From Environmental Futures to Alterities: Relating and Speculating With Useful Microbes

Abstract

In contemporary microbiology, the field of electromicrobiology depends on ‘useful microbes’ for its increasingly sophisticated biohybrid applications such as biosensing. Drawing on our respective experiences in a multidisciplinary biosensor laboratory as ethnographer and engineer, we explore the mutative human, more-than-human, and beyond human relationality of our microbial interlocuters. This article relates the critique of Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach to nature by scholars of environmental alterity into a critique of Future Studies (FTS) approach to environmental futurity. We argue that the common approach to environmental foresight is limited by anthropogenic futurity, which assumes environmental outcomes are purely human-determined. To challenge this human-centered paradigm, we introduce the concept of environmental alterities, focusing on the heterogeneity, limits, and radical non-relationality of microbial agencies, thereby exposing the constraints of FTS’s scalar imagination. Our analysis proceeds in three parts. First, a historical review of microbial biosensor research reveals two primary tendencies in human-microbe relations: an instrumental approach and a collaborative one. Second, drawing on ethnographic participant observation in a multidisciplinary biosensor laboratory, we demonstrate how these categories break down in practice. The lab’s commitment to communicating with microbes is complicated by instrumental practices, yet the microbes’ functional difference—such as the biosemiotics of quorum sensing—makes visible relational gaps where microbial agency exceeds human conceptual frames. Finally, we speculate on the extra-human relationality of the exoelectrogenic microbe Shewanella oneidensis, the platform organism in our study. Its capacity to respire metals participates in a planetary-scale electron-transfer and geomaterial transformation operating beyond contemporary anthropogenic framing. We conclude that if environmental futurity is to properly reckon with the Anthropocene, it must look upon the surpluses of relational and non-relational alterity extending from the present, moving beyond frameworks that superimpose human-centered relations onto fractured ecological futures.