Marvelous, one of the points she makes is that life has always been technological. In other words, the technology is not a deviation from what life has come up with in order to persist.

Where we get our food from is central to thinking about things like climate change as well as the emergence of zoonotic disease. And so as, hopefully, we pass out of the moment of intensity with the pandemic and we come out of the pandemic as almost a portal for rethinking our relationships to the nonhuman world.

Hello. I'm Bruce Clark. I teach literature and science at Texas Tech University. My most recent book is Gaian Systems, Lynn Margulis, Neo Cybernetics and the End of the Anthropocene. This project really started in earnest when I met Lynn Margulis in 02/2005, and she very quickly dispelled my lingering skepticism about Gaia as a scientific topic.

Lynn had been working on Gaia really from the earliest, articulation of the concept beginning her collaboration with James Lovelock back in the early nineteen seventies. And as a result of my getting to know Lynn, I came into possession of her correspondence with Lovelock, and that gave me some pretty deep insights into how this scientific collaboration developed and how the concept of Gaia developed, as a conversation between Lovelock and Margolis. So as I began to familiarize myself with the science, I began to write papers, and publish on it and keep my eye out for Gaia scholarship and saw that the idea had really begun to take hold in the twenty first century among major set of theorists whose work I respected. The book itself is, in large part, grounded in a history of the unfolding of Gaia as a scientific idea and as more broadly as a as a figure of thought, in just in general discussion about planetary affairs. So I look at Lovelock and Margolis' own developing discourse of Gaia.

I look at the work of Bruno Latour, Isabel Stengers, Donna Haraway in popularizing Gaia really for the academic community. I look at the background of what I call the systems counterculture, which is the whole earth catalog, which is then succeeded by coevolution quarterly. And this was really the launching pad of an article published in 1975 in coevolution quarterly. Lead authored by Margolis was the launching pad for the the reception of Gaia by the environmental counterculture here in The States. And I proceed from there to kinda work the Gaia idea in terms of contemporary science fiction and the history of cybernetic ideas that it was bound up with by the science that Lovelock and Margolis were doing in the way they articulated that science.

And I bring the story through pretty much to the contemporary moment with the onset of the Anthropocene and and looking at how Gaia discourse, I think, is, in many ways, a preferable alternative discourse to a lot of the way that Anthropocene has been spoken about. That's a very large sketch of the the breadth of my book, Giant Systems. Jamie, why don't you tell us a little bit about the probiotic planet?

Hello. My name is Jamie Lorimer. I'm a geographer based at the University of Oxford, in The UK, and I teach environmental geography, so broadly interested in human environment relations. My second book, Probiotic Planet, Using Life to Manage Life, argues that there's a probiotic turn underway in how life is being managed across a range of different policy domains and across different, scales of ecological thinking. And by probiotic turn, I'm looking at, systematic efforts to use life, to manage life, to tackle a range of problems that are associated with the excessive application of antibiotic modes of managing life.

So if you like, the predominant way I argue of managing life in the Anthropocene has been about the systematic rationalization, simplification, control of ecological systems, which has led to a set of crises within the functionings of those systems. And that could be anything from, crises within, the human microbiome and the rise of a range of autoimmune diseases to crisis in, resource management in landscape scale, around biodiversity loss, around dramatic forest fires, around extreme flooding events, right up to, crises on a planetary scale that we see associated with climate change and and global warming. So we these are the kind of blowbacks to antibiotic modes of managing life. A probiotic approach looks at how you could manage the intensities of those systems to restore some desired mode of functioning, within them to deliver, services and and properties. And and in particular, it often involves the use of keystone species, a particular species that have disproportionate agency within their ecologies to restore functions and services.

And I focus in particular on, a body of, policy and science that's known as rewilding in nature conservation, in which conservationists have shifted somewhat from a focus on managing, or preventing the extinction of rare species towards restoring, functions and services within ecology. So bringing back wolves, bringing back beavers, restoring grazing regimes with the idea that these could deliver desired functions and services within a contemporary ecology. So that's that's one example. And the other example I look at is, a group of scientists and citizens who are experimenting on their personal microbiome, so on the bacteria and fungi that make up the human body, in the interest of tackling a range of autoimmune allergic diseases, and in particular, a group who are taking helminths. So helminths are a species of human worm, often called parasitic worms.

And the argument is that we coevolved with these helminths. You can have too many helminths in situations of poor sanitation. But in the absence of helminths, the human microbiome goes into a situation of dysbiosis. And as a consequence, the human immune system turns against itself. And so these folk are taking worms.

