“ Bacteria are not germs, but the germinators—and fabric—of all life on Earth. In declaring war on them we declared war on the underlying living structure of the planet—on all life-forms we can see—on ourselves.” —Stephen Harrod Buhner1
When my children were young, our chickens walked in and out of the house; I wiped up accidents if they occurred, but I didn’t scrub with Lysol. The boys played outside in the dirt and mud in the summer and swam in the river every day instead of taking showers. In winter, they bathed once or twice a week, whether they needed it or not. I taught them to eat food after it fell on the floor, as long as there was nothing obviously sticking to it.
We shared ice cream cones with our dog. We drank raw unpasteurized milk. We baked bread from a 200-year-old fermented sourdough starter that had purposefully picked up bacteria and yeasts from the unwashed kitchen tables of hundreds of women in log cabins across the American prairies and huts across the steppes of Russia.
Was this living dangerously? I don’t think so.
The most basic allies that we have overlooked in the era of industrial medicine are so close to us we can’t even see them. Our focus on sterility has made us blind. Modern medicine is just beginning to rediscover and celebrate the secret of life, something that regenerative agriculture has already embraced: a thriving microbial ecosystem.
Each one of us harbors an ecosystem that includes at least 1,000 trillion bacteria and other microorganisms. Ninety percent of the cells in our bodies are not our own. Yet for years and years we have associated “germs” with illness, and have done everything we could to get rid of our germs: scrubbing furiously at our bodies, inside and out, with antiseptic wipes and antibiotic regimens, and purifying our food chain so that no one else’s germs can enter us. And it’s true: when someone’s immune system is compromised—because of a virus, because of a cut in the skin or membranes, or because of stress or malnutrition—there are a few strains of bacteria (fewer than 200) that will opportunistically come in and create an infection; sometimes a horrendous infection. But most of the time, most bacteria create health—lush, complicated, life-giving, fertile health—in our bodies, in the soil, in the ocean, and everywhere around us. That’s because bacteria and other microorganisms help things grow and thrive, including us.
Building Healthy Inner Landscapes
It was once believed that babies were sterile at birth, but it turns out that even in the protected space of the uterus, fetuses start to develop a microbiome: an ecological community of microorganisms that literally share a person’s body space.2
As soon as infants are out in the world, they need many more beneficial bacteria in order to survive. They pick up some of those healthy bacteria (such as Bifidobacteria and Lactobacillus) from the birth canal, which colonize their digestive tracts and allow them to easily digest breast milk. These lay the groundwork for other helpful gut bacteria to be welcomed in through breastfeeding (breast milk has more than 600 species of bacteria34) and casual contact, such as sucking on fingers, toys, and everything around them. The skin of babies is colonized with bacteria via similar routes: first the birth canal, and then by contact with the skin of people who care for them—all teeming with microorganisms.
Traditionally, after weaning, children and adults constantly replenished their intestines with beneficial microorganisms by eating raw fruits and vegetables with minuscule bits of soil still clinging to them, raw milk products (from healthy, grass-fed cows), raw or rare fish and meats, and a wide array of lacto-fermented foods full of beneficial bacteria and yeasts.5 Once mobile, we travel in a personal cloud of microorganisms, extending out from our bodies into the air around us, that announces our arrival wherever we go, leaves traces of our travels on surfaces around us, and mingles momentarily with other people’s clouds as we wait in line for school lunches.
The landscape of microorganisms in our guts, mouths, noses, eyes, ears, genitalia, skin, and personal space is built up gradually, and then replenished throughout life from the microbiomes of people and animals we touch and kiss, foods we eat, and the world around us.
By adulthood, each of us has a uniquely personal microbiome reflecting not just our mother’s microbiota, but also the personal history of each of the people who have held us and cared for us; the dogs, cats, and cows who have licked us; the friends we have wrestled with; the foods we have eaten; the cities we have lived in and traveled to; the people with whom we have shared intimate moments or passed on a crowded street; the money and objects we have touched; and the places where we dug in the dirt, swam in the river, chewed on the grass, or ate wild strawberries.
Life, when lived as it is meant to be lived, is a deeply communal activity. It’s a sensual dance of species through spaces, the seen and unseen, a continual weaving together of our interior and exterior worlds.
Lacto-Fermented Foods
Long before the Industrial Revolution, before anyone tried feeding whiskey swill to cows, people understood how to partner with microorganisms to do work. In particular, they knew how to preserve foods, extract nutrients, change flavors, and prevent illnesses with special help from a family of bacteria called Lactobacilli, along with yeasts and other tiny allies.
