“13” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
13
The Anthropocene Within
Love and Extinction in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the Bridge
Johan Höglund
In “Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life after the Anthropocene” (2018), Eben Kirksey considers what a truly postapocalyptic future might look like. In this future, anthropogenic climate change has made the world uninhabitable to humans, and also to most advanced forms of life. Interestingly, Kirksey’s essay is partly motivated by a perceived need to interrogate the notion that such a development must be thought of as tragic:
If the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene comes to an untimely end, this could mean extinction for many life forms that we love. But if we kill ourselves, and those we love, a multitude of unloved others will continue with their own affairs. . . . Many kinds of life are involved in their own interspecies love stories. Humans are not exceptional in our capacity to experience entangled empathy—many other creatures have an awareness of others’ interests and a motivation to satisfy those interests.1
The notion that Kirksey puts forward is provocative, first because it forces the reader to face the possibility of a complete man-made extinction. Kirksey envisions a future devoid of humans, and of the Nature that once emerged out of Enlightenment epistemologies. However, the real challenge of Kirksey’s proposition is the notion that such extinction is not the end of everything, that an ecology will persist, meaning that humans are disposable to the planet, to agency, to history, even to love itself. This love is not the anthropogenic, heteronormative emotional bonding celebrated in mainstream culture but a complex and interspecies queer erotics that constantly remakes the world.2
This rethinking of love and who can practice it allows Kirksey to speculate on the entangled empathy that can build between microscopic organisms, and perhaps also between the human animal and the multitude of organisms that inhabit this species. Such empathy is possible because, as new microbiology is increasingly revealing, and as will be described in more detail herein, the human body is in itself an ecosystem. Rather than existing as a discrete being, it is host to trillions of other forms of life that nurture the human body but also deny it the homogeneity and sacredness that have so often been attributed to it by members of its own species. The failure to love and cherish connections to these life-forms is destroying the health of the human body, just like the failure to love and cherish the infinitely complex system that constitutes ecology is eroding the biodiversity of the planet.3
Culture has only recently begun to acknowledge and explore these strange relationships and what they mean in a time of climate crisis. As discussed in the Introduction, Amitav Ghosh argues in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) that the realist paradigm that accompanied the emergence of Nature as a category separate from humanity during the Enlightenment elides the catastrophic and uncanny. In a time of climate crisis, which is also a time when human science has begun to understand the weird and complex connections that exist between the human body and microbial worlds, normative realism bars humans from comprehending the complexity of life and how the climate crisis is destroying it. Unfettered by the representational paradigm of realism, gothic is better able to accommodate the strange and catastrophic events that accompany the climate crisis.4 Its departure from conventional realism also makes gothic singularly capable of exploring the invisible, uncanny multispecies world that the human body constitutes. Now that the already strange and uncanny multispecies ecology that inhabits (human) animal bodies is growing increasingly uncanny as it deteriorates due to various environmental factors, gothic is one of the few cultural modes capable of making both the climate crisis and the weird nature of the human body comprehensible to a human reader.5
This chapter explores gothic in the Anthropocene by focusing on new gothic narratives that recognize that the body is a multispecies ecology and that this ecology is as deeply affected by the climate crisis as the biosphere. The focus of the chapter is M. R. Carey’s postapocalyptic novels The Girl with All the Gifts (2014) and The Boy on the Bridge (2017), two texts that narrate multispecies being and becoming in an age of profound climate emergency. I argue that these novels convey dark stories of ecological and social upheaval and of human interiority suffering from anthropogenically engineered deterioration. However, rather than seeking ways of salvaging conventional modes of humanity and restoring the imagined hegemony of man, these texts imagine how interspecies empathy and love can rise to the surface also in an age of extinction. The chapter first discusses the revolutionary new research in microbiology that has revised the role that microbes have played in evolution and that they perform for all life. Drawing from a wide range of science texts, the chapter notes that the human being is a multispecies ecosystem and not simply an individual bounded by a certain genome and set of experiences. Via Donna Haraway’s consideration of this new science, the chapter then turns to the two novels that constitute its primary material.