They're conducting clinical trials in these worms to look at what they could do to restore desired functions and services. So so the book looks across these examples on different scales, and it it makes a case that there's something common and interesting going on in terms of how life is being conceived and managed across these different, different domains. And then it pivots in the second half to a a kind of critical mapping of the different ways in which one could go probiotic. So it sketches out a very unequal geography to where in the world, one is able to go probiotic if you like. There's a very partial geography, as to who has sufficient control over life around them that they can, conduct these controlled experiments in in restoration.

It looks at the different ways in which life is being imagined, largely as a deliverer of functions and services. Life is being put to work, with, fairly exploitative consequences for the life forms that have been put to work to deliver probiotic properties. It looks at the different forms of value that 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. And ultimately aims to offer this color coded spectrum of different ways of going probiotic. So it's sort of claiming that there's a significant historical event underway, but what it implies for the future of the management of life is open, if you like, and there are different trajectories, emerging in the present.

Well, I'm very interested in hearing you speak to the the primary differences the probiotic orientation makes relative to other more traditional research programs. For instance, you borrow a term from other writers to describe the current probiotic era as post pastorian, in that we've been decisively moving away from the antibiotic world ushered in by Pasteur's identification of bacterial pathogens and infections. So I'd be interested in your thoughts on what we could call the Pasteurian planet, the one we're leaving behind, that subsequent long century of demonization of microbes as morbid rather than beneficent in their main effects, and on what it means to have gained today's perspective on the broadly mutualistic nature of most symbiosis between microbes and their macroscopic hosts?

That's a great question. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I take the concept of the post posterior from the anthropologist Heather Paxson, who studied the, a group of, people making raw milk cheese on the Northeast of of The US. And, Paxson's developing an analysis offered by by Bruno Latour.

If you like the ways in which Pasteur, who's a great figure in in in French microbiology, but also a great figure in modern hygiene, produced this body of science, which through its application led to this kind of blunderbuss approach to managing, our relationships with with the microbial world. There was a a kind of indexing of hygiene to the absence of of microbes. And if we extend that out to think about the ways in which life has been conceived and managed, not just within the human body or within the kitchen, but to to the wider countryside, let's say. There was a tendency and still is, in many forms of, pest control, in the use of pesticides in in in agriculture, towards the wholesale eradication of of life that is not held to be useful. So whether that's insects or soil microbes, everything is sort of bundled into this bracket of redundant life that we could we can do without, and life gets rationalized and and streamlined.

And and the argument that you get from immunologists and and ecologists is that this absence creates the conditions for particularly virulent, sometimes, antibiotic resistant to the pests and and problematic species to emerge. You have this blowback in particularly virulent, pathogenic microbes that come to the fore. And what emerges particularly in the microbiome with the advent of next generation sequencing technologies, which allow scientists to map out the full diversity of life in the microbiome. During past years' time, you can only really know a microbe was there if you could if you could culture it. And there's a very small subset of microbes that can be cultured in laboratory settings.

Genetic approach gives us this great picture of the diversity of life that characterizes any microbial setting and a sense that a great deal about life is is harmless, but also a subset of that life can be beneficial, can be mutualistic, can lead to desirable relations that that enable the human body to to function in a way that we expect it to. So that's the kind of post posteriorian idea. It's a sort of much more nuanced, much more calibrated application of ways of knowing and and managing life. There's a Dutch philosopher, Joseph Kulets, who describes a similar shift in, the management of agricultural and conservation landscapes as the controls decontrolling of ecological controls. This is kind of nuanced application of of an ecologized form of of science still ultimately towards, the delivery of services that are useful for people.

It's not a kind of rejection of the benefits of modern antibiotic approaches. It's just just sort of nuanced recalibration to deliver different functions and and services. So, yeah, so maybe I could reciprocate, Bruce, with a with a question question for you. I mean, I guess, one of the common strands that runs across our books is is trying to make sense of the enthusiasm for Guy in thinking now, and you trace this long history to place the contemporary enthusiasm in a much deeper history. But if you had to sort of characterize why this conjunction of ideas around the Holoboy and the Anthropocene and Gaia have come to the fore in the contemporary present.

Why would that be, do you think?

That is a great question. You're right. I take the discussion back and kind of trace it forward, and and one notes in the first several decades of the discussion of Gaia, it's it's really struggling with various unreceptive areas of of mainstream science to establish itself as an idea. But both Lovelock and Margolis are are steadfast in their development and promotion of the idea. There's an kind of unusual radiation, you could say, of Gaian ideas coming out of science, but being received by a wider public that is captivated in various ways by what they take Gaia to represent as a kind of reconnection to, a planetary horizon.

