolerance, designating the event when this absolute desire for justice gets determined in a "particular language and culture" (Naas, Derrida from Now On, 24-25), inevitably perverts hospitality: it turns it into conditional hospitality, existing within the confines of particular politics and laws. And since Derrida goes as far as to say that tolerance (as "conditional, circumspect, careful hospitality") "is actually the opposite of hospitality" (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 127-28), he would also oppose any metaphorical transfer between what immunologists call "natural autoimmunity" (the "tolerance" of the "other" in case it is necessary for the survival of the "self"), and the political concept of autoimmunity (an ipseity in advance open to its own undoing).

In what follows, I am going to show first that Derrida draws, in fact, his arguments on autoimmunity from the discourse of AIDS. In the framework that I propose, the first question to be answered will be whether it is possible to regard HIV, which clearly comes from the outside, as a metaphor for something that blurs the distinction between friend and foe.

AIDS: ACQUIRED IMMUNODEFICIENCY SYNDROME

The causative agents of AIDS are HIV, that is, human immunodeficiency viruses. The major targets of HIV are immune cells called helper T cells (a type of white blood cell developed in the thymus). Helper T cells play an essential role in the self-protective system of the body, because they are involved in activating and directing other immune cells. During HIV infection, the virus infects and thereby destroys precisely those immune cells that are responsible for the immune response as a whole. However, since not all of the helper T cells are infected at the same time, the healthy ones can still activate the immune cells specific to the virus. These, in their turn, start to destroy those helper T cells that are infected by HIV. As a result, the major helper T cells are attacked on two fronts: healthy T cells are attacked by HIV itself, while the infected T cells are eliminated by the specific immune cells. Despite this double attack, the body could still gain victory over HIV infection, since the immune cells specific to the virus could very well eliminate all the infected helper T cells. However, since HIV is a mutating virus, that is, it can constantly change its antigen (the very thing to which the immune system specifically responds), by the time the immune cells specific to the virus could destroy all the infected helper T cells, another, new type of HIV emerges, which needs another kind of specific immune response. This process, that is, the mutation and remutation of HIV, the resulting infection of new helper T cells, and the concomitant development of new types of immune responses can last for years and decades, but, eventually, the immune system gives up the fight. In the end, the whole immune system is destroyed by the parallel attacks of HIV and the specific immune response eliminating all the infected immune cells. In what follows, I shall first outline the most conspicuous parallels between the workings of the immune system infected by HIV on the one hand, and Derrida's outline of the logic of autoimmunity on the other, and then show the reasons why these parallels are, in fact, untenable.

Firstly, the specific immune cells that destroy the major immune cells infected by HIV, and eventually make impossible the working of the immune system as a whole, perform precisely what Derrida says of autoimmunity, which "consists for a living organism [...] of protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system" (Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 73, n27).

Secondly, the fact that the virus keeps mutating and remutating all along, in an unforeseeable, incalculable way, and without ever being identifiable once and for all, parallels the unidentifiable, anonymous character of terror. As Derrida puts it, "From now on, the nuclear threat, the 'total' threat, no longer comes from a state but from anonymous forces that are absolutely unforeseeable and incalculable" (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 150-51).

Thirdly, since the virus lives and reproduces itself within the body's own immune cells, that is, within the immune system itself, it does not leave the boundary between self and other, friend and foe intact. It acts, precisely, as a "third term" between friend and foe. As Derrida also claims in The Rhetoric of Drugs, the virus "belongs neither to life nor death", and "may always already have broken into any 'intersubjective' trajectory" (Derrida, The Rhetoric of Drugs, 251, my emphasis). There is no virus without the immune cells that act as hosts, in other words, there is no other without the self. This is exactly the reason why the immune system, infected by HIV, has to destroy itself, which destruction obviously entails both the death of the other, the virus, and the death of (the protective system of) the self.

Fourthly, the way in which the biological body reacts to the attack of HIV, and the desparate attempts it makes to neutralise it, bears uncanny resemblances to the way in which the political body destroys itself while wanting to protect itself in Derrida's account of autoimmunity. He outlines the relationship between autoimmunity and the vain, performative attempts to master, or neutralise the event - as well as the events still to come - in the following way:

all these efforts to attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism (to deny, repress, or forget it, to get over it) are but so many desperate attempts. And so many autoimmunitary movements. Which produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome. What will never let itself be forgotten is thus the perverse effect of the autoimmunitary itself. [Derrida, Autoimmunity, 99]

The more the immune system struggles to overcome traumatism, the more it becomes entangled with it, and the more it becomes exhausted by the vain struggle to neutralise it. In fact, one of the most conspicuous parallels between the immune system's reaction to HIV infection, and the political community's reaction to terrorism is their common, lethal exhaustion in trying to suppress or repress the trauma caused, and still to come.

However, whereas in Derrida's version of autoimmunity, the protective system (of democracy) destroys itself in order to make itself vulnerable ("a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, 'itself' works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its 'own' immunity" [Derrida, Autoimmunity, 94, my emphasis]), in the medical definition of AIDS, the immune system destroys itself in order to eliminate the virus. It is this virus that, at first sight, appears to parallel Derrida's "terrorist", who cannot live without (as both outside of, and deprived of) the system it invades. As Derrida puts it:

the aggression [...] comes, as from the inside, from forces that are apparently without any force of their own but that are able to find the means, through ruse and the implementation of high-tech knowledge, to get hold of an American weapon in an American city on the ground of an American airport [...] these hijackers incorporate, so to speak, two suicides in one: their own (and one will remain forever defenseless in the face of a suicidal, autoimmunitary aggression - and that is what terrorizes most) but also the suicide of those who welcomed, armed, and trained them. [Derrida, Autoimmunity, 95, my emphasis]

And although the double suicide implied in the "autoimmunitary aggression" of the terrorists seems to parallel the double suicide of the immune system infected by HIV (which destroys both itself and the virus), in Derrida's account, the viral logic of terrorism is predicated upon that of autoimmunity: "terrorism" has always the potential to happen when democracy, as something necessarily autoimmune, is in place. As if the openness resulting from the autoimmunity (the vulnerability) of democracy always potentially entailed the unforeseeable arrival of the virus, of any virus. In this sense, Derrida seems to imply that infection is the potential risk generated by a protective system that is always already autoimmune.

In the same vein, what Derrida calls an (always necessary) "autoimmunitary perversion" is very much like (and I emphasise like again, because we also have to see the difference in the similarity) having unprotected sex and then welcome its risks: its potentially deadly or potentially happy consequences. The aporia that thus seems to emerge from Derrida's writings is the unconditional imperative of opening up to a potentially lethal and potentially life-giving contact with the "Other" - which "unconditionality", as he says, "is a frightening thing, it's scary" (Derrida, Politics and Friendship). Consequently, the imperative of unconditional opening becomes always perverted by the conditionality of the same opening: the possibility of the arrival of HIV through sex, or better to say, love, is, indeed, much less welcomed by Derrida than what the imperative of a politics of autoimmunity (unconditionally conditioned by an ethics of "hospitality") would dictate. According to the argument presented in The Rhetoric of Drugs, HIV, which is at the heart of any rapport ( Rapport), at the heart of any intersubjectivity, of any bond, is "the mortal and indestructible trace of the third party". However, this "third" does not act as a "third term" between friend and foe, this "third party" is not understood as "the condition of the symbolic and the law", nor is it "the Third" that turns ethics into politics. On the contrary: this "third party" is interpreted as social disconnection, as something that has become "fatally installed at the heart of the social bond" (Derrida, The Rhetoric of Drugs, 251). As he goes on to say, anticipating, again, his argument on the traumas of terrorism (past and still to come),

even should humanity some day come to control the virus [...] still, even in the most unconscious symbolic zones, the traumatism has irreversibly affected our experience of desire and of what we blithely call intersubjectivity, the relation to the alter ego, and so forth [ibid.]

At the same time, Derrida also warns us: the politicization of the virus is able to bring forth the worst political violence. He would starkly oppose all identification between terrorists (humans) and a virus, or terror and AIDS. First, the analogy between the terrorist and the virus is always already undermined by the human agency he attributes to terror: the terrorists "are able to find the means, through ruse and the implementation of high-tech knowledge, to get hold of an American weapon" (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 95). Without the framework offered by autoimmunity, this acknowledgment of the human agency of the terrorists would immediately amount to the politicisation of the virus, entailing democracy's entanglement in a xenophobic discourse. However, the (non-)concept of autoimmunity allows for the recognition that a discourse simply shifting the responsibility from "us" (who refuse to acknowledge that democracy always contains the seeds of its own undoing) to "them" (who actively attacked "us" through "ruse") would only show up its own failure to actively embrace the ethical position of passivity in the face of the Other. This might be one of the reasons why one has to have recourse to the metaphor of autoimmunity, which, for Derrida, implies a body, a community always open to its own undoing, to an undoing that may happen, from within, even without enemies outside. Autoimmunity thus becomes a catachresis that points to the question of the relationship between politikon and bios, but averts the terrifying consequences, so well remarked by Derrida, of any transfer between viruses and humans, as well as that of any parallel between the functioning of the self-protective systems of biological and political bodies.

COHEN'S MODEL OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

Yet, one might still ask the question, as Mitchell did, whether an ethical community can actually "learn" anything from the functioning of the biological body. According to the latest findings of immunology, the processes of natural autoimmunity indicate that the binary between self-protection and auto-destruction is untenable. Derrida also points to the non-contradictory relation between the immune and what threatens it, when he evokes, for instance, the double meaning of the term salut as both greeting (the hospitality of visitation) and salvation (immunity, health, security) in an analysis of Heidegger: "the relation is neither one of exteriority nor one of simple contradiction. I would say the same about the relationship between immunity and autoimmunity" (Derrida, Rogues, 114).

