May 20, 2021 • 58 mins
Jamie Lorimer’s THE PROBIOTIC PLANET calls for a rethinking of artificial barriers between science and policy and a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches. Bruce Clarke’s GAIAN SYSTEMS is a pioneering exploration of the complex evolution of Gaia’s many variants. In a conversation that ranges from Lynn Margulis to science fiction, neocybernetics to COVID-19, Lorimer and Clarke ultimately seek insight into solving an environmental crisis of humanity’s own making. This conversation was recorded in November 2020.
BOOKS:
The Probiotic Planet: z.umn.edu/theprobioticplanet
Gaian Systems: z.umn.edu/gaiansystems
REFERENCES:
Helminth, a species of parasitic worm
Heather Paxson on raw milk cheese
Bruno Latour
Isabelle Stengers
Donna Haraway
James Lovelock
Lynn Margulis
Lyndisfarne Conferences
Stewart Brand
O’Neill cylinder
William Gibson’s Neuromancer
Stanisław Lem
Frank Herbert’s Dune
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Bruce Clarke (00:06):
Marvelous, one of the points she makes is that
life has always beentechnological. In other words,
the technology is not adeviation from what life has
come up with in order topersist.
Jamie Lorimer (00:22):
Where we get our food from is central to thinking
about things like climate changeas well as the emergence of
zoonotic disease. And so as,hopefully, we pass out of the
moment of intensity with thepandemic and we come out of the
pandemic as almost a portal forrethinking our relationships to
the nonhuman world.
Bruce Clarke (00:43):
Hello. I'm Bruce Clark. I teach literature and
science at Texas TechUniversity. My most recent book
is Gaian Systems, Lynn Margulis,Neo Cybernetics and the End of
the Anthropocene. This projectreally started in earnest when I
met Lynn Margulis in 02/2005,and she very quickly dispelled
(01:06):
my lingering skepticism aboutGaia as a scientific topic.
Lynn had been working on Gaiareally from the earliest,
articulation of the conceptbeginning her collaboration with
James Lovelock back in the earlynineteen seventies. And as a
(01:26):
result of my getting to knowLynn, I came into possession of
her correspondence withLovelock, and that gave me some
pretty deep insights into howthis scientific collaboration
developed and how the concept ofGaia developed, as a
(01:47):
conversation between Lovelockand Margolis. So as I began to
familiarize myself with thescience, I began to write
papers, and publish on it andkeep my eye out for Gaia
scholarship and saw that theidea had really begun to take
hold in the twenty first centuryamong major set of theorists
(02:11):
whose work I respected. The bookitself is, in large part,
grounded in a history of theunfolding of Gaia as a
scientific idea and as morebroadly as a as a figure of
thought, in just in generaldiscussion about planetary
(02:33):
affairs. So I look at Lovelockand Margolis' own developing
discourse of Gaia.
I look at the work of BrunoLatour, Isabel Stengers, Donna
Haraway in popularizing Gaiareally for the academic
community. I look at thebackground of what I call the
(02:53):
systems counterculture, which isthe whole earth catalog, which
is then succeeded by coevolutionquarterly. And this was really
the launching pad of an articlepublished in 1975 in coevolution
quarterly. Lead authored byMargolis was the launching pad
for the the reception of Gaia bythe environmental counterculture
(03:18):
here in The States. And Iproceed from there to kinda work
the Gaia idea in terms ofcontemporary science fiction and
the history of cybernetic ideasthat it was bound up with by the
science that Lovelock andMargolis were doing in the way
they articulated that science.
And I bring the story throughpretty much to the contemporary
(03:40):
moment with the onset of theAnthropocene and and looking at
how Gaia discourse, I think, is,in many ways, a preferable
alternative discourse to a lotof the way that Anthropocene has
been spoken about. That's a verylarge sketch of the the breadth
of my book, Giant Systems.Jamie, why don't you tell us a
(04:04):
little bit about the probioticplanet?
Jamie Lorimer (04:07):
Hello. My name is Jamie Lorimer. I'm a geographer
based at the University ofOxford, in The UK, and I teach
environmental geography, sobroadly interested in human
environment relations. My secondbook, Probiotic Planet, Using
Life to Manage Life, argues thatthere's a probiotic turn
underway in how life is beingmanaged across a range of
(04:28):
different policy domains andacross different, scales of
ecological thinking. And byprobiotic turn, I'm looking at,
systematic efforts to use life,to manage life, to tackle a
range of problems that areassociated with the excessive
application of antibiotic modesof managing life.
So if you like, the predominantway I argue of managing life in
(04:51):
the Anthropocene has been aboutthe systematic rationalization,
simplification, control ofecological systems, which has
led to a set of crises withinthe functionings of those
systems. And that could beanything from, crises within,
the human microbiome and therise of a range of autoimmune
diseases to crisis in, resourcemanagement in landscape scale,
(05:14):
around biodiversity loss, arounddramatic forest fires, around
extreme flooding events, rightup to, crises on a planetary
scale that we see associatedwith climate change and and
global warming. So we these arethe kind of blowbacks to
antibiotic modes of managinglife. A probiotic approach looks
at how you could manage theintensities of those systems to
(05:36):
restore some desired mode offunctioning, within them to
deliver, services and andproperties. And and in
particular, it often involvesthe use of keystone species, a
particular species that havedisproportionate agency within
their ecologies to restorefunctions and services.
And I focus in particular on, abody of, policy and science
(05:59):
that's known as rewilding innature conservation, in which
conservationists have shiftedsomewhat from a focus on
managing, or preventing theextinction of rare species
towards restoring, functions andservices within ecology. So
bringing back wolves, bringingback beavers, restoring grazing
regimes with the idea that thesecould deliver desired functions
(06:22):
and services within acontemporary ecology. So that's
that's one example. And theother example I look at is, a
group of scientists and citizenswho are experimenting on their
personal microbiome, so on thebacteria and fungi that make up
the human body, in the interestof tackling a range of
autoimmune allergic diseases,and in particular, a group who
(06:43):
are taking helminths. Sohelminths are a species of human
worm, often called parasiticworms.
And the argument is that wecoevolved with these helminths.
You can have too many helminthsin situations of poor
sanitation. But in the absenceof helminths, the human
microbiome goes into a situationof dysbiosis. And as a
consequence, the human immunesystem turns against itself. And
(07:05):
so these folk are taking worms.
They're conducting clinicaltrials in these worms to look at
what they could do to restoredesired functions and services.
So so the book looks acrossthese examples on different
scales, and it it makes a casethat there's something common
and interesting going on interms of how life is being
conceived and managed acrossthese different, different
(07:25):
domains. And then it pivots inthe second half to a a kind of
critical mapping of thedifferent ways in which one
could go probiotic. So itsketches out a very unequal
geography to where in the world,one is able to go probiotic if
you like. There's a very partialgeography, as to who has
sufficient control over lifearound them that they can,
(07:47):
conduct these controlledexperiments in in restoration.
It looks at the different waysin which life is being imagined,
largely as a deliverer offunctions and services. Life is
being put to work, with, fairlyexploitative consequences for
the life forms that have beenput to work to deliver probiotic
properties. It looks at thedifferent forms of value that
(08:09):
get caught up in a in a kind of,capitalist model of the
probiotic turn, and to whom,value accrues when life gets
commodified in that way. Andultimately aims to offer this
color coded spectrum ofdifferent ways of going
probiotic. So it's sort ofclaiming that there's a
significant historical eventunderway, but what it implies
(08:29):
for the future of the managementof life is open, if you like,
and there are differenttrajectories, emerging in the
present.
Bruce Clarke (08:37):
Well, I'm very interested in hearing you speak
to the the primary differencesthe probiotic orientation makes
relative to other moretraditional research programs.
For instance, you borrow a termfrom other writers to describe
the current probiotic era aspost pastorian, in that we've
(08:59):
been decisively moving away fromthe antibiotic world ushered in
by Pasteur's identification ofbacterial pathogens and
infections. So I'd be interestedin your thoughts on what we
could call the Pasteurianplanet, the one we're leaving
behind, that subsequent longcentury of demonization of
(09:21):
microbes as morbid rather thanbeneficent in their main
effects, and on what it means tohave gained today's perspective
on the broadly mutualisticnature of most symbiosis between
microbes and their macroscopichosts?
Jamie Lorimer (09:38):
That's a great question. Thank you. Yeah. I
mean, I take the concept of thepost posterior from the
anthropologist Heather Paxson,who studied the, a group of,
people making raw milk cheese onthe Northeast of of The US. And,
Paxson's developing an analysisoffered by by Bruno Latour.
If you like the ways in whichPasteur, who's a great figure in
(10:00):
in in French microbiology, butalso a great figure in modern
hygiene, produced this body ofscience, which through its
application led to this kind ofblunderbuss approach to
managing, our relationships withwith the microbial world. There
was a a kind of indexing ofhygiene to the absence of of
microbes. And if we extend thatout to think about the ways in
(10:22):
which life has been conceivedand managed, not just within the
human body or within thekitchen, but to to the wider
countryside, let's say. Therewas a tendency and still is, in
many forms of, pest control, inthe use of pesticides in in in
agriculture, towards thewholesale eradication of of life
(10:42):
that is not held to be useful.So whether that's insects or
soil microbes, everything issort of bundled into this
bracket of redundant life thatwe could we can do without, and
life gets rationalized and andstreamlined.
And and the argument that youget from immunologists and and
ecologists is that this absencecreates the conditions for
particularly virulent,sometimes, antibiotic resistant
(11:04):
to the pests and and problematicspecies to emerge. You have this
blowback in particularlyvirulent, pathogenic microbes
that come to the fore. And whatemerges particularly in the
microbiome with the advent ofnext generation sequencing
technologies, which allowscientists to map out the full
diversity of life in themicrobiome. During past years'
(11:25):
time, you can only really know amicrobe was there if you could
if you could culture it. Andthere's a very small subset of
microbes that can be cultured inlaboratory settings.
Genetic approach gives us thisgreat picture of the diversity
of life that characterizes anymicrobial setting and a sense
that a great deal about life isis harmless, but also a subset
of that life can be beneficial,can be mutualistic, can lead to
(11:47):
desirable relations that thatenable the human body to to
function in a way that we expectit to. So that's the kind of
post posteriorian idea. It's asort of much more nuanced, much
more calibrated application ofways of knowing and and managing
life. There's a Dutchphilosopher, Joseph Kulets, who
describes a similar shift in,the management of agricultural
(12:08):
and conservation landscapes asthe controls decontrolling of
ecological controls. This iskind of nuanced application of
of an ecologized form of ofscience still ultimately
towards, the delivery ofservices that are useful for
people.