Now in in more recent times, however, there's a a kind of convergence of the planetary concern as articulated through what has now be developed as Gaia theory, which has been brought into a kind of normalization of its bona fides as as an idea that's being tested and put to various evidentiary challenges as at the same time it's being expanded as a framework for social thought. So it enters the discourse of environmentalism. Lovelock is gradually, as I observe it, being lionized, as a kind of a green guru, in England, specifically, not not so much in America. But in America, Donna Haraway establishes a relationship. There's a file of letters that I've seen, exchanged between her and Margolis.

And and Margolis is, in a way, a more radical environmental thinker, than Lovelock. So I think her, and, of course, her own science has to do with championing the idea of symbiosis not as a marginal phenomenon within the Biosir, but in fact, is an absolutely central dynamic of evolutionary persistence of life through the eons and just as a matter of fact that life is amazingly, interconnected at all levels and across all kingdoms as just part of its way of doing the business of living on this planet. Lovelock continues to be the more sort of scientifically engaged, advocate, has a body of coworkers that gather around him. Margolis' ideas connect very deeply with Donna Haraway's feminist science studies. And at a certain point, these ideas are gathered in by by the conversation that Isabelle Stengers, the Belgian philosophers, having with Bruno Latour, the premier anthropological, sociological thinker of science and technology, in the International Theory Academy.

And so they gradually start, talking Gaia. There's there's a kind of steady history, not exactly of normalization of Gaia, which still has still kind of an edgy concept for many people, and yet then you add the sort of Anthropocene dilemma about how we bring our understanding around. In other words, it's not just that life is a geological force, which used to be a kind of radical guy and idea, but human life, is now understood as having amounted to something like a geological force. The question then is, you know, are we are we in any position to control Gaia or to manage Gaia? That's a problematic assertion, although that's one of the main debates now.

As I encountered your work, this was the framing that you found, that that had kind of arrived as you were doing the work for Probiotic Planet and created a framework that that was really efficient, sort of intellectually efficient for positioning the the wider philosophical and social theoretical aspects, of your work in Probiotic Planet.

One of the I guess the challenges for me as somebody trained in science studies and in in this sort of, as as a as a ultimately, as a social scientist is is to try and make sense of the epistemic alliances one might make with scientists that I write about. And I guess it's interesting following the intellectual trajectories of some of those figures that you've just mentioned. So particularly Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway, who, you know, I encountered their writings in the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties, where there was a a degree of skepticism, if you like, about how, as anthropologists, they might make alliances with science to tell stories about the social. And and that sort of social construction, scientific knowledge tradition, which was, I guess, particularly critical of modes of biological science that they saw naturalizing kind of western capitalistic, individualistic, patriarchal idea of of the subject and of the organization of society that they they found written into particular stories of creation or particular ways in which, you know, animals were arranged in in naturalistic museums. And and I guess, you know, what what's interesting for me, you know, there's various points, particularly for Latour, where he has a kind of crisis in that, understanding of his role as a critic, particularly in the light of, climate change and this concern that he's seeing climate deniers using some of the very techniques that he and his cowriters pioneered to think skeptically about the position of of science and society.

And and there's this kind of journey of discovery that takes him to Lovelock, one feels. And and, I think, Haraway, it's less clear cut as a kind of epiphany. She's always had this, you know, quite sort of healthy skepticism, but also a deep scientific understanding, I feel, of of Margulis and others. But in Symbiogenesis, in a model of Earth system science that comes from Gaia, they both seem to find a much more palatable political ontology, if you like, in which human society is premised on mutualistic relations, and at which on a foundational level, there's a much more ecological set of preconditions for how life should be should be organized. And so there's a there's a sense that a kind of guy and story comes along at the right time, in order to justify a kind of green liberal vision of the future.

So so I guess my question for you is, you know, is that is that just too cynical to read it in that way as a sociologist of science, or is there something else going on that that makes this really interesting ferment of ideas where anthropologists, philosophers, immunologists, earth system scientists are all kind of thinking along similar lines and forming this kind of common epistemic commitment to a particular way of knowing about the world.