Immunologists also maintain that the task of the healthy immune system is to find "appropriate responses" to changes and to keep the system "fit". In fact, it is precisely the term "change" that introduces a third term between self and non-self in recent discourses of immunology. Further, as Cohen argues, the immune system, rather than giving one singular response to change, "orchestrates the spectrum of responses dynamically over time according to the shifting needs." In other words, the self-protective system of the body finds appropriate responses to changes, which responses always correspond to the extent to which the change affects the system's "fitness." As Cohen claims, "The immune system is about fitness. [...] The answer is not a single discrimination [between self and non-self], but a series of ongoing discriminations" (Cohen, The Cognitive Paradigm..., 216, my emphasis). Thirdly, the physical body makes the series of discriminations that generate responses always appropriate to the given situation by either " dialogue" or " correspondence." As the immunologist puts it, "I think it is fitting to talk about an immune dialogue because the immune system continuously exchanges molecular signals with its interlocutor, the body" (Cohen, The Cognitive Paradigm..., 217). "Correspondence," on the other hand, implies that

each cell type is led by the responses of the other cell types to respond with more or less vigor, and with different response molecules and behaviors. The immune system, in short, responds to its own responses [...] This is correspondence. Correspondence is decision-making by committee. [Cohen, The Cognitive Paradigm..., 218]

The decisions that the "committee" make are, therefore, always singular, and are always dependent upon the given context. Consequently, even though Cohen does not deny the fact that the immune system, which is endowed with "memory cells," learns how to give appropriate responses to changes, the decisions it makes are always singular and are always orchestrated dynamically, according to the shifting needs.

In the Derridean analysis of the body politic, the "fitness" of the system would amount to "peace," best defined as "tolerant cohabitation" (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 127). Putting aside, for a moment, Derrida's misgivings concerning tolerance, it is worth pursuing Cohen's argument. His focus on processes, appropriate responses and dialogic negotiations, rather than one immediate reaction and one singular decision, may already point towards Derrida's emphasis on the necessity of responsible and irreducibly singular decision s, which are not dictated by any normative program (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 132). This, however, would also necessitate a universal alliance or solidarity that extends well beyond the interests of the nation-state: transformations, and as yet unheard-of forms of shared and limited sovereignty (Derrida, Autoimmunity, 131). As he puts it:

in a context that is each time singular, where the respectful attention paid to singularity is not relativist but universalizable and rational, responsibility would consist in orienting oneself without any determinative knowledge of the rule. To be responsible, to keep within reason, would be to invent maxims of transaction for deciding between two just as rational and universal but contradictory exigencies of reason as well as its enlightenment. The invention of these maxims resembles the poetic invention of an idiom whose singularity would not yield to any nationalism, not even a European nationalism-even if, as I would like to believe, within today's geopolitical landscape, a new thinking and a previously unencountered destination of Europe, along with another responsibility for Europe, are being called on to give a new chance to this idiom. Beyond all Eurocentrism. [Derrida, Autoimmunity, 158]

Consequently, it is only by considering the physical body as a metaphor for a universal community understood as a web of carefully orchestrated decisions, responses and responsibilities, which respect the always shifting needs, that the analogy between the animate and the political bodies can escape the trap of biologism. Still, as has been suggested all along, the metaphorical transfers between the processes of biological body and those of the political community are far from being easy ones. These are difficult transfers, transfers that respect distinctions more than similarities. For "democracy," as Nancy puts it, "is not figurable," after all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Marin P. et al. Autoimmune diseases. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ autoimmunediseases.html.

Cohen, Irun R. "Discrimination and Dialogue in the Immune System." Seminars in Immunology 12 (2000).

---. "The Cognitive Paradigm and the Immunological Homunculus." Immunology Today (1992).

---. The Helen and Morris Mauerberger Professor of Immunology. http://www. weizmann.ac.il/immunology/CohenPage.html.

De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida." In Philosophy in a Time of Terror, ed. Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

---. "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Reason Alone." In Religion. Cambridge: Polity. 1998.

---. "The Rhetoric of Drugs." In Points: Interviews, 1974-1994, edited by Elisabeth Weber. Translated by Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

---. Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with Jacques Derrida. http://www. livingphilosophy.org/Derrida-politics-friendship.htm.

---. Rogues. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Eisenbach, Lee, and El-Shami, Khaled M. "Antigen Specific Anti-Tumour Vaccination: Immunotherapy versus Autoimmunity." In Cancer and Autoimmunity, eds. Yehuda Shoenfeld and M. Eric Gershwin. Elsevier: Amsterdam, 2000.

Falus, András et al. Az immunológia alapjai. Budapest: Semmelweis, 2007.

Kronenberg, Mitchell et al. Regulation of Immunity by Self-Reactive T Cells. http:// www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7042/full/nature03725.html.

Miller, J. Hillis. "Derrida Enisled." Critical Inquiry 33/2 (Winter 2007).

---. "Derrida's Politics of Autoimmunity." Discourse 30/1-2 (Spring-Winter, 2008).

Mitchell, W. J. T. Picturing Terror: Derrida's Autoimmunity. http://www.cardozo lawreview.com/content/27-2/MITCHELL.WEBSITE.pdf.

Naas, Michael. Derrida from Now On. New York: Fordham University Press 2008.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Truth of Democracy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

Sontag, Susan. Aids and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.

Thomson, Alex. What's to Become of 'Democracy to Come'? http://pmc.iath.virginia. edu/text-only/issue.505/15.3thomson.txt.

NOTES

[4] Even though Derrida explicitly refers to biology and the life sciences, J. Hillis Miller warns us that biologists actually borrowed the terminology from the social world: „the term Immune was originally a social term applying to those, for instance the clergy, who were in one way or another exempt from the ordinary citizen's obligations. They were immune, indemnified, just as those who took sanctuary in a church were immune from arrest or just as legislators in some democracies today are immune from prosecution for some crimes. Biologists appropriated an entire social and political vocabulary, including the notion of aliens to the community or foreign invaders who must be repelled, to name the operation of the body's immune system and the catastrophe of autoimmunity," J. Hillis Miller, "Derrida Enisled," Critical Inquiry 33/2 (Winter 2007): 248-76. The present paper shall take at face value Derrida's own claims, and focus on the biological meaning of the term. ←

[5] A rare exception can be found in W. J. T. Mitchell, Picturing Terror: Derrida's Autoimmunity, http://www.cardozolawreview.com/content/27-2/MITCHELL.WEBSITE.pdf. ←

[12] "Democracy" itself is a highly saturated concept in Derrida's writings. As he argues: "it is precisely the concept of democracy itself, in its univocal and proper meaning, that is presently and forever lacking" (Derrida, Rogues, 34). It has to be mentioned, however, that democracy is, among others, precisely the right to self-questioning, the questioning of democracy itself, which equally follows the logic of autoimmunity: "When I seemed to imply that it was necessary already to live in a democracy in order for anyone not just to have access to the clear and univocal meaning of this word whose semantic range is so overdetermined (and all the more so, as we have confirmed, inasmuch as it oscillates between an excess and a lack or default of meaning, inasmuch as it is excessive, so to speak, by default), but in order for anyone to be able to debate and continuously discuss it, this seemed already rather circular and contradictory: what meaning can be given to this right to discuss freely the meaning of a word, and to do so in the name of a name that is at the very least supposed to entail the right of anyone to determine and continuously discuss the meaning of the word in question? Especially when the right thus implied entails the right to self-critique - another form of autoimmunity - as an essential, original, constitutive, and specific possibility of the democratic, indeed as its very historicity, an intrinsic historicity that it shares with no other regime?" (Derrida, Rogues, 72). ←

[14] This problem is also treated by Naas, Derrida from Now On, 136-37. On the logic of such metaphorical transfers and the way they lead to "naming", see also Paul de Man on Rousseau's "giant", in Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 150-51. ←

[16] I owe special thanks to Dr. Laszlo Timár, Professor of Infectology at Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary, for giving me all the information on the workings of the immune system. ←

[18] Irun R. Cohen, "The cognitive paradigm and the immunological homunculus," Immunology Today 13 (1992): 490-94. See also Falus András et al., Az immunológia alapjai (Budapest: Semmelweis, 2007), 175. ←

[19] As Eisenbach argues, "immune reaction to normal tissue antigens can lead to cancer regression," see Lee Eisenbach and Khaled M. El-Shami, "Antigen Specific Anti-Tumour Vaccination: Immunotherapy versus Autoimmunity," in Cancer and Autoimmunity, eds. Yehuda Shoenfeld and M. Eric Gershwin (Elsevier: Amsterdam, 2000), 403. Or, as Cohen puts it: "Tumor antigens, for the most part, are normal self antigens, and tumor immunity is mostly autoimmunity," Irun R. Cohen, "Discrimination and dialogue in the immune system," Seminars in Immunology 12 (2000): 215-19. ←

[22] This, of course, contrasts the tenets of immunology, which posit "natural autoimmunity" as part of the "healthy immune system" and necessary for our survival, while "autoimmune disease" is regarded as something "abnormal", as an excess of "natural autoimmunity", that destroys the body's own tissues. ←

[23] The references to the works of Irun Cohen could seem somewhat arbitrary for those outside the field of immunology. However, Cohen is a leading figure in the latest development in the field, cf. Irun R. Cohen, The Helen and Morris Mauerberger Professor of Immunology, http://www.weizmann.ac. il/immunology/CohenPage.html. ←

[24] Mitchell, who equally investigates the political implications of the metaphor of the immune system argues that "one clue [to fight terrorism] is offered by the metaphor (and the literal operations) of the immune system itself. [...] the immune system [...] learns by "clonal selection", the production of antibodies which mirror the invading antigens and bond with them, killing them. The implications of this image are quite clear. The appropriate strategy for international terrorism is not war [...] The best strategy is highly targeted and intelligent intelligence, [...] infiltrators who can simulate the enemy, who speak his language, understand, sympathize - who can clone themselves as "friends" of the terrorists," Mitchell, Picturing Terror, 6. ←

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The concept of autoimmunity appears first in Derrida's explicitly political writings, which, after 9/11, have become thoroughly entangled with the problematics of "terror." In Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides, he defines the autoimmunitary processes of democracy as follows: "As we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi- suicidal fashion, 'itself' works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its 'own' immunity."

