In the floral ecosystems of our bodies — inside and outside — animals — and we humans particularly, can be intelligently understood as a community organism whose staggering cellular diversity is the primary platform of our health and intelligence. 90% of that diversity is and must be bacterial.

We are an animal who only arises from and within a swarming bacterial soup — almost as if we, the animals, are a peculiar expression of bacteriological evolution and, I believe one could argue, intention. For within our bodies their communal powers achieve astronomical magnification. They become human with us, and we cannot become human without them. This is what it means, at a cellular level, to be human.

The relationship is not cause and effect, as too often presented by science. No. It is -identity-. We are -the same creature-.

Of course, most moderns are trained to attack their own bodies and the environment around them, and particularly their commensal bacteria — and, more particularly, those that inhabit the digestive system. This can lead to all kinds of problems, and many of these are cognitive. That is to say they are problems we would ordinarily associate with the brain, not the digestive system. Yet they can, in many cases, be resolved by changing the digestive ecosystem. Directly.

An excellent example is people infected with C. Difficile. These people suffer tremendously because the bacterial ecosystem in their small intestine has been damaged or destroyed. Those treated with antibiotics have a poor recovery rate. Recently, a new treatment was discovered where medical personnel inoculate a patient’s small intestine with a small amount of fecal matter from a person with healthy flora. The results were provocatively positive. 80%+ cure rate, immediate.

Now, there is another, broader and more important lesson here. Just as we cannot be human, healthy or intelligent with our a diverse and healthy inward ecosystem, we cannot survive or prosper in a world where we are held apart from nature and other living beings while they are converted into products, poison, and numbers in machines. Here is the reason: the nature of our relationships with Nature are not, as science will demand, those of cause-and-effect. No. Just as with the relationship with our bacterial symbionts, our animalian and enviornmental relationships are relationships of -identity-. We -are- the animals and plants and living places, the waters, the skies, and the ground itself.

You see, we are animals who rise from two soups at once: the inward soup of our bacterial supercultures, and the outward soup of our environmental relationships. We must recognize and establish human cultures whose nature recognizes and respects ecologies. Both human, and environmental. The reason is simple. What we do out there, is done in us. The forests burn in my own body, in my own mind. The creatures and places of the land and sea that are obliterated by human stupidity and commerce die first in us, and only then beyond us.

So too, those that prosper. Mark my words: as the forests fall, human health and intelligence, both potential and accessible, will crumble in their wake. And what is done in the oceans will have an even greater impact.

We have no time. We must become new ways of being human together, now. With and for each other and our world. We and the soup are the same creature. Forever.