Siv Watkins: Intimacy with the microbial world (ep408)
“Am I a human being having a microbial experience? Or am I collection of microbes having a human experience?”
In this episode we are joined by Siv Watkins, founder of Microanimism: a platform for examining how human beings and human culture engages with microbial organisms. Inviting us to deepen our intimacy with the complex, multi-faceted microbial world, Siv deploys the lenses of science, mysticism, and animism to advocate for some of the smallest, and most mysterious, beings on the planet.
We glimpse into the depth of entanglement between microbes (also referred to as “the smalls”) and their ancient relationship with cycles of life and death; sink into a purview of deep time; and explore questions of “what makes us human?” and whether “our” micro-biomes are even “ours.”
Join us as we “shrink down” to expand cosmic perspectives in relation to the reverent, and sometimes terrifying, microbial kin.
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About our guest:
Siobhán (Siv) Watkins is an academically trained microbiologist, independent scholar, ritualist, and the founder of Microanimism.
Since 2003, Siv has held scientific positions in industry, commercial, and academic research/faculty settings. Her doctoral studies, which she completed in 2011, were on communities of bacteria in satellite wastewater treatment systems. She has also performed scientific research in conservation microbiology, freshwater pollution and bioremediation, environmental viral diversity, and the use of microbiomes and microbial communities in sustaining responsible stewardship of the extended natural environment.
In 2016, Siv became a student of ritual/esoteric arts and technology. This aspect of her scholarly work was the catalyst for beginning to examine the world of the smalls within the context of animism. Much of this work is presented in the resources you’ll find on this website.
Originally from the UK (English/Welsh/Scots ancestry), Siv currently lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico (traditional home to the Pueblo peoples) where she makes home with two cats and a horse.
Artistic credits:
Music: When You Carried Me by Oropendola via Spirit House Records
Episode-inspired artwork by isadora machado.
Dive deeper:
Learn more about Siv here
American Gods, a book by Neil Gaiman
Expand your lenses:
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Siv Watkins: When I was a small kid, I became sort of unhealthily fixated on microbes for a variety of reasons, and I was slightly obsessive about them. So when it came time to dodge getting a real job and go to college and university instead, studying microbes was a natural choice for me. And also, yeah, [I was] a bit lazy because I just found it really easy to learn about them. It was a part of my studies that I just completely soaked up and other aspects of my degree and my education, which are a bit more challenging. I found less easy to deal with. But the “smalls” (microbes) I have always been, I guess the right word is is magnetic. Magnetic and chaotic and scary and nourishing. And I don't know, tons of other words, I guess. But yeah, there's not really an easy answer to that question.
Kamea Chayne: When people think about the history of how our planet came to be, it's quite well accepted and understood that our plant ancestors played a vital role in, for example, taking in and converting energy from the sun and breathing out and exhausting oxygen, which helped make the earth more and more hospitable for various other creatures, including humans.
But you stressed that microbes actually deserve a lot more credit as the ones who brokered the deal of photosynthesis. So I would appreciate it if you could expand more on their role as brokers and why microbes, or as you call them, “the smalls”, deserve more recognition than is often given to them for making the larger life of earth possible as we know them today.
Siv Watkins: I love this question, and I'm so glad that you mentioned photosynthesis because it's just one of my favorite topics to harp on about.
In the teaching that I have done, I often speak about “the smalls” as being conduits or vestibules between other living factions of the world, and photosynthesis is a very wonderful example of what I mean by that.
The reason why plants are so important on this planet— and all respect to the plant world of course—is that a long, long time ago they developed an association, a biological association, with very specific groups of microbes that ultimately went on to evolve to become chloroplasts, which are the organelles in plants that mediate photosynthesis. There's a similar analog to what happened with human beings. We contain organelles called mitochondria. The powerhouse of the cell. And mitochondria used to be microbes as well. So this is a very clear example, two very clear examples, of the foundational impact that microbes have had on two very large groups of living beings, two very present groups of living beings that we're all familiar: with humans and plants.
But really, that foundational aspect of the character of all microbes, whether they're contemporary microbes, microbes that were the first things to be alive on this planet, they lay the bedrock for every other living thing. Every other dead thing that has ever existed on this planet. And it makes sense that a lot of human people wouldn't realize that because up until a few years ago, I think an awful lot of humans had no reason really to consider the microbial universe in their day to day life. And then we were all confronted with it quite starkly in that sense.