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James Lovelock's hypothesis that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.

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The study of planetary habitability is partly based upon extrapolation from knowledge of the Earth's conditions, as the Earth is the only planet currently known to harbour life (The Blue Marble, 1972 Apollo 17 photograph).

The Gaia hypothesis (), also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.

The Gaia hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. Following the suggestion by his neighbour, novelist William Golding, Lovelock named the hypothesis after Gaia, the primordial deity who personified the Earth in Greek mythology. In 2006, the Geological Society of London awarded Lovelock the Wollaston Medal in part for his work on the Gaia hypothesis.

Topics related to the hypothesis include how the biosphere and the evolution of organisms affect the stability of global temperature, salinity of seawater, atmospheric oxygen levels, the maintenance of a hydrosphere of liquid water and other environmental variables that affect the habitability of Earth.

The Gaia hypothesis was initially criticized for being teleological and against the principles of natural selection, but later refinements aligned the Gaia hypothesis with ideas from fields such as Earth system science, biogeochemistry and systems ecology. Even so, the Gaia hypothesis continues to attract criticism, and today many scientists consider it to be only weakly supported by, or at odds with, the available evidence.

Gaian hypotheses suggest that organisms co-evolve with their environment: that is, they "influence their abiotic environment, and that environment in turn influences the biota by Darwinian process". Lovelock (1995) gave evidence of this in his second book, Ages of Gaia, showing the evolution from the world of the early thermo-acido-philic and methanogenic bacteria towards the oxygen-enriched atmosphere today that supports more complex life.

A reduced version of the hypothesis has been called "influential Gaia" in "Directed Evolution of the Biosphere: Biogeochemical Selection or Gaia?" by Andrei G. Lapenis, which states the biota influence certain aspects of the abiotic world, e.g. temperature and atmosphere. This is not the work of an individual but a collective of Russian scientific research that was combined into this peer-reviewed publication. It states the coevolution of life and the environment through "micro-forces" and biogeochemical processes. An example is how the activity of photosynthetic bacteria during Precambrian times completely modified the Earth atmosphere to turn it aerobic, and thus supports the evolution of life (in particular eukaryotic life).

Since barriers existed throughout the twentieth century between Russia and the rest of the world, it is only relatively recently that the early Russian scientists who introduced concepts overlapping the Gaia paradigm have become better known to the Western scientific community. These scientists include Piotr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) (although he spent much of his professional life outside Russia), Rafail Vasil'evich Rizpolozhensky (1862 - c. 1922), Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945), and Vladimir Alexandrovich Kostitzin (1886-1963).

Biologists and Earth scientists usually view the factors that stabilize the characteristics of a period as an undirected emergent property or entelechy of the system; as each individual species pursues its own self-interest, for example, their combined actions may have counterbalancing effects on environmental change. Opponents of this view sometimes reference examples of events that resulted in dramatic change rather than stable equilibrium, such as the conversion of the Earth's atmosphere from a reducing environment to an oxygen-rich one at the end of the Archaean and the beginning of the Proterozoic periods.

Less accepted versions of the hypothesis claim that changes in the biosphere are brought about through the coordination of living organisms and maintain those conditions through homeostasis. In some versions of Gaia philosophy, all lifeforms are considered part of one single living planetary being called Gaia. In this view, the atmosphere, the seas and the terrestrial crust would be results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the coevolving diversity of living organisms.

The Gaia paradigm was an influence on the deep ecology movement.

The Gaia hypothesis posits that the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. The hypothesis contends that this system as a whole, called Gaia, seeks a physical and chemical environment optimal for contemporary life.

Gaia evolves through a cybernetic feedback system operated by the biota, leading to broad stabilization of the conditions of habitability in a full homeostasis. Many processes in the Earth's surface, essential for the conditions of life, depend on the interaction of living forms, especially microorganisms, with inorganic elements. These processes establish a global control system that regulates Earth's surface temperature, atmosphere composition and ocean salinity, powered by the global thermodynamic disequilibrium state of the Earth system.

The existence of a planetary homeostasis influenced by living forms had been observed previously in the field of biogeochemistry, and it is being investigated also in other fields like Earth system science. The originality of the Gaia hypothesis relies on the assessment that such homeostatic balance is actively pursued with the goal of keeping the optimal conditions for life, even when terrestrial or external events menace them.

Rob Rohde's palaeotemperature graphs

Since life started on Earth, the energy provided by the Sun has increased by 25% to 30%; however, the surface temperature of the planet has remained within the levels of habitability, reaching quite regular low and high margins. Lovelock has also hypothesised that methanogens produced elevated levels of methane in the early atmosphere, giving a situation similar to that found in petrochemical smog, similar in some respects to the atmosphere on Titan. This, he suggests, helped to screen out ultraviolet light until the formation of the ozone layer, maintaining a degree of homeostasis. However, the Snowball Earth research has suggested that "oxygen shocks" and reduced methane levels led, during the Huronian, Sturtian and Marinoan/ Varanger Ice Ages, to a world that very nearly became a solid "snowball". These epochs are evidence against the ability of the pre Phanerozoic biosphere to fully self-regulate.

Processing of the greenhouse gas CO 2, explained below, plays a critical role in the maintenance of the Earth temperature within the limits of habitability.

The CLAW hypothesis, inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, proposes a feedback loop that operates between ocean ecosystems and the Earth's climate. The hypothesis specifically proposes that particular phytoplankton that produce dimethyl sulfide are responsive to variations in climate forcing, and that these responses lead to a negative feedback loop that acts to stabilise the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere.

Currently the increase in human population and the environmental impact of their activities, such as the multiplication of greenhouse gases may cause negative feedbacks in the environment to become positive feedback. Lovelock has stated that this could bring an extremely accelerated global warming, but he has since stated the effects will likely occur more slowly.

Daisyworld simulations

Plots from a standard black and white Daisyworld simulation

In response to the criticism that the Gaia hypothesis seemingly required unrealistic group selection and cooperation between organisms, James Lovelock and Andrew Watson developed a mathematical model, Daisyworld, in which ecological competition underpinned planetary temperature regulation.

Daisyworld examines the energy budget of a planet populated by two different types of plants, black daisies and white daisies, which are assumed to occupy a significant portion of the surface. The colour of the daisies influences the albedo of the planet such that black daisies absorb more light and warm the planet, while white daisies reflect more light and cool the planet. The black daisies are assumed to grow and reproduce best at a lower temperature, while the white daisies are assumed to thrive best at a higher temperature. As the temperature rises closer to the value the white daisies like, the white daisies outreproduce the black daisies, leading to a larger percentage of white surface, and more sunlight is reflected, reducing the heat input and eventually cooling the planet. Conversely, as the temperature falls, the black daisies outreproduce the white daisies, absorbing more sunlight and warming the planet. The temperature will thus converge to the value at which the reproductive rates of the plants are equal.

Lovelock and Watson showed that, over a limited range of conditions, this negative feedback due to competition can stabilize the planet's temperature at a value which supports life, if the energy output of the Sun changes, while a planet without life would show wide temperature changes. The percentage of white and black daisies will continually change to keep the temperature at the value at which the plants' reproductive rates are equal, allowing both life forms to thrive.

It has been suggested that the results were predictable because Lovelock and Watson selected examples that produced the responses they desired.

Ocean salinity has been constant at about 3.5% for a very long time. Salinity stability in oceanic environments is important as most cells require a rather constant salinity and do not generally tolerate values above 5%. The constant ocean salinity was a long-standing mystery, because no process counterbalancing the salt influx from rivers was known. Recently it was suggested that salinity may also be strongly influenced by seawater circulation through hot basaltic rocks, and emerging as hot water vents on mid-ocean ridges. However, the composition of seawater is far from equilibrium, and it is difficult to explain this fact without the influence of organic processes. One suggested explanation lies in the formation of salt plains throughout Earth's history. It is hypothesized that these are created by bacterial colonies that fix ions and heavy metals during their life processes.

In the biogeochemical processes of Earth, sources and sinks are the movement of elements. The composition of salt ions within our oceans and seas is: sodium (Na+), chlorine (Cl −), sulfate (SO 4 2−), magnesium (Mg 2+), calcium (Ca 2+) and potassium (K+). The elements that comprise salinity do not readily change and are a conservative property of seawater. There are many mechanisms that change salinity from a particulate form to a dissolved form and back. Considering the metallic composition of iron sources across a multifaceted grid of thermomagnetic design, not only would the movement of elements hypothetically help restructure the movement of ions, electrons, and the like, but would also potentially and inexplicably assist in balancing the magnetic bodies of the Earth's geomagnetic field. The known sources of sodium i.e. salts are when weathering, erosion, and dissolution of rocks are transported into rivers and deposited into the oceans.