It's not a kind of rejection ofthe benefits of modern
antibiotic approaches. It's justjust sort of nuanced
(12:29):
recalibration to deliverdifferent functions and and
services. So, yeah, so maybe Icould reciprocate, Bruce, with a
with a question question foryou. I mean, I guess, one of the
common strands that runs acrossour books is is trying to make
sense of the enthusiasm for Guyin thinking now, and you trace
this long history to place thecontemporary enthusiasm in a
(12:51):
much deeper history. But if youhad to sort of characterize why
this conjunction of ideas aroundthe Holoboy and the Anthropocene
and Gaia have come to the forein the contemporary present.
Why would that be, do you think?
Bruce Clarke (13:04):
That is a great question. You're right. I take
the discussion back and kind oftrace it forward, and and one
notes in the first severaldecades of the discussion of
Gaia, it's it's reallystruggling with various
unreceptive areas of ofmainstream science to establish
(13:24):
itself as an idea. But bothLovelock and Margolis are are
steadfast in their developmentand promotion of the idea.
There's an kind of unusualradiation, you could say, of
Gaian ideas coming out ofscience, but being received by a
wider public that is captivatedin various ways by what they
(13:49):
take Gaia to represent as a kindof reconnection to, a planetary
horizon.
Now in in more recent times,however, there's a a kind of
convergence of the planetaryconcern as articulated through
what has now be developed asGaia theory, which has been
(14:11):
brought into a kind ofnormalization of its bona fides
as as an idea that's beingtested and put to various
evidentiary challenges as at thesame time it's being expanded as
a framework for social thought.So it enters the discourse of
(14:32):
environmentalism. Lovelock isgradually, as I observe it,
being lionized, as a kind of agreen guru, in England,
specifically, not not so much inAmerica. But in America, Donna
Haraway establishes arelationship. There's a file of
(14:52):
letters that I've seen,exchanged between her and
Margolis.
And and Margolis is, in a way, amore radical environmental
thinker, than Lovelock. So Ithink her, and, of course, her
own science has to do withchampioning the idea of
symbiosis not as a marginalphenomenon within the Biosir,
(15:16):
but in fact, is an absolutelycentral dynamic of evolutionary
persistence of life through theeons and just as a matter of
fact that life is amazingly,interconnected at all levels and
across all kingdoms as just partof its way of doing the business
(15:37):
of living on this planet.Lovelock continues to be the
more sort of scientificallyengaged, advocate, has a body of
coworkers that gather aroundhim. Margolis' ideas connect
very deeply with Donna Haraway'sfeminist science studies. And at
a certain point, these ideas aregathered in by by the
(16:03):
conversation that IsabelleStengers, the Belgian
philosophers, having with BrunoLatour, the premier
anthropological, sociologicalthinker of science and
technology, in the InternationalTheory Academy.
And so they gradually start,talking Gaia. There's there's a
(16:24):
kind of steady history, notexactly of normalization of
Gaia, which still has still kindof an edgy concept for many
people, and yet then you add thesort of Anthropocene dilemma
about how we bring ourunderstanding around. In other
(16:46):
words, it's not just that lifeis a geological force, which
used to be a kind of radical guyand idea, but human life, is now
understood as having amounted tosomething like a geological
force. The question then is, youknow, are we are we in any
position to control Gaia or tomanage Gaia? That's a
(17:11):
problematic assertion, althoughthat's one of the main debates
now.
As I encountered your work, thiswas the framing that you found,
that that had kind of arrived asyou were doing the work for
Probiotic Planet and created aframework that that was really
(17:32):
efficient, sort ofintellectually efficient for
positioning the the widerphilosophical and social
theoretical aspects, of yourwork in Probiotic Planet.
Jamie Lorimer (17:44):
One of the I guess the challenges for me as
somebody trained in sciencestudies and in in this sort of,
as as a as a ultimately, as asocial scientist is is to try
and make sense of the epistemicalliances one might make with
scientists that I write about.And I guess it's interesting
following the intellectualtrajectories of some of those
(18:07):
figures that you've justmentioned. So particularly Bruno
Latour, and Donna Haraway, who,you know, I encountered their
writings in the nineteeneighties and the nineteen
nineties, where there was a adegree of skepticism, if you
like, about how, asanthropologists, they might make
alliances with science to tellstories about the social. And
and that sort of socialconstruction, scientific
(18:29):
knowledge tradition, which was,I guess, particularly critical
of modes of biological sciencethat they saw naturalizing kind
of western capitalistic,individualistic, patriarchal
idea of of the subject and ofthe organization of society that
they they found written intoparticular stories of creation
or particular ways in which, youknow, animals were arranged in
(18:50):
in naturalistic museums. And andI guess, you know, what what's
interesting for me, you know,there's various points,
particularly for Latour, wherehe has a kind of crisis in that,
understanding of his role as acritic, particularly in the
light of, climate change andthis concern that he's seeing
climate deniers using some ofthe very techniques that he and
his cowriters pioneered to thinkskeptically about the position
(19:14):
of of science and society.
And and there's this kind ofjourney of discovery that takes
him to Lovelock, one feels. Andand, I think, Haraway, it's less
clear cut as a kind of epiphany.She's always had this, you know,
quite sort of healthyskepticism, but also a deep
scientific understanding, Ifeel, of of Margulis and others.
But in Symbiogenesis, in a modelof Earth system science that
(19:36):
comes from Gaia, they both seemto find a much more palatable
political ontology, if you like,in which human society is
premised on mutualisticrelations, and at which on a
foundational level, there's amuch more ecological set of
preconditions for how lifeshould be should be organized.
And so there's a there's a sensethat a kind of guy and story
(19:58):
comes along at the right time,in order to justify a kind of
green liberal vision of thefuture.
So so I guess my question foryou is, you know, is that is
that just too cynical to read itin that way as a sociologist of
science, or is there somethingelse going on that that makes
this really interesting fermentof ideas where anthropologists,
(20:21):
philosophers, immunologists,earth system scientists are all
kind of thinking along similarlines and forming this kind of
common epistemic commitment to aparticular way of knowing about
the world.
Bruce Clarke (20:35):
I don't think that sounds overly cynical. I mean,
one one is well advised to to beon one's intellectual guard
regarding such enthusiasms. Inmy own case, I, I I I tell the
story at the beginning of mybook of, of sort of the
overcoming of of my skepticism,with regard to Gaia. But on the
(20:59):
other hand, I also trace howMargolis, and this is due to her
having, encountered FranciscoVarela, in a very significant
way in the nineteen eighties, inin relation to a kind of private
symposium called the LindisfarneAssociation. But the outcome of
(21:22):
that was that Lynn encountered avigorous discourse that was
grounded in the systemscountercultures, I call it, of,
second order cybernetics, andthe concept of autopoiesis, as a
theory of the integrity andmaintenance and self production
(21:43):
of the living cell enters intoher her articulation of Gaia.
But what comes along with thattheory is also a kind of
epistemological constructivism.So for instance, Matron and
Varela will say that, a livingsystem, is cognitive from the
(22:04):
get go, that sells our cognitivesystems, and as life ramps up
from its cellular foundations,that that life brings forth its
own world and that and andthat's a kind of, shorthand
formulation of the Gaiahypothesis that life controls
its environment. That's the theradical version, but at least
(22:25):
that that life shapes itsenvironment is not just the sort
of passive recipient ofgeological dynamics to which
it's always adapting itself. Theproblem of constructivism is a
complex one, and I think you'recorrect to consider the the
social constructivism that,Latour in particular feels he he
(22:50):
has to pull away from. That thatsort of one line, but the
epistemological, constructivismgrounded in in autopoietic
systems theory is a is is aseparate dynamic and but what it
means for Gaia is that that Imean, that Gaia is always kind
(23:10):
of straddling this dual identitybetween, sort of contested
scientific hypothesis on the onehand, but on the other hand, a
way of shaping one's vision ofthe world.
That Gaia is a construction, andthat's is to be brought forth in
(23:31):
whatever manner is sort ofconducive to one's
environmental, concerns. So itit's an adaptable, meta concept
at that level. I was thinkingabout your your presentation of
of Gaia, and I pulled a quoteout from your introductory
(23:51):
chapter, where you say, what youfind in the leading accounts of
Gaia is, in your own words,quote, a palatable liberal and
ecological political ontologyfor rematerializing theory after
the idealist excesses of thescientific term. So I take it
(24:13):
that's the that's the socialconstructionism that became
problematic for Latour. At thesame time, you continue, it
provides common epistemic groundfor rebuilding alliances with
the natural sciences after thescience wars and in face of
rising science denialism,unquote.
(24:35):
So it seemed to me that you comeupon Guyan thinking as a ground
for another sort of restoration,a theoretical remediation that
you align with what's called thenew materialism, but it amounts
to a regrounding in biologicaland ecological substance that
(24:56):
compensates for the impasses ofpoststructuralism. Does that
sound right to you?
Jamie Lorimer (25:02):
Yeah. I think that's a fair reading of what I
was trying to take for them withwith a degree of kind of
ambivalence as to, both my kindof qualifications as a social
scientist to judge thecredibility of the work that was
being offered to me, but also adegree of open endedness that
(25:23):
seems to be emerging as to quitewhat forms of environmental
politics gets, created out ofthose starting points, if you
like. And then this sort ofpicks up on some nice common
themes that that we both have orcommon interests we have in
discussions around theAnthropocene and and the ways in
which Earth system science hasbeen powered up by discussions
(25:48):
about the Anthropocene to beginto be charged with
responsibility for planetarysalvation, if you like, this
kind of newfound interest,particularly in in Europe, but
I'm sure it's the same, youknow, in in The US with the
hopeful change of leadershiparound, you know, making climate
change a clear and importantpolitical priority and around,
you know, what we call here netnet zero or what used to be
(26:11):
called geoengineering, thoughthat term is is not as palatable
as it used to be.
But an idea that, you know, onthe basis of this systems
thinking, there are ways ofknowing, predicting, managing,
and intervening into systemssuch that, desirable futures can
be secured. There are severaldifferent desirable futures that
could be secured, that wouldfavor some over others. So so
(26:35):
there's there's a kind ofnondeterministic politics that
comes out of that ontology thatI'm interested in. But maybe I
could pull you towards whereyou're, I think, ending in the
book if if the last threechapters are beginning to
grapple with questions ofplanetary thinking in the
present, astrobiology, and thisidea of of immunity,
(26:55):
particularly kind of, postdiscussions of the biopolitics
immunity, where this sort of guyin thinking leaves us in
discussions about climatechange. And maybe I could
reciprocate by reading a quote,which is the final couple of
sentences from chapter eight inwhich you say Gaia endows life
on Earth with temporary immunityfrom cosmic extinction.
(27:18):
It appears that anthropogenicclimate change will be another
test of Gaia. It is unclear asyet whether we humans will still
be around to see its regulatoryfunctions reset themselves in
light of the altered conditions.And and I guess you're kind of
you're not committing to, to apolitics around geoengineering.
But but but where do you findGaia leaves us in that
(27:38):
contemporary discussion aboutabout climate change and and the
political response?