I don't think that sounds overly cynical. I mean, one one is well advised to to be on one's intellectual guard regarding such enthusiasms. In my own case, I, I I I tell the story at the beginning of my book of, of sort of the overcoming of of my skepticism, with regard to Gaia. But on the other hand, I also trace how Margolis, and this is due to her having, encountered Francisco Varela, in a very significant way in the nineteen eighties, in in relation to a kind of private symposium called the Lindisfarne Association. But the outcome of that was that Lynn encountered a vigorous discourse that was grounded in the systems countercultures, I call it, of, second order cybernetics, and the concept of autopoiesis, as a theory of the integrity and maintenance and self production of the living cell enters into her her articulation of Gaia.

But what comes along with that theory is also a kind of epistemological constructivism. So for instance, Matron and Varela will say that, a living system, is cognitive from the get go, that sells our cognitive systems, and as life ramps up from its cellular foundations, that that life brings forth its own world and that and and that's a kind of, shorthand formulation of the Gaia hypothesis that life controls its environment. That's the the radical version, but at least that that life shapes its environment is not just the sort of passive recipient of geological dynamics to which it's always adapting itself. The problem of constructivism is a complex one, and I think you're correct to consider the the social constructivism that, Latour in particular feels he he has to pull away from. That that sort of one line, but the epistemological, constructivism grounded in in autopoietic systems theory is a is is a separate dynamic and but what it means for Gaia is that that I mean, that Gaia is always kind of straddling this dual identity between, sort of contested scientific hypothesis on the one hand, but on the other hand, a way of shaping one's vision of the world.

That Gaia is a construction, and that's is to be brought forth in whatever manner is sort of conducive to one's environmental, concerns. So it it's an adaptable, meta concept at that level. I was thinking about your your presentation of of Gaia, and I pulled a quote out from your introductory chapter, where you say, what you find in the leading accounts of Gaia is, in your own words, quote, a palatable liberal and ecological political ontology for rematerializing theory after the idealist excesses of the scientific term. So I take it that's the that's the social constructionism that became problematic for Latour. At the same time, you continue, it provides common epistemic ground for rebuilding alliances with the natural sciences after the science wars and in face of rising science denialism, unquote.

So it seemed to me that you come upon Guyan thinking as a ground for another sort of restoration, a theoretical remediation that you align with what's called the new materialism, but it amounts to a regrounding in biological and ecological substance that compensates for the impasses of poststructuralism. Does that sound right to you?

Yeah. I think that's a fair reading of what I was trying to take for them with with a degree of kind of ambivalence as to, both my kind of qualifications as a social scientist to judge the credibility of the work that was being offered to me, but also a degree of open endedness that seems to be emerging as to quite what forms of environmental politics gets, created out of those starting points, if you like. And then this sort of picks up on some nice common themes that that we both have or common interests we have in discussions around the Anthropocene and and the ways in which Earth system science has been powered up by discussions about the Anthropocene to begin to be charged with responsibility for planetary salvation, if you like, this kind of newfound interest, particularly in in Europe, but I'm sure it's the same, you know, in in The US with the hopeful change of leadership around, you know, making climate change a clear and important political priority and around, you know, what we call here net net zero or what used to be called geoengineering, though that term is is not as palatable as it used to be.

But an idea that, you know, on the basis of this systems thinking, there are ways of knowing, predicting, managing, and intervening into systems such that, desirable futures can be secured. There are several different desirable futures that could be secured, that would favor some over others. So so there's there's a kind of nondeterministic politics that comes out of that ontology that I'm interested in. But maybe I could pull you towards where you're, I think, ending in the book if if the last three chapters are beginning to grapple with questions of planetary thinking in the present, astrobiology, and this idea of of immunity, particularly kind of, post discussions of the biopolitics immunity, where this sort of guy in thinking leaves us in discussions about climate change. And maybe I could reciprocate by reading a quote, which is the final couple of sentences from chapter eight in which you say Gaia endows life on Earth with temporary immunity from cosmic extinction.

It appears that anthropogenic climate change will be another test of Gaia. It is unclear as yet whether we humans will still be around to see its regulatory functions reset themselves in light of the altered conditions. And and I guess you're kind of you're not committing to, to a politics around geoengineering. But but but where do you find Gaia leaves us in that contemporary discussion about about climate change and and the political response?

It it's certainly open ended. I I don't take from Gaia any kind of positive sort of specific guidance, for politics. I think I would align with Stenger's overall, sense of, that we've got to learn to live with Gaia. For all the possible interventions that we might find ourself, contemplating, we need to tread very, very carefully. I I tend to see Gaia as a reminder that in ultimate planetary matters, we're not really in charge of the maintenance of the viability of the planet, and that's a a a mission, we can't I don't think we're right to think that we could, take upon ourselves.