The Mediterranean Sea as being Gaia's kidney is found ( here) by Kenneth J. Hsu, a correspondence author in 2001. Hsu suggests the " desiccation" of the Mediterranean is evidence of a functioning Gaia "kidney". In this and earlier suggested cases, it is plate movements and physics, not biology, which performs the regulation. Earlier "kidney functions" were performed during the " deposition of the Cretaceous ( South Atlantic), Jurassic ( Gulf of Mexico), Permo-Triassic ( Europe), Devonian ( Canada), and Cambrian/ Precambrian ( Gondwana) saline giants."

Levels of gases in the atmosphere in 420,000 years of ice core data from Vostok, Antarctica research station. Current period is at the left.

The Gaia theorem states that the Earth's atmospheric composition is kept at a dynamically steady state by the presence of life. The atmospheric composition provides the conditions that contemporary life has adapted to. All the atmospheric gases other than noble gases present in the atmosphere are either made by organisms or processed by them.

The stability of the atmosphere in Earth is not a consequence of chemical equilibrium. Oxygen is a reactive compound, and should eventually combine with gases and minerals of the Earth's atmosphere and crust. Oxygen only began to persist in the atmosphere in small quantities about 50 million years before the start of the Great Oxygenation Event. Since the start of the Cambrian period, atmospheric oxygen concentrations have fluctuated between 15% and 35% of atmospheric volume. Traces of methane (at an amount of 100,000 tonnes produced per year) should not exist, as methane is combustible in an oxygen atmosphere.

Dry air in the atmosphere of Earth contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases including methane. Lovelock originally speculated that concentrations of oxygen above about 25% would increase the frequency of wildfires and conflagration of forests. This mechanism, however, would not raise oxygen levels if they became too low. If plants can be shown to robustly over-produce O 2 then perhaps only the high oxygen forest fires regulator is necessary. Recent work on the findings of fire-caused charcoal in Carboniferous and Cretaceous coal measures, in geologic periods when O 2 did exceed 25%, has supported Lovelock's contention.[citation needed ]

Gaia scientists see the participation of living organisms in the carbon cycle as one of the complex processes that maintain conditions suitable for life. The only significant natural source of atmospheric carbon dioxide () is volcanic activity, while the only significant removal is through the precipitation of carbonate rocks. Carbon precipitation, solution and fixation are influenced by the bacteria and plant roots in soils, where they improve gaseous circulation, or in coral reefs, where calcium carbonate is deposited as a solid on the sea floor. Calcium carbonate is used by living organisms to manufacture carbonaceous tests and shells. Once dead, the living organisms' shells fall. Some arrive at the bottom of shallow seas where the heat and pressure of burial, and/or the forces of plate tectonics, eventually convert them to deposits of chalk and limestone. Much of the falling dead shells, however, redissolve into the ocean below the carbon compensation depth.

One of these organisms is Emiliania huxleyi, an abundant coccolithophore algae which may have a role in the formation of clouds. CO 2 excess is compensated by an increase of coccolithophorid life, increasing the amount of CO 2 locked in the ocean floor. Coccolithophorids, if the CLAW Hypothesis turns out to be supported (see "Regulation of Global Surface Temperature" above), could help increase the cloud cover, hence control the surface temperature, help cool the whole planet and favor precipitation necessary for terrestrial plants.[citation needed ] Lately the atmospheric CO 2 concentration has increased and there is some evidence that concentrations of ocean algal blooms are also increasing.

Lichen and other organisms accelerate the weathering of rocks in the surface, while the decomposition of rocks also happens faster in the soil, thanks to the activity of roots, fungi, bacteria and subterranean animals. The flow of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the soil is therefore regulated with the help of living organisms. When CO 2 levels rise in the atmosphere the temperature increases and plants grow. This growth brings higher consumption of CO 2 by the plants, who process it into the soil, removing it from the atmosphere.

Earthrise taken from Apollo 8 by astronaut William Anders, December 24, 1968

The idea of the Earth as an integrated whole, a living being, has a long tradition. The mythical Gaia was the primal Greek goddess personifying the Earth, the Greek version of " Mother Nature" (from Ge = Earth, and Aia = PIE grandmother), or the Earth Mother. James Lovelock gave this name to his hypothesis after a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same village as Lovelock at the time ( Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, UK). Golding's advice was based on Gea, an alternative spelling for the name of the Greek goddess, which is used as prefix in geology, geophysics and geochemistry. Golding later made reference to Gaia in his Nobel prize acceptance speech.

In the eighteenth century, as geology consolidated as a modern science, James Hutton maintained that geological and biological processes are interlinked. Later, the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt recognized the coevolution of living organisms, climate, and Earth's crust. In the twentieth century, Vladimir Vernadsky formulated a theory of Earth's development that is now one of the foundations of ecology. Vernadsky was a Ukrainian geochemist and was one of the first scientists to recognize that the oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere result from biological processes. During the 1920s he published works arguing that living organisms could reshape the planet as surely as any physical force. Vernadsky was a pioneer of the scientific bases for the environmental sciences. His visionary pronouncements were not widely accepted in the West, and some decades later the Gaia hypothesis received the same type of initial resistance from the scientific community.

Also in the turn to the 20th century Aldo Leopold, pioneer in the development of modern environmental ethics and in the movement for wilderness conservation, suggested a living Earth in his biocentric or holistic ethics regarding land.

It is at least not impossible to regard the earth's parts-soil, mountains, rivers, atmosphere etc,-as organs or parts of organs of a coordinated whole, each part with its definite function. And if we could see this whole, as a whole, through a great period of time, we might perceive not only organs with coordinated functions, but possibly also that process of consumption as replacement which in biology we call metabolism, or growth. In such case we would have all the visible attributes of a living thing, which we do not realize to be such because it is too big, and its life processes too slow.

Another influence for the Gaia hypothesis and the environmental movement in general came as a side effect of the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. During the 1960s, the first humans in space could see how the Earth looked as a whole. The photograph taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission became, through the Overview Effect an early symbol for the global ecology movement.

James Lovelock, 2005

Lovelock started defining the idea of a self-regulating Earth controlled by the community of living organisms in September 1965, while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California on methods of detecting life on Mars. The first paper to mention it was Planetary Atmospheres: Compositional and other Changes Associated with the Presence of Life, co-authored with C.E. Giffin. A main concept was that life could be detected in a planetary scale by the chemical composition of the atmosphere. According to the data gathered by the Pic du Midi observatory, planets like Mars or Venus had atmospheres in chemical equilibrium. This difference with the Earth atmosphere was considered to be a proof that there was no life in these planets.

Lovelock formulated the Gaia Hypothesis in journal articles in 1972 and 1974, followed by a popularizing 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. An article in the New Scientist of February 6, 1975, and a popular book length version of the hypothesis, published in 1979 as The Quest for Gaia, began to attract scientific and critical attention.

Lovelock called it first the Earth feedback hypothesis, and it was a way to explain the fact that combinations of chemicals including oxygen and methane persist in stable concentrations in the atmosphere of the Earth. Lovelock suggested detecting such combinations in other planets' atmospheres as a relatively reliable and cheap way to detect life.

Lynn Margulis

Later, other relationships such as sea creatures producing sulfur and iodine in approximately the same quantities as required by land creatures emerged and helped bolster the hypothesis.

In 1971 microbiologist Dr. Lynn Margulis joined Lovelock in the effort of fleshing out the initial hypothesis into scientifically proven concepts, contributing her knowledge about how microbes affect the atmosphere and the different layers in the surface of the planet. The American biologist had also awakened criticism from the scientific community with her advocacy of the theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory, nowadays accepted. Margulis dedicated the last of eight chapters in her book, The Symbiotic Planet, to Gaia. However, she objected to the widespread personification of Gaia and stressed that Gaia is "not an organism", but "an emergent property of interaction among organisms". She defined Gaia as "the series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the Earth's surface. Period". The book's most memorable "slogan" was actually quipped by a student of Margulis'.

James Lovelock called his first proposal the Gaia hypothesis but has also used the term Gaia theory. Lovelock states that the initial formulation was based on observation, but still lacked a scientific explanation. The Gaia hypothesis has since been supported by a number of scientific experiments and provided a number of useful predictions.

In 1985, the first public symposium on the Gaia hypothesis, Is The Earth a Living Organism? was held at University of Massachusetts Amherst, August 1-6. The principal sponsor was the National Audubon Society. Speakers included James Lovelock, George Wald, Mary Catherine Bateson, Lewis Thomas, John Todd, Donald Michael, Christopher Bird, Thomas Berry, David Abram, Michael Cohen, and William Fields. Some 500 people attended.

In 1988, climatologist Stephen Schneider organised a conference of the American Geophysical Union. The first Chapman Conference on Gaia, was held in San Diego, California on March 7, 1988.

During the "philosophical foundations" session of the conference, David Abram spoke on the influence of metaphor in science, and of the Gaia hypothesis as offering a new and potentially game-changing metaphorics, while James Kirchner criticised the Gaia hypothesis for its imprecision. Kirchner claimed that Lovelock and Margulis had not presented one Gaia hypothesis, but four:

CoEvolutionary Gaia: that life and the environment had evolved in a coupled way. Kirchner claimed that this was already accepted scientifically and was not new.

Homeostatic Gaia: that life maintained the stability of the natural environment, and that this stability enabled life to continue to exist.

