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304 pages, Paperback
Published September 8, 2022
"So that we encourage and bolster the world’s hunger to thrive. And not just because that would benefit us, although it certainly would, but because other life-forms have as much right to flourish as we do and don’t exist for our use." - Kristin Ohlson
"The whole point of our evolution, it seems to me, is for us to find a way to fit back into the world as it is, rather than try to remake the world to fit us." - Brian Doyle
Instead, Kropotkin was struck immediately by how valiantly living things had to struggle against the ferocity of nature and how they often clustered together to withstand it. He observed warfare and extermination among animals but was surprised to see “there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society….”
As soon as they’re old enough, babies put everything in their mouths, from their toes to dead flies to the contents of a litter box if they get the chance; according to one group of researchers, they’d eat twenty grams of soil a day if adults didn’t keep swooping in to interfere. It seems that this is part of a biological strategy to build a robust microbiota and immune system. By the age of three the child has a stable signature microbiota as large and diverse as that of an adult.
How might our behavior change if we understood the extent to which cooperation within and among species undergirds the natural world and makes it thrive? If we looked for that cooperation? Could we begin to see ourselves as partners and helpers, part of a greater fabric of giving, instead of exploiters and colonizers and wreckers?
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Scientists now find that just about every complex plant, fungus, and animal hosts a dynamic microbiota--a community of bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa, and other microorganisms that live in us and on us and are essential to our health, just we are essential to theirs. We are not individuals but ecosystems, each of us hosting a whirl of organisms busily interacting with us and with each other in a complex web of connection. The ecosystem of us lives within larger ecosystems--our gardens, our neighborhoods, our farms, our cities, whatever wilderness we have left--where we interact and overlap with other animal-plant-fungal ecosystems and the invisibles inside them as well as free-living microbes throughout the environment that aren't associated with hosts. Those larger ecosystems are nested within and interacting with even larger ones, on and on until they encompass the entire planet.
And if the rub-your-stomach, pat-your-head mental exercise of picturing those nested ecosystems isn't mind-boggling enough, consider that even our microbiota have a microbiota. Viruses and even small mobile "genetic elements" (meaning, things that move bits of genetic material around but don't meet the traditional definitions of life) weave in and among the bacteria in our guts, changing the affected bacteria's own genetic potential for harm or good.