It's really so I think of it more in terms of a strategic reintegration that may well call for all kinds of thoughtful systemic probes, test runs with regard to mitigation, ecosystem restoration. If and if I could back up just a bit, it was just as I was having an opportunity to be with Lynn in the last couple years of her life at various meetings, to get to know her way of thinking. The Anthropocene as an idea was coming in just around this time, you know, somewhere between 02/2006, '2 thousand '11, the year Lynn dies. The Anthropocene is coming on as an idea, and, of course, one is one has to engage with it one way or another. But I just kept kept thinking to myself, especially after Lynn died, what would Lynn say?

What would Lynn say about the Anthropocene? And and I think the answer is clear. She would have just kind of, uttered some expletive or another and say, a human all too human irrigation to itself of of powers that it doesn't possess. I continue to be skeptical about especially about the eco modernist vision of the Anthropocene in which geoengineering was, a major part of that conversation. Oh, well, we'll just put the techno fix in for what's ailing the planet and, and and trust us.

We we got this thing. And I think I transmit what would have been, I'm I'm most certain, Margolis' extreme skepticism about that.

I mean, maybe, Bruce, I could just come in there. The other touchstone in your account, you know, is is Lovelock, I guess. And, but but Lovelock's latest book has quite a different take. I I can't remember if he uses the word the Anthropocene, explicitly, but he talks about the Novacene, doesn't he? And and and he has this, you know, future which is dominated by perhaps taken over by artificial intelligence by by machines, which isn't necessarily ecomodernist, but definitely has a kind of techno optimist, narrative to it.

There's a central place for for for for technology, in that future. Do you think they'd have differed, the two of them, in terms of what they made of the Anthropocene?

Oh, absolutely. I I I imagine Lynn is rolling over in her grave looking at Lovelock's Novocine. It came out just as I was finishing up. In fact, my manuscript was done, but when the Novocine came out, I felt I had to deal with it. Thankfully, Minnesota, gave me a little time to incorporate a little bit more into my text.

One thing I do in my book is tease apart, Lovelock's science and Margolis's science. Because, as they develop, they really they take different paths, and Novosine makes that perfectly clear that Lovelock is a, essentially, a a first order cybernetician. He's a control theorist, and and an engineer, and he likes to present himself in that guy. So there's this this abiding optimism that we can invent our way out, and and pretty soon the AIs are gonna take over for us anyways, and they'll just, and they'll work out the solutions. But but what gets sacrificed in that vision of the Novocine as the successor to the Anthropocene.

Right? Because it's only the Anthropocene while the human is in punitive control of the planet. But once the AIs take control of the human, they'll take control of the planet, and that will be the Novacene. And that's really the death of Gaia. He kind of fudges it because he says, well, at the beginning, the machines will need to keep the planet cool, and that's what Gaia does.

And so they'll they'll work with Gaia for their own viability. But a point will come when they'll just refashion the biosphere into a post biotic formation. And at that point, there'll be no more use for Gaia. I can't go there with him.

Just thinking through that, I mean, because I guess there's a long history of the concepts of Gaia being picked up by, co opted by a kind of deep ecology movement that was deeply ambivalent about technology and deeply ambivalent about modern society and deeply ambivalent about urbanism and and and capitalism. And is this Lovelock sort of passing snipe at his deep ecology sort of fan base that, you know, that that sort of never mis misconstrued his ideas, or or is there something else going on there?

That's a great question. I'm not sure that I know the answer to it, although it would not be unlike, the mischievous James Lovelock, who whom Lynn characterized in precisely that way as part of what she loved about him was he was a he was a mischievous spirit. So I'm not sure what agendas, might have been there. But, what I propose in my book is that in this matter, let's look at Margolis. She was deeply ecological, but she was not a kind of Luddite variation of, of deep ecology.

She was fine with the technosphere, but she saw the ultimate parameters of the technosphere as the biosphere, that the technosphere does not get out from under the foundation of its possibility within the affordances of the biosphere. In other words, that Gaia remains the the bottom line. Planetary viability of life, writ large, remains the bottom line for human possibility. She was also happy to think astrobiologically about the potential to take life away from Earth to to head out into the universe. But if that was going to happen, we would have to take Gaia with us.

We would have to truly master the the wicked problems of creating artificial self sustaining ecologies. But and and who's to say we couldn't crack that problem? But but but that's what it would take.

