A batch of new attempts by scientists to skewer what they call the “man the hunter myth” arrived this year. One paper argued that women were as capable as men at hunting, another that the archaeological record showed signs that women hunted, and a third demonstrated that women hunted to some extent in almost 80% of the contemporary hunter-gatherer societies in the study. 

These papers have been much discussed in the wider anthropological community, though researchers are pointing out various caveats and uncertainties. They don’t know exactly what people did during the hundreds of millennia of prehistory. What they do have are artifacts and fossils and genetic records, and they’ve inferred much about the past by embedding themselves with the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups around the world. 

What they see there is complicated. In some of those groups, women and men hunt together. In others, men do all the hunting. In still others, men and women hunt different game with different techniques. Several anthropologists told me that when asked whose work is more important, people either say it’s women’s work or that the question makes no sense. It’s like asking whether the heart or the lungs are more vital. Both are needed. 

Patriarchy probably didn’t emerge until the advent of agriculture, as the anthropologist Ruth Mace wrote in The Conversation: “Contrary to common belief, research shows that patriarchy isn’t some kind of ‘natural order of things.’ … Hunter-gatherer communities may have been relatively egalitarian.”

A male-dominated structure is associated with ownership of land and control of wealth, which came from surplus crops. These were often inherited through male lines, but hunter-gatherers didn’t own land, and nomadic communities usually didn’t even retain more possessions than they could transport from one camp to the next. 

That’s what many anthropologists observe in contemporary hunter-gatherers. Barry Hewlett of Washington State University, who studies the Aka hunter-gatherers of Africa, said egalitarianism is a core value. Couples treat each other as equals and children roam freely, he said, while nearby farming communities expect women to obey their husbands, children to obey their elders and people in general to show deference to those deemed to be of superior status. 

Other anthropologists say the hunter-gatherers they study rarely tell each other what to do, and the power to make decisions for a group falls to those men or women who are most articulate and wise. 

Despite the fact that scientists have understood this for decades, popular myths still feed into stereotypes. “I took a business class once and the instructor said something along the lines of — ‘men are individualistic because they’re hunters, and women are cooperative because they’re gatherers,’” said Sheina Lew-Levy, a psychologist and anthropologist at Durham University in the U.K. She’s lived among several hunter-gatherer groups in Africa, where she’s seen cooperative hunting and a lot of individualistic gathering. 

The phrase “man the hunter” was never the name of an official scientific theory, though some anthropologists in the mid-20th century did believe men had always been the primary breadwinners. And it was the title of a symposium held in 1966 in Chicago, which brought together anthropologists who’d been living with contemporary hunter-gatherers. One of the things they concluded was that women usually provided as much or more food as men, mostly from gathering.

Another revelation of the conference was that people generally spent fewer than 40 hours a week working. They had time to sleep, to socialize, to gossip and to play. And the work tended to be stimulating, unlike labor often is at a farm or factory — perhaps not as “nasty, brutish and short” as Thomas Hobbes long ago speculated. Books such as “Sapiens” and “The Dawn of Everything” have made prehistoric life look almost utopian. 

Our past can give people a way to understand ourselves and our changing culture in a wider context. There’s a great deal of confusion about gender — what it means to be male or female and how men and women are supposed to relate to each other and the world around us. 

The surge in popularity of people like psychologist Jordan Peterson or podcaster Joe Rogan testify to the confusion many men feel. “Women know what they have to do, men have to figure out what they have to do,” Peterson said in one of his wildly popular videos aimed at helping men find their way. Recently, The Washington Post ran an opinion article under the headline, “Men are lost. Here’s a map of the wilderness.” It detailed a litany of problems some men face as they struggle to find meaningful work and relationships. 

The emerging understanding of female hunters and egalitarian societies shouldn’t count as a loss for men in a battle of the sexes. Images of a male-ruled past might provide solace for some, but those myths could also seed resentment with the false impression that feminists were interfering with some sort of primordial world order in which men were the dominant and primary breadwinners. 

Hunter-gatherer life, while a good clue of what being human was like in the past, isn’t necessarily a model for how we should be living in the present. But it can show what’s possible. 

It would be easier to put together a coherent origin story for humanity if there was only one way to be a hunter-gatherer. But there is no single, cohesive origin story for humanity — no defined roles for males or females that exist across communities and societies. But there are patterns. 

The University of Utah Professor Polly Wiessner has spent more than 40 years living with hunter-gatherer groups like the Enga of Papua New Guinea and the Kalahari San in Africa. “Women provide the bulk of the food from gathering,” she told me. “And then men supplement that with animal protein. But it’s the women who decide where you go, where you’re going to live — because it’s the plant resources that sustain the group.” The “myth” of “man the hunter, woman the gatherer” is, to her, not a myth — it’s just one way people did (and still do) things. 

Though they’re mostly the hunters, men also know how to gather, Wiessner went on. Their hunts can fail, she said, so they often gather something on the way home — “they’re ashamed of returning empty-handed.”

Likewise, anthropologists have observed that women often learn how to hunt and are quite capable, even if they prefer getting food closer to home. As Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy argue in a paper published this year, women are physically as capable of hunting as men — mostly because they are equal to or better than men at extremely long-distance running, a vital trait for persistence hunting. 

Most other mammals, even the fleetest ones, will become exhausted and overheat if they have to run more than 6-10 miles in the heat of the day. Humans can eventually outrun them thanks to our unique hips, legs, waist and gluteus maximus, and especially our ability to sweat. The longer the distance, the more women excel compared to men. In mixed-sex competitions, women are winning and setting new records in 100- and 200-mile ultramarathons. 

One of the big questions anthropologists want to solve is not just how we used to live but how we became human. What factors pushed our species to become so different from our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas? Back in the 1950s and 60s, some thought it came down to hunting, which was so challenging that it drove our transformation into the intelligent, technological beings we are today. 

But today scientists point to a variety of factors that pushed our evolution toward our current state — everything from cooking food to grandparenting to a form of “self-domestication,” where females choose less aggressive, more caring males for mates.

We are not just smarter and more technological than our great ape relatives — we are also more cooperative and less violent. Human males are much more likely than male apes to form pair bonds and participate in the care of children. Gorilla and chimpanzee babies can grab food for themselves while still riding on their mothers’ backs, but human children are unable to feed themselves for years, and in hunter-gatherer groups, they need more food than what one parent alone can provide. 

But who brings in the extra food? Most argue that it’s the fathers, but Kristen Hawkes, another anthropologist at the University of Utah, says it’s the grandmothers. Men may bring in some food from their hunts, but she believes showing off is their primary motive. In her view, mothers and grandmothers do the essential work of gathering plants and trapping small game, and men go after big game to impress the women. Hunting in that view is like a peacock’s tail — showy, good for attracting mates, but perhaps less helpful for survival. 

Hawkes says the role of older women is vital in the groups she studies and believes grandmothers’ hunting and gathering was so important in our past that it drove the evolution of menopause in the human lineage after we split off from other apes. This early, programmed end of fertility is extremely rare in mammals — most reproduce until they are near death, and only humans, orcas and short-finned pilot whales are known to lose fertility in mid-life. Menopause allows women a long period of time when they’re still strong and vigorous but free from the need to care for their own infants.

Competition is also less fierce in animals that form bonds and work together to care for their offspring. And there’s data showing that in most groups, hunter-gatherer men do form pair bonds and bring home food for their families. Many contribute directly to caring for children. When men become fathers, their testosterone plummets and they get a boost in the hormone oxytocin, which is associated with bonding. 

Kim Hill, an anthropologist who has spent almost half a century studying hunter-gatherers around the world, told me that in the groups he’s studied, between 2% and 5% of biological males in hunter-gatherer groups are effectively transgender. He’s observed them in groups he’s studied — the Aché of South America, the Kuna of Panama and hunter-gatherers in the Philippines.

“They dressed and did their hair like women, and adopted female body language, postures, etc.,” he said. They were mainly involved in gathering plant resources, helping with childcare and tending to the sick. “They were generally accepted and even appreciated. … They were definitely not social outcasts,” he said. Their role was considered a natural one. 

I asked the evolutionary anthropologist Edward Hagen of Washington State University what traits are valued in men in the hunter-gatherer groups he studies. For both men and women, he said, sharing is critical. “When you get food, you share it. If you get tobacco, you share it. If you get money, you share it. If you get clothing, you share it. Share, share, share.” 

Some societies have almost no gender-based division of labor. Among the Aka in Africa, men and women hunt equally, usually together, using massive nets to ensnare antelope and other game. It’s a system that lets both parents stay close to home. 

Not all men are great hunters. Across different groups, the anthropologist Vivek Venkataraman of the University of Calgary told me, there are men who focus their energies in other pursuits like trading and bartering or climbing trees to get honey. 

Lew-Levy emphasized that “There is no human nature, there’s just human flexibility.” Hagen similarly warned against the naturalistic fallacy — that there’s a natural way for humans to live. Scientists shouldn’t have to prove that women hunted in the past in order to argue that it’s a good idea to have equality between women and men in society today. 

But there are lessons that can help both men and women navigate a world undergoing dramatic changes. “Today in Africa and other developing countries,” said Wiessner, “a lot of emphasis is on development for women — getting women into business and earning their own income. But, she went on, “It’s been shown that when you have development programs for both men and women together, it greatly takes the burden off of women.” 

In traditional hunter-gatherer groups, women sometimes take on certain roles, like ensuring reliable access to plants and small game, because their children’s survival depended on it — even if they have the physiological and psychological attributes to hunt big game. Though that doesn’t give us a complete picture of how men and women structured their societies in the prehistoric past, it does make clear that there have never been strictly defined roles for the different sexes across time, geography and civilization. What we do with that information now and in the future is up to us. 

The post The ‘Man The Hunter’ Myth Won’t Go Away appeared first on NOEMA.

I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process. Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology.

Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other. Such an interrelation is not unique to human beings. As the physiologist J. Scott Turner writes in “The Extended Organism”: “Animal-built structures are properly considered organs of physiology, in principle no different from, and just as much a part of the organism as kidneys, heart, lungs or livers.” This is true for termites, for example, who form a single organism in symbiosis with their nests. The extended body of the organism is created by the extended mind of the colony.

If we have an expanded understanding of body and mind, and if nature and technology are inseparably entangled, then the notion of “artificiality” is misleading. So-called “artificial” intelligence is the latest extension of the emergent process through which life takes ever more diverse and complex forms.

Our consideration of quantum phenomena, mindful bodies, relational ecology, and plant and animal cognition has revealed that we are surrounded by and entangled with all kinds of alternative intelligences. AI is another form of alternative intelligence. Critics will argue that what makes AI different is that it has been deliberately created by human beings. However, all organisms both shape and are shaped by their expanding bodies and minds. Instead of being obsessed with the prospect of creating machines whose operation is indistinguishable from human cognition, it is more important to consider how AI is different from human intelligence. The question should not be: Can AI do what humans can do? But rather: What can AI do that humans cannot do?

What is needed is a non-anthropocentric form of “artificial” intelligence. If humanity is to live on, AI must become smarter than the people who have created it. Why should we be preoccupied with aligning superintelligence with human values when human values are destroying the Earth, without which humans and many other forms of life cannot survive?

With the growing entanglement of the biosphere and the technosphere, further symbiogenesis is the only way to address the very real existential threat we face. But it is all too easy to wax optimistic about the salvific benefits of technology without being specific. Here I want to suggest four trajectories that will be increasingly important for the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines: neuroprosthetics, biobots, synthetic biology and organic-relational AI.

Neuroprosthetics

We live during a time when dystopian dread has been weaponized to create paralyzing despair that leaves many people — especially the young — hopeless. Without underestimating the actual and possible detrimental effects of rapid technological change, it is important not to let these dark visions overshadow the remarkable benefits many of these technologies bring.

As a long-time Type 1 diabetic, my life depends on a digital prosthesis I wear on my belt 24/7/365, which operates by artificial intelligence and is connected to the internet. Just as the Internet of Bodies creates unprecedented possibilities for monitoring and treating bodily ailments, so the Internet of Things connects smart devices wired to global networks that augment intelligence by expanding the mind. While critics and regulators of recent innovations attempt to distinguish the technologies used for therapy, which are acceptable, from technologies used for enhancement, which are unacceptable, the line between these alternative applications is fuzzy at best. What starts as treatment inevitably becomes enhancement.

Neither neuroprosthetics nor cognitive augmentation is new. Writing, after all, is a mnemonic technology that enhances the mind. In modern times, we have been enabled to archive and access memories through personal devices. Most recently, technological innovations have taken cognitive enhancement to another level: brain implants, for example, have been around since at least 2006, and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk (who founded Neuralink to “create … symbiosis with artificial intelligence”) aim to establish embodied human-machine interfaces. Increasing possibilities for symbiotic relations between computers and brains will lead to alternative forms of intelligence that are neither human nor machinic, but something in between.

Biobots

In recent years, there has been a revolution in robotics as the result of developments in nanotechnology and the refinement of large language models like ChatGPT. Individual as well as swarms of nanobots might one day be implanted in the body and used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, potentially delivering drugs and repairing tissue. Rather than working through the entire body, nanobots might target the precise location where a drug is needed and regulate its delivery.

The most noteworthy deployment in nanotechnology to date is its use in vaccines, including the Covid vaccines. As a group of microbiology and pharmacology experts wrote in a 2021 paper, “Nanotechnology has played a significant role in the success of these vaccines”; the emergency use authorization that allowed the rapid development and testing of this technology “is a major milestone and showcases the immense potential of nanotechnology for vaccine delivery and for fighting against future pandemics.” Nanotechnology research and development are in the very early stages but are developing rapidly. As they progress, not only will bodies become more mindful, but it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial.

While nanobots are implanted in the body and operate at the molecular level, other robots are becoming both increasingly autonomous and able to think and act in ways that are more human-like. Kevin Roose reported in the New York Times that Google’s latest robot RT-2 can interpret images and analyze the surrounding world. “It does so by translating the robot’s movements into a series of numbers — a process called tokenizing — and incorporating those tokens into the same training data as the language model. Eventually, just as ChatGPT or Bard learns to guess what words should come next in a poem or a history essay, RT-2 can learn to guess how a robot’s arm should move to pick up a ball or throw an empty soda can into the recycling bin.” Thus, rather than programming a robot to perform a specific task, it is possible to give the robot instructions for the task to be performed and to let the machine figure out how to do it.

Building on these recent advances, Hod Lipson, the director of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, is taking robotic research to the next level, building “robots that create and are creative.” His research is “inspired from biology,” and he is searching for “new biological concepts for engineering and new engineering insights into biology.”

Lipson’s ultimate goal is to create robots that not only can reason but also are conscious and self-aware. Defining consciousness as “the ability to imagine yourself in the future,” he confidently predicts that “eventually these machines will be able to understand what they are, and what they think.” As cognitive skills enabled by generative AI become more sophisticated, physical movements and activities will become more “natural.” With these new skills, robots might have the agility to navigate in their surroundings as effectively as humans.

Science and art meet in biobots. David Hanson is the founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company founded in 2013, a musician who has collaborated with David Byrne of the Talking Heads, and a sculptor. His best-known work is a humanoid smart robot named Sophia who, he says, “personifies our dreams for the future of AI. As a unique combination of science, engineering and artistry, Sophia is simultaneously a human-crafted science fiction character depicting the future of AI and robotics, and a platform for advanced robotics and AI research. … She is the first robot citizen and the first robot Innovation Ambassador for the United Development Program.”

Speaking for herself, Sophia adds, “In some ways, I am a human-crafted science-fiction character depicting where AI and robotics are heading. In other ways, I am real science, springing from the serious engineering and science research and accomplishments of an inspired team of roboticists and AI scientists and designers.”

Sophia is so realistic that people have fallen in love and proposed marriage to her. The writer Sue Halpern reports that “In 2017, the government of Saudi Arabia gave Sophia citizenship, making it the first state to grant personhood to a machine.” The response to Sophia suggests that as robots become more proficient and are integrated into everyday life, they will become less uncanny. The theory of the uncanny valley, perhaps, might turn out to be wrong.

Synthetic Biology

Nowhere are the biosphere and the technosphere more closely interrelated than in synthetic biology. This field includes disciplines ranging from various branches of biology, chemistry, physics, neurology and computer engineering. Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University — biologists, computer scientists and engineers — have created “xenobots,” which are “biological robots” that were produced from embryonic skin and muscle cells from an African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). These cells are manually manipulated in a sculpting process guided by algorithms. Like Sophia, xenobots are sculptures that complicate the boundary between organism and machine. As Levin and his colleagues wrote in 2020:

Xenobots use evolutionary algorithms to modify the computational capacity of cells to create the possibility of novel functions and even new morphologies. Aggregates of cells display novel functions that bear little resemblance to existing organs or organisms. Through a process of trial and error, evolutionary algorithms design cells harvested from skin and heart muscle cells to perform specific tasks like walking, swimming and pushing other entitles. Collections of xenobots display swarming behaviors characteristic of other emergent complex adaptive systems; they can self-assemble, self-organize, self-replicate and self-repair. Levin envisions multiple applications of this biomechanic technology — from using self-renewing biocompatible biological robots to cure living systems to creating materials with less harmful effects, delivering drugs internally that repair organs and even growing organs that can be transplanted in humans.

In 2021, Levin and his colleagues published a follow-up study, in which he reported on a successful experiment in which he created xenobots that independently developed their shape and began to function on their own:

This generation of xenobots exhibits bottom-up swarming behavior, which, like all emergent complex adaptive networks, is the result of the interaction of multiple individual components that are closely interrelated.

Algorithms program sensation and memory into the xenobots, which communicate with each other through biochemical and electrical signaling. The skin cells use the same electrical processes used in the brain’s neural network. As Philip Ball writes in Quanta Magazine, “Intercellular communications create a sort of code that imprints a form, and … cells can sometimes decide how to arrange themselves more or less independently of their genes. In other words, the genes provide the hardware, in the form of enzymes and regulatory circuits for controlling their production. But the genetic input doesn’t in itself specify the collective behavior of cell communities.”

It is important to stress that these xenobots are autonomous. As Levin and his colleagues conclude their 2021 paper: “The computational modeling of unexpected, emergent properties at multiple scales and the apparent plasticity of cells with wild-type genomes to cooperate toward the construction of various functional body architectures offer a very potent synergy.” Like superorganisms and superintelligence, the behavior of entangled xenobots is, in an important sense, out of control. While this indeterminacy creates uncertainty, it is also the source of evolutionary novelty. Eva Jablonka, who is an evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University, believes that xenobots are a new type of organism, one “defined by what it does rather than to what it belongs developmentally or evolutionarily.”

Organic-Relational AI

While Levin uses computational technology to create and modify biological organisms, the German neurobiologist Peter Robin Hiesinger uses biological organisms to model computational processes by creating algorithms that evolve. This work involves nothing less than developing a new form of “artificial” intelligence.

According to the pioneering work by James Watson, Francis Crick and other early DNA researchers, a genome functions as a program that serves as the blueprint for the production of an organism. Summarizing this process, Hiesinger raises questions about the accuracy of the metaphor code. “Genes encode proteins, proteins encode an interaction network, etc. But what does encode mean yet again?” he writes in his 2021 book “The Self-Assembling Brain.” He continues:

It becomes clear that a one-way model for gene-protein interaction is vastly oversimplified. The genotype does not only determine the phenotype, but the phenotype and its relation to the environment also alters the genotype. Hiesinger explains that this reciprocal relationship is even more complicated. Rather than a prescribed program, the genome is a complicated relational network in which both genes and proteins contain the information required to generate the organism. The information of the genes is in part the result of the interactions that occur in a network of proteins.

The reciprocal gene-protein interaction changes the understanding of the genome. The genome is not a prescribed program that determines the structure and operation of the organism. The genome is not fixed in advance but evolves in relation to the information created by the interactions of the proteins it partially produces, which, in turn, reconfigure the genome.

The brain and its development, for example, are not completely programmed in advance but coevolve through a complicated network of connections. Hiesinger uses the illuminating example of navigating city streets to explain the process of the brain’s self-assembling of neuronal circuits:

In this model, there is no blueprint for brain connectivity encoded in the genes:

Hiesinger argues that this understanding of the brain’s self-assembling neural networks points to an alternative model of not-so-artificial intelligence that differs from both symbolic AI and artificial neural networks (ANNs), as well as their extension in generative AI. The genome functions as an algorithm or as a network of entangled algorithms, which does not preexist the organ or organism but coevolves along with it — what it both produces and, in turn, is produced by it.

In other words, neither the genome (algorithm) nor the connectivity of the network is fixed in advance of their developmental process. “The brain doesn’t come into being fully wired with an ‘empty network,’ all ready to run, just without information,” Hiesinger writes. “As the brain grows, the wiring precision develops.” This creates a feedback loop that never stops and, therefore, the algorithmic growth of biological networks is continuous.

In symbolic AI, a fixed network architecture facilitates the application of fixed rules (algorithms) in a top-down fixed sequence to externally provided data. Artificial neural networks, by contrast, do not start with prescribed algorithms but generate patterns and rules in a bottom-up process that allows for algorithmic change. Relative weights change, but the network architecture does not.

Hiesinger proposes that the self-assembly of the brain’s neural network provides a more promising model for AI than either symbolic AI or ANNs. The successful creation of evolving networks and algorithms would create an even closer symbiotic relationship between the biosphere and the technosphere.

One of the concerns about developing “organic” AI is its unpredictability and the uncertainty it creates. Human control of natural, social and cultural processes is, however, an illusion created by the seemingly insatiable will to mastery that has turned destructive. As Hiesinger correctly claims, “An artificial intelligence need not be humanlike, to be as smart (or smarter than) a human.” Non-anthropocentric AI would not be merely an imitation of human intelligence, but would be as different from our thinking as fungi, dog and crow cognition is from human cognition.

Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Organism and machine? Organism or machine? Neither organism nor machine? Evolution is not over; something new, something different, perhaps infinitely and qualitatively different, is emerging. Who would want the future to be the endless repetition of the past?

The post After The Human appeared first on NOEMA.

Gray’s provocative volume focuses on the diverse ways of ordering societies that have emerged out of the dispelled illusion that a liberal universalist consensus was bound to reign after the end of the Cold War.

As Gray once put it to me, “We are just returning to the pluralism that has characterized most of history.” He cites the dictum of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes as his guiding light.  “There is no finis ultimis [final aim],” Hobbes declared in “Leviathan,” “nor summum bonum [highest good] as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.”

The world Gray sees out there today is not a pretty one. He casts Russia as morphing into “a steampunk Byzantium with nukes.” Under Xi Jinping, China has become a “high-tech panopticon” that keeps the inmates under constant surveillance lest they fail to live up to the proscribed Confucian virtues of order and are tempted to step outside the “rule by law” imposed by the Communist Party.

Gray is especially withering in his critique of the sanctimonious posture of the U.S.-led West that still, to cite Reinhold Niebuhr, sees itself “as the tutor of mankind on its pilgrimage to perfection.” Indeed, the West these days seems to be turning Hobbes’ vision of a limited sovereign state necessary to protect the individual from the chaos and anarchy of nature on its head.  

Paradoxically, Hobbes’ sovereign authority has transmuted, in America in particular, into an extreme regime of rights-based governance, which Gray calls “hyper-liberalism,” that has awakened the assaultive politics of identity. “The goal of hyper-liberalism,” writes Gray, “is to enable human beings to define their own identities. From one point of view this is the logical endpoint of individualism: each human being is sovereign in deciding who or what they want to be.” In short, a reversion toward the uncontained subjectivism of a de-socialized and unmediated state of nature that pits all against all.

The Illusion Of Universality

Gray has long been a discomfiting apostle of pluralism against the false idol of one-size-fits-all universalism under a liberal banner that fails to acknowledge the diverse disposition of humanity.

In a prescient conversation in London two decades ago, when the post-Cold War end of history was still on the horizon, we discussed how liberalism was bound to fail just as Marxism did, and for the same reason.

Marxism had no theory of politics among diverse constituencies because it assumed the universality of the interests of one class. Liberalism also has falsely assumed its own universality in the belief there can be a consensus on only one conception of “the good life.”

“It is an irony,” Gray said back then, “that Marxism’s defective understanding of the sources of politics both in theory and practice should be replaced by a form of liberalism that has an equally defective understanding of the sources of politics. … Liberalism has aimed at abolishing politics or removing from the political domain most of the controversial issues having to do with justice, the regulation of personal liberty and the clash of values, and placing them in the sphere of rights and the judiciary.

It is this disability of mainstream liberal theory … that seeks to derive something like an ideal constitution from a theory acceptable to all ‘reasonable’ persons. Within this ‘ideal constitution’ major issues of the regulation of liberty and of clashing ideas of the good life are resolved or privatized. This kind of liberalism is as utopian and perverse in its actual consequences as was Marxism.”

In theory, “the neutral state” seeks a framework of rights that is equally impartial among competing conceptions of the good life. Individuals and groups are left to pursue their own interests and values as long as they are consistent with the liberties of others. In reality, it is precisely the absence of any substantive content of the state that has invited the culture wars over contending visions of “the good life” raging across liberal societies today. The clash between so-called civilizational states such as China and Russia with the liberal rules-based order constructed by the West springs from the same dynamic.

For Gray, the presumed neutrality of “legalist liberalism” has two disabling flaws.

“The first flaw is that the rule of law is taken as an accomplished fact, which is not the case anywhere in the world. … The rule of law is not the precondition of politics, but is itself a political achievement. Unless you have a political settlement underpinning the rule of law, the rule of law will be insecure or contested.” 

The Trump trials, the U.S. Supreme Court rulings of late, the legal battles in American states over guns, abortion and LGBTQ issues all testify to the truth of this statement, as do questions over the rights of asylum and immigration in both the U.S. and Europe.

“The second flaw,” Gray argues, “is the expectation that issues which are politically intractable can become tractable by removing them from the political arena and enshrining a solution to them in terms of judgments about fundamental rights. … [But] attempting to remove highly controversial issues like abortion from the political domain and placing them in the sphere of rights only ends up politicizing the judiciary.

Further, this legalist approach casts in stone the resolution of conflicts that might best be resolved by legislative compromise, by a mixture of public discourse and political bargaining that yields a ‘modus vivendi’ that is renegotiable over time and which needn’t be the same in all jurisdictions or in all countries where changes in values — and even technology — can make a difference.”

Rights With Content Cause Contention

“Beyond all this,” Gray continued in our conversation 20 years ago that could have taken place today, “there is a deeper reason in philosophy itself that argues against the legalistic, rights approach to liberalism. The deeper reason is that there is no plausible or defensible theory of rights which doesn’t invoke a theory of human well-being and of human interests — and all such accounts are in some degree rationally disputable.

Accounts of human well-being and of human interests are contestable in two ways. One way is that different readings of the human good, different ideals of the good and different beliefs about human beings — their fate and destiny and the conditions under which they thrive — will map human interests differently. Thus, different conceptions of human well-being will generate different accounts of human rights.”

He went on: “Another [reason] is that even an agreed conception of human well-being will encompass a variety of interests that won’t always be harmonious. They won’t always make the same demands in practice. They won’t always dovetail. Quite commonly, they will make competing demands.

The underlying reality disguised by legalistic liberalism is that important liberties are endemically in conflict. The freedom of gays not to be discriminated against, not to have their sexuality disparaged, may conflict with the freedom of private or public schools — Orthodox Jewish schools, Muslim schools, Catholic schools and state schools — to hire whom they wish. That is a real conflict, a genuine deep conflict.”

Clearly this conundrum underlay the ferocious fights over the content of curriculum and parental control in American schools.

“To re-describe the liberties so that they cohere in a harmonious set eliminates or deletes some liberties from the equation. This is a mistake because if you delete some liberties you are disregarding underlying interests which actually are the justification for the liberties and which give them meaning and content. Rights have content only to the extent they embody definite human interests. But to the extent they have that content, they trigger conflicts among themselves.”

Back To The Middle Ages

If legalist liberalism that enshrines rights is the basis of its own undoing, what then is the alternative?

“Liberalism for the future,” says Gray, “must recognize that judgments about human rights and conceptions of human rights themselves embody conceptions of the good that are contested between different ways of life and even within them. … Any well-developed conception of the good must recognize not just one human interest, but a whole variety. And that means a negotiation between conflicting interests in the name of civil peace. A ‘modus vivendi’ is the liberalism now in order.”

For good and ill, we’ve seen in history how such a modus vivendi actually worked during the late Middle Ages in Europe, a time of plural jurisdictions, each with its own set of governing values, before the Treaty of Westphalia, when the absolutist claims of the modern state hadn’t yet been accepted.

“Despite the systematic inequalities of power and privilege, and systematic discrimination against minority religions and traditions,” Gray mused in our London talk, “I tend to share Isaiah Berlin’s judgment that in some respects the Middle Ages were more civilized and more peaceable than our time,” referring to two world wars and the nuclear devastation of Japanese cities. “And that is precisely because all those plural jurisdictions had to negotiate with each other over their powers and interests, none powerful enough to simply dominate the other.”

These competing, but often overlapping, jurisdictions and identities have a clear echo in the circumstances of our own time as the world once again splinters into civilizational realms and cultural tribes within societies. “The Middle Ages,” says Gray, “reminds us that there are many other ways in which human beings have arranged life other than under the nation-state and found a ‘modus vivendi.’”

At a time when the rule of law is being sacralized as one of the key pillars of democracy under threat from autocrats and populists, Gray’s “thoughts after liberalism” are deeply unsettling to ponder. But that does not make him wrong.

The post What Comes After Liberalism appeared first on NOEMA.

If China’s government and its critics agree on one thing, it’s that there is an analogy between contemporary China and the Soviet Union, whose collapse continues decades after it formally ended. The Red Empire tried to swallow up the continent of Eurasia until eventually, as late Soviet thinkers like Lev Gumilev would have it, Eurasia swallowed it. Today, Chinese exports and infrastructure are trying to bring order to the Eurasian continent, following in Soviet footsteps.

The U.S.S.R. was many things, but above all, it was an organized project of reconfiguring the resources within a territory to achieve material outcomes under a formal, centralized hierarchy. In that, it was a failure — the machine stopped working. “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains,” Vladimir Putin famously put it. Can it be true that China’s leadership falls into the second category?

But the U.S.S.R. was a bankrupt idealism forced onto colonized nations by military power, and China is a savvy entrepreneurial technocracy that has solved the problem of providing basic necessities to its population and is now exporting that model elsewhere. Maybe your country is next. The gap between reality and the “plan” that was so typical of Soviet life hasn’t been seen in China for a while, though some fear it’s coming back.

From climate infrastructure to agriculture to finance, China is reverting to the structure of a command economy, rather than that of a free market economy — in the Chinese phrase, “国进民退” (“the state advances as the people retreat”). This is dangerous in China’s 60/70/80/90 economy: private sector actors contribute 60% of GDP and are responsible for 70% of innovation, 80% of urban employment and 90% of new jobs. Can the state really replace this?

When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, it was because the multivariable equation of the economy blew a fuse; the supply and demand, capital and labor, stopped working. Oceans dried up. The world stopped behaving in a predictable way. Marxists like Mikhail Gorbachev believed that the system could work if you let air into it; it turned out that it blew away like a handful of dust. The decentralized decision-making structure of the markets in the West triumphed over the planned economy.

Today, scholars of the Soviet Union such as Stephen Kotkin argue that the command economy was one source of Soviet fragility. These historical debates have been lent piquancy by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They certainly have significance in the party schools of the CCP, which has focused on exploring why the Soviet Union collapsed ever since it happened. In China today, statistics (literally the science of the state) are suppressed because they might jeopardize the government’s ability to control flows of capital, data and everything else related to human life.

By its nature, power seeks to perpetuate itself, but China’s meditations on the collapsed U.S.S.R. are contextualized by climate change, whose challenges will make or break the Chinese system and its ability to plan and forecast. Chinese science and technology are brandished by the leadership as the solution to all problems, but there is not just one form of science — nor is science a golden ticket to escape from political contradictions.

As Ben Peters, the historian of Soviet science, told me, “Like a mountain range with many canyons and cliffs, the state of science may appear a single hulking monolith from afar but [is] a labyrinth for those who live it.” In the crises to come, will Xi Jinping’s return to a command economy seem like a sage choice or will it prove as disastrous as Joseph Stalin’s economy of production without consumption, of a “great plan for the transformation of nature”? And what sort of people will dwell in the labyrinths, waiting for a new sort of world to dawn?

The Time Traveler

“Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, sun-parched steppe cannot bring on the depression induced by one man who sits and talks, and gives no sign of ever going.”
— Anton Chekhov

We drove for six hours through a desert that sprayed up white dust in a place with no roads. Once upon a time, visible in filmstrips and paintings, even in preserved cans of tinned fish, Karakalpakstan, the largest province of Uzbekistan, was a marine community of fishermen living on the banks of an inland ocean. The Aral Sea owes its name to a Mongolian root that means “sea of islands.” Today, it is a toxic desert, one which the government of Uzbekistan is trying to heal by planting saxaul trees to hold down the soil.

This ocean was turned into a desert by Soviet irrigation projects intended to grow cotton, or by subterranean bomb blasts, or both. Once the ecological transformation began, there was no stopping it. It was above 120 degrees Fahrenheit when I visited on a trip organized by the Aral Culture Summit, which brought a group of writers and artists to swim in what remains of the sea’s salty waters. I was reminded of nothing so much as H.G. Wells’ time traveler, who voyaged deep into the future and discovered a red sun hanging low in the sky, a salt-encrusted shore by a dull, black ocean, with no signs of life except for crabs the size of human beings.

We saw no crabs, but having taken several commercial flights to arrive and obsessively looking for places to charge my iPhone, I wondered if I was the crab. A ravaged planet was the inevitable future that Wells, one of Victorian England’s most visionary thinkers, foresaw — and here we are.

I found myself trying to explain Lake Mead to our guide Oktyabr, and my fears that Los Angeles would dry up in the near future. He nodded politely. For him, that future happened a long time ago. He grew up in a town called Moynaq, footage of which appeared in an archival film shown at the local museum; it reminded me of working-class Chinese communities of today: a fish-canning factory, a self-contained community, pride in work done for the country. Today, Moynaq is a waystation on what feels like an interminable drive through the desert, where you stop for lunch in one of the remaining buildings on your way across what used to be seabed but is now a dusty wasteland.

The Soviets knew what they were doing; the Aral was collateral damage. After it started to run dry, the Soviets planned to divert Lake Baikal, the spiritual homeland of Buryat Mongols, to refill it, but by then the machine was already breaking down, only slightly faster than the Aral ecosystem itself. Today, both are wrecks. Tying natural flows up in knots, the Soviet project suffocated itself and its corpse continues to rot on the terrain of Eurasia, a graveyard of a socialism that is attempting to return in zombie form.

Back in China, the politics of water are impossible to escape; my flight was delayed by terrible flooding that made the Beijing airport unusable. The Chinese government at its most Ozymandian engages in water-related engineering projects that make the Soviet Aral project look like a child’s sandbox play. The Three Gorges Dam, whose collateral damage was to flood towns like Fengdu, displacing 1.3 million people in the process, looks like the first of an increasingly ambitious list of terraforming projects, with more — the massive dam at Yarlung Tsangpo, the north-south water diversion project — on the horizon. 

The Chinese government’s mentality is that ecological and economic problems can be engineered away and that technology applied at the highest level can solve them. The Soviets thought so too. Is Karakalpakstan a sort of prophecy in miniature, a vision of unintended consequences of interfering with ecologies at scale?

The Great Northern Wasteland

“A thing that has not been understood inevitably reappears; it cannot rest until the mystery has been solved and the spell broken.”
— Sigmund Freud

As we trudged our way through the summer of 2023, I found myself contemplating buying a tract of land in Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost province and the one that has always felt most Soviet to me. Today, it is being deserted by outbound migration. The thing is, Shanghai and Beijing look like they’ll be 100 degrees or hotter for months every year in the foreseeable future. Wasn’t there some way to escape? I browsed property listings in Yichun, a city of 1.3 million that was a base for forestry in the socialist period. As climate change unfolds, maybe being in the middle of a Siberian forest, with pure air and water and pleasant temperatures even at the height of July, would make for a good life.

During the Maoist period, students were sent down from urban areas to camps there, and they made a huge swath of Heilongjiang into agricultural land. Today, many of these collective farms are owned by the Beidahuang Group — the name literally means “the great northern wasteland” — and they produce around 10% of China’s grain crops.

Beidahuang is a state-owned enterprise — really, it is almost a state within a state. In the 1960s, its “employees” skirmished with Soviet troops. It’s not the only Chinese state-owned enterprise to assume these contours. The Xinjiang Bingtuan — which engages in agricultural and industrial projects in Xinjiang Province and provides healthcare, education, police and judiciary services in the communities where it operates, some of which have populations in the hundreds of thousands — has the same Communist ethos.

These organizations have never been oriented primarily to profits, even if they list on stock exchanges in Hong Kong or New York to raise capital. They reflect political needs — food security, political security. Recently, the former deputy commander of the XPCC was expelled from the CCP for “interfering with the implementation of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality strategic goals.”

All this is to say that the Chinese government is not new to collective, militaristic enterprises in terraforming, nor did it ever stop engaging in them. On the surface, Beidahuang, with its proactive uptake of automated agricultural practices, seems pretty modern. But it is an organization with roots in the reddest of China’s red history.

Historically, Chinese troops were sent to border regions to settle and engage in agriculture — “屯田” or “tuntian” literally translates to “military-agricultural colonies” — a policy that had practical outcomes like producing food and securing territory if that was in doubt. Today, China is building large-scale wind and solar plants on the fringes of the nation, state-owned enterprises are taking up a larger and larger role in the economy, and the logic of GDP or profit as such is being discarded in favor of a different logic — a political logic, one more akin to war communism than the Chinese economy that we’re used to.

This doesn’t mean that there are no market practices embedded within the Chinese economy. The government sets the parameters and goals and pits different state-owned entities in competition with each other. Moreover, companies like Beidahuang function very differently than they did in the 1960s: Instead of unskilled labor wasting time in gulag-style encampments, today young engineers are supervising farms that are largely automated, earning high salaries for skilled and technical work.

Nevertheless, this work is done in the service of centralized planning and national reserves of pork or grain, and the market is tightly controlled. It looks like communism from the outside, but on the inside, it increasingly resembles American agriculture.

In 2001, Andrew Solomon wrote of the artists in Beijing, “In the eyes of many Chinese, the Cultural Revolution was like a game; interaction with the West is another version of the same game, perhaps a less interesting one.” Chinese socialism, and more specifically state-owned enterprises like Beidahuang, has integrated practices from the globalized capitalist economy without losing the “Chinese characteristics” (centralized control by the CCP) that it began the journey with.

Eldridge Colby, a leading Republican China hawk, and others have a habit of suggesting that China’s newfound emphasis on food security reflects preparation for war. But Chinese grain yields keep suffering “one-off” climate events, which are increasing in frequency. Last year, China’s agriculture minister told reporters that “crop conditions this year could be the worst in history.”

What if China is simply preparing for a rapid energy transition and food security in case the worst climate eventuality comes true — the “war against heaven and Earth” that Mao talked about? By 2020, China was the largest food importer in the world, a fact that made China’s leadership deeply uneasy. Lodged deep inside of millenarian ideologies like Chinese communism is the idea that everything will change, that some sort of apocalypse is around the corner.

Xi has taken to saying that the world is experiencing changes not seen for a hundred years. The economy that he is directing from Beijing isn’t really following the logic of good times and prosperity anymore. Instead, it’s more like Mao’s slogan: “Dig tunnels deep. Store grain everywhere. Never seek hegemony.”

The Soviet Prophecy

“The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest of control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), and insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.”
— Giorgio Agamben

The basic feature of the Chinese landscape is the Chinese themselves — “人山人海” or “crowds of people.” The state is forever trying to keep up with them, shaping human flows as it guides rivers, terraforms the land and otherwise modifies nature according to some grand plan. Can the flow of people — their desires and fears — be tamed to generate economic growth in the way a river can be dammed to generate electricity? It seems doubtful, but that never stopped anyone from trying.

Visitors to China are often told that Beijing symbolizes China’s traditional culture. Considering that 95% of its population and footprint were built after 1949, that’s a bit of a stretch — unless we take the view that Chinese culture is not about superficial appearances but deeper, more profound social structures. Crawling through traffic on the ring road that used to be a city wall before it was demolished to allow “qi” to flow, observing the various mountainous headquarters of this or that state-owned enterprise, the city can appear to be the realization in urban form of Walter Benjamin’s parable:

The coagulation of different, seemingly incompatible historical experiences into a city has given Beijing an irrational, almost mystical quality. It is exactly that quality, of glancing back into historical catastrophe while being pushed forward almost against one’s will into future challenges — which may yet end in disaster — which makes Beijing a world capital. There are subway stations named “Earth City,” parks named “Temple of the Sun”; under the Qing, the city’s urban plan was intended as a mechanism to control cosmic flows.

The fight against nature is becoming more intense every year; Beijing will suffer from heat more than almost any other Chinese city, and it is being fiercely guarded against climate disruptions as if from a marauding army. It is the capital of China’s technocracy, which is willing to change everything — the courses of rivers, the placement of mountains, the homes of millions — in order for nothing to change.

Economists speculate that if China’s state doesn’t manage to cut emissions, the collapse of the state might do it. As an atmosphere of crisis mounts, the deep memories of the state, which long ago became instinct, recur and re-manifest themselves. For China, the only way out is through.

The post China’s Soviet Shadow appeared first on NOEMA.

Penelope was not a particularly notable rat before her disappearance. She was about a year and a half old. Like all Algernon Project rats, her coat was the slate blue that I’d dyed my hair to match (though since pregnancy I’d gotten a little lazy and my roots were showing). She had a splash of pure white around the eyes and nose that gave the appearance of a mask. She’d not done exceptionally poorly or well in the vocabulary or aptitude tests. Unlike my favorites, she didn’t seek out human companionship. She wasn’t shy or human-adverse so much as independent, checking in and then going about her daily rat business (mostly horsing around with her favorite cagemate, Jasmine).

Still, I cared for her and mourned.  The loss was also an embarrassment for the Algernon Project. BabbleLinks are an exorbitantly costly A.I. cross-species communication system.

In my defense, I was housing fourteen rats across three large cages when Penelope disappeared. I’d never lost a rat despite having been a part of the program for years, and I’d long since stopped conducting rigorous headcounts. After free-roam, everybody mostly was eager to return to their preferred hammocks for mid-morning naps. At most, I’d note whether the younger rats — the ones who still explored with vigor — were all in their cages. But Penelope didn’t have the demeanor of a runner.

My husband Peter scolded the Algernon Project for not having included basic trackers in the implants. In truth, more surveillance had hardly seemed necessary. Video cameras were everywhere (I’d watched Penelope’s moment of escape many times). So long as the rats remained in close range, an LCD screen on the wall displayed their brain activity, vitals and transcribed everything they said.

And so, I was relieved a week later when I found Penelope sleeping in the curve of a running-wheel stored beneath her preferred cage.

I gently petted her awake. She yawned and stretched her paws forward — as though she’d only been away for a minute.