Traditionally cured lacto-fermented meats, such as salami, can hang from the rafters for months without going bad, with no need for the addition of nitrates or nitrites (which have been linked to a variety of cancers). Scurvy on long voyages was conquered by Captain James Cook, who stocked his ships with barrels of live, bubbling sauerkraut, and Polynesian seafarers sustained themselves on long voyages with fermented taro root, called Poi.
Korean families buried cabbages and turnips—flavored with garlic, ginger, shrimp, and hot peppers—in containers underground in order to be able to have enzyme-rich vegetables in the form of kimchi all winter. The Swiss made cheese out of bacterially rich unpasteurized milk and cream during the spring and summer months (when the cows were grazing on fast-growing pastures) and ate it all winter to replenish themselves with nutrients.6
Traditional methods of pickling vegetables and curing meats all depend on bacteria, as does the production of traditional beer, mead, wine, root beer, and ginger ale. (In fact, these are the food production processes that Louis Pasteur was studying in order to understand how bacteria work, before he invented new methods of preservation that involved killing off pathogenic bacteria rather than working with natural food-preserving qualities of beneficial bacteria.) Ketchup, chutney, sauerkraut, relish, salsa, and most of the steak sauces we enjoy were originally made with the help of beneficial bacteria, as well. We still crave these flavors, but today’s versions no longer carry any of the original health-giving benefits.
In our modern diets, we pasteurize our pickles and sauerkraut, preserve our pepperoni with nitrites and nitrates, irradiate our meat and many vegetables, and overcook many of the other fresh foods that we traditionally would rely on for beneficial bacteria.
Until recently, yogurt was one of the only lacto-fermented foods that managed to survive the industrialization of our food system. But even yogurt, when produced in industrial facilities, has only a fraction of the types of beneficial bacteria it would have if it were made in people’s homes from raw milk.
Health Benefits of Fermented Foods
Fermentation guru Sandor Ellix Katz writes about some of the research on health aspects of fermented foods in his book Wild Fermentation:7 8
Eating live fermented foods directly supplies your digestive tract with living cultures essential to breaking down food and assimilating nutrients, preventing diarrhea and dysentery, and improving infant survival rates.9
Ferments can inhibit growth of pathogenic bacteria, such as E.coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus, and Shigella.10
A study in the journal Nutrition concluded that Lactobacilli compete with potential pathogens for receptor sites at the mucosal cell surfaces of the intestines, providing a sort of “ecoimmunonutrition.”11
Fermentation creates new nutrients. As they go through their life cycles, microbial cultures create B vitamins, including folic acid, riboflavin, niacin, thiamin, and biotin.
Once they are residing in the large intestine, these bacteria also produce essential vitamins—K, B12, thiamine, and riboflavin—that human bodies cannot produce by themselves.
Lactobacilli create omega-3 fatty acids, essential for cell membrane and immune function.
Fermentation removes toxins, such as cyanide, from otherwise-inedible foods like certain varieties of cassava. It also removes lesser toxins like phytic acid from grains, which would otherwise interfere with absorption of minerals.
Fermentation breaks down nutrients into more easily digestible forms. Tempeh and miso are more digestible than soybeans, and yogurt and cheese are often more digestible than milk. Sourdough breads are more digestible than breads made with baker’s yeast.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization actively promotes fermentation as a critical source of nutrients worldwide because it improves the bioavailability of minerals present in food.
If lacto-fermented foods are so good for us, why aren’t they widely available in supermarkets? It has to do with profits. Lacto-fermented foods are alive and often literally bursting with enzymatic energy. Jars can break or overflow because of the fizzy aliveness of ferments. Like wine, batches of lacto-fermented foods also vary in flavor depending on which yeasts and bacteria are floating around in the air on a certain day, and depending on the temperature, season, and region they are made in. A live pickle (made by putting a cucumber in brine and letting it create its own vinegar, not by sticking a cucumber in vinegar) will taste very different if you eat it on day 6 versus day 20 or day 40.
None of these are benefits if you are trying to create a brand name product that always tastes the same and can be shipped all over the country and stored for months, or even years, on shelves without refrigeration. To sell things on a large scale means they must be easy to transport, have a long shelf life, and be predictable in flavor so that you can create a brand name that people “trust.”