The Anthropocene, New Microbiology, and Staying with the Trouble
In the conventional imagery of the Darwinian evolution of Homo sapiens, a swarthy, crumpled primate grows more erect and pale the farther right (into the future) the eye travels, until a tall white male with a spear in his hand emerges. This figure walks into an empty void that represents a future that does not require or even allow for further evolutionary change. Normative evolutionary history thus tells a story about the becoming of a being that is not simply white and male but also bounded by the limits of his own white body. The spear symbolizes both his ability to create and manipulate tools and the fact that he has reached this ultimate evolutionary stage through struggle with all other species, rising above and beyond them. Although still dressed in animal skins, he is discernible as an individual with a clear gender and racial identity.
What new microbiological research argues is that the human should not be depicted as this bounded biological and psychological entity. The human body, as this research shows, is an assemblage of thousands of species the members of which outnumber the cells of the human body. According to the most recent estimates, the human body is made up of roughly 3–3.7 trillion human cells but it is also inhabited by 3–4 trillion bacterial cells belonging to five hundred to one thousand different species.6 Together with archea,7 viruses, and fungi, these bacteria make up the interconnected microbiome of the human body.8 While the shape and function of the human body are determined by its roughly twenty thousand genes, it is also provided essential aid by some of the at least two million genes that the microbiome contains.9 In this way, the microbe is not, as it has frequently been described, an atavistic pathogen that parasitizes the (human) animal body but a part of a versatile system that serves its own needs, the needs of the host, and, through the cycle of life, death, and decomposition, the planetary ecosystem.10
In place of the white male walking purposefully into the future, new microbiology thus places a multispecies assemblage whose “anatomical, physiological, immunological, and developmental functions evolved in shared relationships of different species,” as argued by Scott Gilbert et al.11 In other words, the human has not evolved as a discrete individual but as “integrated communities of species.”12 Thus the human cannot be considered an individual “in any sense of classical biology: anatomical, developmental, physiological, immunological, genetic, or evolutionary.”13 Viewed in this way, the human being appears more like a complex wilderness than the bounded characters readers encounter in the realist novel.
The human ecosystem is also like the planetary ecosystem in the sense that it is adversely affected by sudden anthropogenic changes to environments that have evolved during millennia. The most easily discernible symptom of this in the human animal is the appearance of a number of what have been referred to as twenty-first-century illnesses or modern plagues. Illnesses that have become exponentially more common during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries include acne, allergies, autism, cancer, eczema, diabetes, and obesity.14 These illnesses are, unlike viral epidemics, so-called noncommunicable diseases, and they have now “surpassed infectious diseases as the principal cause of sickness and death, worldwide.”15 The increasing prevalence of these illnesses can be related to what has been termed dysbiosis, or microbial imbalance in the body. Dysbiosis can be related to a number of factors, including, as claimed by Martin Blaser, the overuse of antibiotics both in human health care and in animal farming16 but also the release of chemicals and microplastics into the environment,17 as well as new, so-called Western diets that are low in essential nutrients and fiber but high in meat, sugars, and saturated trans fats.18
These examples bring out similarities in how the human microbiome is depleted and damaged and the ways in which damage is done to the planetary ecosystem. Global warming is harming the planet and causing the sixth mass extinction of species on the planet in ways that are similar to how misuse of antibiotics and poor diets are causing a reduction in essential microbes in the (human) animal. However—and this is not surprising when the human is viewed as an ecosystem folded into other ecosystems rather than as a discrete individual separated from ecology—the connection between the destruction of planetary biodiversity and dysbiosis goes beyond the simile. Many of the pollutants that are harmful to planetary ecosystems also cause damage to the microbiome to which the human body is host. Heavy metals like mercury, plutonium, and lead released into the environment by human activity are harmful to all living systems and cause both dysbiosis and ecosystem decline.19 In this way, dysbiosis triggered by Western diets, by oversubscribed antibiotics, or by pollutants introduced into the environment by humans can be considered as a kind of Anthropocene taking place within the human body.