Geophysical Gaia: that the Gaia hypothesis generated interest in geophysical cycles and therefore led to interesting new research in terrestrial geophysical dynamics.

Optimising Gaia: that Gaia shaped the planet in a way that made it an optimal environment for life as a whole. Kirchner claimed that this was not testable and therefore was not scientific.

Of Homeostatic Gaia, Kirchner recognised two alternatives. "Weak Gaia" asserted that life tends to make the environment stable for the flourishing of all life. "Strong Gaia" according to Kirchner, asserted that life tends to make the environment stable, to enable the flourishing of all life. Strong Gaia, Kirchner claimed, was untestable and therefore not scientific.

Lovelock and other Gaia-supporting scientists, however, did attempt to disprove the claim that the hypothesis is not scientific because it is impossible to test it by controlled experiment. For example, against the charge that Gaia was teleological, Lovelock and Andrew Watson offered the Daisyworld Model (and its modifications, above) as evidence against most of these criticisms. Lovelock said that the Daisyworld model "demonstrates that self-regulation of the global environment can emerge from competition amongst types of life altering their local environment in different ways".

Lovelock was careful to present a version of the Gaia hypothesis that had no claim that Gaia intentionally or consciously maintained the complex balance in her environment that life needed to survive. It would appear that the claim that Gaia acts "intentionally" was a statement in his popular initial book and was not meant to be taken literally. This new statement of the Gaia hypothesis was more acceptable to the scientific community. Most accusations of teleologism ceased, following this conference.[citation needed ]

By the time of the 2nd Chapman Conference on the Gaia Hypothesis, held at Valencia, Spain, on 23 June 2000, the situation had changed significantly. Rather than a discussion of the Gaian teleological views, or "types" of Gaia hypotheses, the focus was upon the specific mechanisms by which basic short term homeostasis was maintained within a framework of significant evolutionary long term structural change.

The major questions were:

"How has the global biogeochemical/climate system called Gaia changed in time? What is its history? Can Gaia maintain stability of the system at one time scale but still undergo vectorial change at longer time scales? How can the geologic record be used to examine these questions?"

"What is the structure of Gaia? Are the feedbacks sufficiently strong to influence the evolution of climate? Are there parts of the system determined pragmatically by whatever disciplinary study is being undertaken at any given time or are there a set of parts that should be taken as most true for understanding Gaia as containing evolving organisms over time? What are the feedbacks among these different parts of the Gaian system, and what does the near closure of matter mean for the structure of Gaia as a global ecosystem and for the productivity of life?"

"How do models of Gaian processes and phenomena relate to reality and how do they help address and understand Gaia? How do results from Daisyworld transfer to the real world? What are the main candidates for "daisies"? Does it matter for Gaia theory whether we find daisies or not? How should we be searching for daisies, and should we intensify the search? How can Gaian mechanisms be collaborated with using process models or global models of the climate system that include the biota and allow for chemical cycling?"

In 1997, Tyler Volk argued that a Gaian system is almost inevitably produced as a result of an evolution towards far-from-equilibrium homeostatic states that maximise entropy production, and Axel Kleidon (2004) agreed stating: "...homeostatic behavior can emerge from a state of MEP associated with the planetary albedo"; "...the resulting behavior of a symbiotic Earth at a state of MEP may well lead to near-homeostatic behavior of the Earth system on long time scales, as stated by the Gaia hypothesis". M. Staley (2002) has similarly proposed "...an alternative form of Gaia theory based on more traditional Darwinian principles... In [this] new approach, environmental regulation is a consequence of population dynamics. The role of selection is to favor organisms that are best adapted to prevailing environmental conditions. However, the environment is not a static backdrop for evolution, but is heavily influenced by the presence of living organisms. The resulting co-evolving dynamical process eventually leads to the convergence of equilibrium and optimal conditions".

A fourth international conference on the Gaia hypothesis, sponsored by the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority and others, was held in October 2006 at the Arlington, VA campus of George Mason University.

Martin Ogle, Chief Naturalist, for NVRPA, and long-time Gaia hypothesis proponent, organized the event. Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and long-time advocate of the Gaia hypothesis, was a keynote speaker. Among many other speakers: Tyler Volk, co-director of the Program in Earth and Environmental Science at New York University; Dr. Donald Aitken, Principal of Donald Aitken Associates; Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, President of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment; Robert Corell, Senior Fellow, Atmospheric Policy Program, American Meteorological Society and noted environmental ethicist, J. Baird Callicott.

After initially receiving little attention from scientists (from 1969 until 1977), thereafter for a period the initial Gaia hypothesis was criticized by a number of scientists, including Ford Doolittle, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Lovelock has said that because his hypothesis is named after a Greek goddess, and championed by many non-scientists, the Gaia hypothesis was interpreted as a neo-Pagan religion. Many scientists in particular also criticized the approach taken in his popular book Gaia, a New Look at Life on Earth for being teleological-a belief that things are purposeful and aimed towards a goal. Responding to this critique in 1990, Lovelock stated, "Nowhere in our writings do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves foresight or planning by the biota".

Stephen Jay Gould criticized Gaia as being "a metaphor, not a mechanism." He wanted to know the actual mechanisms by which self-regulating homeostasis was achieved. In his defense of Gaia, David Abram argues that Gould overlooked the fact that "mechanism", itself, is a metaphor-albeit an exceedingly common and often unrecognized metaphor-one which leads us to consider natural and living systems as though they were machines organized and built from outside (rather than as autopoietic or self-organizing phenomena). Mechanical metaphors, according to Abram, lead us to overlook the active or agentic quality of living entities, while the organismic metaphors of the Gaia hypothesis accentuate the active agency of both the biota and the biosphere as a whole. With regard to causality in Gaia, Lovelock argues that no single mechanism is responsible, that the connections between the various known mechanisms may never be known, that this is accepted in other fields of biology and ecology as a matter of course, and that specific hostility is reserved for his own hypothesis for other reasons.

Aside from clarifying his language and understanding of what is meant by a life form, Lovelock himself ascribes most of the criticism to a lack of understanding of non-linear mathematics by his critics, and a linearizing form of greedy reductionism in which all events have to be immediately ascribed to specific causes before the fact. He also states that most of his critics are biologists but that his hypothesis includes experiments in fields outside biology, and that some self-regulating phenomena may not be mathematically explainable.

Lovelock has suggested that global biological feedback mechanisms could evolve by natural selection, stating that organisms that improve their environment for their survival do better than those that damage their environment. However, in the early 1980s, W. Ford Doolittle and Richard Dawkins separately argued against this aspect of Gaia. Doolittle argued that nothing in the genome of individual organisms could provide the feedback mechanisms proposed by Lovelock, and therefore the Gaia hypothesis proposed no plausible mechanism and was unscientific. Dawkins meanwhile stated that for organisms to act in concert would require foresight and planning, which is contrary to the current scientific understanding of evolution. Like Doolittle, he also rejected the possibility that feedback loops could stabilize the system.

Margulis argued in 1999 that " Darwin's grand vision was not wrong, only incomplete. In accentuating the direct competition between individuals for resources as the primary selection mechanism, Darwin (and especially his followers) created the impression that the environment was simply a static arena". She wrote that the composition of the Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere are regulated around "set points" as in homeostasis, but those set points change with time.

Evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton called the concept of Gaia Copernican, adding that it would take another Newton to explain how Gaian self-regulation takes place through Darwinian natural selection.[better source needed ] More recently Ford Doolittle building on his and Inkpen's ITSNTS (It's The Song Not The Singer) proposal proposed that differential persistence can play a similar role to differential reproduction in evolution by natural selections, thereby providing a possible reconciliation between the theory of natural selection and the Gaia hypothesis.

The Gaia hypothesis continues to be broadly skeptically received by the scientific community. For instance, arguments both for and against it were laid out in the journal Climatic Change in 2002 and 2003. A significant argument raised against it are the many examples where life has had a detrimental or destabilising effect on the environment rather than acting to regulate it. Several recent books have criticised the Gaia hypothesis, expressing views ranging from "... the Gaia hypothesis lacks unambiguous observational support and has significant theoretical difficulties" to "Suspended uncomfortably between tainted metaphor, fact, and false science, I prefer to leave Gaia firmly in the background" to "The Gaia hypothesis is supported neither by evolutionary theory nor by the empirical evidence of the geological record". The CLAW hypothesis, initially suggested as a potential example of direct Gaian feedback, has subsequently been found to be less credible as understanding of cloud condensation nuclei has improved. In 2009 the Medea hypothesis was proposed: that life has highly detrimental (biocidal) impacts on planetary conditions, in direct opposition to the Gaia hypothesis.

In a 2013 book-length evaluation of the Gaia hypothesis considering modern evidence from across the various relevant disciplines, Toby Tyrrell concluded that: "I believe Gaia is a dead end. Its study has, however, generated many new and thought provoking questions. While rejecting Gaia, we can at the same time appreciate Lovelock's originality and breadth of vision, and recognize that his audacious concept has helped to stimulate many new ideas about the Earth, and to champion a holistic approach to studying it". Elsewhere he presents his conclusion "The Gaia hypothesis is not an accurate picture of how our world works". This statement needs to be understood as referring to the "strong" and "moderate" forms of Gaia-that the biota obeys a principle that works to make Earth optimal (strength 5) or favourable for life (strength 4) or that it works as a homeostatic mechanism (strength 3). The latter is the "weakest" form of Gaia that Lovelock has advocated. Tyrrell rejects it. However, he finds that the two weaker forms of Gaia-Coeveolutionary Gaia and Influential Gaia, which assert that there are close links between the evolution of life and the environment and that biology affects the physical and chemical environment-are both credible, but that it is not useful to use the term "Gaia" in this sense and that those two forms were already accepted and explained by the processes of natural selection and adaptation.