Yeah. I mean, I guess it's interesting. There there seems to be this, you know, I guess, in contrast to the thinkers and the philosophical movement that you were describing, which has this fairly consistent epistemic commitment to to science and and to reason in its different guises. Within the probiotic term, there is there's a sort of retrospective, nostalgia, if you like, for some point in the past, before the fall, before some kind of antibiotic excess creeps in and blowback happens and the order has to be reset. And that is both a kind of technological problem, but it's also a kind of epistemic come spiritual problem that that on the margins of the probiotic turn and where it starts to bleed into what Heather Paxson calls the kind of anti pasturing movement.

It's various forms of deep green thinking that, sometimes very darkly towards kind of fascistic thinking, that holds some kind of judgment in blowback. This is the warning to humans that we need to reset to return, and then there's a range of benchmarks that are called upon that we might return to. So one popular iteration is a kind of paleo version, that is both a kind of lifestyle fad as well as a much more profound philosophical, shift, particularly in in North America. And then there's a kind of pastoral inclination of that that takes the full, you know, slightly, you know, not quite so far back, but which there are sort of various forms of low intensity subsistence technologies that that that are acceptable. And those are, you know, those are kind of, you know, popular culture versions of it.

And then those are squared off against a, eco modernist idea that that can really you know, machines can be harnessed to know the fundamental operations of systems operations, whether that's within the human body, whether that's in the countryside, or whether whether that's in the planet at large, and they can be optimized to deliver bright green futures. And and those are the versions of the probiotic which don't have these retrospective temporities towards the past. But I guess what gets folded into that are these very complicated, ideas about the limits of science and the merits of some kind of either religious or spiritualist way of knowing that comes out of holistic thinking. So maybe to sort of turn this back to you, I mean, what what were the limits to science in some of these historical events? I mean, some of the places that they gathered at, you know, had significance well beyond them as just places to to to be a home at Lindisfarne, for example.

I mean, how does this kind of rub up against new age thinking through the twentieth century, that that some of these characters were were sort of on the margins of?

The thing about the the Lindisfarne sensibility was purposefully, heterogeneous, and it was right up alongside the, the kind of whole earth sensibility as that was constituted by Stewart Brand, who is providing publications, especially in coevolution quarterly, which is a truly amazing body of documentation for, radical environmentalist thinking in the nineteen seventies. But the thing about that venue was that it was not technophobic. Quite the opposite. Brand was a technophile, and and and that's kind of obvious in the way that he's aligned himself in in more recent decades with the ecomodernists. So he was always kind of eco modernist, while at the same time I I love your phrase of bright green.

I I would say he was always not bright green as opposed to deep green. He lent his promotional efforts to, O'Neil's, space colonies, which was a huge vote in the seventies, said that Timothy Leary jumped on that on that bandwagon as well as he was serving his sentence, that we could sort of tap off human populations and put them in a high orbit, around the Earth in these massive, technological constructions in which we would create artificial ecologies. In one of the chapters in my book, I talk about how William Gibson's Neuromancer was, in fact, just took that all the design specs that had been developed, with regard to this project and ran a cyberpunk number on them. But when you're in high orbit in the latter part of the story world of New Romance, so you're exactly in O'Neil's space colonies. Well, Margolis, she wasn't a major promoter of that, but what intrigued her was that that would be a test of Gaia.

One of the tests of Gaia would be, can you can you reproduce it? And and it's not that you're just kind of that that you'll just run the technology over that problem, but you're really going to have to cooperate with you have to let Gaia tell you how you're gonna solve that problem of taking Gaia along with you if you leave the Earth and and wanna stay alive. The the Gaia thinkers that I engage with are are really not, in the deep ecological veins of turning back from the technological developments of the twentieth century. Marvelous one of the points she makes is that life has always been technological. In other words, the technology is not a deviation from what life has come up with in order to persist.

That life has, as it's evolved, has find ways to incorporate its environment into its own function. Just at the base level of that, for instance, calcium was a waste product of at an earlier stage of the biosphere that it was excreted from cells, where, because it it if it built up, it would it would poison poison the metabolism. But but what gradually happened was the ambient calcium that was then put into the environment was reincorporated as bones and teeth. And and, so she she had a, I'd say, a deep evolutionary vision of the interrelation of the biosphere and what we call the technosphere.

I mean, I guess the other great epistemic space that's opened up by these conversations and that you explore really, Ritchie, in your book and which chimes with that. Clearly, a shared interest that we have in science fiction is is the way that it opens space for speculation, if you like. There's sort of speculative fiction that is, you know, very much in vogue now, certainly in in the writings of, of Donna Haraway and the conversations that people like Haraway have clearly had with Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson and others. And, you know, in the book, you nicely use passages from contemporary and classic science fiction to illustrate some of this thinking. Maybe you could say a bit about the role that science fiction plays in your own scholarship and the ways in which you were mobilizing science fiction authors as thinkers, within Guyana systems?