This realization encourages us to rethink our own relationship to the world we inhabit. Donna Haraway has urged humans not simply to pay attention to microbes but to see human existence as intimately intertwined with that of other macroscopic and microscopic species. While accepting the need for descriptors like Anthropocene and Capitalocene, Haraway has proposed the Chthulucene as a concept that does not primarily serve to categorize the species and processes that are damaging the planet but that rather identifies the “ongoing symchthonic forces and powers of which people are a part.”20 In this way, she proposes the Chthulucene as an era that “entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.”21 This is an understanding of life on the planet that resists the normative evolutionary paradigm and the centrality of the individual to instead acknowledge the prevalence and long dominance of “rich multispecies assemblages that include people” on Earth.22 Such a nonanthropocentric understanding of the planet, and of evolution, leads to the realization that earthly survival is only possible if the needs of these assemblages, and the entangled needs of the planet in its entirety, are considered.
Haraway asks the reader to “stay with the trouble,” which is a way of encouraging the reader to recognize the need of a paradigm shift that acknowledges this interconnectedness of the various beings that inhabit the world and to commit to the difficult work that this paradigm shift entails. A way to stay with the trouble is to help narrate stories that problematize anthropocentric perspectives and enable an understanding of the planet and the human being as multispecies worlds. In Haraway’s words, “stories for living in the Anthropocene demand a certain suspension of ontologies and epistemologies, holding them lightly, in favor of a more venturesome, experimental natural history.”23 In her own work, Haraway has turned her attention most often to science fiction and what can be called art activism—modes and media that encourage such adventurous and experimental histories. However, Haraway’s call for stories for living in the Anthropocene also creates a space for gothic and for gothic studies. This mode has always suspended the ontologies and epistemologies that literary, realist fiction laid down. In many ways, that is a definition of gothic.
The experimental nature of gothic, its built-in ability to challenge conventional natural histories, aids it in the exploration first of the fact that the body is a symbiotic ecosystem and then of the notion that this ecosystem is suffering due to anthropogenic interference. This does not mean, of course, that gothic automatically produces stories for the Anthropocene that promote an understanding of the interconnectedness of species. In her writing, Haraway clearly separates her concept of the Chthulucene from gothic horror writer “H. P. Lovecraft’s misogynist racial nightmare monster Cthulhu.”24 If Haraway’s Chthulucene is a tribute to the uncanny, tentacular, multispecies nature of all life, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos summons images of uncanny, tentacular, uncontrollable, nonanthropocentric life only so that the reader can despise and fear it. In this way, conventional ontologies and epistemologies both inform and haunt gothic. Indeed, in some narratives, multispecies life is introduced only so that it can be destroyed by the vast arsenal of modernity—by rational scientists; by discourses of racial, sexual, and evolutionary purity; and by military violence. In this way, and as will be argued in my analysis, there is gothic that recognizes that anthropogenic manipulation of the microbiome is damaging the multispecies (human) animal body, but the resolution the mode offers is not necessarily an embrace of Haraway’s Chthulucene. In the imperial, military gothic that has achieved a certain hegemony, in particular in U.S. Hollywood cinema, entangled and multispecies worlds are still being fought by machine gun–wielding special forces soldiers. But there is also gothic that meanders away from this fantasy of how the agents of modernity salvage the future through hypermasculine, technological violence to instead imagine the formation of new forms of being and new types of emotional connections that extend beyond the human.
Gothic and the Anthropocene Within
M. R. Cary’s novels The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on the Bridge are two recent gothic texts that do in fact recognize the entangled and tentacular nature of microbial and (human) animal worlds and that explore these connections against an Anthropocene backdrop. The two novels take place in the same postapocalyptic world; The Boy on the Bridge, published a few months after the film version of The Girl with All the Gifts premiered, functions as a prequel. In the following discussion, I devote attention primarily to the first novel and use the second to clarify certain details. The two novels draw from a very long tradition of gothic and horror writing. In particular, they traverse some of the same intellectual territory first laid out by Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) and then further explored by George Romero in a number of zombie films.