Bruce Clarke (27:44):
It it's certainly open ended. I I don't take from
Gaia any kind of positive sortof specific guidance, for
politics. I think I would alignwith Stenger's overall, sense
of, that we've got to learn tolive with Gaia. For all the
(28:08):
possible interventions that wemight find ourself,
contemplating, we need to treadvery, very carefully. I I tend
to see Gaia as a reminder thatin ultimate planetary matters,
we're not really in charge ofthe maintenance of the viability
(28:32):
of the planet, and that's a a amission, we can't I don't think
we're right to think that wecould, take upon ourselves.
It's really so I think of itmore in terms of a strategic
reintegration that may well callfor all kinds of thoughtful
(28:54):
systemic probes, test runs withregard to mitigation, ecosystem
restoration. If and if I couldback up just a bit, it was just
as I was having an opportunityto be with Lynn in the last
couple years of her life atvarious meetings, to get to know
(29:15):
her way of thinking. TheAnthropocene as an idea was
coming in just around this time,you know, somewhere between
02/2006, '2 thousand '11, theyear Lynn dies. The Anthropocene
is coming on as an idea, and, ofcourse, one is one has to engage
with it one way or another. ButI just kept kept thinking to
(29:36):
myself, especially after Lynndied, what would Lynn say?
What would Lynn say about theAnthropocene? And and I think
the answer is clear. She wouldhave just kind of, uttered some
expletive or another and say, ahuman all too human irrigation
to itself of of powers that itdoesn't possess. I continue to
(30:01):
be skeptical about especiallyabout the eco modernist vision
of the Anthropocene in whichgeoengineering was, a major part
of that conversation. Oh, well,we'll just put the techno fix in
for what's ailing the planetand, and and trust us.
(30:22):
We we got this thing. And Ithink I transmit what would have
been, I'm I'm most certain,Margolis' extreme skepticism
about that.
Jamie Lorimer (30:35):
I mean, maybe, Bruce, I could just come in
there. The other touchstone inyour account, you know, is is
Lovelock, I guess. And, but butLovelock's latest book has quite
a different take. I I can'tremember if he uses the word the
Anthropocene, explicitly, but hetalks about the Novacene,
doesn't he? And and and he hasthis, you know, future which is
dominated by perhaps taken overby artificial intelligence by by
(30:58):
machines, which isn'tnecessarily ecomodernist, but
definitely has a kind of technooptimist, narrative to it.
There's a central place for forfor for technology, in that
future. Do you think they'd havediffered, the two of them, in
terms of what they made of theAnthropocene?
Bruce Clarke (31:16):
Oh, absolutely. I I I imagine Lynn is rolling over
in her grave looking atLovelock's Novocine. It came out
just as I was finishing up. Infact, my manuscript was done,
but when the Novocine came out,I felt I had to deal with it.
Thankfully, Minnesota, gave me alittle time to incorporate a
(31:38):
little bit more into my text.
One thing I do in my book istease apart, Lovelock's science
and Margolis's science. Because,as they develop, they really
they take different paths, andNovosine makes that perfectly
clear that Lovelock is a,essentially, a a first order
(32:01):
cybernetician. He's a controltheorist, and and an engineer,
and he likes to present himselfin that guy. So there's this
this abiding optimism that wecan invent our way out, and and
pretty soon the AIs are gonnatake over for us anyways, and
(32:22):
they'll just, and they'll workout the solutions. But but what
gets sacrificed in that visionof the Novocine as the successor
to the Anthropocene.
Right? Because it's only theAnthropocene while the human is
in punitive control of theplanet. But once the AIs take
(32:43):
control of the human, they'lltake control of the planet, and
that will be the Novacene. Andthat's really the death of Gaia.
He kind of fudges it because hesays, well, at the beginning,
the machines will need to keepthe planet cool, and that's what
Gaia does.
And so they'll they'll work withGaia for their own viability.
(33:09):
But a point will come whenthey'll just refashion the
biosphere into a post bioticformation. And at that point,
there'll be no more use forGaia. I can't go there with him.
Jamie Lorimer (33:26):
Just thinking through that, I mean, because I
guess there's a long history ofthe concepts of Gaia being
picked up by, co opted by a kindof deep ecology movement that
was deeply ambivalent abouttechnology and deeply ambivalent
about modern society and deeplyambivalent about urbanism and
and and capitalism. And is thisLovelock sort of passing snipe
(33:47):
at his deep ecology sort of fanbase that, you know, that that
sort of never mis misconstruedhis ideas, or or is there
something else going on there?
Bruce Clarke (33:56):
That's a great question. I'm not sure that I
know the answer to it, althoughit would not be unlike, the
mischievous James Lovelock, whowhom Lynn characterized in
precisely that way as part ofwhat she loved about him was he
was a he was a mischievousspirit. So I'm not sure what
(34:16):
agendas, might have been there.But, what I propose in my book
is that in this matter, let'slook at Margolis. She was deeply
ecological, but she was not akind of Luddite variation of, of
deep ecology.
She was fine with thetechnosphere, but she saw the
(34:39):
ultimate parameters of thetechnosphere as the biosphere,
that the technosphere does notget out from under the
foundation of its possibilitywithin the affordances of the
biosphere. In other words, thatGaia remains the the bottom
line. Planetary viability oflife, writ large, remains the
(35:06):
bottom line for humanpossibility. She was also happy
to think astrobiologically aboutthe potential to take life away
from Earth to to head out intothe universe. But if that was
going to happen, we would haveto take Gaia with us.
(35:27):
We would have to truly masterthe the wicked problems of
creating artificial selfsustaining ecologies. But and
and who's to say we couldn'tcrack that problem? But but but
that's what it would take.
Jamie Lorimer (35:45):
Yeah. I mean, I guess it's interesting. There
there seems to be this, youknow, I guess, in contrast to
the thinkers and thephilosophical movement that you
were describing, which has thisfairly consistent epistemic
commitment to to science and andto reason in its different
guises. Within the probioticterm, there is there's a sort of
retrospective, nostalgia, if youlike, for some point in the
(36:07):
past, before the fall, beforesome kind of antibiotic excess
creeps in and blowback happensand the order has to be reset.
And that is both a kind oftechnological problem, but it's
also a kind of epistemic comespiritual problem that that on
the margins of the probioticturn and where it starts to
(36:31):
bleed into what Heather Paxsoncalls the kind of anti pasturing
movement.
It's various forms of deep greenthinking that, sometimes very
darkly towards kind of fascisticthinking, that holds some kind
of judgment in blowback. This isthe warning to humans that we
need to reset to return, andthen there's a range of
(36:53):
benchmarks that are called uponthat we might return to. So one
popular iteration is a kind ofpaleo version, that is both a
kind of lifestyle fad as well asa much more profound
philosophical, shift,particularly in in North
America. And then there's a kindof pastoral inclination of that
that takes the full, you know,slightly, you know, not quite so
(37:15):
far back, but which there aresort of various forms of low
intensity subsistencetechnologies that that that are
acceptable. And those are, youknow, those are kind of, you
know, popular culture versionsof it.
And then those are squared offagainst a, eco modernist idea
that that can really you know,machines can be harnessed to
know the fundamental operationsof systems operations, whether
(37:36):
that's within the human body,whether that's in the
countryside, or whether whetherthat's in the planet at large,
and they can be optimized todeliver bright green futures.
And and those are the versionsof the probiotic which don't
have these retrospectivetemporities towards the past.
But I guess what gets foldedinto that are these very
complicated, ideas about thelimits of science and the merits
of some kind of either religiousor spiritualist way of knowing
(38:01):
that comes out of holisticthinking. So maybe to sort of
turn this back to you, I mean,what what were the limits to
science in some of thesehistorical events? I mean, some
of the places that they gatheredat, you know, had significance
well beyond them as just placesto to to be a home at
Lindisfarne, for example.
I mean, how does this kind ofrub up against new age thinking
through the twentieth century,that that some of these
(38:23):
characters were were sort of onthe margins of?
Bruce Clarke (38:26):
The thing about the the Lindisfarne sensibility
was purposefully, heterogeneous,and it was right up alongside
the, the kind of whole earthsensibility as that was
constituted by Stewart Brand,who is providing publications,
(38:49):
especially in coevolutionquarterly, which is a truly
amazing body of documentationfor, radical environmentalist
thinking in the nineteenseventies. But the thing about
that venue was that it was nottechnophobic. Quite the
opposite. Brand was atechnophile, and and and that's
(39:14):
kind of obvious in the way thathe's aligned himself in in more
recent decades with theecomodernists. So he was always
kind of eco modernist, while atthe same time I I love your
phrase of bright green.
I I would say he was always notbright green as opposed to deep
green. He lent his promotionalefforts to, O'Neil's, space
(39:42):
colonies, which was a huge votein the seventies, said that
Timothy Leary jumped on that onthat bandwagon as well as he was
serving his sentence, that wecould sort of tap off human
populations and put them in ahigh orbit, around the Earth in
these massive, technologicalconstructions in which we would
(40:06):
create artificial ecologies. Inone of the chapters in my book,
I talk about how WilliamGibson's Neuromancer was, in
fact, just took that all thedesign specs that had been
developed, with regard to thisproject and ran a cyberpunk
(40:26):
number on them. But when you'rein high orbit in the latter part
of the story world of NewRomance, so you're exactly in
O'Neil's space colonies. Well,Margolis, she wasn't a major
promoter of that, but whatintrigued her was that that
would be a test of Gaia.
One of the tests of Gaia wouldbe, can you can you reproduce
(40:48):
it? And and it's not that you'rejust kind of that that you'll
just run the technology overthat problem, but you're really
going to have to cooperate withyou have to let Gaia tell you
how you're gonna solve thatproblem of taking Gaia along
with you if you leave the Earthand and wanna stay alive. The
(41:09):
the Gaia thinkers that I engagewith are are really not, in the
deep ecological veins of turningback from the technological
developments of the twentiethcentury. Marvelous one of the
points she makes is that lifehas always been technological.
(41:31):
In other words, the technologyis not a deviation from what
life has come up with in orderto persist.
That life has, as it's evolved,has find ways to incorporate its
environment into its ownfunction. Just at the base level
of that, for instance, calciumwas a waste product of at an
(41:57):
earlier stage of the biospherethat it was excreted from cells,
where, because it it if it builtup, it would it would poison
poison the metabolism. But butwhat gradually happened was the
ambient calcium that was thenput into the environment was
reincorporated as bones andteeth. And and, so she she had
(42:23):
a, I'd say, a deep evolutionaryvision of the interrelation of
the biosphere and what we callthe technosphere.
Jamie Lorimer (42:34):
I mean, I guess the other great epistemic space
that's opened up by theseconversations and that you
explore really, Ritchie, in yourbook and which chimes with that.
Clearly, a shared interest thatwe have in science fiction is is
the way that it opens space forspeculation, if you like.