"The Gaia Hypothesis" is the title of the award-winning collection of short stories A Hipótese de Gaia by Jorge Reis-Sá, published in Portuguese in 2022.

Biocoenosis - Interacting organisms living together in a habitat

Earth science - Fields of natural science related to Earth

Environmentalism - Philosophy about Earth protection

Gaianism - Earth-centered philosophical, holistic, and spiritual belief

Global brain - Futuristic concept of a global interconnected network

Holism - A system as a whole, not just its parts

Hylozoism - Philosophical doctrine which holds that all matter is alive

Planetary boundaries - Limits not to be exceeded if humanity wants to survive in a safe ecosystem

SimEarth - 1990 video game

Spiritual ecology - Field in religion, conservation, and academia

Superorganism - Group of synergistic organisms

Jaworski, Helan (1928). Le Géon ou la Terre vivante. Paris: Librairie Gallimard.

Lovelock, James. The Independent. The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever, 16 January 2006.

Kleidon, Axel (2004). "Beyond Gaia: Thermodynamics of Life and Earth system functioning". Climatic Change. 66 (3): 271-319. doi:10.1023/B:CLIM.0000044616.34867.ec. S2CID 55295082.

Lovelock, James (2001). Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-860429-7.

Lovelock, James (2006), interviewed in How to think about science, CBC Ideas (radio program), broadcast January 3, 2008. Link

Lovelock, James (2007). The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back - and How We Can Still Save Humanity. Santa Barbara CA: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-7139-9914-3.

Staley M (September 2002). "Darwinian selection leads to Gaia". J. Theor. Biol. 218 (1): 35-46. Bibcode:2002JThBi.218...35S. doi:10.1006/jtbi.2002.3059. PMID 12297068.

Thomas, Lewis G. (1974). The Lives of a Cell; Notes of a Biology Watcher. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-43442-8.

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The Gaia hypothesis (), also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.

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What does it mean that one of the West's foundational myths gives 'man' 'dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth'?

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1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. 6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day. 14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. 24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

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Genesis chapter 1 KJV (King James Version)

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Genesis chapter 1 KJV (King James Version)

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This song can be great for mindfulness, grounding yourself and remembering your connection with nature. In a previous R&D we would wind down each day by laying on the floor and listening to this play in peaceful reflection.

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Watch My Octopus Teacher | Netflix Official Site

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A filmmaker forges an unusual friendship with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest, learning as the animal shares the mysteries of her world. Watch trailers & learn more.

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This has fascinating me for a while - suggesting a hierarchical society is natural because it corresponds to the human body. This idea of correspondences and a naturally hierarchical order was prevalent in Europe for centuries, and perhaps still shapes Western thinking.

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The book that introduced me to the idea of dysbiosis - PB

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The book that introduced me to the idea of dysbiosis - PB

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Praise

"Yong just keeps imparting one surprising, fascinating insight after the next. I Contain Multitudes is science journalism at its best." -- Bill Gates

"Beyond fascinating. An amazing book. It'll change the way you think about the world. It'll change who you think you are." -- Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk

"Ed Yong is a talented British science writer..."I Contain Multitudes," his first book, covers a huge amount of microscopic territory in clear, strong, often epigrammatic prose... He is infectiously enthusiastic about microbes, and he describes them with verve." - New York Times Book Review

" The author wonderfully turns to the humanities again and again to enrich the book's scientific detail... And he's funny," - Wall Street Journal

"From his vibrant introduction to the witty endnotes, Yong's expertise and narration hold no less wonder than a sacred text. Yong's prose is alive with an almost incredulous pleasure that the field he has loved since childhood is now in vogue." - Spectator

"Ed Yong's beautiful, smart, and sometimes shocking new book..."-- Wired

"For a lesser writer, the temptation to oversimplify the science or to sex up unwarranted conclusions might have proved irresistible. Mr Yong expertly avoids these pitfalls. No matter. Mr Yong has no need for such hype. I Contain Multitudes bowls along wonderfully without it. His hero, Sir David [Attenborough], would surely approve." - The Economist

"It is a page-turner in a very old-fashioned sense. All life is here, and death too, and sex and violence, including deviations of which you had never dreamed." - Guardian

"A delightful, witty book... he does not just tell the stories of microbiomes, he also introduces readers to dozens of the scientists studying them. Their stories and conversations radiate the excitement of unlocking new secrets, putting a human face on the science." - Science

"Ed Yong is one of our finest young explainers of science-wicked smart, broadly informed, sly, savvy, so illuminating. And this is an encyclopedia of fascinations." -- David Quammen, author of Spillover and Song of the Dodo

"A marvelous book! Ed Yong s brilliant gift for storytelling and precise writing about science converge in I Contain Multitudes to make the invisible and tiny both visible and mighty." -- Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy

"Ed Yong has written a riveting account of the microbes that make the world work. I Contain Multitudes will change the way you look at yourself and just about everything else." -- Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

" I Contain Multitudes changes you the way all great science writing does. You become disoriented, looking at the world around you in a new way. With vivid tales and graceful explanations, Ed Yong reveals how the living things we see around us are wildly complex collectives." -- Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex

"Ed Yong has done something beautiful, and unlikely: he's rendered the unseen world of bacteria thrilling, captivating and highly entertaining. This is a much-needed guide to the hidden kingdom that dominates life on Earth. It cuts through all the hype of microbiomes with a scientifically steady hand, but told with an infectious sense of awe." - Adam Rutherford, author of Creation

"Yong has captured the essence of this exciting field, expressing the enthusiasm and wonder that the scientific community feels when working with the microbiome." -- Jack Gilbert, University of Chicago"

"The most engaging reading read ever." - David, from Canada, who then gave it a four star review.

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"Yong just keeps imparting one surprising, fascinating insight after the next. I Contain Multitudes is science journalism at its best." -- Bill Gates "Beyond fascinating. An amazing book. It'll change the way you think about the world. It'll change who you think you are."

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A queer family member of mine has an allotment patch. He has transformed what began as an overgrown plot into a lush fruitful ecosystem. Doing so has rejuvenated his mental health and allowed space for mindfulness. He says it's very grounding to feel the soil and connect with the earth. I like the idea of that kind of personal relationship with nature, listening to it and protecting it (from frost or on a global scale)
I've also been thinking about grief X rebirth. Maybe a person has recently lost their partner and begins finding messages from them in their allotment patch. This sparks a healing process and deeper understanding of their place in the world. It speaks to the global climate crisis / the need to listen to what nature is telling us.

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Paul Handley - Sustainable Theatre Making by Making Theatre

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The National Theatre is committed to achieving net zero carbon by 2030, the greatest creative challenge it has ever undertaken. This time we are talking to Paul Handley, Production and Technical Director at the NT about his search for a more sustainable model of theatre making. We hear about the ma…

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How We Made it | Designing Theatre in the Climate Crisis for Paradise | National Theatre

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https://www.netflix.com/title/81183477

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000czf4

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Green Originals - Wangari Maathai - BBC Sounds

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Reflections on the modern pioneers of the environmental movement. Today - Wangari Maathai.

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https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/mycorrhizal-networks-wood-wide-web/

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When Prof Suzanne Simard realised the trees were talking to each other, it didn't come as a huge surprise.

She started her career as a forester, working with trees planted in uniform rows, but the nature she knew didn't come in rows. It was incredibly messy, complex and connected.

"If you walk in a wild forest, you can see that the plants are intertwined, they provide habitat for one another," she explains. Nature, as Simard sees it, is a network: a mass of interacting components that rely on each other to function.

This was in the 1990s, and exciting new discoveries were emerging about underground associations between fungi and plant roots, termed mycorrhiza (literally 'fungus-root').

"At the time, lots of people in forestry were looking at how trees compete for light," explains Simard, who is now a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia.

"But I got more and more interested in what was going on below ground, because I figured out that was where the action was."

She was right. Beneath our feet, plants are engaged in a constant dialogue.

Stories of friendship, greed and betrayal are unfolding across a subterranean network, a microscopic version of the connections Simard could see in her beloved forests above ground. This network has come to be known as 'the wood-wide web'.
Read more:
Mycorrhiza are everywhere. Every step you take through a forest can cover hundreds of kilometres of densely packed fungal threads. These are the fibre optic cables of the wood-wide web.

The fungus forms mycorrhiza with plant roots, and through those connections pass substances that both organisms need to grow.

This relationship has been understood for decades as a straight-up exchange between plants and fungi: plants provide carbon-rich sugars made by photosynthesis, and in return they get nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, that the fungi scavenge from the soil.

The common mycorrhizal network

Yet there is another level of interaction; an exchange not only back and forth between the fungus and the plant, but also between neighbouring plants, using fungi as a thoroughfare.

As the fungal threads spread, they can link up to multiple plants, creating webs known as 'common mycorrhizal networks'. Through these networks, plants can exchange sugars, nutrients, water and more.

"I call it 'the language of the trees'," says Simard, and apparently the trees have a lot to say for themselves. By encouraging plants that are connected by common mycorrhizal networks to suck up isotopes (isotopes are atoms of an element with different numbers of neutrons) of a resource like carbon, it's possible to trace the resource's progress from one plant to another.

From this research, a picture emerges of individuals sharing with those in need, of 'mother' trees sending carbon to seedlings, and of dying trees donating nutrients to their neighbours.