But once folks start to pick away at that sort of scab of understanding of how much of a role microbes play in the lives of other things in good ways and bad ways temporally, spatially, physically, spiritually, it really does open up a very rich vein of a new dimension to start considering the world around us and how we fit in that world.
So that question is annoyingly again, one that has a very multifaceted answer to.
Kamea Chayne: And it's kind of unfortunate, I think, that the moments people become more attuned to the presence and role of microbes are disproportionally when they're causing some sort of negative impacts like epidemics or bacterial or viral infections and so forth. But there's still so much we don't know about the microbial world, which is really humbling. And I think for me even more fascinating to learn about and think about.
You share that microbes are as unique to every person as their fingerprint. And wherever we go, we leave a microbial signature. And you also write that your “microbes are not yours. They are very distinct living entities that happen to agree that your gut or skin or lung or mouth at this particular moment in time is a suitable and rewarding environment to live in”. With these things in mind, how resonant is the analogy that our bodies are kind of like unique ecosystems and communities? As in, for example, there might not ever be a silver bullet one size fits all probiotics people can simply ingest to achieve microbial balance for their own bodily communities.
And also, could this idea that your microbes aren't yours be analogous to a particular forest? If they had a voice, for example, saying that the community of animals currently living here aren't ours, but they just happened to agree that in this moment our force is a suitable and rewarding environment to live in. I wonder if this train of thought is applicable to different levels of being-ness in that way, and if so, whether there could be a sense of indigeneity in the microbial world as well, like communities saying we belong to this body, this land, this ecosystem. I know I just toss several things into the mix here, but I'm curious whatever direction you'd want to take.
Siv Watkins: Yeah, there's a lot of really spicy stuff in that to talk over. One of the things that I harp on about in all of the online courses that I've offered and a lot of the essays there are upon my platform “Microanimism” is this idea of agency, right? This idea that…
…if you can respect that a juniper tree or a mountain lion has its own sense of agency in the world, then it stands to reason that you need to be able to do that for microbes.
Right? And so that means and this ties in a little bit to what you said about the unfortunate way that a lot of people come to know about the smalls, which is if a mountain lion mauls you on a hike or, you know, a friend of yours on a hike, I think people are a lot more comfortable with saying, well, mountain lions and mountain lions, and that's what they do than somebody dying of rabies. And that's that's not to discount people who have violent interactions with slightly more charismatic fauna and living things. But I think the idea of infectious disease is really a troublesome concept to a lot of people because it doesn't involve somebody applying a violence to one's body. It involves an ingress. It's a violation. It's a nonconsensual invasion of some part of you. And it's really difficult to invite the idea of agency. It's really difficult to reconcile the idea that something that is invading one's being that way, that it's not an act of malice, that it's just a thing. And so when you say, oh, it's unfortunate that folks come to learn about the smalls that way. That's true, because there's a lot— of I mean, I'm heavily biased—of very shiny, sparkly, amazing things to learn about in the microbial world. But learning about them through disease is it's just a thing. It's a very obvious interaction that we have with them.
Less obvious interactions that we still have on the day to day involves things like making food or gardening or interacting with pets or the built environment. It's part of a great a tapestry.
And this idea of the smalls, that inhabit the surface of our body and the inside parts of our body, not belonging to us, I think is a really important step to understanding the relationship that we have with them on lots and lots of different planes.
So, yes, there are these very obvious biological interactions that we have with them, physiological interactions, sometimes mental. And those are the ones that science, and I'm doing air quotes, knows about. There's the ones that science is familiar about. So when we talk about the probiotic industry or when we talk about the microbiome being the source of all solution to any number of diseases, we're talking about science with a capital “S” manipulating a population that associates with us with very little regard for the fact that it's not an ownership based system. It's a it's a collaboration. Right? And the microbes that human beings have that plants have, that my pet cats have, that my pet horses, have were collected and developed long before we were all born. A lot of these microbes are handed down from our mother, the collected by our parents, by our family, by the people that we interact with through interaction with buildings and landscape and food. So maybe hundreds of years before we're even born. So there's a really substantial and profound embedding, which again, is a conduit between us and the rest of the world that's mediated very, very solidly by the smalls. And I think your analogy of the forest and the animals is a pretty good analogy. And I also think that depending on one's own personal relationship with the smalls, there are lots and lots of other analogies to be had, too.