There's sort of speculativefiction that is, you know, very
much in vogue now, certainly inin the writings of, of Donna
(42:56):
Haraway and the conversationsthat people like Haraway have
clearly had with Ursula Le Guinand Kim Stanley Robinson and
others. And, you know, in thebook, you nicely use passages
from contemporary and classicscience fiction to illustrate
some of this thinking. Maybe youcould say a bit about the role
that science fiction plays inyour own scholarship and the
(43:18):
ways in which you weremobilizing science fiction
authors as thinkers, withinGuyana systems?
Bruce Clarke (43:25):
One thing that Catherine Hale's great work that
kind of got me going as a aliterature and science scholar,
introduced me to not just,writers like Stanislav Lem, but
was sort of my first contactwith information theory and
cybernetics, and then eventuallysecond order cybernetics or
(43:49):
which I just abbreviate as Neocybernetics. So major figures
on, coming out of the Macyconferences on cybernetics,
including Heinz von Foerster,but also the great Gregory
Bateson, who was basically thepresiding spirit of, Stewart
(44:10):
Brand's green thinking of thenineteen seventies, from
Bateson's book, steps to anecology of mind. So how I've
taught literature and sciencejust as a practical matter, in
the university is, with sciencefiction, just tease up the
themes, that much more directly.And so at a certain point, I was
(44:36):
reading Bateson, and I went backand read Dune, which is from the
mid sixties. And I had read thatback in my college days, many
decades ago.
So a while back, I I I picked itup again. I was really curious
to see if it held up, and Ithought it held up, really well.
(44:56):
And what that reminded me wasthat that novel was suffused
with ecosystem ecology, andthat's kind of how the Fremen on
the desert planet were making alife for themselves because they
had these, there was this sortof interplay between these,
ecological scientists who cameinto the indigenous planet of
(45:21):
Dune and then helped the thenative Fremen population, begin
to dream about creating a fairworld, by mastering, the various
planetary systems to theirbenefit. So I I do a brief riff
on that, in the book by way ofestablishing the milieu, the the
(45:43):
kind of popular systems thinkingthat was percolating up in the
nineteen sixties that then kindof becomes full blown in the
whole earth catalog, whichalways begins with the section
called understanding wholesystems. So there's your systems
counterculture, emerging from akind of convergence of,
(46:07):
cybernetic systems thinking,ecological systems thinking, and
the sense that these paradigms,were planetary in scope.
But then fast forward fifteenyears and you're in the world of
New Romancer, which is clearly aa cybernetic development. But
(46:30):
but now we're into the digitalmoment. So you've got a a
virtual world, that has nowemerged. And so that's the kind
of mainstream cyber developmentthat is more often what people
focus on. Once the digital worldarrives at its ability to create
(46:53):
a kind of a parallel virtualreality, then you're kind of on
the mainstream to our world now,which is kind of caught, between
the problematics of its bioticviability and the utopian vista,
(47:14):
which, is now getting a littletarnished of what might be
possible.
My overall effort then was torecover what was kind of thrown
into shadow by the rise of theeighties and nineties, world of
digitality, because what we leftbehind was autopoietic systems
(47:37):
theory and green cybernetics,and that's the incubator of the
guy in ideas that I think aremost durable.
Jamie Lorimer (47:49):
Great. I mean, I wonder seeing as it's so timely
and significant, andoverwhelming to think a little
bit in the context of COVID andthe pandemic, which in some ways
is like living in a sciencefiction future that's been
relayed to us in different ways,but now it's here and every day.
(48:10):
And I guess thinking throughwhat our two books have to say,
if anything, about about thepresent. You know, I finished
the manuscript for the probioticplanet in November 2019, so just
before everything began. And,you know, here was a book that
was gonna celebrate the wondersof the microbiome, and and we
should love our love ourmicrobes.
And and, fortunately, Minnesotaallowed me to write a preface
(48:33):
for the book in April. So wewere sort of, at least in The
UK, in the middle of the firstwave. And, you know, on the one
hand, what we've seen is thisdramatic amplification of
antibiotic ways of managinglife. You know, we are ever
encouraged to keep distance fromeach other, to put up boundaries
that enforce degrees of ofimmunity and all sorts of, you
(48:54):
know, mundane handwashing andall the rest of it, but also a
sense that the genesis of the ofthe virus comes from within the
hot spots and intensities ofantibiotic ways of of organizing
commerce and trade andpotentially from within hot
spots of intensive agriculturalfood production. So there's a
there's a sort of there's anunfolding story both about the
(49:17):
necessity of antibioticinterventions, the vaccine that
looks like it may be, you know,what secures the return to some
semblance of normality.
Those are this diagnosis of thepathological nature of some
forms of modern life thatcreates these super virulent
entities and allows them tospread around the world. And,
certainly, there was a storyemerging from some strands of
(49:39):
environmentalism that thepandemic was Gaia's revenge,
some kind of dystopian idea thatthis is something that humans
have brought upon themselves.And that's clearly not where
you're going with your argument.But but but looking at the
contemporary situation from theperspective of of a guy and
thinker, I I mean, what, ifanything, does your analysis
give us to making sense of ofCOVID and the political response
(50:03):
to it that we're seeing playingout around this?
Bruce Clarke (50:07):
Sort of the micropolitics are I mean, we
have no choice but to fall backon the vaccine developers. A
probiotic solution, at themicrobiome level does does not
seem to offer itselfimmediately. But panning back a
bit, I think it's clear that, asmany people have been pointing
(50:30):
out, it's it's deforestation.It's the encroachment, the the
unrestrained encroachment of,shall we just say, the techno
sphere or just the realm ofhuman building has crushed up
against the the the remaininghabitat of of the wilder parts
(50:52):
of the planet or the the as yetundeveloped parts of the planet
so that zoonotic diseases, theopportunity of the rare but
real, pathogenic actors as Imean, we flush them out, by the
(51:12):
way we're behaving on thisplanet. Now I'm not a guy as
revenge person at all.
I mean, that's that's, ofcourse, a title of one of
Lovelock's more heatedinterventions. But, no. I I I
agree completely with the waythat you purvey Stenger's
verdict. I mean, Gaia doesn'twant anything from us one way or
(51:35):
another. But at the same time, Iwas thinking how but people just
don't understand the differencebetween viruses and bacteria,
for instance.
There's amazing scientific worknow on mutualistic viruses that
that in fact, we we're we'reswimming in the virus sphere all
the time, and what we'relearning is it's really just
(51:57):
like the the microcosm ofbacterial life. We swim in that
all the time. And 99.9 times outof a hundred, it's it's not
pathogenic. It's just part ofthe the web of life in which we
are completely and inextricablyenmeshed. But we have a
(52:19):
disbiotic civilization at themoment that just, especially at
deforestation is kind of themost glaring manifestation of
our ongoing unwillingness tocurtail the, you know, a
neoliberal capitalist model ofinfinite extraction.
So as long as we're just outthere pushing, grinding ever
(52:45):
further into, the rainforests,We're gonna kick up these
problems for ourselves, so stopdoing that. How about yourself,
Jamie? I'm curious how you woulddraw the lessons here.
Jamie Lorimer (52:59):
Yeah. I mean, since finishing the book in
2019, much of my researchinterest has turned to the food
system and looking at variousefforts underway, I guess, at
the kind of frontiers of ofecological food systems thinking
to imagine how agriculture mightbe the solution to some of these
problems alongside tackling someof the issues that agriculture
(53:23):
has rightly identified withbeing responsible for and
looking at manifestations of theprobiotic turn, in which, I
guess, various agronomists,scientists, and and farmers are
trying to manipulate soilmicrobiome, the, microbiome of
particular crops, even down tothe microbiome of particular
ruminant animals. There'sinterest in making cows that
(53:45):
don't fart and burp so much sothat they can not emit so much
methane. And, yeah, there'sthere's some kind of heartening
ways in which a growingawareness of of climate change
is starting to cascade down intoagriculture and food systems.
And I guess a wider popularunderstanding that that, you
know, where we get our food fromis central to thinking about
(54:05):
things like climate change aswell as the emergence of
zoonotic disease.
And so as, hopefully, we passout of the moment of intensity
with the pandemic and we comeout of the pandemic as almost a
portal for rethinking ourrelationships to the nonhuman
world, that there is apossibility to reset some of
these dynamics and and thinkdifferently about how how life
(54:27):
is managed. So this is a there'sa promise in probiotic thinking.
But I guess at the same time,there's, you know, large parts
of the world that are only ableto think probioticly because
we've globalized some of theseprocesses elsewhere, so
particularly thinking aroundrewilding, which, you know, by
and large, has taken place innorthern temperate situations,
(54:48):
parts of of Canada and and NorthAmerica and and parts of Europe,
where land has been freed upbecause agriculture has been
globalized to the tropics. Thekind of question is whether the
net quantity of wildness isincreasing in the world, or have
we just shuffled itgeographically to temperate
regions away from tropicalregions. There's sort of bigger
(55:08):
distributional questions in thatsense.
And if you like, you know, thesehot spots or intensities of
deforestation, which follow theprocesses of globalizing
agriculture, you know, are verymuch things that, we when I
think of we, I think as, youknow, I guess the listeners of
this blog, educated peopleliving in, urban situations in
(55:29):
various parts of the world arecomplicit with. And it I guess
the the key thing from a from ageographer's perspective is to
think about where in the worldthese networks touch down, how
they benefit some at the expenseof others, and a kind of
conditionality to thepossibilities of going
probiotic, which codependent on,you know, some people suffering
elsewhere. So just try andstitch those two together and
(55:49):
think holistically about how youcould improve a lot of humans
and nonhumans globally andacross these different scales.
And so I got the feeling thatthat the science is there. It's
thinking about the trade offsthat seem to be baked into the
way in which we'reoperationalizing some of this
systems thinking.
Is is one of the key challenges,that I'm trying to think through
(56:10):
in this in this current projectat the moment.
Bruce Clarke (56:13):
Absolutely. I enjoyed very much learning about
the activities that that you'vespent your time studying and
gone out into the field torecover the detail of these
probiotic initiatives. Iappreciated overall the
practical orientation, the thesort of field work mode of of
(56:37):
much of your discussion, was soinformative. Ultimately, I'm a
literature scholar, and so, Imean, for me, it it's the
recovery of texts and then themeditation upon the recovered
text. So there's a lot of, youknow, in the milieu of Gaian
discourse, there's a lot ofrelatively forgotten or
(56:59):
neglected textual history, andso but that leads me into a a
more kind of theoreticalengagement with the play of
ideas.
But I think if you put our twobooks together, you've got an
amazing one two punch of, Gaianpotency.
Jamie Lorimer (57:19):
I think that's a great place to leave it. And
thank you very much to toeveryone involved in the in the
production of the book at at thepress to Maggie Sadler for for
setting up this, you know,fantastic opportunity to have a
conversation with Bruce. And,Bruce, I really hope we get a
chance to have this conversationface to face at some point, in
the future. It'd be great to tocontinue this discussion.