Traditional Wisdom about the Microbiome
For 2,500 years, Chinese medicine has taught that three of the body’s seemingly disparate areas—the respiratory system, the large intestines, and the skin—are all part of one system, the wei qi or “protective function,” that regulates grief and depression and modulates immunity. Traditional Chinese dietary therapy also taught that people with weakness of this protective function could be nourished best by eating foods with a “rotten” flavor.
We puzzled over this language in acupuncture school, but it became clear once I understood the health benefits of lacto-fermented foods. The more I learn about the interaction between “rotten” lacto-fermented foods, the microbiome, mood regulation, and immunity, the more I appreciate the depth of traditional wisdom and “kitchen medicine.”
The Chinese theory is absolutely correct:
The skin (including orifices), the mucosal membranes of the respiratory system, and the large intestine are precisely the areas of the body where the microbiome is most active.
The microbiome can be nourished with “rotten” lacto-fermented foods.
Both mood and immunity, if not properly regulated by a well-nourished microbiome, can easily go awry.
[As this manuscript was being edited in the mid 2010s, scientific and popular articles about the microbiome started popping up all over the place. Interestingly, none of them gave credit to natural medicine or traditional cultures for having kept these concepts alive during the 150-year campaign of medical sterilization of our guts and lives. Few, if any, of them mentioned the role that lacto-fermented and raw foods play in keeping those microbiomes biologically diverse and well populated.]
Dirty Rats, Vaginal Births, “Old Friends,” and the Hygiene Hypothesis
In 1989, scientists proposed that the rate of chronic illness— in particular, allergic and autoimmune disorders—was rising in wealthier developed nations because of a lack of exposure to dirt and bacteria, specifically in the early years when the immune system is developing. This theory was nicknamed the “hygiene hypothesis.” It started with one famous study, published in the Lancet, which showed that babies growing up on farms who were exposed to stables and to raw milk had a lower incidence of asthma and allergies, and another study that showed that children who had taken antibiotics in infancy were more likely to develop asthma.
Wild rats, whether living in the countryside or in city sewers, were also found to have healthier immune systems than laboratory rats raised without exposure to germs and dirt. The explanation given was that the dirty rats’ rough and rugged immune systems were better poised to fight actual pathogens, rather than reacting over mild irritants the way sheltered immune systems do when they have no actual work to do.
In our highly sterilized world, autoimmune and allergic disorders are on the rise. One in every 12 people in the US now has asthma (and 1 in 6 African-American children). The National Institutes of Health says the prevalence of autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and inflammatory bowel disorders, is rising dramatically, as well. It now appears that the lack of certain gut bacteria (as well as lack of other gut inhabitants, like worms) is implicated.
Babies born by cesarean section miss out on the initial colonizing bacteria from the mother’s birth canal and perineum—and have 20 percent higher incidence of childhood asthma and a decrease in overall immunity.1213 This puts a sting in the fact that the current rate of C-sections in the US is climbing fast—[in 2010] about one-third of all births in the US are C-sections (and half of all births in China). The World Health Organization estimates that only about 15 percent of these C-sections are necessary.14
One-quarter of babies born in the United States are never breastfed, and half are breastfed for less than six months,15 which represents a gigantic blow to a baby’s immune system at birth. There is no passive immunity from the mother without breast milk and the hundreds of varieties of good bacteria it provides.16
Graham Rook, a professor at the Centre for Infectious Diseases and International Health in London, renamed the hygiene hypothesis the “Old Friends Hypothesis.” The problem, according to Rook, is not so much about being too clean; it’s that in our newly sterilized lives we are missing out on many important members of our inner ecosystem, with which we coevolved, and that we actually rely on to teach our system how to respond without overreacting—to the environment, to food, to events, and to its own tissues.1718
Mood-Altering Bugs
Gut bacteria influence our behavior and thinking, our movements and moods. Using gene signaling, Swedish scientists were able to show that the brain chemicals serotonin and dopamine—as well as synapse function in general—all appear to be regulated by colonizing bacteria, and that learning, memory, and motor control were all affected by the absence of gut bacteria.
Mice raised in germ-free environments exhibit different behaviors than those raised with normal microorganisms. When microorganisms were reintroduced to the germ-free mice early in life they would exhibit “normal” behavior, but not if the microorganisms were introduced later.1920 Other studies showed that by transplanting gut bacteria from a group of mice known to be more passive to another, more active group, they were able to predictably change the mice’s behavior, and vice versa.21 Our little friends in our bellies apparently have a lot of opinions.