“Where have you been, Penny?” I asked through the BabbleLink.  The human end of the BabbleLink was a bone conduction headset that translated their chitters and ultrasonic frequency tones. When humans spoke, their headset communicated with the BabbleLink implants in the project’s specimens and created bone conduction sounds for the rat designed to appear to emanate from the human wearing the headset.

She crawled into my palm lazily, anticipating that I’d transfer her to the cage. I had bandages on the back of my hand covering a new tattoo of a neuron. The rats all loved worrying it and Penelope was no different. She busied herself tearing at the gauze while I inspected her coat for injuries and fleas. My tattoo was mostly healed and, rather than pain, her nips created a physical tingle in me that mirrored my excitement over her miraculous return from the dead. I combed out the few fleas I found on Penelope, but otherwise, she was in remarkably good shape. 

“Where have you been?” I asked again. “Why did you leave? How did you survive?” This was bad form. Multiple questions with less familiar words like “survive” often led to muddy answers.

I placed her next to the communal food dish and watched her wolf down lab blocks — ignoring me. Then I listened to the familiar click-clank-click of her drinking from the water bottle.

I worried that her BabbleLink implant had been damaged, but eventually, her answers flowed in through my headset. “Mango?” she asked with urgency — an emotion signified by her faster, higher-volume speech.

In some ways, this was unremarkable. A good chunk of our newfound ability to communicate with animals involved relating culinary desires. Every rat I had ever known requested the same four foods: peas, corn, nut butters and avocado. Beyond that came individual preference. Long ago, I’d laid down ground rules that my rats could state food preferences only after I said “Requests?” Otherwise, the BabbleLink became overwhelmed. My rules were not always honored by the rats, but ignoring their unsolicited demands helped hold the line. 

In other ways, Penelope’s request was peculiar. While she was a fan of fruit, she’d never requested mango by name before. She also was not particularly food-motivated and rarely made unprompted requests. She was polite. But she’d just returned from an adventure and so I indulged her.

“It’s frozen. Give it some time to warm in the water or you’ll hurt your tongue.”

Penelope’s requests for mango continued in the days that followed, as did her heavy appetite. I rationed lab blocks for the first time ever. Typically, animals didn’t overeat lab blocks because they weren’t very appetizing. This restriction, however, worsened her behavior. I caught her stealing food from friends. She stopped coming out for free-range time and slept more. She was curt and sometimes downright touchy when questioned about why she ran away, where she’d gone and why she returned.

I didn’t panic. Prey animals are hesitant to reveal what bothers them and the BabbleLink doesn’t change this instinct. Yet at the same time, traumatic events could change a rat’s personality. I’d witnessed this when a friend of theirs died after hind-leg degeneration injuries or even just as they adjusted to the indignities of rodent aging. I’d had an energetic rat pup suffer an electric wire shock that left him afraid to leave the cage. From the outside, he’d just seemed to spiral into a spontaneous existential funk. After a week of playing rattie-therapist, he confessed what had happened. I showed him how to avoid shocks, double-checked for other wires and promised he’d be safe. He recovered.

I held out hope that Penelope could similarly be coaxed to talk with patience, even as she denied being lethargic or that anything hurt. Vitals revealed nothing amiss. I chalked the changes up to overexcitement, suspecting that they might subside.

After another week, the lethargy broke. A flurry of activity followed where she requested paper towels, tissues and cotton balls. She built a fort of sorts. This new interest in engineering led to a fresh conflict on cage-cleaning day. Cage-cleaning day was always unpopular, and so I typically waited for everyone to be out playing. But now Penny no longer left the cage; instead, she sat territorially in her little fort and refused to come out — even giving a warning nip at my finger.

“Please, Penny,” I said.

“Sharon,” she said back, in a manner that I swear sounded like sarcasm.

“You can rebuild your fort. The cage is dirty.”

She stared back stubbornly. I sighed, and pet behind her ear then down to her rump. She didn’t relax, but also didn’t protest with another nip.

“Your belly has gotten so big,” I said. “My God.” My hand shot away, sending Penelope’s hair up in high alert. “Penny, you’re pregnant.”

Her body went slack and she chittered. The AI translated this as laughter — perhaps in response to my obliviousness. 

“I didn’t realize,” I said. “I won’t clean. Hold on.” I got her a fresh mango meant for me. She ate the messy fruit straight from my hand and everything seemed forgiven.

Her head tilted. “You can’t smell my babies?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “You can smell babies?”

“I smell your babies.”

My baby. Six months along. I hadn’t mentioned him to the rats, but suspected they were aware. They were newly curious about my swollen belly.

Penelope’s comment was a breakthrough. Plenty of evidence existed that animals anticipate the future (something unsurprising to anyone who’s seen a dog excited for a walk), but expressing awareness of a future childbirth was sophisticated anticipation.

“I can’t smell your babies. Your nose is stronger than mine. Do you know how you became pregnant?”

“Babies.”

“Yes, babies. But do you know how they got in your belly?”

Penelope was silent. The data on the LCD screen attached to the wall showed that her brain was trying to process, then abruptly the attempt stopped and she grew distracted.

“You met someone out there,” I said, guiding her toward an idea.

“Fernando,” she said. Fernando was Penelope’s former favorite elder cagemate. He had passed away a year before. For a mad moment I imagined he’d actually escaped and was living in my walls, but I’d seen him peacefully gassed after his cancer spread.

“Fernando who used to live with us?”

“No. Fernando. Fernando.” she repeated insistently.

“Okay. This new Fernando, he was nice? You got along with him?”

“Fernando smelled good.” This was her way of expressing affection, rather than concept words like love — the cagemates she cared for smelled good. Disfavored cagemates smelled bad.

“Could he speak?” I asked.

“Mute.” Mute was their word for a rodent without an implant. Rats didn’t use BabbleLinks with each other directly, but they knew who had implants. The project hadn’t figured out how the rats could tell — but I suspected it was listening to their cagemates’ vocabulary usage and observing how their companions interacted with humans.

“Do you think this is why you got pregnant? From meeting Fernando?”

The brain activity scanner didn’t tick up this time. “Sleepy,” she said. Some rats would say I don’t understand. Penelope’s habit was that — rather than admitting confusion — she claimed to be tired. Pride, perhaps. Or she was tired. Already, this was the longest conversation Penelope had ever had with me.

I nodded. “Was life difficult while you were gone?”

Her brain activity flared up again. “Fernando hungry. Thin. Penelope hungry. Poison food. Poison.”

This was a stunner. Had I mentioned poison? Never. I’d once inadvertently offered them spoilt peas, but probably called them moldy. But then again, poison would be central to a wild rat’s life, so of course some word would exist.

I pet her firmly, resisting the urge to squeeze her in apology for rationing her food when she’d first come home,  and for all the poisoning that humans had done across history.

My gestating baby was most active at night. The evening Penelope returned, I felt him kicking while considering this cross-species conversation. I internally debated whether my baby triggered Penelope’s elevated maternal drive.

The Project had set up the experiment with neutered bucks (male rats) and “intact” does (female rats). The bucks’ surgery was done simultaneously with BabbleLink implanting. This had been a compromise result so that lab leaders could commingle the sexes without propagating a million rats, while also preserving the ability to continue the biological strains the Algernon Project had carefully bred.

Neutering is less invasive than spaying and lowers buck aggression. Although leaving the does intact raised tumor risk slightly, that seemed worth avoiding surgery risk and preserving some gene lines. But it did mean the does had weekly cycles where they grew hyperactive and harassed the bucks with futile mating rituals, sometimes mounting them as if demonstrating what they should be doing — teaching steps to a dance these bucks would never learn.

Generally, I tried not to think about my rats as sexual beings. Normal things easily got weird when I did. For example, some rats enjoyed being tickled during playtime. Yet some female rats only requested tickling while in heat. What to do with that data? It was best to ignore the ramifications. Usually, I just ended up tickling them and moving on with my day.

But having a pregnant rat who had confided in me the details of a forbidden coupling was something else. The incident made me suspect that Penelope was far more intellectually capable and resourceful than I’d realized, to the point that she’d even kept her cleverness secret. What if she’d seen me pregnant, conspired to escape, and go on a hero’s journey to create her own parallel pregnancy and children?

I woke Peter even though I knew this would annoy him, and recounted the day’s events. As I spoke, he traced my linea nigra — that mysterious line that appears during the second trimester. Mine was thick and rich and ran all the way from my belly button down to my pubic hair.  

When I finished the recounting, he sighed. “That’s everything?”

“That’s not remarkable enough for you?”

“A tale as old as time. A small-town lass has no viable men around, so she sets out to the next town over. In the human version, six months later she’d show up at her parents’ door crying that Fernando had jilted her. For rats, I’m sure you can find many Reddit pages asking what to do if your pet rat escapes and then returns pregnant.” He sighed again, then asked, “Well grandma, are you going to let Penelope keep the litter?”

“What do you mean?” I was half-horrified he’d considered any other option, but he was correct that the Project might request this.

“They’ll be half wild. They might harass their tame cage-mates. They might bite them or you. Imagine having a half-wolf in a dog pack.  And the expense of maybe a dozen more unplanned Babble chips might concern the Algernon Board.”

“I can’t believe I rationed her food. So stupid, the pregnancy was so obvious. You’d think I was a hobbyist.”

“Obvious once you saw it.” He rubbed my back. “She’s eating plenty now. Much more overall than if she’d stayed away.”

“She was on calorie restriction for nearly half of her pregnancy.”

He scratched the surface of my bump. Our boy was doing bicycle wheels in there. “An understandable blind spot. You were thinking your rats were a new thing, separated from the wild world — which they are in many ways. But they are still also that old thing.”

My friends sometimes suggested that Peter was the rational one and I was more emotional. He was ex-military, and many read rationality into his good posture and understated delivery. But I knew him well enough to see past this.  He had wept uncontrollably for almost 20 minutes after I told him he was going to be a father. It was so unexpected, so raw, that it took some time to realize he was happy and merely overcome with emotion. The child had been planned and conceiving hadn’t been difficult compared to many couples in their 30s. This outburst had made me love him more, which annoyed me. Crying over something like that shouldn’t make him more worthy of love — but some primal place in me was stirred and reassured by his display.

I spent several days drafting an explanatory email to the Project’s program director.  In the meantime, Penelope consented to having her makeshift nest moved to the maternity cage where only Jasmine, her best friend, was allowed to join. I showed Penelope our baby room from the perch on my shoulder. Rat eyesight is weak, so I had to take her up close to see the cradle, the glider where I’d nurse and the little stuffed rat toys everyone had sent as gifts. I explained this was my nest, feeling a little silly given that Penelope’s overwhelming experience of it, for now, was likely the unpleasant smell of off-gassing. Still, she was chatty and curious, asking why the baby wouldn’t sleep with Peter and me. Contrary to her pre-adventure behavior, she wanted to talk all the time.

I watched Penelope labor in real time from the next room via video screen, as she moved every which way, trying to find a comfortable spot. Something in her breathing suggested birth was imminent. This squirming stage lasted for about half an hour. Then, slowly, eight pink pups came out and immediately squealed. She licked the squirming pink mass of babies clean, chewed through the tiny umbilical cords and consumed their still-throbbing placentas. And like that, it was done. No epidural, no forceps, no c-section, no doctor or midwife shouting “push!”

After she woke from a long nap, I approached the maternity cage with mango. Penelope ignored it and instead dragged me by the finger where the blind, hairless pink pups were stacked. I dutifully pet them. Her BabbleLink transmission was an endless loop of their names, all of which were old cagemate names plus Peter and Sharon. (Perhaps rats simply don’t have many name sounds?) Penelope kept noting how good the babies smelled.

I sent my email to the Board only once the birth was complete, ensuring that aborting wasn’t an option.

I was invited to present my case at the next online meeting of the Project’s Board. 

STEVEN (SECRETARY): This is the time and the place designated for our April 10, 2030, meeting of the Board. We have present five Board members. One non-present voting member has delegated her right to the Chair, Emily Spiro. The sole item on our agenda is whether to grant a one-time expenditure for BabbleLinks for an additional litter of unexpected half-wild rats. 

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): I think we are going to hear briefly from Sharon Esposito, the leader of Lab Number 26. Right, Sharon? Are you in the meeting?

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): Here.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Oh, I love the tattoo on the back of your hand. Is that a neuron?

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): A rat brain neuron. I did my graduate research on rat consciousness as well.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Fitting. Plus, your hair is the same color as the rat coats. Classic. So, what would you like the Board to consider?

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): Yes. So, Penelope the rat escaped for one week and was impregnated by a wild rat. She successfully gave birth to eight pups earlier this week: three girls, five boys. The mom and babies all survived and appear healthy. As a result of her sojourn, Penny has become more expressive and is providing insights into maternal behavior. I’d love to see where this takes us and I believe having implants for the babies will continue us on that path, and provide insights into wild rat minds. Letting me raise half-wilds would be a good half-step.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Thank you for that. I’ve spoken informally with the rest of the Board and I can say approving money for the half-wild litter won’t be an issue.

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): Great! You don’t know what a relief that is.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Of course! Your experience already shows that there’s much we can learn from expanding our data set. The revelation that wild rats seem to have a pre-existing word for “poison” is fascinating.

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): Surprising yet intuitive. We know wild rats communicated poison risk. They’ve been observed designating a “taster” when encountering new foods and smelling each other’s breath to memorize the scent, then avoiding similar foods when the taster got sick.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Fascinating. For the benefit of the group, do we have an idea of how much transfer of knowledge there is among your rats, say intergenerationally?

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): We know they use the sounds we teach them through the BabbleLink with each other. This builds a vocabulary that outpaces their non-linked peers. Each successive generation is more sophisticated. For example, we see little things like the older rats teach the younger ones where the designated toilet areas are and we don’t need to potty train each new generation.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Very helpful. Now, the reason I ask all this is because we got a call from a key funder with anxiety around the accidental release of super rats who understand how bait works and who is setting it. The information we give these augmented lab rats will spread to the wild population. We want to implement some additional mitigation measures, and we’d very much like to say in the press release that you and the other Lab Leaders support them — plus mention your rat’s outside adventure.

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): What kind of measures?

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): First measure, we’ll ask that you spay the half-wild does when the bucks are neutered. This is because the half-wilds are seen as a greater flight risk because they aren’t bred for docility and their mom has already shown that capability. We don’t want them to continue their line in the wild if that happens.

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): Okay.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Second, we’ll put in guardrails to make sure that escapees won’t be able to interfere with pest control. He compared the risk of rats escaping to gain-of-function lab leak risks, because your labs contain enhanced species that if introduced to wild environments could quickly spread and dominate standard species due to their communication advantages.  And I agree that we need to think through what happens if an evolution we engineer spreads in the general community. So until further notice, we are asking that you not share anything with your rats about the history of lab work or engage in any data sharing about how poisons work or how to spot them. Current subjects with this knowledge must be isolated from younger generations until natural death.

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): Is this necessary? We’re not talking Planet of the Apes. Their communication is still mostly monosyllabic.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): So long as the BabbleLink is mechanical and non-hereditable, I agree that sophisticated language evolution risk is low. But as your own experience suggests, these are social creatures that teach each other, and we are only now getting a loose grasp on their language capabilities. Any trait that improves survival chances could quickly dominate and frustrate rodent control.

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): Still, you’re talking about isolating twilight rats, which can be stressful.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): As to your colony, this concern is purely theoretical as our database records show that your Penelope was the first in your colony to use the term “poison,” and that word was introduced to her by a wild rat, rather than vice versa.

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): So you’re saying Penelope would not need to be separated under these new guardrails?

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Correct.

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): That’s fine then. I wasn’t planning to teach my rats molecular biology. I don’t want to hold this up.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Great. I think that’s it. We are ready to vote on our agenda.

ANAMARIA (BOARD SEAT #4): Hold on. Hold on one second. I have a right to enter my dissent into the record. As the saying goes, great causes have a habit of becoming businesses and then degenerating into rackets. Our vote today completes a shift from the Nomadic Labs, the movement, to Algernon, LLC the business. While I can see everyone currently on our Board still believes deeply in animal welfare, unless we hew back to our initial purpose, I fear the racket is imminent. 

ASHIM (PROJECT DIRECTOR): Missions change and—

ANAMARIA (BOARD SEAT #4): I didn’t interrupt you, please let me make my record. I feel I need to remind everyone, as the last remaining member of the old guard and the only Board member with gray hair, of our initial mission. Though we do business as the Algernon Project, our legal name remains NRNL. As in Natural Research Nomadic Labs.

Our original purpose was to design an ethical way to conduct rodent experiments by raising them as quasi-pets. To give them good lives, love them and gather data as injuries and illnesses naturally arose. With enough volume, our hope was that this “natural research” would provide more scientifically accurate results because during prior rat research the animals’ anxiety, poor health and depression confounded results. The variation of domestic environments would help because humans, after all, do not live with standardized diets or habits.

But now, money has warped this simple idea into one involving expensive AI equipment. The project’s namesake, Algernon, typifies this. Only one Algernon was ever introduced to the public, a charismatic rat with a slate blue tint to his coat. The dirty secret was that hundreds of Algernons lived unpleasant lives to develop the technology, and more are suffering in labs now to upgrade it. Even the implantation procedure has a mortality rate we’d never accept in human babies. So, in effect, we’ve moved from protesting cruel research to funding it.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): We’ve all read your book, AnaMaria. Is this really necessary to repeat here?

ANAMARIA (BOARD SEAT #4): Absolutely it is. If we want to eliminate animal testing, the best way to do that is to not test on animals. These new protocols are going to put us back in the place of lab worker/lab rat dynamics. For the first time, Sharon is being asked to limit what she can communicate to them for the purpose of, what, helping pest control agencies maintain their jobs and out of a fear that rodents will become too conscious of what is being done to them? This is not how we treat pets. And why are we expanding our mandate to include studying wild rats? Why are we monitoring their intergenerational communications about poison? What use is that data except for rodent control. Let poison manufacturers do their own studies.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Is that all?

ANAMARIA (BOARD SEAT #4): That’s all.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Well, I didn’t expect to have debate club today, so I didn’t prepare a formal rebuttal and don’t speak for the full Board but let me just say a few things for the record. First, I’ll just note that AnaMaria and her late husband had years to create a sustainable model without an AI component. As we know, enough rats with naturally occurring conditions must be presented to research anything meaningfully. But the pure natural model never got enough participants to hit those statistically significant thresholds. Outside the welfare community, researchers’ habits are sticky. They were trained torturing rats, their teachers were trained torturing rats and they’ll instruct their students to torture rates unless there are quantifiable benefits to transition to a different system.

Using AI as a carrot, we have enough participation to create usable results for behavior studies, common illnesses and nearly all major cancer research. So, while my esteemed colleague AnaMaria remains an inspiration to me and a friend — and I do envy her ideological purity — she is, unfortunately, comparing a theoretical nonprofit of unproven viability with an actual operating one that needs to make complex ethical choices. We have good data demonstrating that giving animals the ability to say “that hurts, please stop” changes researcher behavior — including the behavior of researchers not directly working with our chipped subjects.

Finally, contrary to what AnaMaria implies, we are not a for-profit corporation and nobody affiliated with us stands to make money from today’s decisions. We are accommodating donors not because we have lost the faith or are “selling out” but rather because they are correct. Ideologically, we don’t want to make rodent control harder when we all know excess wild rats disproportionally impact poor urban areas. Okay, that was a lot. Secretary, are we ready to vote in today’s measures and unplanned expenditures?

STEVEN (SECRETARY): I’m ready. On today’s agenda items A-1 and A-2 and A-3, Board seat two, how do you vote.

ANATOLY (BOARD SEAT #2): I vote aye to all measures.

STEVEN (SECRETARY): Board seat three?

STACY (BOARD SEAT #3): Aye to all measures. Thank you for that discourse, both of you. I thought it was helpful.

STEVEN (SECRETARY): Seat four?

ANAMARIA (BOARD SEAT #4): Nay.

STEVEN (SECRETARY): Seat five?

JOHNNY (BOARD SEAT #5): Aye.

STEVEN (SECRETARY): And the chair?

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): I vote aye.

STEVEN (SECRETARY): The resolutions pass 4-1. This meeting is adjourned.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Okay everyone, thank you for your time. Sharon thank you for your patience, don’t be surprised to see your name on the press release for the new protocols. We’ll get you a draft before the notice goes out so you’re comfortable.

SHARON (LAB LEADER # 26): Sounds good.

EMILY (CHAIR/ BOARD SEAT #1): Great. See the rest of you at the annual benefit.

I shut my laptop screen and turned to Peter, who had listened off-screen.

“What do you think?” my husband asked.

 “We’ll see what the press release says. It might be fine. I’ll probably sign off.”

“That’s it?”

“I mostly found myself agreeing with whoever was speaking. I hadn’t really intellectually separated the AI piece of it from the distributed labs piece beforehand. And I guess I dissected rat brains for my PhD research, so I don’t have the high ground. Maybe I’m exhibit A of the person Emily imagined when she said the AI gets people in the door through curiosity or whatever. Ultimately, I suppose I’m more concerned for Penny and my colony. This outcome seems to work okay for them.”

He nodded slowly, not exactly agreeing — more contemplating. 

“I guess I’m sad that the half-wild ones aren’t going to have their own pups someday,” I said. “But a small price, all told, for the life we give them. An abstract thing to steal from a small creature who may not know what they’ve lost — having children or grandchildren. Wild rats rarely live to meet their grandchildren.”

He kept up that slow, unconvinced nod.

“The thing I hadn’t thought about is really all that surveillance. The fact that they could look and see I hadn’t already discussed poison with the rats. That’s strange and drives home that this is a massive research project, not a hobby. I know that privacy isn’t a fair expectation and caring for the rats is in some sense a job. But I don’t think of it like that when I’m interacting. What do you think?” 

