USI 2020 Symposium, Day 3 / SYMBIOGENESIS

Fig. 1. Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis, a painting by Shoshanah Dubiner. A six-foot wide reproduction of the painting occupies a hallway in the Morrill Science Center at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. via International microbiology : the official journal of the Spanish Society for Microbiology

This conversation convened us all — protists, scientists, poets, bacteria, educators, fungi, activists, plants, artists and all our respective cell organelles — in an anti-anthropocentric tone, to listen to the nature of nature and explore living on earth as a holistic system of parts, with soils as a foundation of diversity.

How do we become by living together?

Dorion Sagan, Paul S. Mankiewicz, Cindy Qiao, Marietta J. Tanner, Joshua Harrison and Viacheslav Vasenev laid down points of departure for our large audience.

What are the bolts of fabric that are evolving and sustaining life?

What is the role of soils in facilitating evolutionary change?

How do soils, fertile and alive, provoke, or beget, systemic change, a change for the better?