This article draws on interview data and insights from environmental studies and somatic therapy to argue for the significance of thinking ‘with rivers’ in order to reaffirm human and nonhuman entanglements in the current challenges presented by anthropogenic devastation. River microbial communities are unintelligible and complex entities due to their unclear origin and continuous flow downstream. The account of one environmental scientist is presented to consider how the metaphors of movement used in the riverine context assist in exploring the complicated dynamics of fluid communities facing constantly changing environments I call ‘microbial rivers’. A pollution incident affecting a UK river, where microbial communities responded by growing in number and activity, further illustrates the intersection of communities and ecosystems in their adaptation to troubling human interventions. Engaging with somatic understandings of trauma, this article proposes thinking with flow as a possibility to reimagine the capacity for renewal when experiencing debilitating adversities, thus countering apocalyptic responses of immobility in the face of environmental destruction and inviting novel opportunities for growth for human and nonhuman communities.
This visual essay explores more-than-human relationships between microbes and humans emerging across agricultural fields and scientific laboratories. Through material collected across fields and labs, and drawing on the concept of microbiopolitics proposed by Heather Paxson, the essay reflects on emerging attitudes of both affect and management. These relationships arise and become visible through growers’ and scientists’ practices, the objects they employ and the spaces they occupy. Seen in this light, pots and compost become the manifestation of attentive relationships with invisible nonhumans, potentially important in tracing the unfolding of ongoing environmental crises.
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