All Hail Bacteria!

(Berkeley, March 20, 2018 ) — On Sunday, I came to more fully understand one of the most important ideas about life on our planet thanks to a new movie called Symbiotic Earth, directed by John Feldman. This in-depth​, ten-part journey into the science of our ecosystem brings humanity’s choice into sharp focus: We can learn how to live more like bacteria does — symbiotically creating an environment in which we can thrive — or we keep putrefying our global petri dish and eventually perish.

Symbiotic Earth is about the revolutionary breakthroughs in understanding made by late American scientist Lyn Margulis.

“Our view of man apart from nature, man exploiting nature, has got to change. This is the basis of the environmental crisis. People are ruining their environments.” Looking into a microscope, she continued, “These bacteria are producing an environment that is livable. We have a lot to learn from them.”

So it’s survival not of the fittest, but of the most convivial? The most cooperative? The most biologically compatible? If we look to bacteria for clues, survival is not something to be fought for but a community to be created. And apparently all we have to do is learn how to be like bacteria. Margulis made instant and profound sense to me. At the ocean, she picked up a foamy sponge of bacterial slime. Explaining that it is both essential to life and found everywhere, she called it “a planetary petticoat, the underwear of the earth.”

Some of her revelations were scandalous — not because she talked about undies but because the neo Darwinian guys (just about everybody) didn’t like hearing that evolution and survival wasn’t all about DNA. To them, a symbiotic cellular process in conjunction with its environment sounded way too scary, especially if a woman was talking about it. But Margulis soldiered on, one more reason to love her and this movie. She was a threat to the neanderthals who to this day seek to justify perpetual warring by pointing to perpetual scarcity of resources.

I sat in front, and after the screening, was thrilled to listen to Fritjov Capra and director John Feldman for the Q & A session. Capra is still as smart and charming as ever, and he made the point that this movie could help create a whole new world view — based on our mutual understanding of how inextricably we are connected to our environment, and how important it is for everyone to get this — on a cellular level.

I asked Capra what could be done to bridge the gap between what science knows and the public understands, especially in the red states. He had some good advice: “People need to come together and create islands of sanity,” he said. “Make it a regular thing to get together with your community and connect with one another, talk about what is happening in this crazy world, and share a little bacteria with each other while you are about it.”

In my book The Girl from Spaceship Earth, Bucky says, “It is upon the integrity of the individual that humanity’s future rests.” Only now do I realize this is not just a philosophical thing, but a biological one.

This movie cracked my mind open more than anything since Bucky’s lectures of thirty-six years ago. It gave me hope that we humans might pass our final exam after all, and just as importantly, that more brilliant but disregarded women will finally get the recognition they deserve and a rightful place in history.

Just one note, the ten-part movie may be too long for many people to digest at one sitting, so viewers should plan to pace themselves. If the film were edited into a manageable length, Symbiotic Earth could become a commercially viable film, which would be a great thing for the planet. I hope this happens, that Lyn Margulis becomes a household name, and that every living human being comes to understand just how connected we are to the world that creates us every minute of every day, and that it all happens in time to turn things around for our species.

#SymbioticEarth #BacteriaRules #LynMargulis #HumanityChoice

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