So what else are we missing when we have cesareans, bottle-feed our babies, bathe them every day, feed them baby foods out of a jar, and give them antibiotics “just in case”? Studies have linked deficiencies and imbalances of gut bacteria (particularly in the first few months of life) to depression, anxiety, autism, and other brain disorders, as well as to allergic and autoimmune disorders, and disturbances in gastrointestinal, metabolic, neuroendocrine, circulatory, and immune functions. The gut microbiota also influence drug metabolism and toxicity, dietary calorific bioavailability, immune system conditioning and response, and postsurgical recovery.22232425
Tolerance is one of three ways we learn to deal with potential pathogens. The first is avoidance (like seeing someone with a snotty nose and deciding not to kiss them). The second is by attacking a pathogen (which is what our immune system does as it creates most of the symptoms we think of as colds, flus, allergies, infections; coughing, fevers, runny noses, swelling, etc.). The third is to develop a tolerance to the pathogen: to learn to live with it or let it pass through us without being harmed by it.
The most striking part of this is that our human DNA is actually incomplete without the proper bacterial companions. Our DNA leaves the responsibility for some developmental jobs to the DNA of the bacteria it assumes will take up residency soon after birth. And not just minor jobs. Over the course of evolution, the colonization of the gut by microorganisms in early infancy appears to have become part of the process of brain development, which changes behavior and brain functioning later in life.26
Likewise, our DNA leaves some of the development of our immune system up to interactions with the collective genome of the microorganisms that, until recently, all humans hosted: our microbiome.27 In other words? We wouldn’t be humans without our worms and germs. Our DNA itself entrusts much of our survival to our willingness to host these tiny companions.
My Mother Doesn’t Want to Eat Worms
My mother doesn’t want to eat worms. I explain to her that although they are alive, these particular worms I am recommending won’t reproduce inside of her, and that if she needed to, she could kill them off with a single dose of worming medicine. In the meantime, she could stop her autoimmune disorder in its tracks.
Autoimmune disorders, such as asthma, multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s disease, are all significantly lessened by the presence of parasitic worms in the intestines—to the extent that some doctors are actually repopulating patients with worms in order to improve symptoms.
She’s not convinced. She shudders. But she is also desperate for a solution. Her own immune system is attacking her mucus membranes—giving her dry eyes and a dry mouth that keep her awake at night, and weight loss of five pounds a month. She is down to 110 pounds.
“How does it work again?” she asks.
“People and other animals evolved to have a few worms in them, just like the soil has worms. It’s part of our inner ecosystem. The immune system expects them to be there, is ready for them, and is designed to keep them from getting out of hand. If you get dewormed as a child, the part of your immune system that is supposed to keep your gut’s worm population at a healthy level has nothing to do, and no one to keep in check. So it starts attacking whatever other fleshy structures it can find: your own body’s tissues. When you repopulate your intestines with just a few worms, your autoimmune system stops attacking your body and turns its attention back to the worms.”
“It makes sense,” she says. “But I’m just not there yet.”
Dirty Little Secrets?
Canning factories aren’t the only thing that has kept us at a distance from our bacterial allies. The soil that commercial vegetables are grown in also has lost many of its beneficial bacteria because of the use of tillage, long periods without plant cover, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides, all of which tend to interfere with soil microorganisms.
Just as beneficial bacteria help to make nutrients available to us in our digestive tracts, soil organisms are responsible for making minerals biologically available to plants.2829 Although various arguments circle around about the exact reasons why, researchers agree that average nutrient contents (including protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C) of most vegetables and fruits have declined dramatically in the past fifty to seventy years.30 Loss of soil microorganisms and their capacity to make nutrients available to plants may well be part of the issue. But it is more complicated than that.
Glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Roundup®, is used as an herbicide on most GMO crops and as a drying agent on many others, but it was originally patented as a descalant to clean out mineral residues in industrial pipes and boilers—it does this by binding to minerals. This same chelating effect binds minerals in the soil when glyphosate is applied to crops. Monsanto patented it as an herbicide, then patented it again as a broad-spectrum antibacterial, in hopes of having it approved for medical use. It appears that it may be having an effect on our gut bacteria, as well.