One thing that Catherine Hale's great work that kind of got me going as a a literature and science scholar, introduced me to not just, writers like Stanislav Lem, but was sort of my first contact with information theory and cybernetics, and then eventually second order cybernetics or which I just abbreviate as Neo cybernetics. So major figures on, coming out of the Macy conferences on cybernetics, including Heinz von Foerster, but also the great Gregory Bateson, who was basically the presiding spirit of, Stewart Brand's green thinking of the nineteen seventies, from Bateson's book, steps to an ecology of mind. So how I've taught literature and science just as a practical matter, in the university is, with science fiction, just tease up the themes, that much more directly. And so at a certain point, I was reading Bateson, and I went back and read Dune, which is from the mid sixties. And I had read that back in my college days, many decades ago.

So a while back, I I I picked it up again. I was really curious to see if it held up, and I thought it held up, really well. And what that reminded me was that that novel was suffused with ecosystem ecology, and that's kind of how the Fremen on the desert planet were making a life for themselves because they had these, there was this sort of interplay between these, ecological scientists who came into the indigenous planet of Dune and then helped the the native Fremen population, begin to dream about creating a fair world, by mastering, the various planetary systems to their benefit. So I I do a brief riff on that, in the book by way of establishing the milieu, the the kind of popular systems thinking that was percolating up in the nineteen sixties that then kind of becomes full blown in the whole earth catalog, which always begins with the section called understanding whole systems. So there's your systems counterculture, emerging from a kind of convergence of, cybernetic systems thinking, ecological systems thinking, and the sense that these paradigms, were planetary in scope.

But then fast forward fifteen years and you're in the world of New Romancer, which is clearly a a cybernetic development. But but now we're into the digital moment. So you've got a a virtual world, that has now emerged. And so that's the kind of mainstream cyber development that is more often what people focus on. Once the digital world arrives at its ability to create a kind of a parallel virtual reality, then you're kind of on the mainstream to our world now, which is kind of caught, between the problematics of its biotic viability and the utopian vista, which, is now getting a little tarnished of what might be possible.

My overall effort then was to recover what was kind of thrown into shadow by the rise of the eighties and nineties, world of digitality, because what we left behind was autopoietic systems theory and green cybernetics, and that's the incubator of the guy in ideas that I think are most durable.

Great. I mean, I wonder seeing as it's so timely and significant, and overwhelming to think a little bit in the context of COVID and the pandemic, which in some ways is like living in a science fiction future that's been relayed to us in different ways, but now it's here and every day. And I guess thinking through what our two books have to say, if anything, about about the present. You know, I finished the manuscript for the probiotic planet in November 2019, so just before everything began. And, you know, here was a book that was gonna celebrate the wonders of the microbiome, and and we should love our love our microbes.

And and, fortunately, Minnesota allowed me to write a preface for the book in April. So we were sort of, at least in The UK, in the middle of the first wave. And, you know, on the one hand, what we've seen is this dramatic amplification of antibiotic ways of managing life. You know, we are ever encouraged to keep distance from each other, to put up boundaries that enforce degrees of of immunity and all sorts of, you know, mundane handwashing and all the rest of it, but also a sense that the genesis of the of the virus comes from within the hot spots and intensities of antibiotic ways of of organizing commerce and trade and potentially from within hot spots of intensive agricultural food production. So there's a there's a sort of there's an unfolding story both about the necessity of antibiotic interventions, the vaccine that looks like it may be, you know, what secures the return to some semblance of normality.

Those are this diagnosis of the pathological nature of some forms of modern life that creates these super virulent entities and allows them to spread around the world. And, certainly, there was a story emerging from some strands of environmentalism that the pandemic was Gaia's revenge, some kind of dystopian idea that this 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 the perspective of of a guy and thinker, I I mean, what, if anything, does your analysis give us to making sense of of COVID and the political response to it that we're seeing playing out around this?

Sort of the micropolitics are I mean, we have no choice but to fall back on the vaccine developers. A probiotic solution, at the microbiome level does does not seem to offer itself immediately. But panning back a bit, I think it's clear that, as many people have been pointing 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 of human building has crushed up against the the the remaining habitat of of the wilder parts of the planet or the the as yet undeveloped parts of the planet so that zoonotic diseases, the opportunity of the rare but real, pathogenic actors as I mean, we flush them out, by the way we're behaving on this planet. Now I'm not a guy as revenge person at all.