The protagonist of The Girl with All the Gifts is a ten-year-old, extremely intelligent, imaginative, blonde girl by the name of Melanie. Every morning, Melanie is strapped into a wheelchair and driven into an underground classroom that is part of a complex of military bunkers where she has spent all of her conscious life. Melanie has a fraught relationship with the soldiers who transport her between her cell and the classroom and with the physician, Dr. Caldwell, who visits the bunker from time to time. However, she loves her teacher Miss Justineau, who tells her and the class stories from time to time. Some of these are Greek myths, and, listening to them, Melanie decides that she would prefer to be called Pandora, a name that is said to mean precisely “the girl with all the gifts.” Melanie is indeed supremely intellectually gifted, and it is easy to assume that the name suits her for this reason. However, it actually means “gift giver,” and anyone familiar with Greek mythology knows that the gift that Pandora finally gives is a dark one.
Melanie is generally aware of the fact that she inhabits a postapocalyptic world where so-called hungries roam. The hungries are the better part of humanity that has now succumbed to a microscopic fungus named Ophiocordyceps. This fungus is a fictional version of an actual fungus that exists outside of this fiction: Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It can be found in tropical climates and adheres to the bellies of foraging ants. When the fungus reaches the ant, it breaks through its exoskeleton and infects the circulatory system and the brain. Once it has accessed the brain, the fungus can manipulate the behavior of the ant. The infected ant will climb up the stem of a plant that matches certain conditions in temperature and humidity and then bite through the main vein of the plant with unusual force. When the ant has become locked into the plant in this way, the fungus will paralyze the ant and kill it. The fungus then matures inside the ant, growing out of its body. Eventually, fungal spores will erupt through the head of the dead ant, releasing into the environment to begin the cycle anew.
In the novel, Ophiocordyceps has now mutated and entered into a parasitic relationship with the Anthropos. The physician Dr. Caldwell is able to discern the exact nature of this relationship through a microscope:
Gross and fine structures are rendered in pin-sharp detail, like an illustration in a textbook. . . . She shifts the slide minutely under the turret, [and sees] foreign matter—dust motes, human hair and bacterial cells as well as the expected fungal mycelia—among the neurons. The nerve cells themselves are completely and thrillingly laid out to her gaze. . .
She sees exactly how the cuckoo Ophiocordyceps builds its nests in the thickets of the brain—how its mycelia wrap themselves, thread-thin, around neuronal dendrites, like ivy around an oak. Except that ivy doesn’t whisper siren songs to the oak and steal it from itself. . . . The massively parallel structures of the human brain have regrouped, forlorn and outnumbered, around and between the fungus-choked nerve cells. Some uninfected clusters of neurons have actually grown denser, although the newer cells are bloated and threadbare, ruptured from within by jagged sheets of amyloid plaque.25
In this passage, the text moves far into the world of microbes and visualizes connections that can only be perceived in the microscopic realm. It is clear from this, and other descriptions in the novel, that the fungus has a distinct agency of its own and that the human has become a vehicle for the parasite. The passage depicts a type of tentacular, Chthulucene love affair, perhaps, but in this passage, it is clearly an unrequited love that consumes the (human) host.
Whereas The Girl with All the Gifts never states what led to the evolution of the Ophiocordyceps variant that infects humans, The Boy on the Bridge makes it clear that anthropogenic manipulation of the fungus was the probable cause: “There’s a prevailing theory that these medicinal uses of the fungus were the precursors to the hungry plague—the doorway through which Cordyceps infected human populations.”26 In other words, the eruption of the parasite inside the human body is an example of the Anthropocene within. Just as man-made antibiotics or pollutants are eroding the inside of the (human) animal body in the present, the man-made fungus variant is damaging the insides of the humans of the novel. All advanced brain function disappears. In the place of rational thought is an imminent need to bite and feed on uninfected animal life, and thus also to spread the fungus.