Glyphosate’s antibacterial properties take effect by creating mutations in the bacteria, not by killing them off directly. Glyphosate does this by inhibiting the “shikimate” pathway—an ancient metabolic pathway found in bacteria, algae, fungi, and plants (unless they have been genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate’s effects), but not in animals. By inhibiting this pathway, glyphosate interferes with the bacteria, algae, fungi, and plants’ ability to biosynthesize vitamins, hormones, and amino acids.31
If you read through the patent, which is available online, {in particular the long list of organisms that it impacts] it seems highly likely that ingesting crops sprayed with glyphosate would impact the microbiota of the human digestive tract, through this same effect. If it works as an antibacterial, then it should function as an antibacterial when you ingest it, even if you are using it as an herbicide. Given glyphosate’s widespread use, it may well be having a profound impact on the microbiomes of many systems and species, starting with soil microorganisms, bees, and birds, and moving all the way up the food chain to the microorganisms in our own guts.
This may partly explain why Dr. Theirry Vrain has found an extremely strong correlation between the increase in glyphosate use and the increase in incidence of many diseases that are associated with deficiencies in gut bacteria—such as autism (R = 0.99), diabetes (R = 0.97), obesity (R = 0.96), and dementia (R = 0.99).
He explains his theories in his lecture “Engineered Food and Your Health: The Nutritional Status of GMOs.”32 Other researchers have shown that glyphosate increases rates of cancer, birth defects, kidney disease, and other health problems.33
[Since The Ecology of Care was published, far more research on Glyphosate has surfaced. Here’s just one academic article that shows the neurotoxic effects on children, including behavioral disorders, which are skyrocketing. For an overview by someone who has studied this for a lifetime, I strongly recommend the videos of Dr. Don Huber’s talks part one, and part two, at Fuller Field School in Kansas.]
Welcoming Back the Wild Messiness of Life
So what can we do about the fact that our modern health-care system and modern food production systems have been on a rampage to wipe out our inner companions? Pharmaceutical researchers are already jumping in to fill the void. But instead of telling patients to breastfeed, have more skin-to-skin contact, avoid industrially grown foods, and eat more raw and lacto-fermented foods, these private laboratories are now patenting and genetically engineering “beneficial” bacteria.
I’d suggest that, rather than waiting for pharmaceutical companies to sell us partial solutions at enormous costs, we start doing our own work to restore our collective microbiome. After all, the collective microbiome of humanity represents not only our future herd immunity but also the future of our emotional intelligence.
First we have to make peace with the fact that bacteria and even intestinal worms are not all bad, that clean isn’t always the same as healthy, and that sterile doesn’t always equate with safe. (Even if you still get squidgy about germs, you have to realize that there are only seven billion of us on the planet, and there are five nonillion bacteria, taking up more biomass than all the plants, humans, and other animals on Earth. Each of those bacteria is able to evolve faster than you can say “antibiotic.” Really, it’s time to make friends.)
For years I have taught that we need to honor and restore our inner ecosystems as well as our outer ecosystems in order to be healthy and vibrant now and in the future, and I have proposed that the second wave of medical progress needs to focus on dealing with the side effects of the effective removal of germs from our soil, our food, our homes, and our bodies.
We need to welcome in a wide variety of microorganisms, as if they were our prodigal sons and daughters. And we need to welcome, along with them, the complexity and unpredictability of self-organizing communities and the communal mind-set, symbiotic values, and creativity that come with them. Not just on the microbial level, because the campaign of sterility has extended far beyond the surgical theater and canning factories; it has swept through the offices of doctors and psychologists, into our homes, our schools, our lives, our landscapes, and even our hearts.
During the same time period that we took on the goals of conquering bacteria and subduing nature for our own human benefit, we developed a huge amount of fear and anxiety around dirt, sharing, closeness, “wildness,” and community living. Doctors started advising mothers to feed their babies “clean” formula from sterilized bottles. Children were put into cribs and away from the warm bodies they were meant to be with, for fear of germs. Nursing homes with professional doctors and nurses were touted as cleaner, safer places for elders than having them live with their families. Housewives started scrubbing furiously with antiseptic products, while teachers taught children to avoid strangers at all costs. Nurses started handing out forms for us to sign promising layers of privacy and secrecy, and psychologists started installing extra doors in their offices so that clients never had to cross paths with each other.
