Micro 002: The Microbiome as Terrain & Atmosphere
To think of the microbiome is to challenge the limits of our perception. It exists outside of our sight, beyond immediate sensation, and yet it is foundational to nearly every process that sustains life. The difficulty we’ve realised in our mission to make the microbiome legible is conceptual; how do we hold in mind something that is both microscopic and immense in its influence?
Rather than imagining the microbiome as a collection of isolated organisms, perhaps we can begin to understand it as both terrain and atmosphere; as something we inhabit, and something that inhabits us.
As terrain, meaning landscape, the microbiome is structured, specific, and situated. Just as landscapes vary across geography, microbial communities differ across environments, surfaces, and bodies. The skin is not the gut; the gut is not the soil; the soil is not the air. Each site carries its own conditions, pressures, and possibilities, informing which organisms can thrive and how they interact. These microbial terrains are formed through time, through exposure, through the accumulation of habits and environments. Diet, movement, stress, materials, and climate all leave their trace and impact. In this sense, the microbiome is continuously responding to the conditions in which it exists.
We don’t have to work very hard to understand the atmosphere; it’s simply there. Something we’re held within, and something we move through without needing to define it. Terrain, on the other hand, is more visible, and far more immediate. We recognise its diversity across the planet, and how radically conditions shift from one landscape to the next, with life responding accordingly. We witness happening daily and seasonally in our lives, wherever we are situated within the world.
When we turn to the microbiome, we can draw on these familiar ways of seeing. We might think in terms of microscopic landscapes and microbial beings; as forms of life existing in concert, continuously shaping and being shaped by the terrains and atmospheres they inhabit. The microbiome is something inside us, and it's around us too. It is unseen; moving, shifting, and connecting us in ways that go beyond neat individual boundaries. The microbiome shows us that we are part of a wider field of circulation and relationship, and thinking of it as a governing terrain and atmosphere offer us a way to hold that tension.
We believe that seeing the microbiome has the potential to change how we act. When reminded of our interdependence with the tiniest forms of life, and how they in turn affect us, we can start to turn away from short-term intervention and toward longer-term awareness.
We would love to know, what becomes possible when you begin to notice your microbial terrain and atmosphere?
