we aren’t individuals

Implicit within that arrangement is the assumption that “Me” and “Nature” are discrete entities. But the emerging reality is immensely more complicated. “Me” is not some inalienable being that has to remind himself to plant a tulip once in a while before getting back to the real business of watching Alex Trebek. And “Nature” is not some elfin, rejuvenating spa that provides “Me” with a daily dose of fresh oxygen, mental health, and organic broccoli.

Increasingly, the science of microbiology is showing that we carry “Nature” with us everywhere we go. From the moment we emerge from our mothers, we are colonized, seized, and occupied by other entities. We are not, it turns out, walking cleanrooms that ought to be shuttled into Nature for forty-five minutes, then bustled inside and bathed in hand sanitizer.

In truth, no matter how far “Inside” we get, the “Outside” is always with us.

Witness: your skin harbours whole swarming civilizations. Your lips are a zoo teeming with well-fed creatures. In your mouth lives a microbiome so dense — fusospirochetes, Porphyromonas gingivalis, Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans — that if you decided to name one organism every second (You’re Barbara, You’re Bob, You’re Brenda), you’d likely need fifty lifetimes to name them all.

When you climb out of bed in the morning, ten times more bacterial cells climb out of bed than do human cells. In your gut, coalitions of hundreds of different species compete for food in a dark, simmering biome alive with as many as 100 trillion microbes. Without them, you die. To even write that you are “you” and the microbes are “them” is, perhaps, a failure of pronouns.

Ultimately, we aren’t individuals; we are big permeable societies. In the ten minutes it takes to read this essay, for example, you’ll inhale about 8 billion dust particles — calcite, gypsum, flame retardant from your carpet, spores from nearby woods. Your next breath might contain slag wool, mica, viruses, pollen, and fragments of an aphid who lived and died three hundred miles away.

Even the brain you use to process these sentences, an organ we have long imagined as a perfectly sterile entity operating above the microbial fray, might be home to beings that aren’t strictly “you.” A 2013 study in Canada found proteobacteria and viruses inside multiple human brains, suggesting that even our minds might be occupied by microbial populations of great richness.

Anthony Doerr – The New You