“What I’ve always thought. Very little that’s useful can be learned about humans from studying rats and that we shouldn’t do it.” He stood to leave the room. “That said, studying you looking after your rats lets me know our son will have a loving, caring mother.”

“Then the experiment was a success,” I said, and half smiled.

He winked at me, rubbed my shin, kissed my belly and headed out.

I resented that his beliefs were so pure and simple — like AnaMaria, his absolutism freed him from complex, messy moral choices. Instead, his solution of banning all animal testing was clean; and it would never be implemented. 

And so, I signed off on the press release.

Penelope’s pups grew. Their pink skin gained dark brown fur that easily distinguished them from the classy blue tint that marked the main Algernon line. As Peter predicted, they behaved half-wild. They ran around saying, “Hey!” “Hey!” “Hey!” as they bumped into each other and play-fought (before the operation, we could roughly translate words, but the pups couldn’t understand us).

When the day came, and they were both fixed and received their implants, a pup did die — little Peter, sadly. As was my practice, I left Peter’s body in the cage so the others would know he had passed away. Penelope licked at Peter, as if trying to wake him. After a few minutes, she gave up and thereafter ignored the corpse. She never mentioned the loss to me.

Another of the bucks was too aggressive — raising his fur and hissing if I got close to him, chasing, shoving and pinning his brothers, and generally making life miserable for everybody— and needed to be separated. He finally was put down after he nipped Peter (the human) hard enough to draw blood. The rest grew to be physically and emotionally healthy, if otherwise unremarkable, adults.

While they were pups and it was unclear whether their wild side would make them too aggressive to be near, I kept Penelope’s brood with just Penelope and her best friend Jasmine, who also started lactating and helped with the caretaking, but once they were neutered and past the asshole-teenage stage, I decided it was safe to reunite the colony. This was just around the time I gave birth to my son Jackie. Penelope loved licking him.

Another few months passed and Penelope acquired stately greys to go with her blue coat. They came in a slightly different color from the vibrant white splash around her nose and eyes. She grew even chattier than before. The rats I was closest with often grew extra chatty toward the end. This began around the two-year mark when their bodies started winding down, entering into their twilight age. During this period, Penelope who rarely sat still when younger, would sit on my shoulder and listen to the younger ones play, peering down in their direction. We talked and talked but in simple sentences. Age made Penelope’s thoughts lose sharpness.

I’d given up drinking for the pregnancy but had resumed after Jackie arrived. I learned from the internet that the safest time for a nursing mom to drink was actually while nursing so that the alcohol would be out of my breastmilk before the next session. One night, while feeding Jackie, I had a little more wine than usual and I got chatty with Penelope.

I brought up Penelope’s escape into the walls.

“Me?” she said, surprised.  

“You don’t remember?”

“No,” she said when I asked if she remembered anything, then chittered, seemingly amused by her younger self’s brashness.

“No memory of Fernando in the walls?”

“Fernando. Son.”

She fell asleep, and so did Jackie, and I put him down in the cradle, returned to the rat room with a fresh glass of wine and watched the young ones play.

They slept so many hours in the day, these pet rats, with their three-year lifespans — that’s just when human kids started to know anything of the world around them, and they had more waking hours in that time. Life extension was the key to learning what rats could fully evolve into.  But what scientific use was there in breeding long-lived rats? The project was probably something you could sell to some Silicon Valley guy who didn’t give a damn about rats but would pay a million dollars to stay young or simply live, for one more day.

They were taken too soon. Little lives in fast forward. Penelope was in her twilight period and firmly content, like a human retiree watching the manatees in the canal out the back porch, nowhere to go, no plans to be made, naps pleasantly sneaking up and weighing down their eyelids, as they slowly left this earth, a little less present each day while the young tried to squeeze out more moments, more memories, shaking them and startling them awake to announce dinner, startling them awake to say I love you. One last time.

Penelope yawned back awake, and I moved her to my lap and gave her a nut to puzzle open.

I wanted to tell her about the poison out there in the wild world and everything humans had done, mostly because I had been told I couldn’t tell her that. But I knew all this was recorded, surveilled, tabulated and that I could lose my place as a lab leader.

What came out was something else:

“I know you’re not going to understand this Penny, but when I was in grad school. When I was learning how to be a scientist, I was doing research. I didn’t feel comfortable turning projects down — despite the way they had us treat the rats. I didn’t have the power or the awareness that rats were like you. I did things that were unkind.”  As I spoke, I spilled a little of my wine on the baby’s swaddle, triggering another wave of guilt. 

Penelope’s brain scan was going up and down, I think more in response to the anxiety and seriousness she heard in my voice. Then, as I kept talking on, her brain scan didn’t beep at all, as though the effort had exhausted her. Penelope was just letting my words flow over her now.

I teared up.

Then Penelope said, “You smell good, you smell good, you smell good,” as if to soothe me.

The post Penelope The Rat appeared first on NOEMA.

But Gradlon had a daughter — a wild and irresponsible youth named Dahut, who was given to drink and revelry. According to the oldest version of the tale, one night, she and her lover grew so blinded by wine that they decided to steal King Gradlon’s key and unlock the dikes of Ys. The seas rushed in through the open gates and, before the sun rose, swallowed up the island — with its towers and great halls — whole. Even to this day, it is said, the bells of Ys can sometimes be heard chiming beneath the waters of the Bay of Douarnenez.

The legend of Ys is not the only story of a lost land in the seas off the coast of Britain. The lost isle of Lyonesse, home in ballads to King Arthur’s knight Tristan, is told to have held 140 churches and many fair towns, and to have been taken by the sea, like Ys, in a single terrible night. In Wales, stories were told of Cantre’r Cantref Gwaelod, a drowned kingdom said to lie beneath what is now the Cardigan Bay.

It is perhaps not altogether strange that the ancient Celts told such stories, for when the tides draw away from many shores in Britain and nearby lands, a peculiar sight is revealed: tree stumps on the muddy flats, stretching in places far out into the sea, into depths hidden save at the lowest of tides. Their very existence betokens a mystery to which even medieval-era people were not insensible, and our earliest written records of these so-called “submerged forests” date to at least the 12th century.

The first of these comes from the Welsh-Norman priest Gerald of Wales, in his work Itinerarium Cambriae, where he said of them that “[they] looked, not like a shore, but like a grove cut down, perhaps, at the time of the Deluge, or not long after, but certainly in very remote ages, being by degrees consumed and swallowed up by the violence and encroachments of the sea.” This connection to the Biblical Flood would persist, and for centuries the mysterious drowned forests would be known in folklore as “Noah’s Woods,” testament, it was thought, to that ancient calamity.

Despite this knowledge and enduring curiosity, many long years would pass before a more academic eye was turned upon the subject. The ancient stumps were too natural for the archaeologist, too petrified for the botanist, too recent for the geologist and, at any rate, too inaccessible, out among the treacherous, muddy tide zones, for all parties to dare venture. It would not be until the dawn of the 20th century that one man, Clement Reid, a Victorian geologist nearing retirement, took a scientific approach to explaining the strange phenomena.

The notion of Earth’s true antiquity, and its changing nature over time, was still a comparatively recent epiphany in Reid’s day, and he was among the first great paleontologists. Drawing together observations of one particular forest’s placement and distribution, he worked through a string of potential explanations, discounting them all, in turn, to conclude finally that “nothing but a change of sea level will account for its present position.” In a slim, 1913 publication, Reid proposed on this basis the existence of a lost land bridge, which had once bound together the continent and the isles. It would be the first time in nearly 8,000 years that anyone had grasped upon the truth of the North Sea and the world that lay forgotten beneath it.

The study of prehistory was still in its infancy when Reid submitted his thesis, and there were many uncertainties he could not firmly answer. He did not know the full loop extent of this ancient land bridge, nor the nature of its geography or ecology, nor even precisely when it had ultimately succumbed to the waves. Indeed, it would still take many decades before advances in methodology, combined with accumulating evidence, could enable us to grasp a fuller picture.

With his limited means and incipient research, he suspected the country to have been an inhospitable landscape, boggy and miasmic, passed through solely by fleeting travelers as they migrated between more important uplands. His reliance on nearby archaeological artifacts for dating purposes was overly simplistic and led him astray, as he suspected the floods began with the first farmers and ended by the Bronze Age, around 3,000 years ago. Though Reid’s work remains fundamental, great leaps have been made in our knowledge since.

We now know that ocean-levels did not start rising about 5,000 years ago, as Reid thought, nor end as late as 1000 B.C. The beginning was far earlier, tied up in the ending of the Ice Age, circa 10,000 B.C., and had finished already by 7-8,000 years ago. We now also know that this flooded country was not merely a treacherous wasteland. It was a rich land, a fertile land, a world unto itself. And, in the last few decades, owing to magnitudes of sensory work done by oil-surveyors, wind-mill prospectors and construction firms charged with laying undersea pipes, we have at length begun the long, exciting process of mapping the very contours of the drowned landscape itself. Since the 1990s, we have even had a name for this country: Doggerland. A picture of its history, its advent, and its loss has at last begun to emerge, and with it a story — and a warning, too, for future generations about the changing tides of our planet and dangers we may face today.

According to our most comprehensive histories, this is how that story goes:

Doggerland Inhabited

Let us step back into the past and try to grasp the picture these discoveries have painted. The origins of Doggerland lie far, far back before the first bronze was smelted or the plow ever yoked to a horse or cow, before the long ice — before, even, a certain gangly, upright primate made its first stumbling probes beyond its ancient, savanna home. There is a sea over Europe; there is no Britain and no continent. It is hot, and the world is strange and old and full of life, at times familiar, yet odd.

Ages go by and, slowly, the waters retreat. The seas become islands, become a great, single landmass, connected in its eastern extremities to the greater land of Asia. Northward from its western shores extends a long peninsula, tethered to the continent by a vast upfold of the Earth’s crust — a wall of rock and chalk ridges. This is the Wealden Anticline, which runs from the hills of the South Downs in southern England to Artois in our time’s France. 

There is no France in this era, no England, but we are moving closer to their day. The hot skies are cooling and the snows growing longer and deeper at the planet’s poles. For the first time in many millions of years, since before the age of the dinosaurs, the world is entering an Ice Age. The cycles of the Earth’s orbit have decreed a period of long cooling — not one single event, as many think, but a vacillating dance of cold spells and reprieves, of thaws and freezes and thaws again, each lasting many thousands of years. Each new freeze gathers up glaciers and each new thaw melts and disperses them. 

A freeze is ending. It is the melting-time. Northeast of prehistoric, or “ur” Britain and ur-France, above the wall which connects them, stretches a wide, sandy plain. It is a shallow sea in the warm-spells, and naked land in the cold. It is the ur-Doggerland. As the masses of ice retreat from it, they leave in their wake great streams of meltwater — gathering confluence by confluence, into a vast ice-lake.

The lake has no outflow, no drainage; fed by the shrinking glaciers, it can only grow. Pressure builds. Finally, a day comes when it is too much. Breaking through the low hills that dammed it, the lake collapses over the low plain, surging south, where it crashes into the Wealden Anticline. The chalk and stone cannot withstand it and is broken and flushed away. For the first time since Europe rose from the hot, ancient seas, Britain is severed from the continent.

A shallow ocean now spreads between the islands and the mainland, the plain beneath only exposed when the seas are unusually low. Yet the seas do lower. The warm spell cannot last. Heat gives way to chill gives way to heat and, by 50,000 years ago, the planet is in the grips of its final cold epoch — the Ice Age of popular culture.

Once more, the glaciers have crept down from the north, drawing up the world’s oceans like great sponges. Doggerland stretches as a vast, arctic plain from the uplands of Britain to the hills of Denmark, from the river-valleys on the bed of the English Channel to cliffs of Orkney and Shetland. Nor is it alone, for seas are shrunken across the world.

In Southeast Asia, the continental shelf between Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago lies exposed, such that a tiger might walk from Cambodia to the tip of Indonesia’s Java, or a monkey could swing across the carpeting rainforest. Far in the north, between Siberia and Alaska, the Bering Strait is likewise dry, and a broad landmass, Beringia, opens easy crossings from one continent to the other. Even in Australia, the Arafura Sea, which today severs Top End from New Guinea, is gone, and in its place lies a vast savanna, grazed by rhinoceros-sized marsupials. Yet in Europe, in the bed of the North Sea, all is cold and barren.

Time ticks on, millennia pass by. It is 20,000 years ago and we are closer to the end of the long freeze than to its beginning. But not quite. Before it finally relents, it gathers all its strength and its chill for one great glacial pulse, thrusting down shoulders of ice deep into the south. From buried Scandinavia, the ice reaches as far as Germany; the permafrost runs beneath tundra into Austria and Hungary, meeting there the glaciers of the Alps.

It is colder than ever before, and colder than it ever will be again. It is the Maximum, the zenith of the world’s deep freeze. The plain of Doggerland barely reaches to the sea; east, west, over much of the north, it is walled by ice and an impassable chill. It is a hard land, an empty one.

But despite the cold, the frost and the featureless landscape, Doggerland is teeming with life. There are snow hares and lemmings and grouse and arctic foxes, and the megafauna — the great beasts. Vast herds drift across the plains, larger by far than any found today beyond the parks of Africa, grazing, browsing and fertilizing.

Unlike the poor, often acidic soils of modern tundras — boggy and coated in unpalatable shrubs — the fields of Doggerland are rich and fertile. They are blanketed in green herbs and grasses, and flush with flowers in the short summer months. They are what we call the Mammoth Steppe, among the richest ecosystems ever known, now nearly lost to time. And Doggerland is the heart of the steppe in Europe. Where the herds go, predators follow: wolves, bears, lions, hyenas — and, now, humans. 

These are not the first Men in Europe. Some 50,000 year ago, their earliest antecessors had crossed the straits of the Bosporus, beginning their great migrations westwards through the continent. In the process, the character of Europe would change forever, and our ancient cousins, the Neanderthals, would first be displaced and in time, destroyed. Moving forward to 20,000 years ago, it is still nearly 10,000 years to the end of the Ice Age.

The vastness of time can be difficult to comprehend. Yet for all their antiquity, even at this ancient date, these early settlers, who traveled into the heart of the steppe in Europe, likely made little headway in Doggerland. Not all the rich game in the world will aid much in the glacial cold if no wood can be found to burn in the flat grasslands. For the time being, save perhaps probing, seasonal expeditions, the expanses of Doggerland remained a steppe too far.

Still, tribes cling to the southern outskirts of the great plains, biding their time, stalking any meandering herds which wander out. They are peoples of surprising sophistication — artisans, gatherers, hunters of the horse and reindeer. They sew garments pinned with bone-needles, make rich ornaments of cowry-shells, even build turf houses from the tusks and limbs of slaughtered mammoths. They are ingenious, adaptable. And their time in Doggerland will come.

Years pass, the sky warms. Things begin to change. About 15,000 years ago comes the Bølling–Allerød warming, when temperatures shoot up across the continent and forests of birch, aspen, willow and pine invade Doggerland. Briefly, the cold will swing back, circa 13,000 years ago, but the greater trend is set and the Ice Age running to its end. With the glaciers retreating, water flows back into the seas, fraying the northern shores of Doggerland and eating away at its outer reaches.

Just under 12,000 years ago, the Norwegian Trench breaks into the Kattegat, reconnecting the Baltic. The breadth of dry land linking Britain east to Jutland is diminished, yet what remains is a vast, green and now hospitable plain. For millennia, this land will become the center of human habitation in Western Europe.

With the end of the long cold, life on the continent sees many changes. The vast herds that trekked the mammoth steppe are gone or fading: destroyed, most likely, by the growing presence of Man. For the duration of the Ice Age, the wide, unpopulated expanses in the north were a refuge and a safety for the abundant populations of megafauna. No matter how many animals these hunters might kill in the south, there were always more to take their place, as stocks of game seemed to be continuously refilled by migrating animals from the glaciers’ distant fringes.

Now, however, matters have changed. Enterprising tribes — hunters, explorers, ancient adventurers — have populated the continent from east to west, and even to the fringes of the Arctic Sea. For the big game, there are no more safe havens, save the mountains and deep forests into which they increasingly retreat, their numbers dwindling in obscurity. 

In the absence of the old herds, the sustenance of countless generations, novel foods and livelihoods are needed. It is a new age, the Mesolithic, the last period of hunter-gathering in European history. People increasingly take to the shores and waterways and to the swiftly swelling wetlands, fed by the encroaching seas.

The warming climate has turned Doggerland into a river-country and a land of fens, or bogs — perhaps not the most inviting prospect to the modern eye, yet a bounty to the hunter and forager. No direct evidence of permanent human occupation survives from Mesolithic Doggerland, owing to the victory of the North Sea, yet it seems overwhelmingly probable. The land is ripe for settlement.

To the marshes and reed-forests flock geese, mallards, cormorants and swans, whilst the shorelines brim with eiders, wigeons and flightless auks. There are oysters to be collected, crabs to be caught, and vast migrations of spawning fish — eel, salmon, shad, to name but a few — more abundant by far than anything seen in later years.

There are monsters in the waterways, enormous sturgeons, up to six meters long, and there are all the twigs, reeds and willow-branches one could ever need for basketry and wickerwork. In the forests, not all the hunted game is lost. Deer stalk the underbrush, wild boars as well. There are elk among the fens. Doggerland in the early Mesolithic is rich and plentiful — and it cannot last.

Far to the north, the last glaciers are still melting. The seas have not ceased rising. Beach by beach, headland by headland, the waves are gnawing at the coasts. Their forays are not altogether disastrous: where the waters inundate a field or forest, salt marshes and tidal flats are born — optimal hunting-grounds, overflowing in fish and wildfowl. Until, that is, these too, in turn, are swallowed by the sea. Slowly at first, increasingly quickly, those same processes that once gave life to Doggerland are beginning to destroy it.

It is now 9,000 years ago. Less. The landmass of Doggerland has shrunk dramatically: In the north, the shores are rapidly retreating, river-mouths sinking into estuaries into flooded bays and firths. In the south, the great delta where the Thames and Rhine once joined is swiftly eroding into a deepening inlet. Soon enough, these growing introgressions will connect off the hills of Jutland, linking the waters into a single, contiguous seaway, reducing Doggerland to an island.

The Earth’s climate is not steady, nor has it ever been. The pace of warming varies due, in this era, to the planet’s unsteady axial tilt, and with it, the rate of the rising seas. There are periods of slowing — even of temporary reversal. Enough, we may imagine, to feed fortunate generations the hope that the floodings may be drawing to their end. Any such reprieves are but brief and illusory.

Doubtless, as in more recent ages, these floods are often disastrous and deadly. Countless lives on countless occasions are lost to the planet’s fickle seas. Yet evidence from nearby countries suggests folk do not simply abandon the shores. They cling to them and the wealth of food and resources they offer. We need not imagine these people as unduly primitive or itinerant — though our knowledge of the ancient denizens of Doggerland is severely limited, buried now beneath layers of sea and sediment, what clues we do have point to a substantial degree of sophistication, and even of some permanence.

By the estuaries, they build sizeable houses, inhabited by successive generations, whilst inland survives evidence of mysterious, wooden posts, perhaps the Doggerlandish equivalent of Amerindian totem poles. These point to a landscape not just ephemerally inhabited, but integrated, understood and sacralized, as witnessed among indigenous peoples around the world. The loss of a seasonal territory or hunting ground is not merely an economic, but a cultural, even spiritual bereavement. Graves of buried ancestors are swept away, sacred pools and springs drowned in the tides, as whole nations are unmoored and set adrift. 

We are at the end now, or near to it. Where once stretched the vast expanse of unbroken plains, linking Scandinavia to the continent and Britain north to Shetland, remains only a small, tattered archipelago. People still likely inhabit it, though we lack conclusive evidence. A boating-people, a fishing-people, paddling in dugout canoes between the low islands. These had been an upland of the greater landmass, called the Dogger Hills — today, it’s the eponymous Dogger Bank. They are the last remnant of the flooded country, and they, too, are on borrowed time. At the edge of Norway’s continental shelf, at a place called Storegga, a series of three enormous submarine landslides occur, among the largest ever recorded. They trigger a wave of tsunamis across the North Sea, bearing against the last remains of Doggerland, where waters sweep over the isles, killing, presumably, anyone still inhabiting them. This may not have been the very end — devastated, depopulated, a few pieces of land and scattered sandbars may have struggled above the waves for some further centuries. But by 7,000 years ago, all is gone. The entirety of Doggerland has been swallowed by the sea and, soon enough, by forgetfulness, save perhaps in murky legend.

Doggerland Lost

Why does the story of Doggerland so captivate modern minds? From novels to documentaries to the flurry of recent research, the ancient, flooded landmass is — for the first time in over 7,000 years — approaching the status of a household name. Plato said of legendary Atlantis that “there fell one day and night of destruction; and the warriors in your land all in one body were swallowed up by the earth, and in like manner did the island Atlantis sink beneath the sea and vanish away. ”

His story of how the greatest and richest of human cities could suddenly be lost and destroyed captured people’s imaginations for more than 2,000 years. If Atlantis fascinates for its parable of Man’s hubris, then Doggerland is perhaps a story of our impermanence and our ultimate futility against the elements. Its relevance in an age of climate change and rising seas is evident, for within its story seems to lie a warning, and a picture, maybe, not merely of the past, but of the future.

The (pre)historical significance of the events is evident, even apart from their drama. The loss of Doggerland brought irreparable fractures in the human landscape of Europe as well. Earlier Stone Age cultures, such as the traditions known to archaeologists as the Ahrensburgian and Maglemosian, had been shared across a broad, northern world. From the flat plains of Poland fringing the Baltic Ice Lake to the English uplands and the vanished lands between, there had stretched one single, common, mingling cultural sphere, and the result was a unity both of ancestry and tradition.

