EP10: Mother Earth and Mother Nature

In the final episode of the season, we’re focusing on Mother Earth. We talk to microbiologist Maya about researching the tiniest living parts of the natural world, accounting for bias, plant emotions, and the ecstatic delight of slime blobs.

Topics Touched:

plant diseases, creepy plant metaphors for human bodies, the handful of differences between humans and fruit, our tendency to frame natural non-human phenomena through a patriarchal lens, the powerhouse of the cell, endosymbiotic theory, Trofim Lysenko, the creepiness of constructing the Earth as a mother, questioning who gets to benefit from the idea of “Earth’s bounty,” blobs and all the blobbing to be had in microbiology, blobbing as motherhood, fucking shit up, the slime mold scholar-in-residence at Hampshire (not Hamilton) College, cyanobacteria and the Great Oxygenation Event, how microbes thanklessly run the world, Julian’s eternal question is “Is this a mom?”, every blob is a mom, slime as a fun and popular toy for children, swamps are a great jam, fens are a specific kind of marshland, traumatic acid, all of your feelings and biases are meat, humanity was the true slime all along

Works Cited:

• Lynn Margulis (published originally as Lynn Sagan) – On the Origin of Mitosing Cells
• Hampshire College – visiting non-human scholar Physarum Polycephalum
• Ghostbusters II
• Aparna Nancherla

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