Now we are afraid of things that are “complicated” and “messy.” We are afraid of relationships themselves, and have forgotten the lessons that our bacterial companions teach us—that life is a wildly complex, collaborative, creative process, from inside to outside, from start to finish—from the inoculation of our digestive tracts with good bacteria in the birth canal to the hard work of the soil microorganisms that help to grow our food and that will someday turn our bodies back into beautiful fertile earth at the ends of our lives.
Like the laboratory doves I took care of in college, many of us now spend our days in artificial surroundings, protected from germs with hand sanitizers, communicating with our friends from a distance, with our creativity expressing itself mostly by our choices of the industrially made foods we eat or reject. Really, though, we were born for something much more interesting.
Walking Through Another Living Being
Increasingly, I see the Earth around me as alive. Like the microorganisms I’ve been writing about, I see complex relationships nested within other relationships, as well as indivisible manifestations of the whole.
While picking fiddlehead ferns, last year’s spores stick to my feet and repopulate the areas I traverse. Cultivation and harvesting become seamlessly integrated with the land, just by my moving through it. Burdock seeds cling to my legs as I stretch for a hard-to reach berry, and my boys disperse milkweed and dandelion in their roughhousing as we walk through a field to see the line of rocks the beavers are setting in place across the river. These relationships benefit us in future years, as we eat dandelion pancakes and steamed milkweed pods, gather the beavers’ sharpened sticks for staking garden plants, and cook up stir-fried burdock and dried wild leeks.
Over time I’ve learned to know things in pictures and smells and sounds, lessening the need to look things up or write things down. I know where the turkey-tail fungi and chaga will pop from the trees, offering powerful medicine to help prevent and treat cancer. I’ve learned—in a way that I can’t forget—that St. John’s wort has side effects of sun sensitivity: from seeing the white spots literally peel off of our cows, leaving the black spots intact, when the heifers accidentally browsed in the meadow where St. John’s wort grows thickly.
I know the places where the bright-blue indigo milkcap mushrooms and the tiny hedgehog mushrooms with their adorable spikes will spring up each year to add to our bounty. I know the places where the rare black raspberries grow, and how long to wait between black raspberries and wild blackberries.
There is also a sound that I’m aware of in my body (though it is not audible to my everyday ears): a subterranean hum that tells me I belong in this world—a reflection in my own cells of the sound of the whole. It’s a symphonic resonance that could only be possible with the accompaniment of trillions of organisms, from microscopic to majestic, busily working, eating, reproducing, learning, growing, resting, dying, and decomposing in and around each other, creating more and more life and complexity.
It sometimes seems to me that this must be the sound of the unfolding of evolution itself: the “is-ness” of an unnameable creative force moving through time. I suspect this might be the same as the inaudible “OM” emitted by Tibetan prayer wheels, the unspeakable “I AM” of the Torah, and whatever it was that led Jesus to ask his disciples over and over again to “open” their ears that they might hear. Whatever it is, I am in awe of it.
As I walk through this huge living being, I see the history, as well as the future, of medicine and agriculture. The species that surround me are neighbors, with long histories between our families.
“Oh, hello!” I say, as wild lettuce comes into view, towering above my head like a giant, looking down with amusement at the small human who spends hours caring for tiny little lettuce cousins in her garden.
“Aren’t you glorious . . . ” I say, while admiring the loops and baubles of wild cucumber climbing a dead tree, as if decorating it for an early Christmas, surrounded by the lacy white flowers of wild carrots.
“All right, all right . . . easy now . . .” I say, navigating around the wild parsnip and nettles that could hurt me if I touched their leaves while harvesting them.
I am struck silent when I walk through the prehistoric landscape of straight, leafless horsetail plants along the Ompompanoosuc River, near the old mill site. The plants seem to be like the Earth’s antennae for the ancient sound of the universe I’ve been feeling vibrate within me. The silica in them, which gives them their rigid structure and their medicinal benefits, stretches back to pre-human history, but it also links them to the era we are in right now—a silicon-based era of intense communication and interconnection through computers, allowing us to measure, understand, and show each other the direct impact of the industrial era on the planet. The horsetail quivers as I walk through it, sending signals into the future.
Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2002).
Ylva Kai-Larsen, et al., “A Review of the Innate Immune Defense of the Human Foetus and Newborn, with the Emphasis on Antimicrobial Peptides,” Acta Paediatrica 103, no. 10 (2014):1000–08.
Katherine M Hunt, et al., “Characterization of the Diversity and Temporal Stability of Bacterial Communities in Human Milk,” PLOS One 6, no. 10 (2011).