I mean, that's that's, of course, a title of one of Lovelock's more heated interventions. But, no. I I I agree completely with the way that you purvey Stenger's verdict. I mean, Gaia doesn't want anything from us one way or another. But at the same time, I was thinking how but people just don't understand the difference between viruses and bacteria, for instance.

There's amazing scientific work now on mutualistic viruses that that in fact, we we're we're swimming in the virus sphere all the time, and what we're learning is it's really just like the the microcosm of bacterial life. We swim in that all the time. And 99.9 times out of a hundred, it's it's not pathogenic. It's just part of the the web of life in which we are completely and inextricably enmeshed. But we have a disbiotic civilization at the moment that just, especially at deforestation is kind of the most glaring manifestation of our ongoing unwillingness to curtail the, you know, a neoliberal capitalist model of infinite extraction.

So as long as we're just out there pushing, grinding ever further into, the rainforests, We're gonna kick up these problems for ourselves, so stop doing that. How about yourself, Jamie? I'm curious how you would draw the lessons here.

Yeah. I mean, since finishing the book in 2019, much of my research interest has turned to the food system and looking at various efforts underway, I guess, at the kind of frontiers of of ecological food systems thinking to imagine how agriculture might be the solution to some of these problems alongside tackling some of the issues that agriculture has rightly identified with being responsible for and looking at manifestations of the probiotic turn, in which, I guess, various agronomists, scientists, and and farmers are trying to manipulate soil microbiome, the, microbiome of particular crops, even down to the microbiome of particular ruminant animals. There's interest in making cows that don't fart and burp so much so that they can not emit so much methane. And, yeah, there's there's some kind of heartening ways in which a growing awareness of of climate change is starting to cascade down into agriculture and food systems. And I guess a wider popular understanding that that, you know, where we get our food from is central to thinking about things like climate change as well as the emergence of zoonotic disease.

And so as, hopefully, we pass out of the moment of intensity with the pandemic and we come out of the pandemic as almost a portal for rethinking our relationships to the nonhuman world, that there is a possibility to reset some of these dynamics and and think differently about how how life is managed. So this is a there's a promise in probiotic thinking. But I guess at the same time, there's, you know, large parts of the world that are only able to think probioticly because we've globalized some of these processes elsewhere, so particularly thinking around rewilding, which, you know, by and large, has taken place in northern temperate situations, parts of of Canada and and North America and and parts of Europe, where land has been freed up because agriculture has been globalized to the tropics. The kind of question is whether the net quantity of wildness is increasing in the world, or have we just shuffled it geographically to temperate regions away from tropical regions. There's sort of bigger distributional questions in that sense.

And if you like, you know, these hot spots or intensities of deforestation, which follow the processes of globalizing agriculture, you know, are very much things that, we when I think of we, I think as, you know, I guess the listeners of this blog, educated people living in, urban situations in various parts of the world are complicit with. And it I guess the the key thing from a from a geographer's perspective is to think about where in the world these networks touch down, how they benefit some at the expense of others, and a kind of conditionality to the possibilities of going probiotic, which codependent on, you know, some people suffering elsewhere. So just try and stitch those two together and think holistically about how you could improve a lot of humans and nonhumans globally and across these different scales. And so I got the feeling that that the science is there. It's thinking about the trade offs that seem to be baked into the way in which we're operationalizing some of this systems thinking.

Is is one of the key challenges, that I'm trying to think through in this in this current project at the moment.

Absolutely. I enjoyed very much learning about the activities that that you've spent your time studying and gone out into the field to recover the detail of these probiotic initiatives. I appreciated overall the practical orientation, the the sort of field work mode of of much of your discussion, was so informative. Ultimately, I'm a literature scholar, and so, I mean, for me, it it's the recovery of texts and then the meditation upon the recovered text. So there's a lot of, you know, in the milieu of Gaian discourse, there's a lot of relatively forgotten or neglected textual history, and so but that leads me into a a more kind of theoretical engagement with the play of ideas.

But I think if you put our two books together, you've got an amazing one two punch of, Gaian potency.

I think that's a great place to leave it. And thank you very much to to everyone involved in the in the production of the book at at the press 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 conversation face to face at some point, in the future. It'd be great to to continue this discussion.

I, I'd also Jamie, I look forward to that opportunity. Thanks so much working with University of Minnesota Press. I think for both of us, this is our second book with the press, but you guys are the greatest. You could tell you gave us both opportunity to make very last minute revisions. I I know we're both really proud to be represented by Minnesota.

So thanks.