Bruce Clarke (57:38):
I, I'd also Jamie, I look forward to that
opportunity. Thanks so muchworking with University of
Minnesota Press. I think forboth of us, this is our second
book with the press, but youguys are the greatest. You could
tell you gave us bothopportunity to make very last
minute revisions. I I know we'reboth really proud to be
(58:02):
represented by Minnesota.
So thanks.
Marvelous, one of the points she makes is that
life has always beentechnological. In other words,
the technology is not adeviation from what life has
come up with in order topersist.
Jamie Lorimer (00:22):
Where we get our food from is central to thinking
about things like climate changeas well as the emergence of
zoonotic disease. And so as,hopefully, we pass out of the
moment of intensity with thepandemic and we come out of the
pandemic as almost a portal forrethinking our relationships to
the nonhuman world.
Bruce Clarke (00:43):
Hello. I'm Bruce Clark. I teach literature and
science at Texas TechUniversity. My most recent book
is Gaian Systems, Lynn Margulis,Neo Cybernetics and the End of
the Anthropocene. This projectreally started in earnest when I
met Lynn Margulis in 02/2005,and she very quickly dispelled
(01:06):
my lingering skepticism aboutGaia as a scientific topic.
Lynn had been working on Gaiareally from the earliest,
articulation of the conceptbeginning her collaboration with
James Lovelock back in the earlynineteen seventies. And as a
(01:26):
result of my getting to knowLynn, I came into possession of
her correspondence withLovelock, and that gave me some
pretty deep insights into howthis scientific collaboration
developed and how the concept ofGaia developed, as a
(01:47):
conversation between Lovelockand Margolis. So as I began to
familiarize myself with thescience, I began to write
papers, and publish on it andkeep my eye out for Gaia
scholarship and saw that theidea had really begun to take
hold in the twenty first centuryamong major set of theorists
(02:11):
whose work I respected. The bookitself is, in large part,
grounded in a history of theunfolding of Gaia as a
scientific idea and as morebroadly as a as a figure of
thought, in just in generaldiscussion about planetary
(02:33):
affairs. So I look at Lovelockand Margolis' own developing
discourse of Gaia.
I look at the work of BrunoLatour, Isabel Stengers, Donna
Haraway in popularizing Gaiareally for the academic
community. I look at thebackground of what I call the
(02:53):
systems counterculture, which isthe whole earth catalog, which
is then succeeded by coevolutionquarterly. And this was really
the launching pad of an articlepublished in 1975 in coevolution
quarterly. Lead authored byMargolis was the launching pad
for the the reception of Gaia bythe environmental counterculture
(03:18):
here in The States. And Iproceed from there to kinda work
the Gaia idea in terms ofcontemporary science fiction and
the history of cybernetic ideasthat it was bound up with by the
science that Lovelock andMargolis were doing in the way
they articulated that science.
And I bring the story throughpretty much to the contemporary
(03:40):
moment with the onset of theAnthropocene and and looking at
how Gaia discourse, I think, is,in many ways, a preferable
alternative discourse to a lotof the way that Anthropocene has
been spoken about. That's a verylarge sketch of the the breadth
of my book, Giant Systems.Jamie, why don't you tell us a
(04:04):
little bit about the probioticplanet?
Jamie Lorimer (04:07):
Hello. My name is Jamie Lorimer. I'm a geographer
based at the University ofOxford, in The UK, and I teach
environmental geography, sobroadly interested in human
environment relations. My secondbook, Probiotic Planet, Using
Life to Manage Life, argues thatthere's a probiotic turn
underway in how life is beingmanaged across a range of
(04:28):
different policy domains andacross different, scales of
ecological thinking. And byprobiotic turn, I'm looking at,
systematic efforts to use life,to manage life, to tackle a
range of problems that areassociated with the excessive
application of antibiotic modesof managing life.
So if you like, the predominantway I argue of managing life in
(04:51):
the Anthropocene has been aboutthe systematic rationalization,
simplification, control ofecological systems, which has
led to a set of crises withinthe functionings of those
systems. And that could beanything from, crises within,
the human microbiome and therise of a range of autoimmune
diseases to crisis in, resourcemanagement in landscape scale,
(05:14):
around biodiversity loss, arounddramatic forest fires, around
extreme flooding events, rightup to, crises on a planetary
scale that we see associatedwith climate change and and
global warming. So we these arethe kind of blowbacks to
antibiotic modes of managinglife. A probiotic approach looks
at how you could manage theintensities of those systems to
(05:36):
restore some desired mode offunctioning, within them to
deliver, services and andproperties. And and in
particular, it often involvesthe use of keystone species, a
particular species that havedisproportionate agency within
their ecologies to restorefunctions and services.
And I focus in particular on, abody of, policy and science
(05:59):
that's known as rewilding innature conservation, in which
conservationists have shiftedsomewhat from a focus on
managing, or preventing theextinction of rare species
towards restoring, functions andservices within ecology. So
bringing back wolves, bringingback beavers, restoring grazing
regimes with the idea that thesecould deliver desired functions
(06:22):
and services within acontemporary ecology. So that's
that's one example. And theother example I look at is, a
group of scientists and citizenswho are experimenting on their
personal microbiome, so on thebacteria and fungi that make up
the human body, in the interestof tackling a range of
autoimmune allergic diseases,and in particular, a group who
(06:43):
are taking helminths. Sohelminths are a species of human
worm, often called parasiticworms.
And the argument is that wecoevolved with these helminths.
You can have too many helminthsin situations of poor
sanitation. But in the absenceof helminths, the human
microbiome goes into a situationof dysbiosis. And as a
consequence, the human immunesystem turns against itself. And
(07:05):
so these folk are taking worms.
They're conducting clinicaltrials in these worms to look at
what they could do to restoredesired functions and services.
So so the book looks acrossthese examples on different
scales, and it it makes a casethat there's something common
and interesting going on interms of how life is being
conceived and managed acrossthese different, different
(07:25):
domains. And then it pivots inthe second half to a a kind of
critical mapping of thedifferent ways in which one
could go probiotic. So itsketches out a very unequal
geography to where in the world,one is able to go probiotic if
you like. There's a very partialgeography, as to who has
sufficient control over lifearound them that they can,
(07:47):
conduct these controlledexperiments in in restoration.
It looks at the different waysin which life is being imagined,
largely as a deliverer offunctions and services. Life is
being put to work, with, fairlyexploitative consequences for
the life forms that have beenput to work to deliver probiotic
properties. It looks at thedifferent forms of value that
(08:09):
get caught up in a in a kind of,capitalist model of the
probiotic turn, and to whom,value accrues when life gets
commodified in that way. Andultimately aims to offer this
color coded spectrum ofdifferent ways of going
probiotic. So it's sort ofclaiming that there's a
significant historical eventunderway, but what it implies
(08:29):
for the future of the managementof life is open, if you like,
and there are differenttrajectories, emerging in the
present.
Bruce Clarke (08:37):
Well, I'm very interested in hearing you speak
to the the primary differencesthe probiotic orientation makes
relative to other moretraditional research programs.
For instance, you borrow a termfrom other writers to describe
the current probiotic era aspost pastorian, in that we've
(08:59):
been decisively moving away fromthe antibiotic world ushered in
by Pasteur's identification ofbacterial pathogens and
infections. So I'd be interestedin your thoughts on what we
could call the Pasteurianplanet, the one we're leaving
behind, that subsequent longcentury of demonization of
(09:21):
microbes as morbid rather thanbeneficent in their main
effects, and on what it means tohave gained today's perspective
on the broadly mutualisticnature of most symbiosis between
microbes and their macroscopichosts?
Jamie Lorimer (09:38):
That's a great question. Thank you. Yeah. I
mean, I take the concept of thepost posterior from the
anthropologist Heather Paxson,who studied the, a group of,
people making raw milk cheese onthe Northeast of of The US. And,
Paxson's developing an analysisoffered by by Bruno Latour.
If you like the ways in whichPasteur, who's a great figure in
(10:00):
in in French microbiology, butalso a great figure in modern
hygiene, produced this body ofscience, which through its
application led to this kind ofblunderbuss approach to
managing, our relationships withwith the microbial world. There
was a a kind of indexing ofhygiene to the absence of of
microbes. And if we extend thatout to think about the ways in
(10:22):
which life has been conceivedand managed, not just within the
human body or within thekitchen, but to to the wider
countryside, let's say. Therewas a tendency and still is, in
many forms of, pest control, inthe use of pesticides in in in
agriculture, towards thewholesale eradication of of life
(10:42):
that is not held to be useful.So whether that's insects or
soil microbes, everything issort of bundled into this
bracket of redundant life thatwe could we can do without, and
life gets rationalized and andstreamlined.
And and the argument that youget from immunologists and and
ecologists is that this absencecreates the conditions for
particularly virulent,sometimes, antibiotic resistant
(11:04):
to the pests and and problematicspecies to emerge. You have this
blowback in particularlyvirulent, pathogenic microbes
that come to the fore. And whatemerges particularly in the
microbiome with the advent ofnext generation sequencing
technologies, which allowscientists to map out the full
diversity of life in themicrobiome. During past years'
(11:25):
time, you can only really know amicrobe was there if you could
if you could culture it. Andthere's a very small subset of
microbes that can be cultured inlaboratory settings.
Genetic approach gives us thisgreat picture of the diversity
of life that characterizes anymicrobial setting and a sense
that a great deal about life isis harmless, but also a subset
of that life can be beneficial,can be mutualistic, can lead to
(11:47):
desirable relations that thatenable the human body to to
function in a way that we expectit to. So that's the kind of
post posteriorian idea. It's asort of much more nuanced, much
more calibrated application ofways of knowing and and managing
life. There's a Dutchphilosopher, Joseph Kulets, who
describes a similar shift in,the management of agricultural
(12:08):
and conservation landscapes asthe controls decontrolling of
ecological controls. This iskind of nuanced application of
of an ecologized form of ofscience still ultimately
towards, the delivery ofservices that are useful for
people.
It's not a kind of rejection ofthe benefits of modern
antibiotic approaches. It's justjust sort of nuanced
(12:29):
recalibration to deliverdifferent functions and and
services. So, yeah, so maybe Icould reciprocate, Bruce, with a
with a question question foryou. I mean, I guess, one of the
common strands that runs acrossour books is is trying to make
sense of the enthusiasm for Guyin thinking now, and you trace
this long history to place thecontemporary enthusiasm in a
(12:51):
much deeper history. But if youhad to sort of characterize why
this conjunction of ideas aroundthe Holoboy and the Anthropocene
and Gaia have come to the forein the contemporary present.
Why would that be, do you think?