So my relationship to the Smalls, as somebody who has studied them for 20 years and who is enamored by them, terrified by them, in love with them, all these things is going to be very different to somebody who has Lyme disease or is HIV positive. And this, I think, is why, you know, there are so many rabbit holes to go down when you start thinking about this work is because this universe and these relationships and dynamics between human beings and the smalls is multifactorial. It goes through time, through space. Yes, we have the biological physiological relationships, but we also have emotional relationships with them, psychological relationships with them, ancestral relationships with them. And that's why I think it's such a meaty space to start digging into.
Kamea Chayne: And also through another perspective, this idea “that our microbes aren't ours” I wonder if that could be the beginning of people also seeing that individuals aren't these neatly bounded beings, but actually in everything that we consist of are more than human. Like there's no separation. There's not one definitive way of defining me as a self because my cellular and microbial community make me transforming as well.
Siv Watkins: Yeah, absolutely. And that's a really powerful idea when you start thinking about micro animism.
The sense of self becomes very blurry when you start thinking about one's own personal microbiome and you start to look at this situation a little bit differently The questions become things like: am I a human being having a microbial experience? Or am I collection of microbes having a human experience?
Because there are more microbial cells associated with our persons than there are human cells, and they play roles in digestion and our nervous system and our immune system. Like truly, there are many aspects of that relationship that define us, define our persons, and define very broad reaching aspects of who we are and our personal histories, our ancestral histories, all sorts of things. So yeah, I think that over the last couple of years I've tried to stop using the word “nature” quite so much because I think that the idea of nature is a bit of a falsehood. It suggests that there is this separation between us and everything else when of course we're just we're just part of a continuum. And that comes back to the idea of a conduit. And it can be easier to see how microbes allow us to merge with that continuum, to blend in with the rest of the life and the death around us that we might find difficult when we're sort of embedded in a capitalist materialist society, as many of us are.
Kamea Chayne: Just thinking through the microbial world, the fungi world, it just brings up so many questions. And this could go into like a million different directions. But you've mentioned before that microbiologists you've worked with talk about a sixth sense when working with microbes. How would you elaborate on that and on this statement that “culturing microbes is an art and relies heavily on intuition”. What does this look like in practice? And is this the beginning of how you came to relate science to animism?
Siv Watkins: Yeah, that's a beautiful question. And again, I mean, it's probably becoming clearer at this point that exist in the space of almost complete chaos.
I always joke to my students that microanimism, is just a collection of unanswered questions or unfinished thoughts, really.
But yeah, I mean, I guess arguably scientists have some of the most practical, logical folks that you can interact with. At least I was when I started, because you rely so heavily on data and numbers. And I love data and I love numbers still, but you do come to a point where you realize, especially when you're working with microorganisms, who for whatever reason are difficult to study, that you don't know what you don't know.
And so, say you are growing E coli in the laboratory, which is one of the organisms that students will acquire first, because in theory that easy (air quotations again) to grow, And you'll be given a recipe which is like chicken broth for bacteria, and you'll make your broth and you'll sterilize the broth and you'll inoculate your breath with E coli. And within maybe half a day you'll have a lovely soup full of of E coli cells because bacteria reproduce exponentially. But sometimes it just doesn't work. Nine times out of ten, it will work. But the 10th time, sometimes it doesn't work. And it's consistently baffling and frustrating. And it can be discouraging for students and folks learning about bacteria. But when you get to the point in your career and you interact with folks are at the same stage in the career as you have been doing it for five years, ten years, often working with one organism, one genera or one species, or even one subtype of bacterium, you develop an intimacy. And even the most practically minded microbiologists that I've met still develop a level of intimacy with these organisms. I've just never been able to ignore that, I've always found that really fascinating. And so somebody who is really experienced at working with cyanobacteria, for example, will walk into the lab in the morning and see their flasks and say, oh, that that guy's not happy, he's about to die, needs more whatever, nitrogen or whatever. And you can be looking at a flask being like, well, it looks pretty, it's pretty green to me, itt looks okay, and then within 2 hours it's crapped out.
These relationships come from somewhere, and I never really had the balls to ask anyone about it directly. And I'm not sure why I haven't reached out to anyone since. I probably should do that. I should probably reach out to some colleagues and ask them about it. But I think when I began to examine what was going on within my own experience, the limits of my own experience, the truth of it is that every single human being has a very well-established, very well-developed relationship with the smalls, whether we know it or not. Right? And the vast majority of that relationship does not involve disease or suffering or epidemics or anything, but some of it, for sure. Yeah. Chicken pox or whatever.