At the beginning of the novel, Melanie has not yet figured out what the reader soon understands: that she is also a “hungry” of sorts. However, for some obscure reason, she retains her intellectual faculties. In other words, Melanie is neither human nor fungal hungry but a multispecies hybrid whose actions are fueled by the needs of both her human and her fungal natures.
To the scientists on the base, such hybridity is unacceptable and unthinkable. Melanie has been brought to the base along with similarly infected children not to save them from the postapocalyptic world but so that Dr. Caldwell can understand how Melanie and the other children are able to resist the detrimental effect of the fungus. The children believe that they attend a school of some sort, and they are indeed stimulated through regular teaching and stories. However, at certain intervals, Dr. Caldwell will bring a child into the laboratory, kill it, remove its brain, and analyze it. In the early part of the book, Dr. Caldwell has operated on one of the children (cruelly, without the use of now priceless anesthetics). The boy both dies and does not die as the top of his head is opened up and his brain lifted out:
Subject number twenty-two, whose name is Liam if you accept the idea of giving these things a name, continues to stare at her, his eyes tracking her movements. It doesn’t mean he’s alive. Dr Caldwell takes the view that the moment of death is the moment when the pathogen crosses the blood-brain barrier. What’s left, though its heart may beat (some ten or twelve times per minute), and though it speaks and can even be christened with a boy’s name or a girl’s name, is not the host. It’s the parasite.27
Dr. Caldwell’s assistant is deeply uncomfortable with the procedure, but Dr. Caldwell insists that “the subject presents as a child but is actually a fungal colony animating a child’s body. There’s no place for sentiment here.”28 Dr. Caldwell’s one mission is to save Homo sapiens from the extinction that seems imminent, and she refuses to recognize an in-between, multispecies state of being. When colleagues object to the treatment the children receive, she states bluntly, “If I make a vaccine, it might cure people like Melanie, who already have a partial immunity to Ophiocordyceps. It would certainly prevent thousands upon thousands of other children from ending up the way she has. Which weighs the most, Helen? Which will do the most good in the end? Your compassion, or my commitment to my work?”29
The question Dr. Caldwell asks is important. If humanity is, as anthropocentric models of being have long insisted, a bounded individual and a species apart, exercising compassion with fungal colonies seems absurd. From this perspective, the fungus is clearly a freakish parasite, a microbe selfishly feeding off the sacred, rational mind of the human. While Dr. Caldwell sounds callous, there is a sense that she may turn out to be the heroine of the story, the one who miraculously invents the cure and reinstates the hegemony of humankind. There is a long tradition of such closures in gothic fiction, where the heroic scientist finds the cure and things return to the status quo of modernity.30
However, before Dr. Caldwell has the opportunity to dissect Melanie, the base is overrun by a group of survivalists known as “junkers,” who inhabit the lands outside the base. Dr. Caldwell, a couple of soldiers, Miss Justineau, and Melanie manage to escape in an army vehicle, and in the process, Melanie bites some of the junkers, saving Miss Justineau’s life but also discovering that she is indeed host to the fungus, that she has an innate desire to feed off living bodies. For Melanie, this experience and the realization it brings trigger an identity crisis. How can she both love Miss Justineau and want to eat her? Is she truly a human being? If not, to what species does she belong?
These questions become increasingly central as the small group makes its way through what remains of England. The destination is a base called Beacon, the only remaining walled-in colony of humans left in the nation. During the slow and hazardous journey, they encounter more of the infected children. Because these children have never been in the company of uninfected human adults, they lack a functioning language and survive by hunting animals and the occasional stray Homo sapiens. The group also runs into what amounts to a dense forest of fungi growing out of the decomposing bodies of fully dead hungries. Seeing the forest, Dr. Caldwell theorizes that the fungus has developed a new strategy. These enormous fungal growths mimic the fungi growing out of the heads of parasitized ants; they contain seed pods full of spores and await some kind of environmental trigger that will set them free, turning the contagion airborne. If this occurs, all human beings, including those hiding in Beacon, will become infected.