Bruce Clarke (13:04):
That is a great question. You're right. I take
the discussion back and kind oftrace it forward, and and one
notes in the first severaldecades of the discussion of
Gaia, it's it's reallystruggling with various
unreceptive areas of ofmainstream science to establish
(13:24):
itself as an idea. But bothLovelock and Margolis are are
steadfast in their developmentand promotion of the idea.
There's an kind of unusualradiation, you could say, of
Gaian ideas coming out ofscience, but being received by a
wider public that is captivatedin various ways by what they
(13:49):
take Gaia to represent as a kindof reconnection to, a planetary
horizon.
Now in in more recent times,however, there's a a kind of
convergence of the planetaryconcern as articulated through
what has now be developed asGaia theory, which has been
(14:11):
brought into a kind ofnormalization of its bona fides
as as an idea that's beingtested and put to various
evidentiary challenges as at thesame time it's being expanded as
a framework for social thought.So it enters the discourse of
(14:32):
environmentalism. Lovelock isgradually, as I observe it,
being lionized, as a kind of agreen guru, in England,
specifically, not not so much inAmerica. But in America, Donna
Haraway establishes arelationship. There's a file of
(14:52):
letters that I've seen,exchanged between her and
Margolis.
And and Margolis is, in a way, amore radical environmental
thinker, than Lovelock. So Ithink her, and, of course, her
own science has to do withchampioning the idea of
symbiosis not as a marginalphenomenon within the Biosir,
(15:16):
but in fact, is an absolutelycentral dynamic of evolutionary
persistence of life through theeons and just as a matter of
fact that life is amazingly,interconnected at all levels and
across all kingdoms as just partof its way of doing the business
(15:37):
of living on this planet.Lovelock continues to be the
more sort of scientificallyengaged, advocate, has a body of
coworkers that gather aroundhim. Margolis' ideas connect
very deeply with Donna Haraway'sfeminist science studies. And at
a certain point, these ideas aregathered in by by the
(16:03):
conversation that IsabelleStengers, the Belgian
philosophers, having with BrunoLatour, the premier
anthropological, sociologicalthinker of science and
technology, in the InternationalTheory Academy.
And so they gradually start,talking Gaia. There's there's a
(16:24):
kind of steady history, notexactly of normalization of
Gaia, which still has still kindof an edgy concept for many
people, and yet then you add thesort of Anthropocene dilemma
about how we bring ourunderstanding around. In other
(16:46):
words, it's not just that lifeis a geological force, which
used to be a kind of radical guyand idea, but human life, is now
understood as having amounted tosomething like a geological
force. The question then is, youknow, are we are we in any
position to control Gaia or tomanage Gaia? That's a
(17:11):
problematic assertion, althoughthat's one of the main debates
now.
As I encountered your work, thiswas the framing that you found,
that that had kind of arrived asyou were doing the work for
Probiotic Planet and created aframework that that was really
(17:32):
efficient, sort ofintellectually efficient for
positioning the the widerphilosophical and social
theoretical aspects, of yourwork in Probiotic Planet.
Jamie Lorimer (17:44):
One of the I guess the challenges for me as
somebody trained in sciencestudies and in in this sort of,
as as a as a ultimately, as asocial scientist is is to try
and make sense of the epistemicalliances one might make with
scientists that I write about.And I guess it's interesting
following the intellectualtrajectories of some of those
(18:07):
figures that you've justmentioned. So particularly Bruno
Latour, and Donna Haraway, who,you know, I encountered their
writings in the nineteeneighties and the nineteen
nineties, where there was a adegree of skepticism, if you
like, about how, asanthropologists, they might make
alliances with science to tellstories about the social. And
and that sort of socialconstruction, scientific
(18:29):
knowledge tradition, which was,I guess, particularly critical
of modes of biological sciencethat they saw naturalizing kind
of western capitalistic,individualistic, patriarchal
idea of of the subject and ofthe organization of society that
they they found written intoparticular stories of creation
or particular ways in which, youknow, animals were arranged in
(18:50):
in naturalistic museums. And andI guess, you know, what what's
interesting for me, you know,there's various points,
particularly for Latour, wherehe has a kind of crisis in that,
understanding of his role as acritic, particularly in the
light of, climate change andthis concern that he's seeing
climate deniers using some ofthe very techniques that he and
his cowriters pioneered to thinkskeptically about the position
(19:14):
of of science and society.
And and there's this kind ofjourney of discovery that takes
him to Lovelock, one feels. Andand, I think, Haraway, it's less
clear cut as a kind of epiphany.She's always had this, you know,
quite sort of healthyskepticism, but also a deep
scientific understanding, Ifeel, of of Margulis and others.
But in Symbiogenesis, in a modelof Earth system science that
(19:36):
comes from Gaia, they both seemto find a much more palatable
political ontology, if you like,in which human society is
premised on mutualisticrelations, and at which on a
foundational level, there's amuch more ecological set of
preconditions for how lifeshould be should be organized.
And so there's a there's a sensethat a kind of guy and story
(19:58):
comes along at the right time,in order to justify a kind of
green liberal vision of thefuture.
So so I guess my question foryou is, you know, is that is
that just too cynical to read itin that way as a sociologist of
science, or is there somethingelse going on that that makes
this really interesting fermentof ideas where anthropologists,
(20:21):
philosophers, immunologists,earth system scientists are all
kind of thinking along similarlines and forming this kind of
common epistemic commitment to aparticular way of knowing about
the world.
Bruce Clarke (20:35):
I don't think that sounds overly cynical. I mean,
one one is well advised to to beon one's intellectual guard
regarding such enthusiasms. Inmy own case, I, I I I tell the
story at the beginning of mybook of, of sort of the
overcoming of of my skepticism,with regard to Gaia. But on the
(20:59):
other hand, I also trace howMargolis, and this is due to her
having, encountered FranciscoVarela, in a very significant
way in the nineteen eighties, inin relation to a kind of private
symposium called the LindisfarneAssociation. But the outcome of
(21:22):
that was that Lynn encountered avigorous discourse that was
grounded in the systemscountercultures, I call it, of,
second order cybernetics, andthe concept of autopoiesis, as a
theory of the integrity andmaintenance and self production
(21:43):
of the living cell enters intoher her articulation of Gaia.
But what comes along with thattheory is also a kind of
epistemological constructivism.So for instance, Matron and
Varela will say that, a livingsystem, is cognitive from the
(22:04):
get go, that sells our cognitivesystems, and as life ramps up
from its cellular foundations,that that life brings forth its
own world and that and andthat's a kind of, shorthand
formulation of the Gaiahypothesis that life controls
its environment. That's the theradical version, but at least
(22:25):
that that life shapes itsenvironment is not just the sort
of passive recipient ofgeological dynamics to which
it's always adapting itself. Theproblem of constructivism is a
complex one, and I think you'recorrect to consider the the
social constructivism that,Latour in particular feels he he
(22:50):
has to pull away from. That thatsort of one line, but the
epistemological, constructivismgrounded in in autopoietic
systems theory is a is is aseparate dynamic and but what it
means for Gaia is that that Imean, that Gaia is always kind
(23:10):
of straddling this dual identitybetween, sort of contested
scientific hypothesis on the onehand, but on the other hand, a
way of shaping one's vision ofthe world.
That Gaia is a construction, andthat's is to be brought forth in
(23:31):
whatever manner is sort ofconducive to one's
environmental, concerns. So itit's an adaptable, meta concept
at that level. I was thinkingabout your your presentation of
of Gaia, and I pulled a quoteout from your introductory
(23:51):
chapter, where you say, what youfind in the leading accounts of
Gaia is, in your own words,quote, a palatable liberal and
ecological political ontologyfor rematerializing theory after
the idealist excesses of thescientific term. So I take it
(24:13):
that's the that's the socialconstructionism that became
problematic for Latour. At thesame time, you continue, it
provides common epistemic groundfor rebuilding alliances with
the natural sciences after thescience wars and in face of
rising science denialism,unquote.
(24:35):
So it seemed to me that you comeupon Guyan thinking as a ground
for another sort of restoration,a theoretical remediation that
you align with what's called thenew materialism, but it amounts
to a regrounding in biologicaland ecological substance that
(24:56):
compensates for the impasses ofpoststructuralism. Does that
sound right to you?
Jamie Lorimer (25:02):
Yeah. I think that's a fair reading of what I
was trying to take for them withwith a degree of kind of
ambivalence as to, both my kindof qualifications as a social
scientist to judge thecredibility of the work that was
being offered to me, but also adegree of open endedness that
(25:23):
seems to be emerging as to quitewhat forms of environmental
politics gets, created out ofthose starting points, if you
like. And then this sort ofpicks up on some nice common
themes that that we both have orcommon interests we have in
discussions around theAnthropocene and and the ways in
which Earth system science hasbeen powered up by discussions
(25:48):
about the Anthropocene to beginto be charged with
responsibility for planetarysalvation, if you like, this
kind of newfound interest,particularly in in Europe, but
I'm sure it's the same, youknow, in in The US with the
hopeful change of leadershiparound, you know, making climate
change a clear and importantpolitical priority and around,
you know, what we call here netnet zero or what used to be
(26:11):
called geoengineering, thoughthat term is is not as palatable
as it used to be.
But an idea that, you know, onthe basis of this systems
thinking, there are ways ofknowing, predicting, managing,
and intervening into systemssuch that, desirable futures can
be secured. There are severaldifferent desirable futures that
could be secured, that wouldfavor some over others. So so
(26:35):
there's there's a kind ofnondeterministic politics that
comes out of that ontology thatI'm interested in. But maybe I
could pull you towards whereyou're, I think, ending in the
book if if the last threechapters are beginning to
grapple with questions ofplanetary thinking in the
present, astrobiology, and thisidea of of immunity,
(26:55):
particularly kind of, postdiscussions of the biopolitics
immunity, where this sort of guyin thinking leaves us in
discussions about climatechange. And maybe I could
reciprocate by reading a quote,which is the final couple of
sentences from chapter eight inwhich you say Gaia endows life
on Earth with temporary immunityfrom cosmic extinction.
(27:18):
It appears that anthropogenicclimate change will be another
test of Gaia. It is unclear asyet whether we humans will still
be around to see its regulatoryfunctions reset themselves in
light of the altered conditions.And and I guess you're kind of
you're not committing to, to apolitics around geoengineering.
But but but where do you findGaia leaves us in that
(27:38):
contemporary discussion aboutabout climate change and and the
political response?
Bruce Clarke (27:44):
It it's certainly open ended. I I don't take from
Gaia any kind of positive sortof specific guidance, for
politics. I think I would alignwith Stenger's overall, sense
of, that we've got to learn tolive with Gaia. For all the
(28:08):
possible interventions that wemight find ourself,
contemplating, we need to treadvery, very carefully. I I tend
to see Gaia as a reminder thatin ultimate planetary matters,
we're not really in charge ofthe maintenance of the viability
(28:32):
of the planet, and that's a a amission, we can't I don't think
we're right to think that wecould, take upon ourselves.