Some trees even show favouritism, doling out more resources to closely related plants. Donations of nutrients and water take place across a 'source-sink' gradient, whereby a plant that is rich in a particular resource will give its excess to those in need.

It appears that by staying connected, plants can provide mutual support and help shape the ecosystems they inhabit. With all their inhabitants linked up, forests look less like collections of individuals, and more like giant superorganisms.

The wood-wide web is not confined to woods, however. Mycorrhiza occur anywhere you find vegetation, from tropical rainforests to Arctic tundra, and they benefit the growth of the vast majority of land plants.

The networks they form are complex, often encompassing not just multiple plants but multiple species, and depending on the type of fungi involved, different materials can be exchanged. In the past few years, researchers have demonstrated that plants connected to the wood-wide web can exchange more than just nutrients.

When broad bean plants come under attack by aphids, they release chemicals that not only repel their attackers, but also attract wasps that prey on the aphids. It's an ingenious, two-pronged defence strategy.

Prof David Johnson, a microbial ecologist at the University of Manchester, wanted to find out if mycorrhizal networks could be used to send out advance warnings, letting plants know that an attack is on its way.

To do this, he introduced aphids to plants and watched how their neighbours reacted. "What we found was that plants have the same response when their neighbour is attacked," he says, "but only when their root systems are connected by these common mycorrhizal fungal networks."

This fungal communication is slow, more dial-up than broadband, but nevertheless it seems to be playing a role in relaying messages between plants about everything from hungry caterpillars to harmful pathogens.

Competition and cooperation

So far, so friendly. The idea of plants giving a helping hand, or branch, to their neighbour is nice, but evolutionary biologist Prof Toby Kiers of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam thinks it's unrealistic.

"We see harmony because we want to see harmony," she explains. "It fits with our world view of nature as the ultimate nurturer. But look under the surface, and it is anything but harmonious." After all, in any environment with limited resources, a neighbour is really just another name for a rival.

Work by Kiers and her colleagues suggests that when different species of plant are connected to the same fungal network, they will invest less in sustaining the fungi. To her, this makes perfect sense. If fungal networks are benefitting a plant's rivals, why invest in them?

Like its online counterpart, the wood-wide web has a dark side.

For every birch donating carbon to its fir neighbours, there's an orchid stealing carbon from nearby trees. For every plant that informs others of a disease outbreak, another sends out toxins to kill its rivals.

Competition, at least as much as cooperation, defines the wood-wide web. Even seemingly friendly exchanges might not be all they seem, however.

Dr Kathryn Morris at Xavier University in Ohio has spent years eavesdropping on both the 'nasty and nice' conversations that plants have via mycorrhizal networks.

"It's tempting to think of the plants as helping other plants," explains Morris, highlighting the particularly cuddly example of older trees 'feeding' seedlings with carbon. But rather than being fed, she says, you could just as easily view this as younger trees parasitising the network.

Conflicting and dependency

So what about the fungi? Although the relationship between plants and fungi appears to be mutual, here too we find individuals looking out for number one.

"At the basis of all cooperative relationships is conflict," explains Kiers. "We all want to maximise the payoffs from the relationship. Plants and fungi are no different."

In this case, the plants and the fungi want to extract the resources they need from their partners while giving as little in return as possible. While experiments have often treated fungi as mere pathways in mycorrhizal networks, they probably take far more of an active role.

"There's good reason to think that they should be in some sort of control," says Johnson.

The very formation of the wood-wide web - fungi linking up with multiple plant hosts - may only occur because the fungi benefit from having a diverse set of partners from which to obtain carbon.

Fungi are generally at a disadvantage, because while plants could still extract nutrients from the soil without them, many mycorrhizal fungi are entirely dependent on the plants for survival.

To level the playing field, fungi in these networks could be restricting their plant host's access to resources, creating what Kiers calls "an addiction of sorts".

"If I restrict your direct access to food, you become more dependent on me to provide that food," she explains.

At present, most investigations have been limited to establishing the movement of signals or resources from plant A to plant B. "A mycorrhizal network is incredibly complex, and the fact that we can even detect a signal going from one plant to another is amazing," says Simard, who thinks there are many different mechanisms driving communication across these networks.

Morris, for example, has been exploring the idea that the transfer of signals is a passive process, with chemicals hitching a ride on water that was moving around anyway. For the most part, however, the mechanisms of transfer still remain unknown to us.

"There are a million pathways that can go in all kinds of directions, and so to think that it's only one mechanism, or to think that the fungi themselves are not involved, is too simplistic," explains Simard.

Complexity in abundance

Language, superorganisms, wood-wide web - discussion of mycorrhizal networks is certainly not short of metaphors, but none of them quite captures these networks' complexity, with their subtle blend of cooperation and conflict.

Perhaps the most effective description is the one preferred by Simard: "The work I'm doing is a huge metaphor for how we relate with each other, and our own social systems," she says.

"We have journalists, scientists, teachers, doctors, and all together we have a society. And if you take out all the teachers that system doesn't work any more."

For an ecosystem to remain functional, it requires every one of its components to be in place.
Read more:
So are these societies socialist utopias, with resources equally distributed among all the stakeholders, or are mycorrhizal networks controlled by capitalist plants seeking to exploit their connections for profit?

Well, maybe they are a little bit of both.

Just like human society, this plant society is characterised by variety, with its capacity to help and to hinder, to cooperate and to exploit. Just as Simard suspected, nature is built on connections, and so are we.

This article first appeared in issue 308 of BBC Focus.

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Can the wood-wide web really help trees talk to each other?

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When Prof Suzanne Simard realised the trees were talking to each other, it didn't come as a huge surprise. She started her career as a forester, working with trees planted in uniform rows, but the nature she knew didn't come in rows. It was incredibly messy, complex and connected.

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https://britishlichensociety.org.uk/learning/what-is-a-lichen

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A lichen is not a single organism; it is a stable symbiotic association between a fungus and algae and/or cyanobacteria. Like all fungi, lichen fungi require carbon as a food source; this is provided by their symbiotic algae and/or cyanobacteria, that are photosynthetic. The lichen symbiosis is thou…

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https://ecostageonline.wordpress.com/

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https://ecoscenography.com/

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This is an online platform for theatre artists and designers who are interested in the emerging concept of 'Ecoscenography' (ecological design for performance). The site features content that explores ways of bringing an ecological focus to the performing arts, both in scholarship and in practice. The platform seeks to be a hub for all things 'eco' in theatre and performance design, with opportunities to forefront leading practitioners and thinkers that are driving this emerging field into the mainstream.

Over the coming months, Ecoscenography.com aims to explore the online space in a novel, diverse and engaging way, with regular calls for contributions. The platform links with the Ecoscenography facebook group and my forthcoming book on Ecoscenography; combined, these initiatives aim to provide an architecture upon which the future of the field can be built. To assist in the revitalisation of the platform, I am joined by Monique Roy who is currently in her final year of studies as a Bachelor of Fine Arts Technical Production student at the Queensland University of Technology.

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My name is Tanja Beer and I am the editor of Ecoscenography.com This is an online platform for theatre artists and designers who are interested in the emerging concept of 'Ecoscenography' (ecological design for performance). The site features content that explores ways of bringing an ecological focus to the performing arts, both in scholarship and...

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http://ecostage.online/

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Case Studies Resources Community Placing ecological thinking at the heart of creative practice Welcome to the Ecostage online community, where you can connect with other performing arts practitioners and share knowledge. Make a public commitment to work and thrive in a sustainable way. pledge

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There is Inherent Sexism in How We Talk About Biology

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There is Inherent Sexism in How We Talk About Biology

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Pride and persecution The rise and fall of the world's oldest transgender community

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A documentary that works alongside grassroots activists to portray the stories of four Hijra (transgender, intersex, hermaphrodite) http://www.lilyvetch.com/project/bodyofourownfilm

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Humboldt Penguins at ZSL London Zoo celebrate Pride

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Source: https://placesjournal.org/article/on-wimmins-land-the-heartland-of-lesbian-separatism/?cn-reloaded=1

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Throughout history, LGBTQ+ people have used geography to create safe spaces for themselves and their communities.

One of the most interesting examples of this is the "womyn's land" movement of the 1960s. As part of this movement, many lesbians built small rural farming communities to escape the widespread discrimination they felt in more populated areas. At the movement's peak in the late 1900s, nearly 150 rural lesbian separatist communities existed across the U.S. These women spent their time tending the land, growing crops, raising animals, and hosting other women for safe retreats or gathering spaces.

https://www.sustained.kitchen/latest/2021/6/17/queer-ecology-and-intersectional-environmentalism

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The Land of No Men: Inside Kenya's Women-Only Village

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We visited the matriarchal villages of northern Kenya to see what its like to live without men.

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For Sabine, members of the queer community explore unique and beautiful perspectives through their relationship with nature: “I'm thinking specifically about the incredible art and activism that came out of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The unique insight is that much of this art embraces complexity and can help us turn away from the apathy and nihilism that many folks experience in relation to the climate crisis.” https://luxiders.com/queer-ecology-the-eco-queer-movement/

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Sustainable Fashion - Eco Design - Healthy Lifestyle - Luxiders Magazine

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2SLGBTQIA+ oppression has manifested itself throughout our society. Underlying all elements of our systems and culture. Our perspective of biology and ecology is no different. Queer Ecology is a scientific theory that aims to bring together queer theory and ecology to shift biology and environmentalism away from human binaries. A focus on the intersectional, away from the rigid heteronormative understanding of nature. There is a focus on breaking down perceptions and elitist ideas, giving a platform to ignored or unexplored viewpoints.