But this other sort of more esoteric aspect of the dynamic between the smalls and the human beings is so tangible and so accessible to everybody, whether you're a microbiologist or not. I think we can't help but form those intimacies and those connections that we don't really understand.
It's just sort of delivered to us. And then, of course, you know, it's up to the individual how they pursue that relationship. What does that mean for them personally? And there's no real right or wrong answer there and really, sort of, human answers to how we interact with other-than-humans. But yeah, I think that. I think that's a really interesting discussion within the field of microbiology, and it's something that I've always gone back to whenever I've had a blip and thought that I was probably just a crazy lady, that there's something so tangible there to examine that connection between the scientist and the subject of their study.
Kamea Chayne: When you talk about this intimacy with and the agency of the smalls, it makes me think about the phrase culturing microbes. And I know that's just the other meaning of culture as a verb, but it does make me wonder about like the culture of microbial communities as well. And if that's something that's come up in your research or in your intuition and in your observation that it's possible for microbial life to develop and have distinct cultures.
Siv Watkins: Yeah. I mean, I guess arguably that's not really a thing for me to say yes or no to because I'm just a puny human being. But my sense of it is, yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, as with anything, all of the best thoughts and ideas and intuitions come from learning more about diversity. And so. Just by virtue of learning of the breadth of capacity and facility in the microbial world, I can absolutely see how there are personalities, which is very anthropomorphic sort of idea. But if you compare, for example, let's say the microbes that live up your nose, that probably live and die within the course of a few days, and you compare those ones to the ones that live in the crust of the earth, that have been there for millions and millions and millions of years—not dead, not alive or not really doing anything, but just almost sort of bearing witness to the planet as it grew up and the things that sprouted all over the surface of the planet. I mean, these are very disparate communities. There's a very two very different types of wisdom, both equally as valuable, both equally as engaging, both equally as capable in their own ways, but very, very different nonetheless. And this is also just with regard to the bacterial world. As soon as you start talking about the viral world, all bets are off. It gets really spooky really quickly. But I think what's worth mentioning here is the vast majority of the smalls that we're aware of that we have studied, are a result of the fact that they are accessible to our scientific methodology. But by virtue of applying some of a sort of kind of adorable but quite clumsy techniques for studying them, like culturing them in a laboratory, like growing our E coli soup, as soon as we start doing that, we're no longer working with a member of the ecology as it defines itself. It becomes domesticated, saying it becomes a different type of person. I guess it's analogous to what we were talking about with the idea of infectious disease and how that feels like an affront. It's a similar situation if you pull a microbe out of its environment and put it in the fridge and transfer it to a lab and you try and grow it in chicken broth or whatever that's non-consensual.
So this is why I think I ended up categorizing these sort of three very broad flavors of the relationships that we can examine as practitioners of microanimism, is these ideas of: what we know, we know (which comes from the E coli and the ones that live in the lab). What we know we don't know (which is the stuff that's completely inaccessible to techniques and tools). And then what we don't know, we don't know Which is what I spend a lot of time thinking about outside of the scope of more practical science and through slightly more esoteric interrogation. But I suppose that idea of domesticating these ones is a separate culture in of itself and another aspect of the universe that’s worth exploring a little bit that puts a whole new spin on how we interact with them when we start thinking about how we manipulate them, particularly for example, with biotechnology and and stuff like that.
Kamea Chayne: I really enjoyed dwelling in this uncomfortable space of not having clear answers. And actually a lot of these responses sparking a lot more questions for me. So I appreciate this conversation with you. And I'm also thinking about how applying the lens and tools of science to understand the smalls better might raise questions in regards to how the field of science currently defines what it is that even constitutes life to begin with. So what do you think is important to share or know about that?
Siv Watkins: Yeah. This is like it's such a soup-y, nebulous question because science loves boxes. Science loves is neat little receptacles that you can pick something up and plop it in this little box and say, yes, this, this pertains to this. So one of the first things that I remember being taught in school was the definition of life. And I have a Phd and I probably can spin off all of them in order, but it's stuff like respiration and excretion and and all that good stuff. But it's such a stuck boundary. I think especially to a microbiologist, to say this counts as alive because consistently, year after year, decade after decade, we see from the smalls, even with our very fumbling limited capacity to interrogate and examine and question them, that a lot of the stuff they do really doesn't fall within these categories of life. And again, I think a really obvious example of that are viruses. Microbiologists, biologists cannot agree whether or not viruses technically are alive. The main reason being that they're obligate intracellular parasites. So a virus traditionally has been defined as a being that can't replicate itself unless it invades a host cell and kind of hijacks the biochemistry of that cell to make proteins and things like that.
