Writer, Daisy Hildyard in conversation with microbiologist, Karen Lloyd.
EXISTING BETWEEN
Writer, Daisy Hildyard in conversation with microbiologist, Karen Lloyd.
Writer, Daisy Hildyard speaks with marine microbiologist, Karen Lloyd about 100-million-year-old microbes, that breathe and excrete minerals. From the small town of Ny Ålesund, Svalbard, Lloyd describes her explorations into the permafrost sub surface – where she extracts living microbes that have not interacted with the surface for at least 10,000 years – and questions the possible importance of the individual microbe within its community. Considering time as a malleable resource, they discuss the possibilities of differing perceptions of time, space and motion on different lifespan scales: from the human and the 100-million-year-old microbe. Interwoven with readings from Hildyard’s book, The Second Body, the conversation bridges possibilities of dialogue, connections and the refusal of rules between the organic and the non-organic, the living and the non-living
YOUR BODY HAS A RELATIONSHIP TO EVERYTHING ON EARTH
‘What do an American barn owl, a Zimbabwean hippopotamus and a Norwegian reindeer have in common? What they have in common is that they all have a relationship with your body – they are all, in some sense, your responsibility. There is a way of speaking which implicates your body in everything on earth. Dead whales have something to do with you, the disorientation of the waxwing is indirectly your problem, the freak storm and the changing seasons are consequences of actions performed by your body. Meanwhile, in the human world, there are car bombs going off in Baghdad every day. Does this have anything at all to do with you? Moreover, a teenager in Kolkata is missing a thumb and you are wearing a pair of inexpensive gloves. Is there any connection there?’
DAISY There aren’t many other humans who frequent the places you work with. I wondered if you could start by telling us a little bit about what it’s like to work in these silent spaces?
KAREN I think one challenge in working in places like this is that most of them you can’t really go to I can’t really get into the earth the way I want to. I would love to put my body into the earth and sort of swim in it, like you can in the ocean. If you work on coral reefs, of course, you can move about through the coral, explore it and look at things. But I can’t really do that inside earth.
In some ways, that’s kind of a fun challenge how do you see things that you can’t really get to? We do our best to try to get as close to it as we can we go down in submarine we drill down with deep drills, whether it’s in permafrost or underneath the oceans. But another way is to wait for it to come back to you there’s a lot of pressures, crushing things all the time on our earth, and some of that forces some of this water and gases and stuff up to the surface. So we try to be passive observers as well.
DAISY What is it like down there, if you were to be able to swim through it? What’s the mud like? What does it smell like? Is it very solid or hot?
KAREN It’s all those things depending on where you are. So, you know, think about if you’re in a mud flat anywhere along a coastline: that’s not very active. It’s really sticky, some people find it very unpleasant. It’s like rotten eggs. But that’s wonderful. I mean, that’s the product of the microbes that are doing all these activities. But then if you go out in the deep ocean, sometimes that smell is not so intense because of all that more active stuff that’s already been worked through. And so, when you get sort of the deeper muds, it just kind of smells like clay or salt.
We get as close as we can
DAISY There aren’t many other humans who frequent the places you work with. I wondered if you could start by telling us a little bit about what it’s like to work in these silent spaces?
KAREN I think one challenge in working in places like this is that most of them you can’t really go to I can’t really get into the earth the way I want to. I would love to put my body into the earth and sort of swim in it, like you can in the ocean. If you work on coral reefs, of course, you can move about through the coral, explore it and look at things. But I can’t really do that inside earth.
In some ways, that’s kind of a fun challenge how do you see things that you can’t really get to? We do our best to try to get as close to it as we can we go down in submarine we drill down with deep drills, whether it’s in permafrost or underneath the oceans. But another way is to wait for it to come back to you there’s a lot of pressures, crushing things all the time on our earth, and some of that forces some of this water and gases and stuff up to the surface. So we try to be passive observers as well.
DAISY What is it like down there, if you were to be able to swim through it? What’s the mud like? What does it smell like? Is it very solid or hot?
KAREN It’s all those things depending on where you are. So, you know, think about if you’re in a mud flat anywhere along a coastline: that’s not very active. It’s really sticky, some people find it very unpleasant. It’s like rotten eggs. But that’s wonderful. I mean, that’s the product of the microbes that are doing all these activities. But then if you go out in the deep ocean, sometimes that smell is not so intense because of all that more active stuff that’s already been worked through. And so, when you get sort of the deeper muds, it just kind of smells like clay or salt.