Close to this forest, the group discovers an abandoned but advanced and still functional research vehicle equipped with a precise electron microscope, a tool that Dr. Caldwell has previously lacked. Dr. Caldwell manages to lure one of the feral children into a trap, decapitates him, and examines his brain with her new equipment. This allows her to see the difference between the brains of a first-generation and a second-generation hungry.31 She explains to Melanie:
The fungus utterly wrecks the brain of a first-generation hungry. . . . In the second generation . . . the fungus is spread evenly throughout the brain. It’s thoroughly interwoven with the dendrites of the host’s neurons. In some places it actually replaces them. But it doesn’t feed on the brain. It gets its nourishment only when the host eats. It’s become a true symbiote rather than a parasite.32
This is an answer to the questions that Melanie has been asking herself. She realizes that she is neither human nor fungus but a multispecies, symbiotic hybrid. This explains the instinctual, protective love she feels both for the hungries and for the hybrids she comes across. This leads on to another realization: her true identity as Pandora, the giver of gifts. Melanie supplies the environmental trigger that the fungal growths are waiting for by setting them on fire, effectively obliterating the entire human species. She explains her actions to one of the soldiers:
If you keep shooting them [the hungries] and cutting them into pieces and throwing them into pits, nobody will be left to make a new world. Your people and the junker people will keep killing each other, and you’ll both kill the hungries wherever you find them, and in the end the world will be empty. This way is better. Everybody turns into a hungry all at once, and that means they’ll all die, which is really sad. But then the children will grow up, and they won’t be the old kind of people but they won’t be hungries either. They’ll be different. Like me and the rest of the kids in the class.33
The only human to survive this apocalypse is Miss Justineau, who finds shelter in the protective environment of the research vehicle.34 In a supremely ironic reversal of fates, she will live out her days encased by the vehicle or a biohazard suit, continuing to teach the new hybrid children reading, arithmetic, and classical literature.
Posthuman Presents in Gothic
The Girl with All the Gifts clearly outlines a very different intellectual and corporeal territory than most other zombie narratives, where the typical resolution to the zombie plague is constant machine gun fire and the antidote produced by the scientists sheltered by this fire. In The Girl with All the Gifts, capitalist technoscience was what brought on the catastrophe in the first place. Thus the scientists, guns, and soldiers that constitute the only conceivable antidote to the zombie plague in other narratives are not allowed to grasp sudden triumph out of a dissection of Melanie’s infected body. A different way of thinking, a thinking beyond the Anthropos, even beyond the notion of “saving,” is necessary to realize the postapocalyptic future.
In this way, the extinction of the Anthropos is not necessarily tragic in The Girl with All the Gifts—certainly not as tragic as the alternative future of constant killing and destruction that Melanie envisages. Prospects for the planet may still be bleak, but something is gained by making room for tentacular multispecies being and becoming. In this way, The Girl with All the Gifts imagines a future in which mankind has indeed gone extinct but where love is still a possibility. The novel makes it possible to envisage the hybrid children forming communities very different from current human society. The new microbiome has made the second-generation hungries much more resilient and effective. They will have no need to develop a fossil fuel economy, enabling also love between them and the planet. Thus, the novel enables a love not simply between human–fungal hybrids but also between the hybrids and the fungus itself and between these entangled entities and the planet into which they are folded. As Kirksey has proposed, symbiotic entanglement is perhaps best described as a form of love. Melanie’s decision to let humanity die out is, in fact, imagined not as an act of anger but as one of love.