E. A. Quinn, “Human Milk Has a Microbiome—And the Bacteria Are Protecting Mothers and Infants!” Biomarkers & Milk, December 14, 2014.
Sandor Ellix Katz, Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live Culture Foods (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2003).
Ron Schmidt, The Untold Story of Milk: Green Pastures, Contented Cows, and Raw Dairy Foods (Washington, DC: New Trends Publishing, 2003).
Sandor Ellix Katz, Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live Culture Foods (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2003).
Hundreds more research studies can be found in the book The Life Bridge: The Way to Longevity with Probiotic Nutrients (New Chapter, 2002).
Wilbald Lorri and Ulf Svanberg, “Lower Prevalence of Diarrhoea in Young Children Fed Lactic Acid-Fermented Cereal Gruels,” Food and Nutrition Bulletin 15, no. 1 (1994):57–63.
S. K. Mbuguaa and J. Njenga, “The Antimicrobial Activity of Fermented Uji,” Ecology of Food and Nutrition 15, no. 3 (1992):191–98.
S. Bengmark, “Immunonutrition: Role of Biosurfactants, Fiber, and Probiotic Bacteria,” Nutrition 14, nos. 7–8 (1998):585–94.
S. Thavagnanam, et al., “A Meta-analysis of the Association Between Caesarean Section and Childhood Asthma,” Clinical & Experimental Allergy 38, no. 4 (2007):629–33.
Anu Huurre, et al., “Mode of Delivery: Effects on Gut Microbiota and Humoral Immunity,” Neonatology 93, no. 4 (2008):236–40.
Denise Grady, “Caesarean Births Are at a High in US,” New York Times, March 23, 2010.
“Breastfeeding Report Card,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed May 13, 2015, http://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/reportcard.htm.
Lars A. Hanson, “Breastfeeding Provides Passive and Likely Long-Lasting Active Immunity,” Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology 81, no. 6 (1998):523–33, 537.
Graham A. W. Rook, “Review Series on Helminths, Immune Modulation and the Hygiene Hypothesis: The Broader Implications of the Hygiene Hypothesis,” Immunology 126 (2009):3–11.
Graham A. W. Rook, et al., “Microbial ‘Old Friends,’ Immunoregulation and Stress Resilience,” Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, no. 1 (2013):46–64.
McMaster University, “Gut Bacteria Linked to Behavior: That Anxiety May Be in Your Gut, Not in Your Head,” Science Daily, May 17, 2011.
Emmanuel Denou, et al., “The Intestinal Microbiota Determines Mouse Behavior and Brain BDNF Levels.” Gastroenterology 141, no. 2 (2011):599–609.
Ibid.
James M. Kinross, Ara W. Darzi, & Jeremy K. Nicholson, “Gut Microbiome-Host Interactions in Health and Disease,” Genome Medicine 3, no. 3 (2011)
Timothy G. Dinan, et al., “Collective Unconscious: How Gut Microbes Shape Human Behavior,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 63 (2015):1–9.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism,” New York Times, August 26, 2012.
Charles L. Raison, et al., “Inflammation, Sanitation, and Consternation: Loss of Contact with Coevolved, Tolerogenic Microorganisms and the Pathophysiology and Treatment of Major Depression,” Archives of General Psychiatry 67, no. 12 (2010):1211–24.
Rochellys Diaz Heijtz, et al., “Normal Gut Microbiota Modulates Brain Development and Behavior,” PNAS (2011):3047–52.
S. K. Mazmanian, et al., “A Microbial Symbiosis Factor Prevents Intestinal Inflammatory Disease,” Nature 453 (2008):620–25.
Elaine Ingham, Soil Carbon Workshops and Keynote Lecture at the Northeast Organic Farming Association Summer Conference, Amherst, Massachusetts, August 8–10, 2014.
“Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious?” http://www. scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/.
Donald R. Davis, “Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition: What Is the Evidence?” Horticultural Science 44, no. 1 (February 2009):15–19
US Patent number 7771736 B2, “Glyphosate Formulations and Their Use for the Inhibition of 5-Enolpyruvylshikimate-3-Phosphate Synthase.”
Thierry Vrain, “Engineered Food and Your Health: The Nutritional Status of GMOs,”
Jeff Ritterman, “Will Richmond Reject Monsanto’s Roundup? The Case for Banning Glyphosate,” http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/blog/2015/feb/24-1.
Ancient Relationships: Beyond the Germ Theory of Disease