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Short abstract:

This presentation looks into the scientific imaginaries connected to bioremediation and explores the frictions between the handing over of agency to the microbes, and the simultaneous thrusting of microbes into human’s advantage.

Long abstract:

"Microbes have lived on this planet for such a long time that they have already figured out all the solutions; there’s a microbe for every pollutant" I am told during a lunchbreak in the lab kitchenette. After more than a century in which microbes have been thought of as enemies to be eradicated, an emerging probiotic turn is now recasting microbes as phenomenal allies, essential companions and serviceable labourers. In this context, "bioremediation" has come into view as the promise to repair damaged ecologies through the manipulation of selected organisms capable of balancing out, transforming and restoring entire ecosystems.

By drawing on my ongoing ethnographic engagement with microbiologists’ practices and discourses, I look into what bacteria look like from the perspective of a microbiology laboratory focused on metabolism and the conservation of energy. I thus wonder how the way microbes are framed, managed and manipulated at the molecular level might provide specific modes of interspecies relation and possibilities of action, reaction, and intervention in the current global environmental crisis. In this presentation, I look into the research and practices that underpin imaginaries and research agendas connected to bioremediation and the promise of a more sustainable ecological management through the manipulation and control of microbial transformations. The microbiologists’ appreciation for the seemingly infinite metabolic potential of bacteria provides an entry point to discuss the frictions between the handing over of agency to the microbes, and the simultaneous thrusting of microbes into human’s advantage.