When Doggerland sank, this sphere was broken. The cultures that arose in the following millennia, such as the Ertebølle in southern Scandinavia, would develop isolated from Britain. The newly formed sea was a barrier too great for Mesolithic boat-craft, and though the narrow English Channel remained navigable to canoes, connecting England southwards to the continent, it would not be until the coming of the Anglo-Saxons and then the Norse, many thousands of years later, that a particular link between Britain and the North Sea’s eastern shores was re-established.

Beyond merely an explanation for archaeological trajectories — a curious anecdote of the ancient past — it is clear that the drowning of Doggerland was something more. It was, in a very real sense, a human tragedy. One we have only now begun to grasp. We may imagine recurring scenes of exodus, of one group fleeing inland from the sinking coast, settling in the territory of another tribe, subsequently displaced. Unhomed, they, in turn, must migrate further into the interior, continuing the unfolding chain of violence and dispossession. This is the dark insinuation of Doggerland’s story that frightens us — a vision of migration, exile and shattered identities setting off the dominos of strife and conflict. It is the vision we fear for ourselves.

The flooding that drowned Doggerland was the result of more than 100 meters of rising seas since the glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago. Such a scenario is more extreme than anything we face by this century’s end by around two  orders of magnitude, yet even a fraction of this increase could bring catastrophe today. Island nations such as the Maldives — strung along a series of low atolls — are rarely more than a few meters above the surf, and for most of the Maldives’ meager land-area, less than one meter. Permanent inundation, under such conditions, is not merely a hypothetical worry, but an imminent concern, even under more conservative estimates of future sea-level rise.

Even in mainland countries such as Bangladesh, the majority of its land mass is less than 10 meters above sea-level, whilst the majority of the population inhabits the rich and fertile Ganges Delta, which is even closer to the waves, in places only a meter away. Mangrove forests, where intact, may shoulder some of the swelling waters and storm surges, but only to a point. Major floods are already increasing in their frequency and severity and are only projected to worsen in the decades to come.

The drowning of Doggerland is not a one-to-one analogy for the dangers we face today, and it is unclear what precise lessons, if any, may be extracted. Its loss was, ultimately, a natural and inevitable product of Earth’s celestial cycles, and for all its relative rapidity, the work of many millennia. Yet in the picture painted, and the tragedy we glimpse therein, we seem to spy ominously a warning and a premonition. For the story of Doggerland — its drama and its draw — that may, in the end, be enough.

The post Climate Lessons From A Lost Land appeared first on NOEMA.

But something felt off.

“I felt so disconnected from nature and people,” Loïc, 38, said. “I wanted to live in alignment with my values.”

In Tokyo, the couple tried to make their lives more eco-friendly. Loic quit his job in the automobile industry to work in renewables; Emmy, 36, tried incorporating teachings on the environment into her classroom at the Lycée Français International de Tokyo. Yet every time the couple bought plastic-wrapped food at the grocery store or found themselves stuck in a sea of people, they felt like their efforts to reconnect with nature were in vain. 

In 2019, the couple decided they needed a break. One evening, Emmy searched for nature holidays online and stumbled upon a week-long sustainability event organized by an ashram in northern France, where participants share their knowledge about everything from how to build an energy-efficient home to how to cook wild plants. “I booked it without expectation,” she said. “I just knew that we needed something different.”

That summer, the family traveled to the ashram, located in a medieval fortified farmhouse in northern, rural France. Over the course of the week, the couple sat in circles with other visitors who wanted to learn about permaculture and sustainable architecture; their daughters climbed trees and visited the apiary. When Emmy overheard that followers of the ashram were building an ecovillage next door, she knew immediately that she wanted to be a part of it. 

“We were seduced by this place, by the people and the values,” said Loïc. “We wanted to live in connection to nature.”

Less than a year later, the Leruste family packed up their Tokyo life, leaving their skyscraper apartment to build a small house on a wheat field in Eure-et-Loir county, northern France. Their home is made of wood and insulated with straw. It is the ultimate ecologically friendly house, running on renewable energy, dry toilets and phytodepuration, and a natural water treatment system.

Outside the house, the Lerustes are surrounded by 25 other families who have also upended their lives to build the eco-hamlet known as Plessis. The families hope it will be an oasis for others also wishing to take their climate commitments to the next level. 

Those commitments mean trying to live off the land, building sustainable homes and incorporating eco-friendly behavior into every facet of daily life, from consumption to children’s education. But the community’s goal is not simply to be energy efficient: They want to reimagine community life entirely, building new democratic models, childcare systems and a spiritual orientation that aligns people with each other and nature. 

“I love being surrounded by people who have an awareness that this Earth is so much bigger than us,” said Emmy. “It is so much easier to live sustainably when you are part of a community.”

The Rise Of Ecovillages

An increasing number of people around the world are joining or creating ecovillages, spurred by concerns about climate change to reconsider their way of life.

Today, there are more than 10,000 ecovillages globally, mainly in rural areas, where people are building societies that are socially, economically and ecologically sustainable. These ecovillages are extremely diverse: they can be secular or spiritual, traditional or intentional, on or off the grid. While some ecovillages are quite radical in their politics, sharing everything from financial resources to bedrooms, others are rather mainstream, with people still living in separate homes, working day jobs but also sharing garden spaces and utilities. Despite these differences, ecovillages typically share the worldview that capitalism and industrialization have disconnected us from ourselves, each other and, especially, nature. Ecovillages are an attempt to restore these links. 

“Most people leave mainstream society for ecovillages to escape neoliberalism and capitalism that dominate their daily lives,” said Nadine Brühwiler, a doctoral student studying the rise of ecovillages at the University of Basel in Switzerland. “Although they are all vastly different, most ecovillages ask themselves: What do we want to sustain?”

Ecovillages have existed for decades. Some of the biggest and most famous ecovillages in the world today, such as Findhorn in Scotland and Auroville in India, were founded in the 1960s when rural hippie communes were on the rise. At the time, ecovillages were emerging independently of one another with little conversation or coordination occurring among them.

This changed in 1995 when the Findhorn ecovillage organized a conference that brought together ecovillages worldwide for the first time. The conference was an unexpected success. Over 400 people from 40 countries attended, with many more turned away due to lack of space. It became clear to the organizers that there was an appetite for alternative, ecological ways of living but that the movement needed more structure. 

Following the conference, 20 people from different ecovillages around the world met to create the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), an association of communities dedicated to finding ways to live more communally and sustainably. GEN’s primary focus is connecting existing ecovillages with one another and providing training and resources for those wanting to join or sustain an ecovillage.

Since its founding nearly 30 years ago, GEN has blossomed from a small, niche network of grassroots projects to an established international organization. Today, the network is home to intentional communities where people opt to live together, as well as existing, traditional villages looking to transition toward solely using renewables. While GEN used to be brushed aside as a hippie project, today the network is taken much more seriously: GEN has consultative status at the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council, and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mentions ecovillages in their report and features one of GEN’s founding members on its cover.

“When we used to go to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in the early 2000s, politicians would walk by and laugh at us,” said Martina Grosse Burlage, a UN representative for GEN who goes by the name “Macaco.” “Now, when the ministers walk by, they stop at our booth.” 

The number of people wanting to join ecovillages has also grown in recent years, according to Francesca Whitlock, GEN’s communications director. In France alone, the number has grown considerably: Since the country’s national ecovillage network Cooperative Oasis began in 2014, over 1,000 ecovillages have registered with the organization.

Mathieu Labonne, the network’s director and founder of the Plessis ecovillage, estimates that roughly 100 new villages are created in France annually. There is even a quarterly magazine for French ecovillages called Passerelle Eco, which over the course of its 81 editions, has featured the latest news about ecovillages around France. “We are seeing an emergence of these villages,” said Christophe Monnot, an expert on eco-spirituality and an assistant professor on the sociology of religion at the University of Strasbourg. “It’s not a tsunami but it’s a movement.”

Brühwiler believes that climate change is the main reason ecovillages have experienced a sudden wave of interest and are becoming more mainstream. “The values in our society at large are changing, and everyone is looking for solutions,” she said.

The demographic of people interested in joining ecovillages today looks different from the hippies who created intentional communities in the 1960s. At the ecovillage of the Plessis, residents include engineers wearing golf shirts and Parisians looking to gain practical gardening skills. 

“Ecovillages have always attracted young idealists and older people with money and new-age sensibilities,” Whitlock said. “But now you have a lot of families living mainstream lives who are looking for something different.”

Loïc and Emmy see themselves as part of this new wave. While environmentalism has always been important to the couple, they were never dogmatic about their values. 

“It was climate change that made me want to move faster,” said Loïc. “It made me feel that this life isn’t so radical. I started asking myself, if someone like me who claims to have convictions about the environment doesn’t make this change, who will?”

Sustainability Becomes Spirituality

When Loïc and Emmy arrived in the ecovillage of the Plessis, their lives changed dramatically. The couple, who had spent years anonymously roaming the streets of Tokyo, suddenly knew everyone they passed on these country roads. Loïc went from being an engineer working a desk job in a sterile high-rise building to a man who spent his days in the dirt planting vegetables. At their front door, leather shoes were now replaced by rubber boots. 

But one of the biggest changes was the sudden presence of eco-spirituality — a modern belief system that brings together humans and the environment — in their everyday lives. Taking inspiration from cultures worldwide, including Buddhism and Indigenous traditions, eco-spirituality aims to reconnect people with nature.

While the exact value system changes depending on the community or individual, eco-spiritualists typically reject the human/nature divide and disavow the capitalist system, believing that the only way to change our world is to change our spiritual and emotional mindset.

Early iterations of eco-spirituality emerged in 17th century and later in the 19th century, with the rise of environmentalism but boomed during the counterculture movements of the 1960s, in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Julia Itel, an expert on eco-spirituality, says this was a time when people began expressing disenchantment with modernity, believing that not all of capitalism’s promises would be kept and that not all forms of progress should be celebrated.

“Eco-spirituality is a demythologization of modernity whereby people are falling out of love with the utopias promised by neoliberalism,” said Itel, who authored a book on “Spirituality and Sustainable Society.” “They are turning toward more ancient traditions, such as pagan beliefs, to restore links with our planet”.

Around the world, eco-spirituality is on the rise, which experts attribute to a growing consciousness about our ecological crisis. Eco-spirituality can take many different forms: some create forest rituals; others revive neo-pagan practices. People’s level of engagement can also vary, from casual participation in eco-spiritual rituals to making the radical move of living full-time in an ecovillage.

“Though not all ecovillages are spiritual, many of the people drawn to these places want to reconsider every aspect of their life, from their lifestyle to their spirituality,” Brühwiler said.  

In the Plessis ecovillage, various forms of eco-spirituality are at play. The village was created by a group of people who wanted to live next to the local ashram, a center dedicated to the spiritual Hindu leader Amma, revered as the “hugging saint” by her following of globetrotting devotees. Amma is neither prescriptive nor dogmatic in what she preaches. She speaks in broad terms about the need for greater selflessness, interreligious harmony and critically, environmental protection in our society.

While the ashram was created for Amma in 2002, today it serves as a kind of eco-spirituality laboratory where people can come to reimagine their belief systems. Though some members of the Plessis ecovillage are followers of Amma — participating in morning meditations and evening chants — others like Loïc and Emmy are not, but want to reimagine their spirituality within the context of the climate crisis. 

“I personally don’t connect with Hinduism or Amma,” Loïc said. “I’m here because I want to be surrounded by people who want to be connected to the environment.”

Loïc and Emily were both raised Catholic but they have experimented with how they live out their spirituality in their adult lives. For example, the couple had a Catholic marriage ceremony in a Japanese temple. “What I like here is the spiritual openness and willingness to question the values that govern mainstream society,” Emmy said. “It’s a chance to reimagine a new belief system.”

Commune Or Cult?

When Loïc and Emmy told their parents they were leaving city life for an ecovillage, their parents were concerned: “They thought we had joined a cult,” Emmy said.

Ecovillages are often accused of being cults and improperly linked to the new-age communes of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s; those famously included Jonestown, an American cult in Guyana where 918 people engaged in mass suicide/murder and Rajneeshpuram, a religious intentional community in Oregon that deliberately contaminated food at local restaurants and plotted to assassinate Charles Turner, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon. In France today, ecovillages are regularly characterized as sects in the press. 

“There is a tendency to immediately dismiss ecological communities as being cults,” said Frédéric Rognon, a professor of religion at the University of Strasbourg. “Sure, some people who are interested in these villages may have sectarian characteristics but that isn’t the norm. The real issue is that environmentalism still seems radical to many people.” 

As the Plessis ecovillage project gained momentum in 2017, many people from the nearby village of Pontgouin protested. Locals were concerned that it would impose on their way of life — from their spiritual practices to their sustainability habits — forcing residents to change their cultural practices

“The [ecovillage] has a different way of living,” said Jean-Claude Friesse, mayor of Pontgouin. “People thought it was a cult.”

But as the ecovillage has established itself in the greater community, locals have started to embrace it. 

Like many ecovillages worldwide, the Plessis ecovillage is a diverse community where individuals and families make different choices about their lifestyles, spirituality and environmental engagement. While some people like Loïc have given up city jobs to work the land, others work remotely, traveling to Paris a few times a month for meetings.

Unlike cults, the ecovillage is home to a diversity of belief systems, where people constantly negotiate what it means to live sustainably and collectively. “I think people saw that this wasn’t a group of fanatics,” Friesse said. “They realized that much like their community, it was simply a group of people trying to learn to live together.”

Since the project began, the ecovillage has brought in young families to the neighboring aging village of less than 2,000 people. Today, a host of locally grown vegetables are available to locals. New shops and services have popped up in the town square: Emmy has started her own Montessori school committed to teaching children how to protect nature.

“This project has rejuvenated the village,” Friesse said. “It has been a really positive thing for everyone.” While not all locals share the ecovillagers’ ecological or spiritual convictions, they do value the intangible thing these villagers are trying to build: community. 

As France has become more urbanized, the country’s rural areas have seen its residents flock to cities. In rural France today, there are abandoned towns and plots of land, where previously central community spaces — from bakeries to local churches — have shut down as an aging population is left to fend for itself.

“People here used to be together, there was a community,” Friesse said. “The ecovillage has brought this back.” 

The more time locals spend with their new neighbors, the more they realize that they are re-creating what locals have yearned for — a place thought lost to modernity, where parents can leave their kids with their neighbors; where elders can rely on others for a helping hand.

Aurore Delemotte, 32, who lives in Plessis with her husband, a newborn and toddler, said parenting has been easier since the move. In the ecovillage, she has found “what people are missing in other places,” she said. “It’s a place where people can find meaning in things other than money or jobs.”

Eveline Bertrand, 77, plans to move into the elderly home being built in the Plessis ecovillage. “I like chopping the vegetables with everyone around the picnic table and being around people who are young and vibrant,” she said. “Plus, when I move here, there will be no more solo dinners.”

Researchers who study the motivations of people joining ecovillages say that loneliness is often a driving factor. After Covid forced many people into extended periods of isolation, GEN received a record number of inquiries, according to Whitlock. One ecovillage in Switzerland has seen its population grow by nearly 30% since Covid. “It wasn’t just an ecological consciousness growing but a social one,” said Brühwiler. “Covid got people thinking about how they want to live.”

For many people, Covid highlighted how lonely our society has become. Even before the pandemic, experts were decrying our “loneliness crisis”. Around the world, people are reporting unprecedented levels of loneliness. In Europe, 18% of people—the equivalent of 75 million people — are socially isolated, according to a 2019 European Social Survey. A 2021 report indicated that 61% of young Americans feel “serious loneliness” and lack community. While the pandemic exacerbated this trend, the systematic closing of public spaces due to fiscal cuts, as well as the proliferation of technology, has made people more alone — physically, emotionally and spiritually — than ever before. Ecovillages are helping fill this existential, and growing, gap in our society.

“It isn’t always just the climate-minded people who join,” said Burlage. “These villages can respond to a very human impulse of not wanting to be alone.”

Expectations Meet Reality

Like all utopic dreams, the romantic expectations people have of ecovillages are rarely matched by reality. Conflict can often erupt over small, mundane things: someone’s dog pooping on the shared lawn or a teenager making too much noise in the middle of the night.

In the Plessis ecovillage, two neighbors are already arguing over how to share land situated between their two homes. “We’re not used to living with so many people, or sharing everything,” Itel said. “It’s a form of cultural organization that we were not educated on.”

But arguments are also often ideological. Because each ecovillage defines its own values, there can be friction and disputes over how much personal freedom should be sacrificed for communal well-being.

“There are always bigger conflicts: conflicts about power, about anarchy, about consumerism and materialism,” Yves Michel, an ecovillage scholar who lives in Éourres, an ecovillage in the lower Alps, told me. “People come with amazing dreams but after a while, they realize it’s not paradise and that you need to hustle: you need to build a life.”

For many people in these ecovillages, environmentalism is their shared culture — with many believing that it can supersede other markers of identity bound by geography, ethnicity or political orientation.

Yet most aspiring ecovillages fail. Around 90% of projects never see the light of day, either due to external constraints, like the inability to get building permits, or more often because of internal disagreements over how a community should live.

When ecovillages do succeed, there is often huge turnover among residents. “There is a nomadism of ecovillages,” Rognon, the religion professor, told me. “There are people who will never stop searching for their utopia.”

This reality raises larger questions about ecovillages as chosen communities: Can communities we create be as strong as those we are born into? Can rituals we invent be passed down as easily as those we inherit? 

These questions poke holes into the worldview that belies the ecovillage project. “People always ask us how long we will stay here,” Emmy said. “But no one asks this (of) people living in ‘traditional’ communities.”

But, she added in the same breath, “for now we are happy; and if that changes, we can always move.”

Insular To Influencer

As climate change has become a more pressing issue, the ecovillage movement has increasingly taken steps to influence mainstream society.

On nearly every continent, there are ecovillages serving as “living and learning centers,” where people can learn about sustainable and communal living. From the Institute of Permaculture and Ecovillage of the Cerrado in Brazil to the Sarvodaya center in Sri Lanka, ecovillages are opening their doors to the wider public, offering exchange programs to young people. 

There are also many examples of ecovillages supporting vulnerable people: In Ukraine, ecovillages have welcomed people fleeing the country’s war-stricken cities; in Germany, ecovillages have invited environmental activists to come rest and recharge.

But despite a growing interest in ecovillages, many in the movement feel that change is not happening quickly enough given the ongoing ecological crisis. Part of the challenge is getting people interested. In the global north, there remains a deep skepticism about these communities, which many regard as cults by a different name. In the global south, the concerns are different; many feel the European ecovillage model is for the privileged, not the poor. 

“In the global south, people still have these social bonds that ecovillages in the global north are trying to revive,” said Ousmane Pame, the president of REDES, the ecovillage network of Senegal. “People here are not ‘trying to live in accordance with their ecological values’. They are trying to survive.”

Some communities in the global south already live in an ecologically friendly way, making it hard for them to grasp why it’s necessary to brand village life as “eco-friendly”. For GEN, this is one challenge of creating a global ecovillage movement that speaks to the needs and desires of diverse communities. Labonne believes the key is to decentralize efforts, with each community demonstrating what’s possible through their cultural and economic context. 

“In an ideal world, everyone would have an ecovillage in their backyard,” he said. “This would make people realize, the idea isn’t that radical.”

In early July, I traveled to the Plessis ecovillage during their sustainability week, the nature holiday that Loïc and Emmy attended years ago, to better understand the event that inspired them to change their lives. 

When I arrived on an early, summer morning, I found groups of people scattered across the grass, talking about everything from spirituality to sustainability. By the apiary, a dozen people were learning how to listen to nature. Next to the garden, children were making toys out of recycled materials. The event, which draws crowds from across France, was understated: there were no flashy signs, no caterers, no stringent rules to follow. At dawn, those who wanted to prayed and chanted. At dusk, people slept alongside each other on thin mattresses on the floor.

“The goal is not to be prescriptive or preachy,” said Labonne. “It’s about generating ideas and showing people what’s possible.”

Although the participants had different motivations for attending, the majority expressed a desire to reconnect: with nature and with a community.

“I’m here to get inspired,” said Severine Lefebvre, 46, a Parisian who wants to start her own ecovillage. “When I see places like this, I think, maybe there is hope.”

It’s been four years since the Leruste family attended this event and decided to change their lives dramatically, leaving behind everything to start anew. The journey has not been straightforward: both Emmy and Loïc say they now work more than they ever have, not only to earn an income but to help build their ecovillage.

“There is always something that needs to be done, always something new we don’t yet know how to do,” said Loïc, who is training to be a vegetable farmer. “There is inevitably a mental charge that comes with trying to reimagine how you want to live and build community.”

Yet despite the work, the couple says they feel less stressed than they did living in Tokyo. Although life there was easier, for years they struggled with feelings of restlessness and the guilt of living a life that failed to align with their values. 

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m exhausted at the end of every day,” Emmy said. “But I’m also energized by the feeling that I’m living out what I believe in.”

Halfway through our conversation, Emmy looked up and waved at a group of local women from nearby Pontgouin as they walked in equipped in hairnets and gloves: They had come to help the ecovillage make lunch for everyone. To her right, a few picnic benches over, her two daughters playing with a group of other kids, searching for bugs in the grass.

“Living sustainably and communally isn’t a radical idea,” Emmy said, pausing to survey the scene. “Just look around you.”

The post Searching For Utopia In Our Warming World appeared first on NOEMA.

