The story seems simple enough. Humanity is a threat to itself. Humans are cruel, short-sighted, and intolerant. Our human nature — fickle, disloyal, despotic — harms us. We are responsible and to blame for the climate crisis. The planet does not lie.

Although the oversimplification of this idea seems obvious at first glance, by widening our gaze we can see that this narrative of humanity as an ecological threat runs through many imaginaries and public policies.

A clear example can be found in the basic model of colonial conservation that predominates in many countries: ecologies are ‘protected’ by emptying them of human beings, protecting them in fenced national parks. It is this same logic — which reproduces a philosophy of nature, a worldview and a creation myth above all others — that nature and humanity must be separated in order to survive. Ecologist José Lutzenberger observed that: “the creation of a protected area is a confession of suicide. A society that needs to protect nature from itself cannot be true”.

This tale of an irrepressibly fallacious humanity is dangerous not only because it is false but because it blocks us, robs us of hope, and alienates us from other possibilities. If human nature has brought us this far, then what are we doing trying to change things?

To start thinking about other possibilities, we have to invert this point of departure, one which assumes our separation from nature. Living on this planet means relating — through our lungs, our stomachs, and so many bodily processes — with the multiple worlds and beings that surround us. From our gut microbiome, to the air that breathes us, to the water cycles that hydrate the crops we eat, we are porous and interdependent beings. The places we inhabit literally live in us and the biodiversity that runs through us is our health. We are a fabric of constant exchange.

Based on this inescapable interdependence, the most relevant question becomes: how do we relate to this great fabric to which we inevitably belong? What kind of relationships do we sustain? What interactions can (and should we) germinate?

Nurturing diversity among the fires

This point of departure immediately cracks our gaze, to open us to a plurality of paths. There are endless variations in the ways we intertwine our human and non-human existences. Our senses — from our palate to our sight — are also cultural and political, and if we do not provide them with breadth, with a curiosity for other ways of approaching the world, we abridge our already limited perceptions.

Let us imagine two maps of the world: one showing places with high concentrations of human linguistic and cultural diversity, and the other showing the most biodiverse territories on the planet. Comparing them, we can observe many overlaps. From Amazonia to Papua, there is a reciprocal relationship between the protection of cultural diversity and the biological diversity of life. What is diverse nourishes what is diverse.

No organism is an island. Every organism exists in the complexity of diversity. The ecological destruction of our present and recent past comes in large part from a concerted attempt to trample on the multiplicities that we are. Colonial projects led by great empires, motivated by profit and civilising missions, have long sought to subdue and silence the human pluriverse. These histories consume the present to reduce it to crumbs of possible existences.

Today, the world's richest countries use about ten times more energy than lower-income countries, and the wealthiest 5% of the world's people consume more energy than the poorest half of the human population. The richest 1% of the global population produces a thousand times more emissions than the poorest 1%. More than 3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. We simply cannot understand the ecological crossroads without understanding the multidimensional inequality engendered by the prevailing economic system.

In addition to expelling us from the great web of life and making us completely dependent on mass production and distribution systems, this economic model, which we can characterise as extractivist, proposes a relational metabolism in which some consume excessively, devouring the rights and aspirations of others. The peripheries, seen as sacrificial territories or sites of production, feed a privileged urban and elitist experience. An extractivist model not only creates poverties and inequalities, but it is built on them, and it continues to produce them in order to survive as a model. In order for a few to have a lot economically (and gastronomically), others have to have little.

There is no way to face the great challenges of our time without challenging this relational logic, and our great ally in this challenge is diversity itself. Extractivism expresses itself through monoculture, in fields as well as in ministries, suppressing what is plural, imposing singular, linear, accumulative models. Our challenge is to regenerate our cognitive monoculture, to disarm the barbs of imposed thinking. We cannot heal our ravaged ecologies without reforesting and recovering our critical memory, opening the space for other possible futures.

The emergence in emergency

Beyond abstraction, what does this act of reimagining and regenerating look like? How do we open space for emergence, the sprouting of other models, in the midst of this emergency?

We have a variety of doors and portals available to us. The Kenyan collective Cave Bureau invites us into a process of 'reverse futurism': revisiting ancestral conceptions, architectures, and worldviews to listen to their contributions to the present. In our profoundly growth-oriented world, which urges us to optimise ourselves as individuals and gallop into the future with frenzy, stopping and looking back can already be a subversive act in itself.

The philosopher Ailton Krenak similarly invites us to dream of ancestral futures. This invitation to ancestrality is to realise that we share a biological heritage and a millenary trajectory of life with all beings on our planet, and that this shared heritage harbours infinite possibilities that can nurture our imagination. New ways of being, of relating to each other, are distilled in the act of encounter.

This issue of Anchoa focuses on fermentation processes and the tremendous transformative capacity that lives in microbiotic cultures. After all, microbes made our human lives possible. They cooperated, evolved and created microbial communities, which changed the atmosphere of planet Earth, and spawned the first multicellular organisms. Fermentation is a manifestation of the diversity of possible lives. In both literal and figurative fermentation, the process is one that rearranges old forms into new ones.

Microbes germinated other ways of relating, leaving vital legacies that continue to unfold through us. Fermentation, an echo of transformation, provides us with a living metaphor for understanding the past and the present. It also reveals something profound about processes of change. Life is emergent — it is constantly coming into being. All interactions between organisms can unfold in multiple ways. Following the quilombola teacher and philosopher Nêgo Bispo, life processes have no ends: they are made up of beginnings and middles, of middles that become beginnings. This reality of insistent emergence embodies cultures that make more living tapestries of life possible.

Diverse scientific disciplines, from physics to urban planning, have taken notice of the astonishing collective intelligence of bacteria, which weave structures, networks and synchronisations in ways that can guide us in designing approaches to the most intense problems afflicting us today. From carbon sequestration by microorganisms in soils, to the microbes that oxidise the ocean and enable aquatic life to thrive, the microbiotic world is a source of abundant openings to begin to heal our links with the more-than-human worlds. All the plants and animal products we eat are populated by these elaborate communities of microorganisms. And these worlds also live among us. Most of the cells in our bodies are bacterial cells that profoundly influence our digestive, immunological, and even brain processes. Under a microscopic lens, a single being, an individual person, ends up being an ecosystem of different beings, living together, collaborating, interacting.

The present cries out for our boldness. The violence of global inequality and the planetary crisis call for acts of audacity, radical changes in how we understand our economies, cultures, and political priorities. But the focus on diversity and the microbiotic scale invite us, as Eduardo Galeano said, not to confuse greatness with size. At the scale of a body, of the nearest tree, of the next dish, live stories that challenge the most stubborn myths of our time.