It takes a megacity

I excitedly told a friend of mine tonight about something I'd just read but she was not excited by it. Why, I wonder? In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene I learned that each of us is not the individual we think we are - genetically, evolutionarily or otherwise. Rather, we have symbionts by the bucketload - 160 kinds of bacteria! It turns out that these are what make our functioning in the environment possible, and thus must also be a big part of the story of our development and survival from the species level down to the apparent individual. Chances are my twenty-two thousand genes are not the only decisive ones, as my microbiome packs another eight million.

In this we're hardly exceptional, floating in a sea of bacteria vaster and more ancient than we can fathom, though creatures whose genes are determined by lineages of naturally selected variations resulting from sexual reproduction in fact are unrepresentative. Bacterial genes move sideways without a thought. It makes everything entangled in the most promiscuous, but also astonishingly symbiotic ways. The wonder and terror of the Anthropocene, the editors say, lies in discovering this entanglement in a moment of cascading extinctions; a moment when, in Deborah Bird Rose's words from Arts of Living ... : Ghosts of the Anthropocene, "dependence becomes a peril rather than a blessing."

Scott F. Gilbert, “Holobiont by Birth: Multilineage Individuals as the Concretion of Cooperative Processes" and Deborah Bird Rose, "Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed" in Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, eds., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minnesota, 2017), Monsters 73-90 and Ghosts 51-63.

[And a thought about why I'm not as freaked out at the thought of untold numbers of unnoticed symbionts chugging away at making me me, well, letting me feel like I'm me. Privilege! Male privilege, white privilege. I take it for granted that there are numberless beings working in the background of my world, the world in which I get to strut and fret my hour on the stage, beings out of sight and, yes, out of mind. - 22/11]