This does not mean that Kirksey or Carey is promoting the extinction of the Anthropos. Rather, Kirksey’s observation—and that of many other scholars who can be tentatively labeled as posthumanist—that to push “beyond anthropocentric concerns, into the world of this microbe, also offers an opportunity to imagine the possibilities of life without us”35 and his contention that even if the “Anthropos destroys itself, and other creatures we love, perhaps it is possible to embrace post-human futures”36 are not calls for collective human self-extermination. Rather, “learning how to love and care for invertebrates, and their microbial companions, in an era of extinction could open up lively post-human possibilities.”37 Carey’s novel should perhaps be read in the same way: not as a request to give up on humankind as a species but as a gothic call to embrace tentacular, multispecies life in the Chthulucene, to “make kin” as Haraway proposes.38 Such a call is not a death knell but a request to form emotional attachments across the species barriers erected by Enlightenment anthropocentrism. Such attachments can be the foundation of a new ethics in the time of the Anthropocene.
Notes
Eben Kirksey, “Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life after the Anthropocene,” Theory, Culture, and Society 36, no. 6 (2018–19): 199.
See Sarah Wasson’s chapter “Erotics and Annihilation: Caitlín R. Kiernan, Queering the Weird, and Challenges to the ‘Anthropocene’” in this collection for another discussion of the queer erotics of nonhuman and more-than-human life-forms.
The notion that we should cherish the life of microbes may seem counterintuitive in a world that has experienced the Covid-19 pandemic, but this pandemic only further emphasizes the need to consider the wants and natures of microbes. Viruses are a hazard to human life and to societies, but viral “phages” also cooperate with bacteria to keep both the human immune system and the ecosystem well balanced. See Karin Moelling, “What Contemporary Viruses Tell Us about Evolution: A Personal View,” Archives of Virology 158, no. 9 (2013): 1833–48.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unknowable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 24.
While this chapter uses “Chthulucene” rather than “Capitalocene” as proposed by Jason W. Moore and Andreas Malm, I recognize, as proposed by Moore, that the climate crisis that is currently unfolding has not been caused by the Anthropos as a species but by a capitalism rooted in, fueled by, and fueling colonialism.
For the number of bacterial cells that live inside and on the human body, see Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs, and Ron Milo, “Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body,” PLoS Biology 14, no. 8 (2016): e1002533. For the number of bacterial species that inhabit the human body, see Jack Gilbert, Martin Blaser, Gregory Caporaso, Janet Jansson, Susan V. Lynch, and Rob Knight, “Current Understanding of the Human Microbiome,” Nature Medicine 24, no. 4 (2018): 392–400.
Archea are unicellular organisms like bacteria and were long classified as such. No authoritative estimation of the number of viruses, archea, or fungi that make up the microbiome exists, but viruses are believed to outnumber human cells by 100:1. See John L. Mokili, Forest Rohwer, and Bas E. Dutilh, “Metagenomics and Future Perspectivesin Virus Discovery,” Current Opinion in Virology 2, no. 1 (2012): 63–77, suggesting that there are vastly more archea, bacteria, fungal cells, and viral particles than human cells in the human body.
The bacteriome, archaeome, virome, and mycobiome collectively make up the microbiome, and it is as such that I will refer to it in this chapter. However, it should be observed that this term is often used in literature synonymously with bacteriome.
See Gilbert et al., “Current Understanding.”
Bacteria perform a number of essential functions in (animal) bodies. As an example, the digestive system of a cow cannot digest the cellulose that binds the nutrients in the grass it eats. This job is outsourced to bacteria that have coevolved with the cow. As Lynn Margulis puts it in The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), “the cellulose-degrading microbes, in a very real sense are the cow” (122).
Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” Quarterly Review of Biology 87, no. 4 (2012): 334.
Gilbert et al.
Gilbert et al.
For general discussions of the connection between a damaged human microbiome and various forms of illness, see Martin Blaser, Missing Microbes: How Killing Bacteria Creates Modern Plagues (New York: Henry Holt, 2014); Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness (London: William Collins, 2015); and Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 103–43.
