Lecture
Of microbes and planetary connections: rethinking metabolic relations and economic scales
- Date
- Friday 23 January 2026
- Time
- Location
- Gorlaeus
- Room
- GORLB – DM.1.09
Abstract
In the last couple of decades, microbes have gained great attention, now seen as key workers of an incipient bioeconomy. Microbial metabolisms appear as interesting to industry as they can deal with a great number of problems, including a range of aftermath effects of industrial processes of fossil-based economies. Microbial metabolisms are put to work for the sake of cleaning up oil-spills, capturing CO2, breaking down plastics, and cleaning up contaminated soils, as well as they are advertised as sources of biomass-based clean energy and compostable materials. Such microbial fixes, I argue, are based on a view on microbes as metabolic workers and entail a scaling up microbial metabolisms to align with ever growing economies. This talk explores the productive character that is attributed to microbes as agents of the bioeconomy. I take scalability as a conceptual tool to trace conversions of microbial metabolisms and enzymatic activity into planetary solutions. The talk invites a reflection on the kind of problems that the dominant version of the bioeconomy prioritizes, and the new problems that scaling up microbial metabolisms may generate. I problematize bioeconomy scales to suggest a (re)-alignment of social and microbial metabolisms as a way to move down to Earth and, perhaps, back to Gaia.
Brief biography: Ana Delgado works as an associate professor in science and technology studies (STS). Her research combines STS, political ecology and data studies, and it is concerned with biodiversity governance, extractivism and environmental justice, including digital sovereignty. She is a member of the network Knowledge in Terra coordinated from the University of Leiden.