It's really so I think of itmore in terms of a strategic
reintegration that may well callfor all kinds of thoughtful
(28:54):
systemic probes, test runs withregard to mitigation, ecosystem
restoration. If and if I couldback up just a bit, it was just
as I was having an opportunityto be with Lynn in the last
couple years of her life atvarious meetings, to get to know
(29:15):
her way of thinking. TheAnthropocene as an idea was
coming in just around this time,you know, somewhere between
02/2006, '2 thousand '11, theyear Lynn dies. The Anthropocene
is coming on as an idea, and, ofcourse, one is one has to engage
with it one way or another. ButI just kept kept thinking to
(29:36):
myself, especially after Lynndied, what would Lynn say?
What would Lynn say about theAnthropocene? And and I think
the answer is clear. She wouldhave just kind of, uttered some
expletive or another and say, ahuman all too human irrigation
to itself of of powers that itdoesn't possess. I continue to
(30:01):
be skeptical about especiallyabout the eco modernist vision
of the Anthropocene in whichgeoengineering was, a major part
of that conversation. Oh, well,we'll just put the techno fix in
for what's ailing the planetand, and and trust us.
(30:22):
We we got this thing. And Ithink I transmit what would have
been, I'm I'm most certain,Margolis' extreme skepticism
about that.
Jamie Lorimer (30:35):
I mean, maybe, Bruce, I could just come in
there. The other touchstone inyour account, you know, is is
Lovelock, I guess. And, but butLovelock's latest book has quite
a different take. I I can'tremember if he uses the word the
Anthropocene, explicitly, but hetalks about the Novacene,
doesn't he? And and and he hasthis, you know, future which is
dominated by perhaps taken overby artificial intelligence by by
(30:58):
machines, which isn'tnecessarily ecomodernist, but
definitely has a kind of technooptimist, narrative to it.
There's a central place for forfor for technology, in that
future. Do you think they'd havediffered, the two of them, in
terms of what they made of theAnthropocene?
Bruce Clarke (31:16):
Oh, absolutely. I I I imagine Lynn is rolling over
in her grave looking atLovelock's Novocine. It came out
just as I was finishing up. Infact, my manuscript was done,
but when the Novocine came out,I felt I had to deal with it.
Thankfully, Minnesota, gave me alittle time to incorporate a
(31:38):
little bit more into my text.
One thing I do in my book istease apart, Lovelock's science
and Margolis's science. Because,as they develop, they really
they take different paths, andNovosine makes that perfectly
clear that Lovelock is a,essentially, a a first order
(32:01):
cybernetician. He's a controltheorist, and and an engineer,
and he likes to present himselfin that guy. So there's this
this abiding optimism that wecan invent our way out, and and
pretty soon the AIs are gonnatake over for us anyways, and
(32:22):
they'll just, and they'll workout the solutions. But but what
gets sacrificed in that visionof the Novocine as the successor
to the Anthropocene.
Right? Because it's only theAnthropocene while the human is
in punitive control of theplanet. But once the AIs take
(32:43):
control of the human, they'lltake control of the planet, and
that will be the Novacene. Andthat's really the death of Gaia.
He kind of fudges it because hesays, well, at the beginning,
the machines will need to keepthe planet cool, and that's what
Gaia does.
And so they'll they'll work withGaia for their own viability.
(33:09):
But a point will come whenthey'll just refashion the
biosphere into a post bioticformation. And at that point,
there'll be no more use forGaia. I can't go there with him.
Jamie Lorimer (33:26):
Just thinking through that, I mean, because I
guess there's a long history ofthe concepts of Gaia being
picked up by, co opted by a kindof deep ecology movement that
was deeply ambivalent abouttechnology and deeply ambivalent
about modern society and deeplyambivalent about urbanism and
and and capitalism. And is thisLovelock sort of passing snipe
(33:47):
at his deep ecology sort of fanbase that, you know, that that
sort of never mis misconstruedhis ideas, or or is there
something else going on there?
Bruce Clarke (33:56):
That's a great question. I'm not sure that I
know the answer to it, althoughit would not be unlike, the
mischievous James Lovelock, whowhom Lynn characterized in
precisely that way as part ofwhat she loved about him was he
was a he was a mischievousspirit. So I'm not sure what
(34:16):
agendas, might have been there.But, what I propose in my book
is that in this matter, let'slook at Margolis. She was deeply
ecological, but she was not akind of Luddite variation of, of
deep ecology.
She was fine with thetechnosphere, but she saw the
(34:39):
ultimate parameters of thetechnosphere as the biosphere,
that the technosphere does notget out from under the
foundation of its possibilitywithin the affordances of the
biosphere. In other words, thatGaia remains the the bottom
line. Planetary viability oflife, writ large, remains the
(35:06):
bottom line for humanpossibility. She was also happy
to think astrobiologically aboutthe potential to take life away
from Earth to to head out intothe universe. But if that was
going to happen, we would haveto take Gaia with us.
(35:27):
We would have to truly masterthe the wicked problems of
creating artificial selfsustaining ecologies. But and
and who's to say we couldn'tcrack that problem? But but but
that's what it would take.
Jamie Lorimer (35:45):
Yeah. I mean, I guess it's interesting. There
there seems to be this, youknow, I guess, in contrast to
the thinkers and thephilosophical movement that you
were describing, which has thisfairly consistent epistemic
commitment to to science and andto reason in its different
guises. Within the probioticterm, there is there's a sort of
retrospective, nostalgia, if youlike, for some point in the
(36:07):
past, before the fall, beforesome kind of antibiotic excess
creeps in and blowback happensand the order has to be reset.
And that is both a kind oftechnological problem, but it's
also a kind of epistemic comespiritual problem that that on
the margins of the probioticturn and where it starts to
(36:31):
bleed into what Heather Paxsoncalls the kind of anti pasturing
movement.
It's various forms of deep greenthinking that, sometimes very
darkly towards kind of fascisticthinking, that holds some kind
of judgment in blowback. This isthe warning to humans that we
need to reset to return, andthen there's a range of
(36:53):
benchmarks that are called uponthat we might return to. So one
popular iteration is a kind ofpaleo version, that is both a
kind of lifestyle fad as well asa much more profound
philosophical, shift,particularly in in North
America. And then there's a kindof pastoral inclination of that
that takes the full, you know,slightly, you know, not quite so
(37:15):
far back, but which there aresort of various forms of low
intensity subsistencetechnologies that that that are
acceptable. And those are, youknow, those are kind of, you
know, popular culture versionsof it.
And then those are squared offagainst a, eco modernist idea
that that can really you know,machines can be harnessed to
know the fundamental operationsof systems operations, whether
(37:36):
that's within the human body,whether that's in the
countryside, or whether whetherthat's in the planet at large,
and they can be optimized todeliver bright green futures.
And and those are the versionsof the probiotic which don't
have these retrospectivetemporities towards the past.
But I guess what gets foldedinto that are these very
complicated, ideas about thelimits of science and the merits
of some kind of either religiousor spiritualist way of knowing
(38:01):
that comes out of holisticthinking. So maybe to sort of
turn this back to you, I mean,what what were the limits to
science in some of thesehistorical events? I mean, some
of the places that they gatheredat, you know, had significance
well beyond them as just placesto to to be a home at
Lindisfarne, for example.
I mean, how does this kind ofrub up against new age thinking
through the twentieth century,that that some of these
(38:23):
characters were were sort of onthe margins of?
Bruce Clarke (38:26):
The thing about the the Lindisfarne sensibility
was purposefully, heterogeneous,and it was right up alongside
the, the kind of whole earthsensibility as that was
constituted by Stewart Brand,who is providing publications,
(38:49):
especially in coevolutionquarterly, which is a truly
amazing body of documentationfor, radical environmentalist
thinking in the nineteenseventies. But the thing about
that venue was that it was nottechnophobic. Quite the
opposite. Brand was atechnophile, and and and that's
(39:14):
kind of obvious in the way thathe's aligned himself in in more
recent decades with theecomodernists. So he was always
kind of eco modernist, while atthe same time I I love your
phrase of bright green.
I I would say he was always notbright green as opposed to deep
green. He lent his promotionalefforts to, O'Neil's, space
(39:42):
colonies, which was a huge votein the seventies, said that
Timothy Leary jumped on that onthat bandwagon as well as he was
serving his sentence, that wecould sort of tap off human
populations and put them in ahigh orbit, around the Earth in
these massive, technologicalconstructions in which we would
(40:06):
create artificial ecologies. Inone of the chapters in my book,
I talk about how WilliamGibson's Neuromancer was, in
fact, just took that all thedesign specs that had been
developed, with regard to thisproject and ran a cyberpunk
(40:26):
number on them. But when you'rein high orbit in the latter part
of the story world of NewRomance, so you're exactly in
O'Neil's space colonies. Well,Margolis, she wasn't a major
promoter of that, but whatintrigued her was that that
would be a test of Gaia.
One of the tests of Gaia wouldbe, can you can you reproduce
(40:48):
it? And and it's not that you'rejust kind of that that you'll
just run the technology overthat problem, but you're really
going to have to cooperate withyou have to let Gaia tell you
how you're gonna solve thatproblem of taking Gaia along
with you if you leave the Earthand and wanna stay alive. The
(41:09):
the Gaia thinkers that I engagewith are are really not, in the
deep ecological veins of turningback from the technological
developments of the twentiethcentury. Marvelous one of the
points she makes is that lifehas always been technological.
(41:31):
In other words, the technologyis not a deviation from what
life has come up with in orderto persist.
That life has, as it's evolved,has find ways to incorporate its
environment into its ownfunction. Just at the base level
of that, for instance, calciumwas a waste product of at an
(41:57):
earlier stage of the biospherethat it was excreted from cells,
where, because it it if it builtup, it would it would poison
poison the metabolism. But butwhat gradually happened was the
ambient calcium that was thenput into the environment was
reincorporated as bones andteeth. And and, so she she had
(42:23):
a, I'd say, a deep evolutionaryvision of the interrelation of
the biosphere and what we callthe technosphere.
Jamie Lorimer (42:34):
I mean, I guess the other great epistemic space
that's opened up by theseconversations and that you
explore really, Ritchie, in yourbook and which chimes with that.
Clearly, a shared interest thatwe have in science fiction is is
the way that it opens space forspeculation, if you like.
There's sort of speculativefiction that is, you know, very
much in vogue now, certainly inin the writings of, of Donna
(42:56):
Haraway and the conversationsthat people like Haraway have
clearly had with Ursula Le Guinand Kim Stanley Robinson and
others. And, you know, in thebook, you nicely use passages
from contemporary and classicscience fiction to illustrate
some of this thinking. Maybe youcould say a bit about the role
that science fiction plays inyour own scholarship and the
(43:18):
ways in which you weremobilizing science fiction
authors as thinkers, withinGuyana systems?