In the last ten years, we've come across viruses that appear to have the remnants of the machinery to make their own proteins. And very recently, we've found bacteria that are visible to the naked eye. And fundamental ideas of biology suggest that that shouldn't be possible. So, yeah, the idea of alive—and I don't I don't want to sound like like I'm being cute or anything—but the more I explore the idea of aliveness with the smalls, and I've had some really amazing conversations with students about this, too, I think it doesn't really matter to them. I think it's not as highly resolved a definition for them as it is for us. Not least because, and this is going to sound trite, but the microbial world makes deaths productive. Anything that's comprised of matter, organic matter, squishy bits and fatty bits and what have you, when it dies and it passes, the microbial universe turns it into stuff that can be used for something else. It brings everything back to the earth.
The microbial world, and again I'm referring mostly to bacteria, inhabits this very broad spectrum of what it means to be alive and what it means to be dead.
So E coli, doubles every 20 minutes, and it dies pretty quickly. But then you have some beings that live at the bottom of the oceans that divide every two or three years. And that's just contemporary bacteria.
If we think about the ancestral relationships that every generation of bacterium has since the beginning of time, it's just like this gigantic pool of really ancient wisdom.
And they don't operate with language the way that we do. I think an awful lot of people would find the idea of communicating with them a bit strange and a bit daunting, even for folks who have experience with communicating with other-than-humans. But it's just this this shimmering sort of kaleidoscopic repertoire of experience and knowledge and capacity. And within that repertoire, I think the concepts of aliveness and death and dying, it just doesn't make much difference to them either way.
Kamea Chayne: I also really appreciate conversations that encourage us to kind of undefine things in very rigid ways or to question accepted truths about the world so we can continue to ask these questions and be humbled by everything we're talking about here. I'm also interested in thinking through the ideas of embodied or unnamed knowledge and intellectual knowledge. So you've said before that “it probably doesn't matter that we only just figure it out in the last 100 years what a bacteriophage is?” I don't know if I pronounce that correctly, but you go on to say, “because we've been hanging out with them for a really, really long time anyway”. So maybe before we were able to put a name on the microbial world, people knew in other ways whether or not their interpretations or stories were necessarily correct, that these complex processes of decomposition and transformation and exchanges were happening by way of not readily visible activities. Maybe it was felt, maybe it was embodied, maybe it manifested in larger symptoms that were then visible and people could make meaning out of.
And at the same time, you share your concerns with people now, with an intellectual awareness of microbes saying things like, oh, we can use these microbes to help clean up oil spills or maybe address plastic pollution and so forth. So I guess there's a delicate recognition that knowledge, intellectual knowledge, while being really humbling and awareness expanding and amazing for most, could open up possibilities for people to feel like they have a sense of control over, to use this knowledge in service to particular interests or to solve problems in very limiting ways. And I don't see any of this in a black and white either-or way at all. But just yeah, still maintaining the recognition that growing our knowledge so we can take better care of ourselves and our communities and our planet is crucial.
But I am curious to have you share more about your concerns in regards to the use of knowledge of microbial life to solve different crises and anything else that might have surfaced for you from these prompts.
Siv Watkins: Yeah. These notions of techno solution-ism and and manipulation of the smalls is so foggy. And I've made quite a lot of big statements about this kind of thing because I have a big mouth, but also, I haven't I haven't really been able to settle on the parts of it that feel intuitively squeaky for me. So I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't use bacteria to produce insulin. Like, I'm not suggesting we should go back to using pig pancreas to do that. And there are lots of other extraordinary technologies that have come about in association with microbial technologies, which I'm grateful for and probably myself have benefited from and people I know have benefited from. I'm sure we all know at least one person who needs insulin, all this kind of stuff. So I try to approach this as gingerly as I as I can, but the idea of microbial technology and techno solution-ism does make me nervous.
And I think part of what makes me nervous about the idea [of techno solutionism] is that there's a fundamental gap in understanding the dynamic of the relationship between the smalls and the human beings.
Am I saying, if everybody woke up tomorrow morning and were invested in honoring the dynamic that they personally have with the smalls and blah blah, that would make it better? No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that this is a question that is worth asking. It's a question that is worth exploring. And I think it's very messy.