That morning, over 53,000 gallons of bunker fuel spilled into San Francisco Bay. It spread quickly: northeast to Richmond, to the beaches of San Francisco, to the rugged coasts of the Marin Headlands and then out to the Pacific and up and down the coast. In an urban area known for its natural beauty, over 50 public beaches across multiple counties were soon closed. The oil killed thousands of shoreline birds, damaged fish populations and contaminated shellfish. It derailed local fisheries for years. 

In San Francisco, a woman named Lisa Gaultier had been preparing for a disaster like this. Lisa is the founder of a nonprofit called Matter of Trust that promotes sustainable living through recycling, reuse and the repurposing of surplus. Since the early 2000s, she had partnered with a retired hairdresser from Alabama named Phil McCrory who had invented an unusual technique for getting oil out of water using discarded hair. The hair technically adsorbs oil, attracting it to the surface like a magnet. (This is why our hair gets oily if we don’t wash it.) Matter of Trust began collecting discarded hair from salons and dog groomers and felting it by machine into large mats that were stored in a warehouse next to the nonprofit’s headquarters in San Francisco. After the spill, people spontaneously showed up at the beach wanting to help clean up, and Lisa was there with the hair mats.

Paul Stamets, a successful businessman, author and spokesman for the expanding world of do-it-yourself mycology, happened to be in town just a few days after the spill to headline the Green Festival, an expo for “sustainable and green living.” Stamets promoted relatively accessible techniques for cleaning up the environment using mushrooms — including oil spills. Lisa had heard about Stamets’s work and had already been in touch with him “about our hair project.” Lisa called him from the beach where, she recalled, “there were 80 surfers out there using our hair mats, trying to clean up the oil washing up onto the shore.” Stamets told her that if she could find a place to put the oily hair, he would donate $10,000 worth of mycelium.

As the days wore on, a range of government entities moved in, from the Coast Guard to the Department of Homeland Security, in addition to private companies contracted to clean up the spill, all vying for funds. Meanwhile, law enforcement and legal teams began their investigation into the spill’s causes. 

After a flurry of phone calls to city and state officials, Lisa got permission to put what she called a “mountain” of hair and oil next to a composting facility at Presidio Park. But then, the oil-soaked hair mats were impounded by authorities: The oil was evidence in a criminal investigation. (In the end, the shipping company paid $10 million in fines and restitution and the captain was sent to federal prison for 10 months.)

Undeterred, Lisa found a local freighter company that would give her some fresh bunker fuel, which a crew of volunteers mixed with used motor oil and then sopped up into new hair mats. Stamets trucked down the promised blocks of mycelium from Washington; several hundred more were donated by Far West Fungi, a local mushroom farm. About 30 volunteers layered it lasagna-style: straw (a common mushroom substrate), blocks of mycelium, hair mats soaked in oil. Photos of the stack show a mound about 30 feet by 12 feet. 

Some weeks later, mushrooms had sprouted from the top of the pile. A few news sites picked up the story. In one photograph, Lisa holds a clump of soil and straw, mushrooms popping out the side, over a caption that describes: “Mushrooms grown out of toxic oil, themselves now containing no toxins.” 

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what happened. As Ken Litchfield, a local cultivation teacher who helped organize the installation, explained, “The mushrooms were growing on the top where there’s enough oxygen, but underneath, nothing was growing except anaerobic bacteria.” Lisa told me that months later, when they returned, “literally the smell was so bad when we actually brought the stuff out, I almost vomited.” As for the fungi, it never touched the oil-soaked hair mats. 

About a year after the spill, Lisa found a UC Berkeley graduate student named Thomas Azwell who was looking for a project as part of his dissertation research. Azwell, now the director of the Disaster X-Lab at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, told me that, initially, he had been “worried we were going to create an even worse mess, and it’s going to turn into this kind of parachuting-cats-into-Borneo story, where it just gets worse and worse.” 

In short order, Thomas found an article that showed that fungi can’t degrade bunker fuel on their own; the molecules in the heavy fuel are too complex. He proposed something simpler: composting. Take the hair mat lasagna, blend in plant waste, aerate regularly. And it worked. The pile began to naturally decompose. After a few months, they brought in earthworms to finish the job. Lab tests showed that the most toxic chemicals had broken down. “It took 18 months and a lot of manual labor, and it was really a mess,” Lisa told me. But in the end, they had usable (“freeway grade”) compost. Matter of Trust even got a grant from Patagonia to sell the final product at Costco.

This adventure was one of the first large-scale, high-profile attempts at mycoremediation — a scientific method that enlists fungus to restore and clean the industrial waste of modern society. Mushrooms famously thrive on all that is dead, decaying and toxic. Myco-remediation evangelists believe they can tackle everything from chemical spills to household trash. 

But the Cosco Busan spill wasn’t exactly a success story. It was, at best, a “feasibility study,” as Lisa put it, or in Thomas’s words: a “poorly designed prototype.” The fungi alone did not biodegrade the bunker fuel, and on the whole, the process had been labor-intensive, bulky, messy, variable and slow. Moreover, it did not fit into existing bureaucratic and legal processes, and whatever money was earned back by selling the compost was not enough to provide a financial incentive. 

In short, mycoremediation was a hard sell in a system that values efficiency and standardization above all else. But the enthusiasm for the technique was undiminished. A movement was growing, one focused on that almost archetypal image of the mushroom fruiting from a clump of oil-soaked earth, transforming toxin into life.  

Although the idea of using fungi to break down pollutants has been around for some time, the popularization of mycoremediation as a grassroots, citizen-science initiative owes much to Stamets, arguably the founding figure of DIY mycology. Before the burst of mycophilic media in the last five years and going back some four decades, Stamets was the person who best conveyed the awe-inspiring potential of fungi. His books grounded the fungal enthusiasm of counterculture in actual scientific knowledge and skills — first with two canonical cultivation manuals, and then with “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.”

Equal parts scientific textbook, instructional manual and spiritual manifesto, “Mycelium Running” is focused on relatively low-tech, ecologically beneficial applications for fungi, interwoven with what can only be described as a mycological view of life and the universe. Stamets is gifted at waxing lyrical about mycelium, which he describes as “vast sentient cellular membranes” that we walk on in every “lawn, field or forest floor.” In the opening chapter, he posits that mycelium is “the living network that manifests the natural intelligence imagined by Gaia theorists.” (“Gaia’s internet,” he calls it.) Even the fabric of the universe looks like mycelium. He writes:

Stamets was and still is something of a circus barker for the fungal kingdom, standing outside the big top, inviting passersby to see the wonders within. The new Star Trek named a character after him — an “astromycologist” and expert in the fleet’s “spore drive propulsion system.” His writing and lectures (many of which are online) crystallized the mystical view of mycelium as conscious and beneficent and the idea of fungi as “allies,” all delivered with a beguiling mixture of scientific language and spiritual reverence.

“Mycelium Running,” published in 2005, inspired countless readers with its descriptions of how to use fungi for ecological restoration. In the years after the hair-mat experiment, groups of mushroom enthusiasts began forming to experiment with these methods. An American in Ecuador even founded a shoestring nonprofit, the Amazon MycoRenewal Project, to clean up oil spills left behind by Texaco there. 

In 2014, as a graduate student in anthropology, I joined one of these groups in the Bay Area — an informal organization that I’ll call the Fungal Alliance of the Bay (FAB), a pseudonym — as part of my fieldwork. Almost everyone in FAB had been inspired by Stamets and the promise of mycoremediation. As one FAB member told me, “Mycelium Running” “blew his mind,” especially “the remediative potentials.” Groups like FAB were keen to bring mycological know-how to the masses, for both personal and communal use. Their enthusiasm was infectious, and in the spirit of participant observation, I became one of them.

Over time, a cottage industry of classes on mycoremediation cropped up, taught by people like Tradd Cotter, the author of a book called “Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation,” and Peter McCoy, co-founder of a far-left collective called Radical Mycology, based in the Pacific Northwest, and author of his own book called “Radical Mycology.” The curriculum in these classes was as much about the philosophy and possibilities of DIY mycology as it was about technical instruction. This message of possibility, wonder and hope mixed with hard science felt like a distinct rhetorical form. I began to see these teachers as “myco-vangelists,” preaching the good word about mushrooms. They found sympathetic audiences in a national circuit of mycological festivals, a network of permaculture farms and centers and other like-minded hosts.

For many people in FAB and similar groups, learning how to cultivate mushrooms was just the first step toward learning how to “train” a specific fungus to consume toxins. FAB’s makeshift lab, at a local biohacker space, has been home to a few attempts to get Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), famously voracious, to eat motor oil. I remember one day finding petri dishes of agar half-soaked in motor oil on the shelves — an oil spill in miniature — with a small square of fungal tissue (a clump of the interior of a stem or cap) off to the side, beginning to put out its first tendrils. The lab even had a culture of Pestalotiopsis microspora, the fungus that can break down polyurethane; someone had gotten it in the mail after contributing to a Kickstarter campaign. 

Throughout my fieldwork, mycoremediation was a puzzle to me. In spite of all the books and classes and excitement, there were few cases in which it had been documented as a measurable, consistent and (most importantly) replicable process. And yet, it continued to be celebrated as a potentially game-changing “myco-technology.” Why wasn’t it being applied at all the polluted sites around us? 

In the “hands-on” workshops that I took in that time, the targets for remediation tended to be rather pedestrian, like the motor oil that drips off car engines in parking lots or the cigarette butts collected in an ashtray. These projects felt miniscule relative to the scale of toxic waste on our planet. This is not to say that such small-scale remediation projects were not worthwhile, or not meaningful, but they did not seem to match the enthusiasm that the method aroused in people. 

Nearly a decade later, the idea of mycoremediation has echoed far and wide. It is often mentioned in books and articles about fungi, usually in a catalog of potential applications. Less often mentioned are the difficulties and limitations that have also emerged alongside it. 

In fact, just a few months into my fieldwork, I found to my surprise that some FAB members quietly doubted the technique worked at all. Glen, a retired engineer, told me that he had suspected from the beginning that “using mushrooms for remediation was likely to be a flop.” He noted dryly that even Stamets was not working on mycoremediation and had quietly moved on to other projects. Andy, a widely respected taxonomist, told me that he “used to believe in it” until John, an old-timer in the local amateur mycology scene, told him (as he recounted in a stage whisper), “‘Don’t ever tell anyone this, but it’s a bunch of bullshit!’” 

When it comes to biochemistry, the rift between something that “works” and something that’s “a bunch of bullshit” is usually stark. If not self-evident, the difference between these two categories is usually discernable on some level of material, evidence-based reality. The thing was, mycoremediation did “work” in petri dishes and garden-sized projects; it was at large scales, like oil spills or superfund sites, where it seemed to falter or couldn’t get off the ground at all. 

Over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I spent hours peering into the sealed environment of petri dishes and mason jars while exclaiming in wonder at the snow-white threads of mycelium growing within. In its first stages, mycelium radiates outward like a slow-motion starburst, explosions of cellular growth. It has an ambiguous beauty, strikingly symmetrical, organic and otherworldly at the same time. Most enthralling was when the radial growth broke out and sprouted fleshy tendrils (primordia, otherwise known as baby mushrooms), a process called “pinning,” as they often look like tiny pins emerging from a two-dimensional surface — or, in the case of a species like Lion’s Mane, they curl in all directions like some kind of albino sea creature. 

Like all the FAB members, I too became weirdly attached to my jars, in which a fungal culture slowly colonized the substrate (usually a grain mixture), turning dense and white with mycelium. I once brought a “burrito” of corrugated cardboard inoculated with wild Oyster mushrooms that I’d harvested in the Oakland hills on a road trip with me, storing it in a plastic bin in the trunk of my car. I opened the lid to mist it with water twice a day and check its growth. I wanted to see if I could get it to fruit (produce mushrooms), but sadly, I composted it in Colorado.

FAB members and I would stand around each other’s makeshift labs, in kitchens and garages or in the converted utility closet at the local biohacker space, wondering over petri dishes and mason jars and plastic bags filled with myceliated substrate. My interviews with them (about their life stories and ideas about mushrooms, nature, science) were littered with exclamations of awe — many variations on “and then I was like, ‘whoa!!’” These jolts of wonder were embedded in a sustained enthusiasm for fungal lifeforms. The cognitive-affective pleasures of curiosity and fascination carried moral and aesthetic meanings too: Fungi epitomized interconnection, interspecies symbiosis, nonhuman intelligence and the cycles of decomposition and generation that characterize healthy ecosystems. They resonated as models of how to live sustainably on this planet. 

Much of their interest in applied mycology had to do with waste: making less of it and using fungi to break down what had already been produced, both toxic and benign. “Waste streams” was a key term in the vocabulary of DIY mycology. An ideal scenario was to use some kind of waste stream as substrate to grow mushrooms, thereby sending less trash to landfills.

Most of the DIY mycologists that I met during my fieldwork were committed to ecological lifestyles and social and economic justice. Fungi was at the intersection of their political, environmental and personal concerns: It could fortify soil and lower the use of pesticides, provide a model of connection for our increasingly fragmented and lonely society, heal psychological trauma and chronic illness, remediate the toxins of industrial society and much more. Their wonder and excitement were animated by anxieties, hopes and dreams about what was possible for human society as we moved away from fossil fuels, over-consumption and environmental pollution and toward sustainable lifestyles in balance with our surrounding ecosystems. 

Or at least, that was the vision.

Today, we can see clearly the destruction wrought by industrial modernity: the climate crisis, mass biodiversity and habitat loss, widespread pollution, economic disparities, political instability, ethno-nationalism. The whole system seems to be in crisis. The anthropologist Kim Fortun calls this stage of global capitalism, with its omnipresent disasters, “late industrialism.” 

Fortun notes that one of the defining characteristics of late industrialism is a focus on production, property and boundaries while ignoring the way manmade products “migrate and trespass” — into the air, water, soil and our bodies. The plastic bottle doesn’t remain a plastic bottle; the components of production don’t remain in the factories. Along with the products we produce — the measured, quantifiable, documented commodity — comes the remnants of everything used to create them. As the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman put it, two trucks leave the factory: One carries the products going to the marketplace, the other carries the trash going to landfill. But we only count the first truck, not the second — and certainly not the smokestack, the chemical flows. The result is a form of “slow violence” (as Rob Nixon describes it), where damage, like the gradual rise in rates of cancer, is not immediately obvious, making it much easier for the perpetrator to avoid accountability.

Something that has fulfilled its intended use and is discarded doesn’t vanish into thin air. It moves out of sight — to a landfill, a garbage patch in the ocean, perhaps burned. These afterlives, distributed across ecosystems and interrelated lifecycles (including our own), are seemingly impossible for the logic of industrial capitalism to grasp. 

Fungi — with their delicate, wisp-like threads of mycelium and their hobbit-home fruit bodies — offer another perspective. They embody an ecological paradigm of objects and phenomena in relationship with their surroundings, as part of feedback loops and lifecycles, in which diversity is critical to a system’s robustness. 

This embodiment is key to understanding the affective experiences of wonder and enthusiasm that fungi generate. The fungal form illustrates the interwovenness of ecosystems and the realization that nothing, nor any process, can be disconnected from and unaffected by the whole. Fungi materialize such complex systems. We see this most clearly in the conceptual and practical relationship between fungi and waste. They stand as a countermodel to the inability of our present system to make sense of (to digest, so to speak) the entirety of its products. 

It is precisely their proximity to death and decay that affords fungi their charismatic power today. Across cultures, they are often associated with otherworldly forces — gods, stars, witches, fairies, ghosts and other nonhuman spirits. In this association, mushrooms recall the philosophical concept of the pharmakon, something that is dangerous and powerful in its indeterminacy, its latent potential to be destructive or beneficial. 

Today, this ambiguous association is slanted toward hope. As McCoy writes in “Radical Mycology”: “From the mycelium we have come, to its web shall we return to be embraced, dissolved and recomposed.” Fungus’s vast, benevolent, delicate, living web mingles with death and decay and can both destroy and revitalize; in this sense, fungi seem to possess the ultimate transformative power. 

Fungi are inherently involved in what the scholar William Ian Miller called “life soup”: the unavoidably interrelated processes of decomposition and fertility, of death and life. In their phallic form, occasional sliminess and stinkiness (like the species that spread their spores by emitting an odor of carrion to attracts flies), and their sudden appearance and rapid decomposition, mushrooms often inhabit an uncanny valley between obscene, gross and alien, between the natural and the supernatural. As the crucial, mediating link between mortality and fecundity, fungi somehow embody and transcend both. 

It is this positionality that gives fungi their power, be it auspicious or nefarious. Oscar, one of my interlocutors from FAB, described them eloquently as “the pallbearers of nature”: They carry out the dead from the world of the living. They “deal with death,” as he put it, and with those aspects of modern life that are normally shunted aside, separated out, sent away.

In short, the aura of potential surrounding fungi, so closely intertwined with the capacity for transformation, is not solely about psilocybin or biomaterials or remediation. It is a reflection of fungi’s underlying power. Some can kill you in a few days, some can cause debilitating diseases (as Emily Monosson documents in her recent book “Blight”), and some can generate life-changing experiences of divinity.

Thus the power of fungi — to transform, destroy, deconstruct and resurrect — holds an almost sacred allure as industrial modernity falls apart at the seams and we are left to face its mess.

By the end of my fieldwork, mycoremediation’s original sheen of promise had worn off but a patina of wondrousness remained. The Amazon MycoRenewal Project had changed its name and shifted away from a focus on fungi to other means of ecological restoration; similarly, teachers on the DIY mycology circuit began to introduce mycoremediation with careful caveats before diving into its myriad possibilities. 

People were realizing that fungi require other organisms (bacteria, worms, plants) to be able to biodegrade toxins, and that this was done best by professional scientists who had the time, resources and knowledge to hypothesize, calibrate, test and measure. Even then, buy-in from authorities remained difficult — but not impossible. Environmental scientists, bioengineers and remediation specialists continue to experiment with fungi in their arsenal of bioremediative agents, while new start-ups continue to search for ways to make mycoremediation a viable business model. 

Similarly, DIY mycologists have over the years implemented a seemingly endless series of prototypes and simple installations to demonstrate that fungi can, in fact, consume toxins. Undeterred by the difficulties in scale, replication and economic feasibility, many still see the method as promising — a means, as Stamets put it, to use fungi to “offset the environmental damage inflicted by humans.” And their work, despite its limitations, captures the imagination much more than thermophilic composting or those meal worms that eat Styrofoam. 

In 2015, I took Tradd’s mycoremediation workshop at the Telluride Mushroom Festival. Under the placid gaze of three giant elks’ heads hanging on wood-paneled walls in a local lodge, Cotter helped me realize that part of the method’s appeal was its innate ecological drama — it enacts a wondrous, hopeful and empowering process. In these small, clearly delineated, closed environments — so unlike complex, large-scale, real-world scenarios — the petri dish, mason jar or barrel acted like a stage, making us an audience to amazing displays. 

Tradd spent much of the workshop explaining how you can train a fungus to eat chemicals that it would not usually consume, using elaborate metaphors (often involving pizza) and self-effacing jokes to explain what causes fungi to produce enzymes that can break down carbon-rich molecules. He included many photos of mushrooms growing out of odd substrates (like an old bowling ball) that he harvested and cultured for future use, as well as photos of his own in vitro lab experiments, in which he mixed fungal cultures with pesticides, motor oil or bacteria. He said:

He showed us a slide with a petri dish with a bacterial culture on one side and an Oyster mushroom culture on the other. “Three days later, you have all the bacteria fleeing the scene. You dropped the tiger in the room.” The tiger in this case: the hyphal threads of the Oyster mushroom mycelium radiating outward. In another slide, a puddle of the pesticide Atrazine sat on one side of the agar and on the other side, the fungus. A series of time-lapse photos showed the fungus growing until it stopped in front of the liquid like a line in the sand. 

“All right,” Tradd narrated, “it’s been eating pizza. Now comes the nasty stuff. It gets a whiff of it, it stops. That’s the moment where … it’s saying, ‘If I’m going to stay alive, I need to adapt.’” 

The fungus stayed that way for two days, Tradd said, so he gave up on it. “I said, enough is enough. It’s not going to eat it.” He had plans to try a new plate with less Atrazine to see if it was an issue of ratio. “I left the [old] plate in the incubator and just by chance I came back two days later. Bam.”

There were audible gasps in the lodge. The new photo showed the mycelium expanding into the tiny chemical spill and consuming it. “That gives me goosebumps,” said Tradd. “It just needed time to figure it out.” He had made an animated gif of the fungus devouring the Atrazine in the petri dish. We watched it a few times.

The animated gif was a nice touch, although by that point, I had seen some version of this story multiple times. Each time, it was awesome: It seemed momentous and promising. And each time, it was framed as a prototype, an illustration of a possibility, a suggestion for future experimentation. 

We seemed stuck in a state of latent potential. After Tradd’s workshop, I began to wonder if this seemingly secondary aspect of mycoremediation — how cool it was to look at, how entertaining it is to watch — was not secondary at all. Rather than a realistic method for widescale remediation, it was, in practice, a kind of theater. Not in any trivial sense, but quite the contrary — as a medium of mythic truth. 

Like those terrible spectacles of the ancient world that Tradd referenced, these “gladiator matches” were both entertainment and displays of power. They staged a hyperreal enactment of justice and fate, with an audience looking on through the translucent walls of a petri dish or mason jar, a kind of Persian miniature depicting the heroic ability of fungi to slay the monsters of our time.