By placing inherent heteronormative binaries onto nature, we ignore the fluid, genderless aspects of the environment. Queerness occurs throughout our natural world. Plants hold no inherent gender, and it makes no sense to place our human beliefs surrounding sex and identity onto androgynous spaces. The inherent queerness of nature has for a long time been ignored, suppressed, and dismissed to reflect society's underlying bias against non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities.

Sabine LeBel, assistant Professor in culture and media studies at UNB has explored queer binaries and ecology through her lecture "Queer Environmental Futures".

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Queer Ecology | The Eco-Queer Movement | Luxiders Magazine

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2SLGBTQIA+ oppression has manifested itself throughout our society. Underlying all elements of our systems and culture. Our perspective of biology and ecology is no different. Queer Ecology is a scientific theory that aims to bring together queer theory and ecology to shift biology and environmentalism away from human binaries.

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Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India (2017) P. 205

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It takes as its starting point the landmark 1992 High Court ruling in favour of Torres Strait Islander land-rights activist Edward Koiki Mabo. The ruling overturned terra nullius (meaning 'land belonging to no-one'), the doctrine on which the British justified colonising the land now known as Australia.

The exhibition explores how artists have acknowledged the continuing relationship Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have with their lands, as well as the ongoing impact of colonisation and the complexities of representation in Australian society today.

The exhibition will feature many works of art jointly acquired by Tate and the MCA in Sydney through an innovative partnership established in 2015 via a gift from the Qantas Foundation. These include works which interrogate post-colonial histories, narrate political tensions, and illustrate how the oldest continuous living cultures in the world, reaching back 65,000 years, assert connection to country in contemporary art today.

Acknowledgement

Tate acknowledges and pays respect to the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to the Elders of these lands and acknowledge the continuation of cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Research supported by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor.

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A Year in Art: Australia 1992 | Tate Modern

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It takes as its starting point the landmark 1992 High Court ruling in favour of Torres Strait Islander land-rights activist Edward Koiki Mabo. The ruling overturned terra nullius (meaning 'land belonging to no-one'), the doctrine on which the British justified colonising the land now known as Australia.

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Kate Grenville's 2005 novel The Secret River is a fictional account of early British settlers in Australia and their collisions with the country's Aboriginal people. The book is firmly rooted in the Australian literary canon, taught in schools across the country. It was adapted for the stage by Andrew Bovell and presented by The Sydney Theatre Company in 2013, under the direction of Neil Armfield. This year, in a bid to spread the story to UK shores, the production went first to the Edinburgh International Festival in August and is now showing at the National's Olivier Theatre in London.

Set in New South Wales in the early 1800s, The Secret River follows William Thornhill, an English convict who was banished to Australia for theft. On being made a free man, Thornhill decides he and his family should stay in Australia where they can claim, own and farm a patch of land along the Hawkesbury River, rather than return to the poverty they left behind in London. But the land is not Thornhill's to take; it's the home of the Dharug people, Aboriginals who were living there long before the settlers came.

Through scenes that are at times touching and full of hope, at others harrowing and full of the violence we now know to be the story of Australia's earliest settlers, we see the two families - the Thornhills and a Dharug clan - meet, attempt to communicate, but ultimately fail to see eye-to-eye with one another.

All this is overseen and narrated to us by Dhirrumbin, an Aboriginal woman who in Australia and Edinburgh was played by performance artist Ningali Lawford-Wolf, who also helped develop the play. But following the sudden death of Lawford-Wolf in Edinburgh, the part is in the hands of Pauline Whyman, who joins the cast from Melbourne and on press night was reading off the book. Whyman undoubtedly has some way to go with making the role her own, but having her read the part does not deduct from it - as the story's narrator, it works.

Led by Nathaniel Dean in the role of William Thornhill and Georgia Adamson in the role of his wife Sal, the stirling cast do a zealous and heart-felt job of telling the story, and were it not for a brief introduction by director Neil Armfield, you would not know this was a cast grieving the loss of an integral member.

The action plays out on a sparse stage designed by Stephen Curtis. Eucalyptus branches frame the space on both sides and above, while cascading sheets become giant rock formations behind the action. These, under Mark Howett's stunning lighting, shift from fiery red to elephant gray or pale sand as the light changes throughout the day.

The Olivier does, however, feel too big a space for this story. Having the characters dwarfed by the rocks behind them works, but a more intimate setting would help bring us closer to the tale.

Another slightly jarring decision is to not translate the speech of the Dharug people. It comes from good intentions: as a white writer, Grenville felt putting words into the mouths of Aboriginal people was a line she could not cross. On turning it into a play, Bovell knew he couldn't have voiceless black characters on stage, so he had the portion of the cast playing Aboriginal people taught to speak Dharug. He left their words untranslated in a bid to represent the troubles the two groups had communicating.

This has the slightly negative effect of making it predominantly a 'white' story. At the same time, the misunderstandings form much of the play's joy: the gift exchange between Dulla Djin (Ema Kris) and Sal is particularly magical, as is the heartwarming scene of the children finding the common language of play, turning the stage into a makeshift water slide.

Music is integral to both parties too and while it doesn't unite them, Iain Grandage's score, with English pub songs layered over with Aboriginal chants, shows us just how rooted the act of singing together is in both cultures.

The Secret River is not a story with a happy ending but it's an important one to tell on the London stage. After all, many of the original settlers with their ideas of land ownership were British. What Grenville's novel - and subsequently Bovell's stage adaptation - do brilliantly is raise awareness of the facts, bringing 200-year-old history to our attention on stage.

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Review: The Secret River, National Theatre

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Kate Grenville's 2005 novel The Secret River is a fictional account of early British settlers in Australia and their collisions with the country's Aboriginal people. The book is firmly rooted in the Australian literary canon, taught in schools across the country.

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Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra Dance Theatre

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Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra Dance Theatre

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Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra Dance Theatre | Official Australian Trailer

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How did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? 

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How did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? 

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For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as “inanimate.”

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The term queer ecology refers to a perspective which views nature, biology, and sexuality through the lens of queer theory. It objects to what it considers heterosexist notions of nature, drawing from science studies, ecofeminism, environmental justice, and queer geography.

"Queer Ecology is a scientific theory that aims to bring together queer theory and ecology to shift paradigms away from binary, rigid and heteronormative ways of understanding nature towards interdependency and fluidity. These intersectional and interdisciplinary practices break down compulsory heterosexuality as it manifests in our perception of nature and academia and, in the process, bring cultural nuances to the fore." (Climate Culture)

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Dysbiosis is characterized by a disruption to the microbiome resulting in an imbalance in the microbiota, changes in their functional composition and metabolic activities, or a shift in their local distribution.

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R&D for a new theatre project exploring our relationship with nature. Dysbiosis (working title) will examine topics including the language we use to speak about nature, the Global North’s relationship to the natural world and queer ecology. It will also investigate greener ways of making theatre, partly building on the ideas of Ecostage.

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Unicorn: The Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen by Amrou Al-Khadhi

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Unicorn: The Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen by Amrou Al-Khadhi

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"I was deeply stirred by the way that the marine creatures moved so freely; the way the soft corals and sea invertebrates seemed to exist without physical boundaries, like warrior shape-shifters; the way the fish regally flaunted their colourful costumes.

That’s how I feel on the inside. In my soul, I’m that colourful; my sexuality, my gender – it’s free-moving, like in the tank. Maybe my soul doesn’t have any boundaries?

I had grown very accustomed to boundaries. I had spliced myself into different sections that existed in segregated spaces.

But here was a parallel universe where everything was fluid. I inched closer to the tank and was hypnotised by the way all the creatures interacted with each other. Cleaner shrimp politely mowed the scales of a fish that was half purple, half yellow; the corals, each with their own distinct texture and colour scheme, seemed to flow as one formless mass with the current of the water.

They were united by their diversity, not divided, like I had learnt to become."

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https://open.spotify.com/episode/1RU2f82Q9iuMCXWbJ68Gex?si=44ee3be4653e4bab

Extracts from UMMAH:

In those early years I thought of God with awe

Doe eyed and malleable, I never saw

I scoffed at that theory evolution

While gazing at that breath stolen creation

Sat on abbus lap I was a pilgrim

I once travelled the time before the conception of Earth

Prior to the downfall of man and dear Adam and Eve

Was told of how man was made and woman thereafter

How Eve was tempted as was in her nature

I was convinced He had all the answers

Seduced by the farce of paradise

Rivers of wine, milk and honey

The indigo skies forever sunny

Never in hardship or in need of the petty

No other cares, just gains and happiness

Available in abundance and excess

Trees forever giving

Everyone immortal and living

Our bodies young and agile

None old, aged and fragile

Such images I was painted

While ultimately blinded

Premature I dared not stop and wonder

What sick game He played with thunder

Placing living beings in this test

Blessing us with his omniscience

He stares down at us inferior things

Having granted us too real feelings

Sending down His messengers

Spreading the word of His divinity

To obey and be promised heavens

Or dissent and punished deservingly

I at last looked once again

At the wonders of His creation

This time seeing the black and the white

The dark and the light

And all the greys in between

The murkiness I once embraced

In His so-called asthetic ideal

The wounds He had inflicted unlikely to heal

The unjustified evils caused by natural disasters

Unspeakable crimes committed by sick bastards

Turned away from religion today the world is cold

All on my own I am walking, naked and bold

No predestined location just going on

Before a path was carved for me

Now I am chained and bound by liberty

My actions serve no greater purpose

I am confronted by the absurdity of existence

No Northern star guides me in this lonely journey