See Walter H. Moos, Douglas V. Faller, David N. Harpp, Iphigenia Kanara, Julie Pernokas, Whitney R. Powers, and Kosta Steliou, “Microbiota and Neurological Disorders: A Gut Feeling,” BioResearch Open Access 5, no. 1 (2016): 138.
See Blaser, Missing Microbes.
See Clémence Defois, Jérémy Ratel, Ghislain Garrait, Sylvain Denis, Olivier Le Goff, Jérémie Talvas, Pascale Mosoni, Erwan Engel, and Pierre Peyret, “Food Chemicals Disrupt Human Gut Microbiota Activity and Impact Intestinal Homeostasis as Revealed by In Vitro Systems,” Scientific Reports 8, no. 11006 (2018), and Liang Lu, Ting Luo, Yao Zhao, Chunhui Cai, Zhengwei Fu, and Yuanxiang Jin, “Interaction between Microplastics and Microorganism as Well as Gut Microbiota: A Consideration on Environmental Animal and Human Health,” Science of the Total Environment 667, no. 1 (2019): 94–100.
See, e.g., Kristina B. Martinez, Vanessa Leone, and Eugene B. Chang, “Western Diets, Gut Dysbiosis, and Metabolic Diseases: Are They Linked?,” Gut Microbes 8, no. 2 (2017): 130–42.
The identification of heavy metals released into soil by human activity is considered one of the “golden spikes” or markers of the beginning of the Anthropocene age. See Yadvinder Malhi, “The Concept of the Anthropocene,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43, no. 77–104 (2017): 77–104, and Jerôme Breton, Sébastien Massart, Peter Vandamme, Evie De Brandt, Bruno Pot, and Benoît Foligné, “Ecotoxicology inside the Gut: Impact of Heavy Metals on the Mouse Microbiome,” BMC Pharmacology and Toxicology 14, no. 62 (2013), for information on how heavy metals cause dysbiosis.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 101.
Haraway.
Haraway.
Donna Haraway, “Symbogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M45.
Haraway, Staying, 101.
M. R. Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts (London: Orbit, 2014), 387–88.
M. R. Carey, The Boy on the Bridge (London: Orbit, 2017), 171.
Carey, 44–45.
Carey, 112.
Carey, 357.
See, e.g., the film version of World War Z (2013), in which a combination of special forces military violence and medical research saves the day for the Anthropos.
In The Boy on the Bridge, the relationship between fungi and human brain is described in more detail: “he [Greaves] finds himself staring at a dense mat of fungal mycelia. The brain is one vast spider web of threads, woven about and through the regular neurons all the way from the outer cortex to the thalamus and transverse fissure. By volume, this brain is half human and half fungus. But where is the damage? The human cerebral matter ought to have been hollowed out, devoured by the fungal invader. There ought to be a 55–80 per cent reduction in actual brain mass and a visible degeneration of whatever tissue still remains. A crust of microglial cells overlaying the damaged cortical areas. Myelin sheaths stripped away leaving bare neurons firing fitfully and futilely into synaptic gaps that have become mud wallows of necrotic juices. None of that is present. If this brain has been invaded, it is mounting a robust defence.” Carey, Boy on the Bridge, 172.
Carey, The Girl, 431–32.
Carey, 456.
The Boy on the Bridge actually salvages a slice of the Anthropos. Having discovered that the fungus does not thrive at high altitudes, a group from Beacon have relocated to the Cairngorms in Scotland. In the final pages of this book, this small and starving community is discovered by a now grown Melanie, who is escorting Miss Justineau, driving the research vehicle. This salvaging of both humanity and Miss Justineau reduces some of the intellectual impact of The Girl with All the Gifts. Yet, even in this novel, humanity will be forever confined to this elevated region as the rest of the Earth is contaminated by the airborne fungus.
Kirksey, “Queer Love,” 5.
Kirksey.
Kirksey.
Haraway, Staying, 102.
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