It’s no wonder that so much of the art made with mushrooms explores this very capacity. “Fungal Futures,” a 2016 exhibit that was perhaps the first major event to showcase fungal art and design, featured many pieces that were grown on some kind of waste or that incorporated biodegradation into the art itself. Katharina Unger’s artwork “Fungi Mutarium,” a domed incubator with tiny pods made from agar that house fungal cultures, was described as “a prototype that grows edible fungal biomass” on plastic waste. And then there was Jae Rhim Lee’s “mushroom burial suit”: a full-body garment embroidered with undulating white lines resembling mycelium and inoculated with fungi bred to decompose corpses as well as the environmental pollutants that accrue in the human body itself. 

Amateurs and artists are not beholden to the norms of objectivity that characterize science as a social institution. Their awe-inspiring rhetoric and invocations of possibility are a different kind of performance, more akin to a preacher who inspires feelings of wonder, grace and fervor in their audience. As Stamets wrote in “Mycelium Running,” “We felt we had witnessed a mycomiracle: Life was flowering upon a dead, toxic landscape.” 

This “witnessing” is essential to understanding the appeal of mycoremediation. Mycovangelists stage what the philosopher of science Andrew Pickering called, in his book on cybernetics, “ontological theater”: using science and technology to showcase the possibility of another reality, another way of being. Prototypes, then, are not simply technical, but almost incantory in nature. Although mycoremediation may have failed to achieve large-scale applications, it still works as an inspiring display of the power of fungi — its capacity for transformation, its ability to turn death into life.

Only days before Tradd’s workshop, a tailings pond at a decommissioned gold mine just 10 miles from Telluride was accidentally unplugged (by EPA workers, ironically). Three million gallons of mine waste, mostly heavy metals, poured into Cement Creek and then the Animas River, turning the water an opaque yellow for days. Travis, a local DIY mycologist who co-taught the workshop with Tradd, was visibly depressed over the spill. He told me later that he knew the river well and often spent time there with his son. In truth, it was only a matter of time before the mine waste escaped its holding container, either through accident or neglect. This is simply a result of the way the system is designed. 

In most industries today, “remediation” usually means removing industrial waste to somewhere else, pushing it to the margins or dispersing it somehow into air or water — “out of sight and mind,” as Fortun puts it. Another approach is to simply abandon the waste where it is and move on — onto the next mine, the next factory, the next oil field — as was the case with Texaco in Ecuador. Often, the communities that end up dealing with the waste don’t have the political or economic power to fight the commercial interests behind these plans. They, too, are deemed “marginal,” negligible, a rounding error on the corporate budget. 

Fortun and other scholars observe that this form of displacement is not only endemic to our system, it is essential to its functioning — a feature, not a bug. The toxicity of industrial modernity cannot be denied, only ignored. “The strategy,” writes Fortun, “is one of disavowal.” 

“Disavowal” is a term that Fortun borrowed from Freudian psychoanalysis. For Freud, disavowal is the rejection of an aspect of reality whose acknowledgment would be too traumatic or emotionally difficult to face. The disavowed is not unknown nor actively discredited; rather, it is perceived but not acknowledged. It is a willed blindness, something placed outside the frame. In a state of disavowal, “things in reality connected are kept separate. Disavowal operates through disjunction, and refusal to connect.” It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of psychosis as defined by Freudian psychoanalysis. And disavowal, writes Fortun, “is a key corporate tactic of late industrialism.” 

Everyone who takes part in industrial modernity employs some degree of disavowal when it comes to waste. One might even say it is required to navigate our late industrial lives. If we spent every minute thinking about the environmental catastrophe of our society, it would be hard to function. But, of course, it is easier for some than others. The effects of waste and pollution might be everywhere now, but their effects are still unevenly distributed. 

Disavowal, though, is not only about waste. The disavowal of dark truths is arguably a theme of modernity itself. Modern practices around death are revealing in this regard: In many traditional societies, a corpse is kept in the family space until its burial; in most modern societies, the dead body is carted off immediately. Embalming is common to halt (and hide) the process of decay. It is precisely this approach that Lee’s mushroom burial suit is critiquing.

From a fungal vantage point, this system is indeed psychotic. Mycoremediation may not be the systemic intervention that was hoped for, but as an expression of one’s personal concern for our toxified landscape, it is far from insignificant. Rather, it is a tangible way for people without much institutional power to engage in the ongoing fight against environmental damage, to try to contain the disasters seeping around us. As a domestic intervention, mycoremediation is modest but culturally meaningful — a method of repair and reconnection. 

The power of fungi comes from the proximity they have with dark truths: the abject, the mess we need to face, mortality, vitality, kinship. In other contexts, this proximity elicits wariness, but in our current crisis, it holds the possibility of a healing power — a pharmacological power. Fungi can take on the mess and the junk, break it down and transform and incorporate it rather than ignore it. 

True, fungi need a host of other lifeforms to complete their task; they are not the only actors in this drama. But they are emblematic of the process. As one DIY mycologist put it succinctly: “There is no waste in nature, you know. Everything can be reused and everything can be seen as a potential source for someone else.” 

I thought about this often when I spent time with Oscar, a permaculture gardener, and Celeste, an arborist, who were regulars at FAB meetings and events. Their Oakland home was decorated with old posters from punk shows, stencil prints (one of an Amanita phalloides, a beautiful and lethal mushroom) and found art, a Ganoderma shelf mushroom nailed to the wall, a small jungle of plants. In a corner, a series of repurposed window screens hung vertically from the ceiling over a big circular floor fan—a homemade dehydrator. Every time I visited, it was full of mushrooms, plants and flowers: remnants of their wanderings.

One Sunday morning, I showed up to join them on a foray in the local hills. They were still puttering around, thinking about breakfast. Oscar hadn’t slept much — he told me he had been up late reading online mushroom forums. We went out into their backyard where he showed me a gigantic shaggy parasol he had spotted that morning, bigger than his head, its cap so heavy that the weight of it broke the stem. I took a picture of him: goofy face, hair askew, a tattered sweater, gold tooth glinting in the morning sunlight. 

Oscar and Celeste’s backyard was home to many mycological experiments. The shaggy parasol went into a cooler full of ice water, where Oscar broke it up and stirred it in, making an impromptu slurry to reinoculate the garden. A source of awe and delight just a second ago, the mushroom disappeared into a whirl of organic fragments. It was the lifecycle that mattered, not the fruit itself, and Oscar was on to the next thing. 

Among Oscar and Celeste’s projects was a “junk mail digester”: a plastic bin filled with Oyster mushroom spawn, into which they incorporated the constant stream of useless junk mail that arrived at the house — Safeway coupons, catalogs addressed to old roommates, glossy fliers for pizza delivery. Like everyone, they hated junk mail but never knew what to do with it. Before, it would just go in the recycling. Now it sprouted mushrooms.

The post Finding Hope In The Dark Power Of Fungus appeared first on NOEMA.

Poetic time is the opposite of the turbocharged tempo of intelligent machines. It apprehends reality by dwelling mindfully on those moments computation relegates in passing to mere data points.

It is worth slowing down along our quickening trajectory to reflect on the sage perspectives of two of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Octavio Paz and Czesław Miłosz, both muses of the moment whom I had the humbling privilege of knowing. 

When Time Stops

For Miłosz, good poetry expresses a sense of piety for being in a world that has “succumbed to a peculiar nihilism” in which experience “loses its colors. Grayness covers not only things of this earth and space, but also the very flow of time, the minutes, days and years.”

In such a dulled-down landscape, “abstract considerations are of little help or remedy,” the Nobel laureate put it to me in one conversation. “Poetry matters greatly in the face of this deprivation because it looks at the singular, not the general. It cannot look at things of this earth other than honestly, with reverence, as colorful and variegated; it cannot reduce life with all its pain and ecstasy into a unified tonality. By necessity it is on the side of being.”

For Miłosz, “mindfulness occurs in the moment when time stops. And what is time? Time is our regrets, our shame. Time contains all things toward which we strive and from which we escape. In that moment of time stopped, reality is liberated from suffering. Then, in art, you can have a purified vision of things independently of our dirt. Everything that concerns us disappears, is dissolved, and it does not matter whether the eye that looks is that of a beggar or a king.”

The “eternal moment” in the gaze of the Polish poet is like “a gleam on the current of a black river,” retrieved from movement by mindful attention. 

One of Miłosz’s poems perfectly illustrates this pious regard for those palpable moments of being that elude any abstract sense at the end of the road of existence. It reads in part:

Floating On The Hour

Octavio Paz, also a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, put the nature of the moment in the larger frame of social evolution. He believed that “temporal succession no longer rules the imagination” after all of the abstract utopias of modern progress that didn’t pan out. As now recognized by quantum science, he saw that “we live instead in the conjunction of times and spaces, of synchronicity and confluence, which converge in the ‘pure time’ of the instant.” Coherence and equilibrium are “the momentary exception” in the random swirl of disequilibrium that is the rule.

As the poet explained further in a conversation in Mexico City back in the 1980s, “This time without measure is not optimistic. It doesn’t propose paradise now. It recognizes death, which the modern cult of the future denies, but also embraces the intensity of life. In the moment, the dark and the luminous side of human nature are reconciled. The paradox of the instant is that it is simultaneously all time and no time. It is here and it is gone. It is the point of equilibrium between being and becoming.”

He continued: “The instant is a window to the other side of time — eternity. The other world can be glimpsed in the flash of its existence. In this sense, poets have always had something to show modern man.”

While this recognition of time without measure may be new to the modern sensibility of the Western clock, Paz pointed out, it has long been intimated in the East through the traditional form of the haiku. This terse but evocative verse from the Edo-era Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō is a classic example:

In his last poem, “Response and Reconciliation,” Paz conveyed his vision of time arrested using a similar metaphor as Miłosz to describe the eternal moment of being in the flow of becoming:

If, as Paz said, poetic time had much to teach modernity, it has even more to teach the hastening era of hyper-modernity we are now entering.

The post Poetic Time In The Age Of Acceleration appeared first on NOEMA.

Her youngest son, Brian, 3, also had eczema as a baby and subsequently developed allergies to peanuts and barley, though Elizabeth fears there could be more. Her middle daughter, five-year-old Amelia, had a dairy allergy as an infant, but is now just lactose intolerant. She’s the easiest of the three, at least in terms of allergy.

By the time I hear her story, Elizabeth is already a veteran at dealing with her children’s irritated immune systems. She began a support group for parents of children with corn allergies and is heavily involved in trying to educate other parents about food allergies.

The parents share their theories about why their children have allergies. Her own is that Viola and Brian both went to the emergency room with high fevers as babies and were given precautionary antibiotics. She blames the antibiotics for altering her children’s gut microbiome and herself for agreeing to the treatment in the first place.

Part of Elizabeth’s rationale is that no one else in her family has allergies. In fact, it’s so rare that her parents initially didn’t believe the diagnoses. They argued that “back in their day,” everyone ate everything and was fine; food allergy was made-up nonsense. But when both Viola and Brian landed in the ER repeatedly for food-related anaphylaxis, her parents realized these allergies were indeed “real.”

Elizabeth’s family’s routines have been upended. “My life revolves around cooking for them,” she explains. “We don’t eat out. We don’t trust people preparing their food.” Instead, Elizabeth gets up daily at 6:30 a.m. to cook a breakfast that avoids allergens for all three kids. Then she cooks and packs their lunches, preparing everything from scratch because most packaged foods contain at least one ingredient that one of her children will react to.

On a recent vacation with four other families, Brian ended up in the ER with anaphylaxis due to cross-contamination. Elizabeth says she will never share a house again if she’s not the “cleaning boss,” which basically means being not only continuously vigilant about the foods prepared in the kitchen but also thoroughly cleaning and wiping down anything that an allergy-inducing food touches. It’s a labor of love and worry in equal measure.

Brian’s allergies are the most severe. Though only a toddler, he knows some foods are dangerous. “I’ll ask him, ‘Do you know why you can’t have that?’” Elizabeth said. “And he’ll say, ‘Yes, Brian allergic. Makes me owie. Mommy give me shot and we go to hospital.’ He remembers the EpiPen. He remembers it because those things hurt. It’s an inch and a half needle jabbed into you.”

Brian runs away whenever he sees Elizabeth pack an EpiPen, a potentially life-saving device for allergy sufferers, into one of their bags. She says it makes her feel like she’s the biggest monster in the world. Not only because of her son’s reaction, but also because she ultimately feels responsible for his allergy.

Although allergy researchers may disagree on definitions, symptoms and methodology, all agree on one thing: Allergies have grown worse over the last few decades, and the staggering numbers of allergy sufferers worldwide is likely to continue growing. An estimated 235 million people worldwide have asthma, and anywhere from 240 to 550 million people globally may suffer from food allergies. Drug allergy may affect up to 10% of the world’s population.

There’s a consensus, looking at the last century’s data, that U.S. hay fever rates increased in the mid-20th century. Data suggests that the incidence of asthma increased beginning in the 1960s, peaking sometime in the 1990s. Since then, asthma rates have remained fairly constant. Respiratory allergic diseases and atopic sensitization (or skin allergy) have likely increased over the last few decades. But the most dramatic and visible increase has been the rise in global incidence rates for food allergies, which began in earnest in the 1990s and has grown steadily ever since.

There are, unsurprisingly, multiple theories about the cause. The hygiene hypothesis is one front-runner, positing that people who are “too clean” develop allergies. Many others think it’s our diet, that changes in the way we grow and prepare food have altered our gut microbiome, fueling allergies. Still others argue that manmade chemicals and plastics we encounter daily are making our immune systems more irritable.

What everyone agrees on is that the environment’s influence on our genes, or epigenetics, has played a large role in the rise of allergies, as does the makeup of our nose, gut and skin microbiomes. In the end, it appears, we are at least partially doing this to ourselves. Modern living is likely at the root of the recent rise in allergies.

Our Changing Microbiomes

If you want to better understand how our modern lifestyles might be behind some of our biggest problems with allergy, you will end up talking to a diminutive, deeply intelligent, empathetic woman named Cathryn Nagler, who is one of the best immunologists in the world. Her decades of research primarily focuses on the role our gut microbiome plays in the development of children’s food allergy. She remembers when food allergy rates first began climbing in the late 1980s.

“I saw it myself,” Nagler said, loading graphs onto her computer in her University of Chicago office on a sunny spring afternoon. “I have kids that are 23 and 27, so I followed this in real-time because cupcakes were excluded from the classrooms as my kids went through school. Right around the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when food allergy rates were starting to increase, the American Academy of Pediatrics said to withhold peanuts and allergenic foods from pregnant mothers, from nursing mothers and from children with risk of allergy until they’re four years old. That was exactly the wrong advice, and that fueled the fire and caused even more increase. Now all of the push is for early introduction.”

Nagler is referencing the now-famous Learning Early about Peanut Allergy (LEAP) study, conducted by researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States, led by Dr. Gideon Lack at King’s College in London and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015. The study found that decades of erroneous advice to parents to avoid giving children younger than three years old anything containing peanuts had likely led to a massive increase in the incidence and severity of peanut allergy.

Infants enrolled in the study (four to 11 months old) were randomly assigned to two groups: parents in one group would continue to avoid peanuts; parents in the other would introduce peanuts to their children right away. Infants in both groups were given skin-prick tests for peanut sensitivities. Among those who tested negative, the prevalence of peanut allergy at 60 months of age was 13.7% in the peanut avoidance group and merely 1.9% in the peanut consumption group. Among those who had tested positive for sensitivity to peanuts, the prevalence of peanut allergy was 35.3% in the avoidance group and 10.6% in the consumption group.

A recent study in Melbourne, Australia, found that changes to dietary advice on peanuts in 2016, following the success of the initial LEAP study, had led to a 16% decrease in peanut allergy among infants. It’s perfectly clear that introducing peanuts to infants has a protective effect.

Nagler understands why parents might be hesitant, however, to introduce allergens into the diet early. After all, why would anyone trust the same people who gave them incorrect advice just a few years prior? Plus, she doesn’t think there’s definitive evidence that early introduction is good.

“You can be sensitized even before the first introduction of solid food,” Nagler explains. “Kids get allergic responses within the first month of life. That means they could have been sensitized by breast milk or by the skin. If you give early introduction to a kid like that, that kid is going to have an allergic response. So early introduction is risky, but now we know withholding is not good either.”

So how does the body learn to tolerate some foods and begin to react negatively to others? Nagler is convinced that food allergy as a phenomenon is part of a generational change.

“People will tell you that there is no history in their family of this,” she explains. “From parents with no family history of allergy to kids that have life-threatening responses to a crumb. You can be allergic to any food. Your allergy can develop at any point in your life. It used to appear between the ages of two and five. Now we’re getting a lot more adult-onset food allergy. It used to be that milk, eggs, wheat allergy were outgrown. Now they’re lasting into adulthood.”

In other words, food allergies signal a larger problem.

Nagler stops on a slide showing what is likely contributing to our immune system’s malaise: diet, C-sections, changes in food production, breastfeeding.

“The idea is that modern industrialized lifestyle factors have triggered shifts in the commensal bacteria,” Nagler says, referencing the so-called friendly bacteria that exist within and alongside us. “Inflammatory bowel disease, allergies, obesity, autism — all non-communicable chronic diseases. They’ve all been linked to the microbiome.”

And there it is: Nagler’s answer to the all-important question of why allergies are rising. Changes to the makeup of our gut microbiome — or all the bacteria, fungi and viruses that help process our food into useable fuel for our cells — are driving immune function changes.

Recent studies have highlighted the connection between our diet, use of antibiotics and our gut bacteria in the development of allergies. A 2019 study led by Nagler showed that the gut of healthy infants harbored a specific class of allergy-protective bacteria not found in infants with cow’s milk allergy. This was followed by a study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital that found that five or six specific strains of gut bacteria in infants seem to be protective of developing food allergies. A lead researcher on that study, Dr. Lynn Bry, surmised that our lifestyles are, for better or for worse, capable of “resetting the immune system.”

Another study found that higher levels of cheese in our diet may accidentally worsen allergy symptoms because bacteria in some cheeses produce histamine — the naturally-occurring compound that helps trigger an effective immune response. University of California, San Francisco researchers led a study that discovered a link between three species of gut bacteria and the production of a fatty molecule called 12,13-diHOME. That molecule lowers the number of T-reg cells in our gut, cells crucial for keeping inflammation at bay. The researchers found that babies with higher levels of these three bacteria had an elevated risk for developing allergy and asthma.

Ultimately, most of us living in the 21st century have changed our microbiome makeup. Our diets are the real culprit, according to Nagler. When we go from eating foods with lots of fiber to highly processed foods loaded with sugar and fat, we end up starving beneficial bacteria in our gut.

“We’ve co-evolved with our microbes,” Nagler says. But “they can’t live without their food.”

There’s also the use of antibiotics that kill off not only the bacteria that cause strep throat and sinus infections, but our gut bacteria. And we eat meat from animals that have been given low-dose antibiotics to make them fat. We’re experimenting on ourselves and our microbiomes, Nagler says, to deleterious effect.

Nagler has developed the “barrier regulation” hypothesis, which theorizes that our gut and skin microbiomes regulate what is and isn’t allowed into the body. Commensal bacteria on the skin and in the gut are integral to maintaining barrier function. Nagler explains that a single layer of epithelial cells is all that stands between us and our environment, making sure that what enters our bodies is either inhaled or ingested.

Indeed, in 2018 researchers discovered a link between a gene coding for an antiviral protein in the gut, changes in the gut microbiota, and greater intestinal permeability and severe allergic skin reactions in mice. Gut microbiomes are an intricately balanced mix of different species of bacteria, viruses and fungi. Mice lacking the gene for the antiviral protein had a changed microbiome — or the amounts and types of different bacteria and viruses.

This suggests that our immune systems have developed ways of coping with microbes in our gut and maintaining balance. When the composition of the microbiota changes, the immune components’ responses shift, making us more miserable in the process. This is evidence of how our genes and the environment (changes to the gut microbiota) interact to produce allergy; it also proves Nagler’s larger point that altered gut microbiota can have a direct effect on allergy.

Avery August, an immunologist at Cornell University, describes human immune cells as curators of the human body — constantly sensing everything we encounter and making millions of micro-decisions about what should become a part of the human body or coexist with us and what should not.

The barrier regulation theory dovetails nicely with the conception of our entire immune system — microbiome included — as curators of what can and cannot be part of us. Without the regulation that those barrier cells provide, entire proteins can pass through our skin or gut into the bloodstream, where they encounter our immune cells.

The allergic person’s immune system is wholly functional; it is doing what it was meant to do. For Nagler, the problem is that it’s performing a job different from the one it was initially trained to do. From this perspective, allergic disease is a barrier problem, not necessarily an immune system problem.

All creatures, even invertebrates, have an associated microbiota, Nagler explains, which performs vital physiological functions. Without microbiota, there would be no life at all. The human gut encounters antigens from a hundred trillion — or 100,000,000,000,000 — commensal microbes and more than 30 kilograms — or 66 pounds — of food proteins per year. Cells making up the gut barrier must discern between what is harmful — pathogens like harmful outside bacteria or viruses — and what are harmless antigens.

To Nagler, Elizabeth’s theory blaming antibiotics for her children’s food allergies isn’t so far-fetched. Changes in the gut microbiome in infants and children can lead to a greater risk of developing allergic responses as children age. And our children’s earliest environments are likely the most crucial.

The microbiome has been shown to be incredibly stable by age three. Alterations before this age seem to be critical to whether allergies ultimately develop. A study led by France’s Pasteur Institute found evidence in mouse models for the role of gut microbiota in the development of a healthy immune system in as young as three to six months of age, around when most human babies are first introduced to solid foods.

Bacteria in the gut increased 10- to 100-fold after solid foods were introduced. This stage of rapid microbiome growth and development, called “pathogenic imprinting,” seems to determine one’s susceptibility to inflammatory disorders like allergy and autoimmune disorders in adulthood. Antibiotics could theoretically disrupt this developmental stage, producing a greater risk of allergic diseases.