One of the things that I always say is like, if you're going to feel okay about throwing domesticated fungi in the ocean to clean up oil spills, then you should feel okay about throwing pandas in the ocean to clean up oil spills. Which is, you know, facetious, obviously, but it hits different. It hits people a different way when you're talking about fungi, because I think there's a sense that they are disposable and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because they grow prolifically. Maybe it's because they don't have very cuddly little bodies. Maybe it's just that people aren't aware of who they are. And even deeper within this idea, there has been a lot more interest in the idea of fungal worlds and mycelial worlds in the last few years, which is great. Lots of very, very smart people, much smarter than me, talking about human dynamics between us and fungi. And I think a lot of people feel warmly towards the fungi, but I'm not sure if that extends necessarily towards viruses, towards bacteriophages, towards bacteria. And I don't know why that is.
I think if we're if we're going to if we're going to put this sort of mantle on the microbial world, which is essentially they're going to clean up all of our mess for us, like look at these amazing beings that can eat uranium, look at these amazing beings that we can clean up the Ganges River with. Aren't they wonderful? Lucky us kind of a thing. It's like that's kind of how we got to where we were in the first place, right? Is this idea of doing a thing to fix the thing in the short term without really understanding what the long term consequences are. This relates also back to the idea of this, the planes that they inhabit. I mean, it's not difficult to find a bacterium or fungi in the soil that is able to bio convert one thing into another thing. It's what the famous for. It's what they do, right. It's not hard to find a bacillus or something else that can eat molybdenum for you. Thing is, it's like, yeah, they can do that, but they're designed to do it over evolutionary timescales and not in the next three or four years. So what would happen if we dumped, I don't know, a few Olympic swimming pools worth of fungi into the Atlantic Ocean to deal with plastics? We don't know. And without a lot more of depth to our relationship with those ones and the processes that allow them to do that, I think it's concerning that we would just feel so blasé about doing it. That's a really wooly answer to that question. I still really have a lot of trouble framing my thoughts about this and they change all the time and some. Yeah, sometimes it's fun to talk about and sometimes I'm just like, oh man, I don't know what I'm talking about. I should become an accountant.
Kamea Chayne: So we are nearing the end of our main conversation. And here I'm interested in connecting the micro with the macro. So when we think about the various interconnected, more macro crises like climate change or social injustices, health epidemics, biodiversity loss and so forth, what role can microanimism play in terms of helping to expand or root our perspectives on these macro issues, or even serving as reminders of what we don't know and are incapable of fully understanding?
Siv Watkins: Hmm. Yeah. This is a wonderful question that I'm asked a lot, and I always feel like there's somebody out there who's a bit more equipped to deal with this than I am because I'm real good at microbes and I find it much harder to understand human beings. But I think what I come back to a lot is, and it sounds trite, or I don't know maybe performancy a little bit, but the truth of it is: the most obvious example that I can offer from the microbial universe that worth exploring is the importance of diversity. It's the importance of abundance versus rarity. It's the importance of violence and peace, the importance of lots of members in a community that can do the same thing as other members and members that can do completely different things to other members. Like, I can I could talk for hours and hours and hours about microbial diversity and how all of it feeds into a greater structure.
In any sort of engineered or observed system, when you lose diversity, you end up with a sick system. You end up with a system that doesn't function the way it's supposed to.
And I have in the past written essays about this in Relationship to capitalism, for example, and it doesn't you can replace the word capitalism with anything else and still find the root comparison is diversity biologically speaking. This is not even from a sort of more esoteric kind of cerebral perspective. Fundamentally, in biological systems, in ecologies, diversity is what keeps every member strong and doesn't take long for folks to figure that out when you start stepping into this work.
// Musical intermission //
Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?
Siv Watkins: American Gods by Neil Gaiman has really framed a lot of my perspective on the living universe.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Siv Watkins: Lots and lots of time on my own.
Kamea Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Siv Watkins:I look after rescued racehorses and yeah, those guys, the rescued racehorse is a pretty special beings.
Kamea Chayne: Siv, thank you so much for joining me on the show today and for this incredibly thought-provoking conversation for now. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Siv Watkins: I guess I want everybody to know that the microbial universe is not a trivial thing to think about. It's really old. It's really scary. It's very confusing. But stepping in and meeting those ones on a level that you perhaps haven't considered before can do really wonderful things to your perspective about the rest of the world. So I invite you all to give it a try.
