To not only reproduce this narrative of failure but to go further in uncovering its epistemic assumptions that are yet invisible I want
10 At the end of the article, Margulis poses the crucial question “If we invest in Space Colonies from what other budget lines do we take the funds?” (1977).
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to outline another possible perspective. In order to re-narrate the story of Biosphere 2, I propose a shift in focus onto alliances and transitions that exceed the story of so-called distinct, pas-sive, and operable factors. I will center the perspective of those organisms, which surpassed the glass walls and revealed whose agency has been left out. In doing so, I am following Haraway’s approach of using “string figures as a theoretical trope, a way to think-with a host of companions in sympoietic threading, felting, tangling, tracking, and sorting” (2016, 31). What shatters the glass dome is the appearance of those organisms that ate their way through the glass ball, settled in it, made it permeable, composted it, and thus composed another perspective on this story. To understand this perspective, we need to follow the cock-roaches and the ants.
Four different kinds of cockroaches were deliberately imported into Biosphere 2 to recycle organic waste. The common household cockroach, although not one of them, was the most prevalent species in the glass dome and the population of this “great evolutionary survivor” (Nelson 2018b), as ecologist and former biospherian Mark Nelson dubbed it, nearly exploded. Dating back to the Jurassic period, the species’ longevity comes as no sur-prise regarding their collective knowing and doing, their ecology of practices: first, they are outstanding recyclers, eating almost [Fig. 5] A tardigrade or “water-bear,” a microscopic organism that accidentally made its way to the Moon, presumably dormant (Source: Scanning electron micrograph by Bob Goldstein & Vicky Madden, distributed under a CC-BY 2.0 license)
every organic waste material; second, gregarious cockroaches 173 display collective decision-making when searching for food or shelter; and third, cockroaches have the ability to adapt to almost every environment:
[T]he social biology of domiciliary cockroaches so far can be characterised by a common shelter, overlapping generations, non-closure of groups, equal reproductive potential of group members, an absence of task specialisation, high levels of social dependence, central place foraging, social information transfer, kin recognition, and a meta-population structure.
(Lihoreau, Costa, and Rivault 2012)
The ants, however, made their way into Biosphere 2 by eating five holes through the sealed glass dome. More specifically, it was Paratrechina longicornis, also baptized “crazy ant” because of its erratic movements. This ant species lives in symbiosis with scale insects. These so-called plant pests feed on tree sap and excrete honeydew. The ants use the honeydew as food, so they protect the scale insects from their predators and support them in their spreading (Wetterer et al. 1999, 386). One could argue against my point that the ants tell us a different story, because they are organized in colonies and act altruistically due to their queen, who controls the entire population. However, biologist Deborah Gordon has shown that the ant queen is not—as is often assumed—a “cybernetic super brain” that manages all processes within the ant colony. Rather, ants are organized in task groups whose size and affiliation vary according to the importance of the task (Gordon 2010, 45–74). In this sense, the ants inhabiting Biosphere 2 were much better organized than the human bio-spherians. The division of the eight scientists into two hostile groups evolved due to their relation to project management—as opponents or advocates. Artists Hito Steyerl and Anton Vidokle frame the situation as follows: “the ants especially had great social tactics, they practiced a form of cross-colony solidarity, which made them very resilient. The humans just divided and fell out; of course the ants won” (Steyerl & Vidokle 2017).
174 The crazy ant is categorized as “tramp ant” as it is present around the globe, “dispersed worldwide by human commerce and associated with human disturbance” (Wetterer et al. 1999, 384). Seen this way, the ants are closely linked to human agency and history. By focusing on organisms that invaded Biosphere 2, I am aiming to reflect the inherent anthropocentrism of the experiment and to irritate a standardized default anthropocen-tric view that situates “nature” as the “other”, as the unknown, wild, chaotic “virgin” land that is feminized and racialized and that can and needs to be controlled and managed. The feminization of land, nature and the Earth as a nurturing mother or a wicked stepmother has a long tradition in Western thought. It builds upon the modern classification of nature and women as pas-sive and subordinate (Merchant 1990, 1–41). It is also connected to imperial imagery that sexualizes the space to be colonized, indeed drawing a parallel of colonial and sexual control over Indigenous women (Blunt & Rose 1994, 10).
Contextualizing the Biosphere 2 story and looking at its entan-glements from different perspectives is a way of research inspired by historian of science Carolyn Merchant’s take on fem-inist history:
Feminist history in the broadest sense requires that we look at history with egalitarian eyes, seeing it anew from the viewpoint not only of women but also of social and racial groups and the natural environment, previously ignored as the underlying resources on which Western culture and its progress have been built. To write history from a feminist perspective is to turn it upside down—to see social structure from the bottom up. (1990, xx)
Accordingly, I want to suggest a provocative experiment of thought by not thinking like or as but thinking with the ants:
Are crazy ants stowaways of human globalized transport or did humans build this infrastructure unwittingly to enable crazy ants to travel globally? What if Biosphere 2 is regarded as a shiny
warm castle built for ants and cockroaches? What is the term 175
“Ant-hropocene” really hinting at?
The view from the bottom up, from a creepy-crawlies’ per-spective, revolves around the ants and cockroaches who found a way to break the closed design of the ecosystem and establish themselves as unknown factors under the glass dome. Despite all efforts to include and regulate all factors of the biosphere experiment, these organisms managed to contaminate the iso-lated glass sphere. The attempt to build an autonomous system failed when viewed from the anthropocentric position that, in the case of Biosphere 2, sets the default human as one looking from “Extraterrestria” or from Sirius. From a creepy-crawlies’
perspective, the idea of an autonomous, independent, separated system of human existence is shaken, as is the idea of “[b]ounded (or neoliberal) individualism amended by autopoiesis” (Haraway 2016, 33). Letting ants, cockroaches and other “muddy” organisms crawl into the human vantage point is a metaphorical take in order to think-with disruptive organisms, the agency of the excluded, and the impure mixtures. What this perspective hints at and what it is deeply entangled with is the idea of sympoi-esis, carefully worded by scholar in environmental planning Beth Dempster (2000), who uses the term for collectively producing systems lacking centralized control and self-defined boundaries that are constantly changing and evolving. Sympoiesis implies challenging the imaginary of closed systems and boundaries as exemplified in the biospheric venture that aimed to separate a distinct ecosystem, thus only allowing humanly controlled biome compositions. In contrast, practicing symbiosis implies tentacular thinking, as well as cultivating care and response-ability that is always with, thinking-with, acting-with, worlding-with, creating laboratories of mud with regard to our entanglements and inter-species connections on this planet, and re-narrating stories, because “it matters what stories we tell, to tell other stories with”
(Haraway 2016, 12).