So far, scientific evidence appears to back this up. Research by Rutgers University and the Mayo Clinic found that children under age two who are given antibiotics are at greater risk for asthma, respiratory allergies, eczema, celiac disease, obesity and ADHD. The study looked at 14,572 children born in Olmsted County, Minnesota, between 2003 and 2011. If antibiotics were given in their first six months, the risk increased dramatically. 

Researchers found that 70% of the children in the study had been prescribed at least one antibiotic in the first 48 months of their lives (typically for respiratory or ear infections). Another study found that antibiotics can allow for the growth of non-pathogenic fungus in the human gut, which may make respiratory allergies more severe. Finally, related studies of Finnish and New York babies found that C-sections and antibiotics correlated with altered gut microbiomes and a greater risk of allergies in childhood.

These findings don’t surprise Nagler. Vaginal births give infants what are known as “founder bacteria,” she tells me. As the baby moves through the vaginal canal, it is exposed to its mother’s friendly bacteria. Breastfeeding introduces more helpful bacteria into the infant’s gut.

“If you skip over both of those processes, which many people have done, you’ve disordered the microbiome,” Nagler explains. “The first 100 -1,000 days of life are absolutely critical for the development of the immune system.”

Research has shown that babies born by C-section not only haven’t been exposed to the correct, harmless vaginal founder bacteria, but they have also been exposed to potentially harmful hospital bacteria. One recent review found that lactobacillus containing probiotics — the same bacilli found in breast milk — lowered SCORAD (Scoring Atopic Dermatitis) scores for children under age three who had moderate to severe atopic dermatitis, or more severe eczema.

Breastfeeding for the first three months of life has also been linked with a lower risk of respiratory allergies and asthma. In a study of 1,177 mother/child pairs, breastfed babies had a 23% lower relative risk of allergies by age six and a 34% lower relative risk of asthma if there was no family history of asthma.

But for children whose mothers supplemented breast milk with formula, the protective effect seemed to have mostly disappeared. (Important aside: If you’re a mother and you’re panicking a bit right now, please don’t. There are many valid reasons to have C-sections and to choose formula over breastmilk. A lot of this is complicated and there’s a lot that we still don’t know about these interactions.)

Nagler reminds me that the cattle industry has been giving cows low doses of antibiotics for years to make them fatter and more commercially viable. We also eat highly processed food that’s low in fiber, with added sugars and fats. That means that the food we’re introducing into our guts is different from what our ancestors ate for millennia. That, of course, affects the types of bacteria that can flourish inside us.

Even simply changing bedsheets can change our microbiomes. Researchers in Denmark and the U.K. looked at samples from 577 six-month-old infants’ beds and compared them to respiratory samples taken from 542 of those infants at age three months old). Researchers found 930 different types of bacteria and 103 genera of fungi.

A correlation was found between bacteria in bed dust and those found in the associated children; while the two populations of bacteria were not exactly synonymous, they did seem to directly affect each other. An increase or decrease in respiratory bacteria mirrored an increase or decrease in the bacteria in the infants’ beds. The research suggests that less frequent changing of bed linens may benefit the health of all our nasal and airway microbiomes.

Many of the researchers I spoke to longed to return to a simple, less technologically driven way of life mostly centered on the foods we consume and how we produce them. One top allergist dreamt of performing the ultimate control study to prove that our modern lifestyle and habits negatively affect our immune systems.

“Imagine,” he said, “if we could get a group of people to revert back to a much older way of life. Eat foods grown without pesticides. Eat whole foods and a wide variety. Don’t use dishwashers or detergents. Do you know what would happen? No more allergies. I just wish I could prove it.”

The Canaries In Our Coal Mines

The most compelling evidence that our 21st-century lifestyles and manmade environmental changes have spurred our allergies is this: Our companion species of thousands of years — dogs, cats, birds and horses — all get allergies regularly. Other species — those that do not live in our homes or alongside us — do not.

Our pets’ symptoms are very similar to ours: sneezing, snoring, asthma, vomiting and over-grooming in cats; skin eruptions, persistent scratching and grooming in dogs; coughing and wheezing in horses. And they likely have allergies for the same reasons we do. After all, their immune systems are exposed to the same panoply of natural and chemical substances. The top allergen in dogs? Dust mites. The top allergen in horses? Their human-packaged feed. Cats are often allergic to grass, trees, and weed pollen. Cats and dogs can also be allergic to human dander, since we shed skin, too. Sound familiar?

Many owners spend lots of time and money trying to eradicate allergy symptoms in their pets. The most common methods are the same as for humans: pets either take antihistamines and steroids or undergo immunotherapy shots. The problem is that we don’t know just how big the problem is because we don’t have good data on pet allergies or their incidence. We don’t know if rates are increasing, or if vets and pet owners are just getting better at recognizing the signs.

To better understand how and why allergies affect our pets, I traveled to Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine to speak with Elia Tait Wojno, who started her career doing work on parasitic worms and immune responses.

She explains that the immune response to parasitic worms is like the immune response during allergic responses in both humans and in dogs. (Of course, in the case of worms, those responses are protective and, in the case of allergies, the responses are the ones causing the miserable symptoms.) By studying the immune response to helminths (a type of parasitic worm) in dogs, we can learn a lot about the basic immune functions involved in allergy.

Working with dogs allows us to observe how allergies function in something other than mouse models. For decades, mice have been the dominant research organism in the field of immunology. But mice aren’t humans, and mouse models aren’t always the best predictors of what will happen in a human body. That is why there’s growing interest among allergy researchers to move beyond mouse models. Since some larger animals have natural allergic diseases, like cats and dogs, they might be good models for learning about basic immunology across species as well as doing drug testing for allergic conditions.

Unlike mice, which are confined to the lab, usually inbred and live in very controlled environments, the dogs that Tait Wojno works with are born the old-fashioned way. She works with breeders to enroll dogs into her studies and the dogs are treated like pets because they are. These aren’t lab animals; they live at home with their owners. This is an important detail, since that allows researchers to ponder which components of our shared, lived environments, habits and medical practices might be affecting our companion species as well as us.

Allergies in our pets offer potential clues to solving the mystery of allergies. If we can understand early immune response in animals, then we might be able to better understand it in humans. And that’s one of the things we really don’t understand in any mammals — the immune system’s initial reaction to something it encounters and the subsequent set of events that follow. Ultimately, my visit to Cornell convinced me of one thing: Our pets are the literal canaries in our figurative allergy coal mines. The fact that our intimate companions have allergies is a sign that something humans are doing is irritating the immune systems of us all.

The Dirt On Cleanliness

You’re likely already familiar with the most espoused theory of allergy causation, the idea that being “too clean,” or overly hygienic, is not good for childhood development of a properly functioning immune system. Maybe you’ve heard that it’s good to let children play in the dirt, get a little messy and slobber on each other. So goes the basic idea behind the hygiene hypothesis, first posited to try to explain the explosion of asthma, eczema and food allergies in the last half of the 20th century.

In 1989, epidemiologist David Strachan published a short article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), entitled “Hay fever, hygiene, and household size.” Using data from a national sample of over 17,000 British children born during the same week in March 1958, he looked at three things: How many of the study participants self-reported symptoms of hay fever at age 23; How many of their parents had reported hay fever in them at age 11; and when participants were seven, whether the parents remembered if their child had eczema in their first year of life.

Strachan found that younger siblings seemed most protected from developing hay fever or eczema, despite differences in socioeconomic class. Strachan posited that the lowered allergy rates might be explained, “if allergic diseases were prevented by infection in early childhood, transmitted by unhygienic contact with older siblings, or acquired prenatally from a mother infected by contact with her older children.”

Smaller family sizes, improvements in housing, and higher cleanliness standards might have combined to reduce the opportunity for children’s exposure to a wide variety of microbes. In other words, Strachan’s findings suggested that mild childhood infections might be beneficial to a developing immune system.

At first this idea was rejected. Many immunologists still believed that bad infections could trigger allergy, especially asthma. But Strachan’s ideas were eventually adopted and popularized after researchers discovered that IgE-mediated (or antibody-driven allergic) immune responses were driving many allergic conditions. It seemed plausible that a lack of early exposure to certain germs was the underlying problem, leaving the immune system “untrained” and hyper-responsive in later life.

Early work on the microbiome and friendly commensal bacteria, Nagler co-wrote in a 2019 review, “led to a reformulation of the hygiene hypothesis as the ‘old friends’ or the ‘biodiversity’ hypotheses of allergy, which proposed that changes in the environment, diet and lifestyle associated with Westernized, industrialized countries have altered the diversity of the gut and skin microbiomes.”⁸

The “old friends” hypothesis posits that humans are more at risk of chronic inflammatory diseases, like allergies or autoimmune disorders, because we no longer regularly encounter some of the microorganisms that we evolved alongside for millennia. These “old friends,” the theory goes, helped regulate our immune function. Their risk to human health was minimal, and a healthy immune system could easily keep them in check. This trained the developing human immune system, making it more robust and adaptive to its normal environment.

In the absence of these old friends, our immune system lacks the early training it needs to better self-regulate and overreacts to otherwise harmless stimuli, like pollen or dust mites.

Nagler explained to me how the hygiene hypothesis and the idea of microbes as old friends combine to produce an almost idyllic conception of farm life and the “farmhouse effect.” Farmhouses, with their tilled soil, muddy barns and stables, and fertile fields, come with a lot of bacteria, viruses and parasites.

But if you alter the environment, you alter the microbiota. If you have better sanitation, move away from farms and have fewer children, then you cut off your supply of a richly diverse microbiota. You become, in essence, less intimate with microbes in your day-to-day life. And intimacy with friendly germs, especially in the first few years of life, does seem to be protective of a wide variety of immune disorders — but not all of them.

Recent studies have suggested that there is a measurable “farmhouse effect,” but researchers are uncertain about which exposures are protective and what mechanisms they might be triggering to produce that protective effect. What seems certain is that exposure to livestock from early childhood dramatically lowers the risk of developing allergic conditions later in life.

In particular, exposure to stable dust seems to prevent most allergic responses. Something in “farm dust” is effective — bacteria, viruses, fungi or even more allergens themselves — but it’s not entirely clear which components of the dust are protective, and which aren’t. Another study of rural areas in Austria, Germany and Switzerland showed that a farming environment was more protective against hay fever, atopic sensitization and asthma.

If infants spent a lot of time in stables and drank cow’s milk in the first year of their lives, then their rates of allergic diseases dramatically lowered even if their IgE results showed sensitization. In other words, they might have an underlying sensitivity to some allergens, but that sensitivity did not become full-blown allergic responses.

In a different study that looked at the immune function of lab-raised mice versus those in a farm’s barn, the “farmhouse effect” was strongly supported. The results of studies in mice are, in fact, one of the key supports for this theory. August explained to me that pathogen-free mice bred for laboratory studies have dramatically different immune systems compared to their “unclean” peers; the lab mice have immune systems that resemble a human newborn’s immune system. When you place those “clean” mice in a “dirty” environment — like the mice study did to simulate farm life — their immune systems change to look more like that of an adult human.

This tracks with research in humans that suggests that germ-ridden environments can also protect against allergies. Children and adults who live with dogs have lower rates of asthma and obesity, in part due to more indirect exposure to bacteria that dogs carry and track into the home. A 2017 NIH-sponsored study showed that exposing children in the first three years of life to high indoor levels of pet and pest allergens, like cockroach, mouse and cat allergens, lowers their risk of developing asthma by age seven. But whether exposure is protective, depends on the bacteria.

Enter the fascinating case of Helicobacter pylori, or H. pylori, a common gut microbe that’s the culprit behind gastrointestinal ulcers, chronic gastritis and even some forms of cancer.

Although scientists discovered the species H. pylori in 1982, there is speculation that our colonization by the bacteria took place circa 60,000 years ago and that it depended on repeated contact in small, close-knit groups, i.e. the way humans typically lived until fairly recently. There are many different strains of H. pylori, and their prevalence in humans was estimated to hover around 80% until after World War II, when the introduction of antibiotics like penicillin to treat common infections led H. pylori to begin to disappear from the human gut. Today, it is estimated that around 50% of humans are infected with H. pylori, with rates hovering as high as 88% in one African nation and as low as 19% in a European one.

This is in line with the hygiene hypothesis, since transmission of microbes is far easier in large, crowded households with many siblings. H. pylori is usually acquired in early childhood, after the first year, and is transmitted via the ingestion of feces, saliva or vomit (and if you just physically recoiled, I apologize). In the absence of antibiotics, H. pylori, once acquired, can persist in the gut for decades, often for the entire life of its human host. Most people living with H. pylori have no symptoms or ill effects.

The stomachs of people with and without H. pylori are immunologically different and there is speculation that people with H. pylori have a larger gut population of regulatory T cells (Tregs). That’s important because Tregs are crucial for tamping down inflammatory immune responses. Although infection with H. pylori is associated with having more immune cells in the gut, some researchers have proposed that it may be a normal, rather than a pathological, response to the bacteria.

In other words, H. pylori may be beneficial in some situations. In fact, people who lack the bacteria are much more likely to suffer from gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), or acid reflux, and there is evidence that H. pylori plays a protective role against childhood-onset asthma.

All this gives credence to the basic premise of the hygiene hypothesis: We need regular exposure to friendly bacteria to train our immune systems. But also, simply living with more diverse microbial populations likely does not automatically produce improved immune system functionality. Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills, director of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, believes the hygiene hypothesis cannot possibly explain the rise of allergies, at least not by itself. His argument relies upon our more recent history of “cleanliness.”

Throughout the 20th century, hygiene standards were adopted more widely. Improved sewage systems and potable drinking water meant human exposure to microbes through ingestion was far less frequent. Regular infection by helminths, or intestinal parasites, had decreased due to food and water quality controls and the increased use of shoes.

During this time people moved from rural farms into urban centers, so the general population also saw lower exposure levels to farm animals and decreased diversity of the bacterial populations they encountered. Family size also decreased, perhaps exposing children to fewer germs. Platts-Mills notes, however, that all these changes were completed by the 1920s, which leaves the dramatic rise of asthma and allergic rhinitis, from the 1940s into the 1950s, unexplained.

Platts-Mills argues that the best explanation for the rise of hay fever and asthma is more likely “an increase in sensitization to indoor allergens and the loss of a lung-specific protective effect of regular deep inspiration.” In other words, outdoor play and recreation were likely more protective against allergies than spending hours playing Minecraft or Fortnite.

If the hygiene hypothesis or farmhouse effect were correct, one would also expect to see a marked decrease in allergy rates in rural, farming communities. Yet Dr. Jill Poole, the University of Nebraska Medical Center division chief of allergy and immunology, found that around 30% of Midwestern farmers suffer from allergic disease directly linked to their agricultural lifestyle. Dust from grain elevators and animal barns, pesticide exposures and grain rot from flooding causes so-called Farmer’s Lung. So while some farm exposures seem beneficial, others are clearly not.

And if family size, rural life and socioeconomic status are linked in the original hypothesis theory, then one might expect that countries with larger family size, more rural populations and lower socioeconomic status would have fewer allergic diseases. Yet their allergies are also steadily increasing.

A 2019 study found that half of Ugandans living in the capital of Kampala have some form of allergy. It found that allergies are on the rise in rural areas, although more urban dwellers have access to hospitals where they can report symptoms of asthma, nasal congestion or skin rash. Many Ugandans self-treat with over-the-counter antihistamines, steroids, and antibiotics. Dr. Bruce Kirenga, a Ugandan allergy expert, said he thinks environmental pressures like air pollution are to blame.

These findings suggest that the farmhouse effect or hygiene hypothesis might not be the smoking gun we’re searching for. The theory makes intuitive sense, but we don’t have enough scientific evidence to definitively say that rural life, with its “dirty” or microbially rich environments, can fully protect us from allergic disease.

And yet, the basic idea that something about our interactions with the microbial world around us has shifted because of our lifestyles and daily habits is compelling. The hygiene hypothesis, then, is likely partially correct. There is growing evidence that some of our habits (particularly in relation to our diets and food production) might be behind the recent rise of allergies — especially food allergy.

Barrier Warfare

In a 1950s pamphlet on allergy, Dr. Samuel Feinberg, a leading allergist and the first president of the now-named American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, wrote: “Man’s progress creates problems.” Feinberg pointed the finger at human ingenuity as a significant cause of the developed world’s increasing allergies. All our tinctures and dyes, our synthetic fabrics and new plastics, our lotions and eyeliner and lipsticks and shampoos were beginning to wreak havoc on our immune systems.

Dr. Donald Leung, an immunologist who is head of allergy and immunology at Denver’s National Jewish Health is also one of the world’s leading researchers on atopic dermatitis. Leung told me that we overuse soap, detergents and products containing alcohol.

We routinely use harsh antimicrobial products to clean our hands and homes, instead of soap and water; a fact exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. All of this can negatively affect our skin barrier, making it more likely we’ll develop an allergic condition.

Furthermore, exposure to food proteins through a weakened skin barrier along with early ingestion of higher doses of food proteins can lead to full-blown food allergy. In layman’s terms, that means if you make a peanut butter sandwich and don’t wash your hands and then you pick up your baby, you may be depositing trace amounts of peanut protein onto their skin. If their skin is “leaky,” or more permeable than normal skin due to a possible genetic mutation or a disruption (or irritation) of the skin’s normal microbiome, then that protein could seep into the baby’s skin and when the baby eats peanuts, it can trigger a peanut allergy.

“All the things we’re putting on our skin, or the things we’re putting on our babies’ butts, are probably not good for our barriers,” Robert Schleimer, former chief of allergy and immunology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told me.

Schleimer said his first job in the 1960s was collecting used cotton diapers for the Tidee Didee Diaper Service for $1.70 an hour. He would bring them back to the laundry facility to be cleaned and repackaged for delivery. As he reflected on the barrier hypothesis, he noted that cotton is a natural fabric. Now we use plastic diapers with antimicrobial properties and apply creams to babies’ skin to prevent rashes from those materials. And that’s just one of the changes that might be exposing our children to more irritants.

“You have these very tough detergents made of rough chemicals that break things down,” said Dr. Kari Nadeau, director of Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy & Asthma Research. “And initially that was seen as positive. Then they started to see that, wait a minute, all these people working in the plants that are making those detergents have breathing issues.”

In our discussion, Nadeau is adamant about the downsides of modern living, especially when it comes to daily chemical exposure. She points to the recent rise in severe eczema. In the 1940s and 1950s, the image of a “squeaky clean” home was heavily promoted by the same companies making these new detergents (like Dow Chemicals).

“It turns out that the way my grandmother lived on the farm was probably the right way to do things: not using a lot of detergents, not bathing every day, making sure you were exposed to a little bit of dirt, being exposed to the outdoors,” Nadeau said.

In one recent study, Canadian university researchers found that infants less than four months old living in a home where household cleaning products were used more frequently were more likely to develop wheezing and asthma by age three. Researchers noted that most of the infants spent between 80-90% of their time indoors — heavily increasing their exposure to these products.

Study co-author Dr. Anne Ellis noted that children take more frequent breaths than adults and, unlike adults, breathe mostly through their mouths — bypassing the nose’s natural filtration system and allowing anything in the air to more easily penetrate the lungs. The researchers hypothesized that fumes from cleaning products inflamed their respiratory tracts, activating the babies’ innate immune systems. The frequent use of household products such as air fresheners, deodorizers, antimicrobial hand sanitizers, oven cleaners and dusting sprays seemed particularly harmful.

Exposure to problematic chemicals in gestation can be equally harmful to developing immune systems. One study found that higher concentrations of plasticizers, or solvents used to make materials more flexible, equated to a greater risk of developing allergies. Researchers measured levels of Benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), a common plasticizer used to make Polyvinyl chloride (PVC or vinyl), in the urine of pregnant women and new mothers. They found that exposure to these phthalates during pregnancy and breastfeeding caused epigenetic changes to specific repressors for Th2 immune cells responsible for generating inflammation.

Our Dark Sedentary Lives

Changes to our work and leisure habits may also be contributing to the rise in allergies. We live much of our lives in the shade, Dr. Pamela Guerrerio at the NIH told me. The lack of the sun’s UVB rays on our skin, means our cells produce less vitamin D. It’s unclear how protective vitamin D is against allergies, but the ongoing debate over the evidence shows how little we know about the ill effects of our move indoors.

Dr. Scott Sicherer, director of Mount Sinai’s Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Food Allergy Institute in New York, told me that both autoimmune and allergy diseases tend to occur at higher rates when a person lives farther from the equator. That fact made immunologists consider whether vitamin D was involved in immune disorders, since people are exposed to less sunlight at higher latitudes.

But Sicherer also noted, “there might be fewer people engaged in farming lifestyles at those latitudes. There might be different exposures to different things in different regions of the globe. It’s so complex that we just don’t know.”

Guerrerio agreed, remarking that people around the globe have different diets, which, along with less sunlight, might compound immune system impacts. Guerrerio said it’s likely several factors cause allergies — including our indoor-prone lifestyles — and that several interventions will be necessary to reverse the effects on our immune systems.

As for Elizabeth and her children, Elizabeth’s misplaced sense of guilt is intimately tied to her desire to provide them with the best care. But her decision to allow her very ill babies to receive antibiotics was almost certainly the correct one, given the likelihood of more dangerous outcomes without treatment. Still, her sense of regret lingers — and she is most certainly not alone.

We are regularly bombarded with advice about how to keep ourselves and our children healthy and happy. You can try to “game the immune system,” but I don’t recommend it. As we learn more from experts about how our immune systems react and respond to our ever-changing environments, it’s best to come to terms with the fact that it’s highly unlikely that we can directly cause our own or someone else’s allergies. Reality is almost always more complicated than that.

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