Holomicrobiome

Unleash the power of microbiomes to save the planet!

This is what I am currently working on.

I successfully started to make kombucha. I also experimented with water kefir and natural fermentation. The latter two were not yet successful. But this is not what this blog is about. Although, it might merit a blog post as well.

This blog is about the program I am now part of. The Holomicrobiome.

I am a sustainability transformation researcher. I am still struggling with this label. Because, what does this even mean?

I am interested in how transformations happen. Or how they do not happen. And because all of this is complex and cannot be looked at from one lens only, I keep on looking at transformations from various angles. This includes transformations in different domains, like energy or food. Or microbes. It also includes different analytical angels, approaches and methods. I still apply a mix of socio-ecology, systems thinking, political economy and post-growth to what I do.

Though, one of my current focus areas connects to what I worked on at TU Delft. There I looked into human behavior and the energy transition. Because I had no background in behavioral science I started to survey what is out there. I gained a limited understanding of the different lenses and theories on could apply. There are many aspects one could study! However, one of my main areas of interest at the time was how action and mind connect.

Changing human behavior that also learning. How do we change our behavior? And how does our behavior connect to our thoughts? Do we learn through what we experience out there? Can we be nudged into sustainability. Can our daily actions lead to deeper changes in how we think, in how we see the world? Or do we first have to change our mind and actions follow?

Currently I am focusing on reflexive monitoring. Reflexivity, connects to learning and thus to change. Reflexivity is often depicted through a loop indicating a cyclical pattern. We do something, we reflect on it, we might learn something and so we change our behavior giving us another chance to learn and adapt. Because of this cyclical pattern, it also fits to earlier work of mine on agility in academia. There the learning process of a program is facilitated through agile means of working, which has the same structure as reflexive monitoring.

Within the program, we aim to install a process that helps everyone involved to regularly reflect on what is being done. We try to build as much as possible on existing structure. That is as we try to not design a process that comes on top of everything else. The next years will show how successful we are in this endeavor.

I am in any case very excited about this program. Apart from the research I am doing, I am fascinated by the microbes. I started to read a bit about the innovations under way. The potential is huge. Not only because the innovations themselves could provide solutions to many problems. I think what is even more important is that to truly unleash the power of microbes we have to embrace the human-nature interrelationship. We are not apart from nature, we are nature. We are microbes. If you learn how many microbes live in and on us. When you learn how much DNA in us is microbes, and when you learn how vital all of these microbes are for our well-being, then you realize that we are not apart from them. We are in a symbiotic relationship with these microbes. There are some interesting philosophical papers about this topic! What does it mean that we are not one, but a community?

Another aspect that could change our understanding of the world, is the complexity that microbes bring along. Studying microbes, microbiomes and connections between them as well as the host environment is extremely complex. This does not only mean that we might need AI to understand this complexity. It also means, that we need to adopt systems thinking. On the one hand this also fosters understanding humans and nature as one. On the other it emphasizes that our world is not a simple linear cause and effect relationship. Everything is interwoven and removing one thing might have unexpected side-effects. We might not be able to control systems (nature), we might never be able to fully understand these systems. They are complex adaptive emerging systems. The behavior we saw in the past might not tell us much about the future. This complexity, I would argue puts limits to the Newtonian worldview. The world might be a deterministic, and predictable machine. But we might not have the tools to make all the needed calculations (Sapolsky,2023).

If that is so, the precautionary principle becomes even more important. Maybe we do not just release massive amounts of PFAs in the environment, thinking we can fix it later. Maybe we do not release so much greenhouse gases that we change the climate system. Maybe we do not kick off the next mass extinction, thinking that we can fix biodiversity decline later. Maybe economic profits cannot simply trade-off environmental losses.

One of the root problems of the sustainability crisis we are facing is that we too often perceive ourselves as separate from the environment. We live in environments that might give this impression. We get the water from the tap or a bottle, we do the groceries in a supermarket or get ultra-processed foods that do not resemble anything we would find out there in the fields. We turn on the heating when it is cold and the AC when it is warm. We easily forget that we are part of nature. But the importance of microbes in and on our bodies might remind us of the delicate and important balance between nature and humans. It reminds us that we are nature.

Reference:

Sapolsky, R. (2023). Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Penguin Press.