Bruce Clarke (43:25):
One thing that Catherine Hale's great work that
kind of got me going as a aliterature and science scholar,
introduced me to not just,writers like Stanislav Lem, but
was sort of my first contactwith information theory and
cybernetics, and then eventuallysecond order cybernetics or
(43:49):
which I just abbreviate as Neocybernetics. So major figures
on, coming out of the Macyconferences on cybernetics,
including Heinz von Foerster,but also the great Gregory
Bateson, who was basically thepresiding spirit of, Stewart
(44:10):
Brand's green thinking of thenineteen seventies, from
Bateson's book, steps to anecology of mind. So how I've
taught literature and sciencejust as a practical matter, in
the university is, with sciencefiction, just tease up the
themes, that much more directly.And so at a certain point, I was
(44:36):
reading Bateson, and I went backand read Dune, which is from the
mid sixties. And I had read thatback in my college days, many
decades ago.
So a while back, I I I picked itup again. I was really curious
to see if it held up, and Ithought it held up, really well.
(44:56):
And what that reminded me wasthat that novel was suffused
with ecosystem ecology, andthat's kind of how the Fremen on
the desert planet were making alife for themselves because they
had these, there was this sortof interplay between these,
ecological scientists who cameinto the indigenous planet of
(45:21):
Dune and then helped the thenative Fremen population, begin
to dream about creating a fairworld, by mastering, the various
planetary systems to theirbenefit. So I I do a brief riff
on that, in the book by way ofestablishing the milieu, the the
(45:43):
kind of popular systems thinkingthat was percolating up in the
nineteen sixties that then kindof becomes full blown in the
whole earth catalog, whichalways begins with the section
called understanding wholesystems. So there's your systems
counterculture, emerging from akind of convergence of,
(46:07):
cybernetic systems thinking,ecological systems thinking, and
the sense that these paradigms,were planetary in scope.
But then fast forward fifteenyears and you're in the world of
New Romancer, which is clearly aa cybernetic development. But
(46:30):
but now we're into the digitalmoment. So you've got a a
virtual world, that has nowemerged. And so that's the kind
of mainstream cyber developmentthat is more often what people
focus on. Once the digital worldarrives at its ability to create
(46:53):
a kind of a parallel virtualreality, then you're kind of on
the mainstream to our world now,which is kind of caught, between
the problematics of its bioticviability and the utopian vista,
(47:14):
which, is now getting a littletarnished of what might be
possible.
My overall effort then was torecover what was kind of thrown
into shadow by the rise of theeighties and nineties, world of
digitality, because what we leftbehind was autopoietic systems
(47:37):
theory and green cybernetics,and that's the incubator of the
guy in ideas that I think aremost durable.
Jamie Lorimer (47:49):
Great. I mean, I wonder seeing as it's so timely
and significant, andoverwhelming to think a little
bit in the context of COVID andthe pandemic, which in some ways
is like living in a sciencefiction future that's been
relayed to us in different ways,but now it's here and every day.
(48:10):
And I guess thinking throughwhat our two books have to say,
if anything, about about thepresent. You know, I finished
the manuscript for the probioticplanet in November 2019, so just
before everything began. And,you know, here was a book that
was gonna celebrate the wondersof the microbiome, and and we
should love our love ourmicrobes.
And and, fortunately, Minnesotaallowed me to write a preface
(48:33):
for the book in April. So wewere sort of, at least in The
UK, in the middle of the firstwave. And, you know, on the one
hand, what we've seen is thisdramatic amplification of
antibiotic ways of managinglife. You know, we are ever
encouraged to keep distance fromeach other, to put up boundaries
that enforce degrees of ofimmunity and all sorts of, you
(48:54):
know, mundane handwashing andall the rest of it, but also a
sense that the genesis of the ofthe virus comes from within the
hot spots and intensities ofantibiotic ways of of organizing
commerce and trade andpotentially from within hot
spots of intensive agriculturalfood production. So there's a
there's a sort of there's anunfolding story both about the
(49:17):
necessity of antibioticinterventions, the vaccine that
looks like it may be, you know,what secures the return to some
semblance of normality.
Those are this diagnosis of thepathological nature of some
forms of modern life thatcreates these super virulent
entities and allows them tospread around the world. And,
certainly, there was a storyemerging from some strands of
(49:39):
environmentalism that thepandemic was Gaia's revenge,
some kind of dystopian idea thatthis is something that humans
have brought upon themselves.And that's clearly not where
you're going with your argument.But but but looking at the
contemporary situation from theperspective of of a guy and
thinker, I I mean, what, ifanything, does your analysis
give us to making sense of ofCOVID and the political response
(50:03):
to it that we're seeing playingout around this?
Bruce Clarke (50:07):
Sort of the micropolitics are I mean, we
have no choice but to fall backon the vaccine developers. A
probiotic solution, at themicrobiome level does does not
seem to offer itselfimmediately. But panning back a
bit, I think it's clear that, asmany people have been pointing
(50:30):
out, it's it's deforestation.It's the encroachment, the the
unrestrained encroachment of,shall we just say, the techno
sphere or just the realm ofhuman building has crushed up
against the the the remaininghabitat of of the wilder parts
(50:52):
of the planet or the the as yetundeveloped parts of the planet
so that zoonotic diseases, theopportunity of the rare but
real, pathogenic actors as Imean, we flush them out, by the
(51:12):
way we're behaving on thisplanet. Now I'm not a guy as
revenge person at all.
I mean, that's that's, ofcourse, a title of one of
Lovelock's more heatedinterventions. But, no. I I I
agree completely with the waythat you purvey Stenger's
verdict. I mean, Gaia doesn'twant anything from us one way or
(51:35):
another. But at the same time, Iwas thinking how but people just
don't understand the differencebetween viruses and bacteria,
for instance.
There's amazing scientific worknow on mutualistic viruses that
that in fact, we we're we'reswimming in the virus sphere all
the time, and what we'relearning is it's really just
(51:57):
like the the microcosm ofbacterial life. We swim in that
all the time. And 99.9 times outof a hundred, it's it's not
pathogenic. It's just part ofthe the web of life in which we
are completely and inextricablyenmeshed. But we have a
(52:19):
disbiotic civilization at themoment that just, especially at
deforestation is kind of themost glaring manifestation of
our ongoing unwillingness tocurtail the, you know, a
neoliberal capitalist model ofinfinite extraction.
So as long as we're just outthere pushing, grinding ever
(52:45):
further into, the rainforests,We're gonna kick up these
problems for ourselves, so stopdoing that. How about yourself,
Jamie? I'm curious how you woulddraw the lessons here.
Jamie Lorimer (52:59):
Yeah. I mean, since finishing the book in
2019, much of my researchinterest has turned to the food
system and looking at variousefforts underway, I guess, at
the kind of frontiers of ofecological food systems thinking
to imagine how agriculture mightbe the solution to some of these
problems alongside tackling someof the issues that agriculture
(53:23):
has rightly identified withbeing responsible for and
looking at manifestations of theprobiotic turn, in which, I
guess, various agronomists,scientists, and and farmers are
trying to manipulate soilmicrobiome, the, microbiome of
particular crops, even down tothe microbiome of particular
ruminant animals. There'sinterest in making cows that
(53:45):
don't fart and burp so much sothat they can not emit so much
methane. And, yeah, there'sthere's some kind of heartening
ways in which a growingawareness of of climate change
is starting to cascade down intoagriculture and food systems.
And I guess a wider popularunderstanding that that, you
know, where we get our food fromis central to thinking about
(54:05):
things like climate change aswell as the emergence of
zoonotic disease.
And so as, hopefully, we passout of the moment of intensity
with the pandemic and we comeout of the pandemic as almost a
portal for rethinking ourrelationships to the nonhuman
world, that there is apossibility to reset some of
these dynamics and and thinkdifferently about how how life
(54:27):
is managed. So this is a there'sa promise in probiotic thinking.
But I guess at the same time,there's, you know, large parts
of the world that are only ableto think probioticly because
we've globalized some of theseprocesses elsewhere, so
particularly thinking aroundrewilding, which, you know, by
and large, has taken place innorthern temperate situations,
(54:48):
parts of of Canada and and NorthAmerica and and parts of Europe,
where land has been freed upbecause agriculture has been
globalized to the tropics. Thekind of question is whether the
net quantity of wildness isincreasing in the world, or have
we just shuffled itgeographically to temperate
regions away from tropicalregions. There's sort of bigger
(55:08):
distributional questions in thatsense.
And if you like, you know, thesehot spots or intensities of
deforestation, which follow theprocesses of globalizing
agriculture, you know, are verymuch things that, we when I
think of we, I think as, youknow, I guess the listeners of
this blog, educated peopleliving in, urban situations in
(55:29):
various parts of the world arecomplicit with. And it I guess
the the key thing from a from ageographer's perspective is to
think about where in the worldthese networks touch down, how
they benefit some at the expenseof others, and a kind of
conditionality to thepossibilities of going
probiotic, which codependent on,you know, some people suffering
elsewhere. So just try andstitch those two together and
(55:49):
think holistically about how youcould improve a lot of humans
and nonhumans globally andacross these different scales.
And so I got the feeling thatthat the science is there. It's
thinking about the trade offsthat seem to be baked into the
way in which we'reoperationalizing some of this
systems thinking.
Is is one of the key challenges,that I'm trying to think through
(56:10):
in this in this current projectat the moment.
Bruce Clarke (56:13):
Absolutely. I enjoyed very much learning about
the activities that that you'vespent your time studying and
gone out into the field torecover the detail of these
probiotic initiatives. Iappreciated overall the
practical orientation, the thesort of field work mode of of
(56:37):
much of your discussion, was soinformative. Ultimately, I'm a
literature scholar, and so, Imean, for me, it it's the
recovery of texts and then themeditation upon the recovered
text. So there's a lot of, youknow, in the milieu of Gaian
discourse, there's a lot ofrelatively forgotten or
(56:59):
neglected textual history, andso but that leads me into a a
more kind of theoreticalengagement with the play of
ideas.
But I think if you put our twobooks together, you've got an
amazing one two punch of, Gaianpotency.
Jamie Lorimer (57:19):
I think that's a great place to leave it. And
thank you very much to toeveryone involved in the in the
production of the book at at thepress to Maggie Sadler for for
setting up this, you know,fantastic opportunity to have a
conversation with Bruce. And,Bruce, I really hope we get a
chance to have this conversationface to face at some point, in
the future. It'd be great to tocontinue this discussion.
Bruce Clarke (57:38):
I, I'd also Jamie, I look forward to that
opportunity. Thanks so muchworking with University of
Minnesota Press. I think forboth of us, this is our second
book with the press, but youguys are the greatest. You could
tell you gave us bothopportunity to make very last
minute revisions. I I know we'reboth really proud to be
(58:02):
represented by Minnesota.
So thanks.
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