Toggling macro and micro perspectives for flourishing in unstable times
You think about yourself as a unique individual, but you are an exuberant ever-changing crowd, a planet swarming with life, a symbiotic microbiome full of millions of micro-organisms that perform various, indispensable functions in your body. Could thinking with the microbiome provide us with tools to end the tiranny of individualism? Will toggling from macro to micro perspectives enable us to understand ourselves as relational and connected multitudes rather than discrete bodies? Here I make a case for re-membering of our extended webs into nature and environments as a prerequisite for flourishing in unstable times.
Our bodies probably contain more cells of microbial than primate origin. These microbes don’t just live on our bodies, like moss on a tree in a host-symbiont kind of way, but are rather an integral (and hereditary) part of us, without which we wouldn’t be ourselves. Moreover, without them we’d get sick or might even die. In this article we explore the implications of the micro perspective of the microbiome on larger scale macro-concepts like health care and sustainability. How can we flourish in current unstable times?
Abandoning individuality
To think of ourselves as planets we have to abandon the notion of individuality. That’s hard because individuality is very much a part of how we see ourselves and how we have build our societies. It is a key asset in our so-called Western world: we have the right to self-determination and we also believe that we have the right to fulfill our personal needs and pursue our dreams.
But from the moment you were born, you ceased to be an individual. Babies in the womb are sterile, but vaginally born babies are swiftly colonized by their mother’s microbiome. Breast milk mostly isn’t even meant for the baby itself but feeds the first microbes of a baby.
Skin deserts and gut-based rainforests
You can say we are very intimately intertwined with our microbiome. Some of the things that define our individual selves such as self-awareness, personality traits and emotional state are at least partially controlled by microbes. Just like a planet where different ecosystems flourish under different conditions (temperature, climate, longitude) our bodies grow different ecosystems on different locations. The desert of the skin hosts different communities than the oceans in our eyes or the dense and species-rich rainforest of the gut.
The effect of microbes on us depends on the location where they appear and reside, but also whether the communities in that location are in balance. A healthy microbiotic ecosystem can easily deal with harmful invaders. A healthy microbiotic gut community responds to pathogens by producing antimicrobial proteins and is a line of defense. An imbalanced ecosystem on the other hand, like a robbed rainforest, is very susceptible to outside influences.
The disregarded pan-microbiome
Our health care is focused on individual health, with little attention to the consequences for public health. This is a missed opportunity given the shared nature pan-microbiome (the shared total of human microbiomes in a population), across communities, and vertical and horizontal mechanisms for the exchange of microbiomes between humans. An imbalance in the human microbiome makes it easier for pathogens to colonize the body and disease to cause havoc. Dysbiosis, as this is called, in the gut microbiome has been associated with obesity, inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
If we do want to learn more about how the microbiome influences the course of diseases and to what extent it influences battling harmful pathogens, it clearly is not enough to look at individual microbiomes, we must also take the pan-microbiome of the whole community into consideration.
We already know lots about keeping our individual microbiomes in shape: eating a plant-based diet, foods rich in probiotics such as yoghurt, and limiting antibiotics. But how do we go about keeping the pan-microbiome in shape? Is it possible to create conditions that promote distribution of good microbiota throughout the population? Is there a more social and interconnected approach to healthcare?
An entanglement of relations
If we extrapolate these notions, it is clear that what’s good for our bodies, ultimately benefits our planet too. Eating a plant-based diet would require less of earth's raw resources than meat production. Of course these are gross oversimplifications. Earth’s system, like our microbiome covered bodies, is a complex entanglement of interrelations with both positive and negative feedback loops. It is a network of ecosystems containing many species cooperating, competing and ignoring each other, depending on environmental factors, input and output.
But in the very least when we realize that we are connected from the inside out with all life around us, it makes us mindful of how all life, throughout history, has always been connected. We do not exist in isolation, we are not discrete units. We are ever-changing crowds that exist in constant relation with other ‘crowds’ that we need to survive and thrive.