In the spring of 2020, when the shelves of hygiene products were emptying, a paradoxical product fell into my hands: a probiotic hand sanitizer. While the product’s claim to differentiate between bad bugs and good ones added to it cannot be discussed here, the mélange certainly embodied a collective ambivalence about microbes. Had we not learned in the preceding years that microbes were not our foes but rather partners in health (microbiome, phage therapy) and nutrition (fermentation), as well as in planetary homeostasis, such as through oceanic photosynthesis? In early 2020, these insights faced a sudden retreat. Yet, just three years distant, it seems safe to say that the pandemic did not elicit a wholesale backlash in humanity’s relationship to microbes, but rather, that the sea change revealing them as ubiquitous, as partners, if not as constituents of multitude selves seems to have prevailed.
This essay explores this sea change...
University of California Press