Earth system science is revealing how animals regulate planetary metabolism and shape landscape dynamics, disclosing a range of ecosystem engineers and geomorphic agents. This science informs a subset of Nature-based solutions (NbSs) that aim to address the risks posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation. This article examines the biopolitics of NbS, introducing the concept of governing through Gaia to describe a mode of governance that targets the life–earth interface by deploying animals as metabolic levers to modulate geomorphic processes and geochemical cycles. It reviews a range of empirical examples and outlines the scientific framework underpinning NbS, introducing concepts from biogeomorphology, biogeochemistry, and the Gaia hypothesis. The analysis presents NbS as a distinct mode of metabolic politics that seeks to repair the metabolic shifts enacted by modern environmental management. It provides a framework to differentiate NbS by the types of repair that they perform, distinguishing between those that maintain and those that transform the status quo. The conclusions identify the potential of NbS and call for further work by a range of environmental geographers to develop just and adaptive approaches to governing through Gaia.

A fermentation renaissance is afoot. This revival has given rise to work in the environmental humanities that mobilizes DIY fermentation to ground a progressivist politics. The authors share in this enthusiasm but articulate a concern that imputing an essential politics to fermentation is not possible and risks turning it into a fetish. Drawing on a range of work on fermentation, some of which has raised similar concerns, the article outlines a political zymology (zymology being the science of fermentation), channeling the concerns of political ecology to facilitate a critical engagement with fermentation's diversity and avoid its fetishization. The article begins by defining fermentation, situating the fermentation zeitgeist in the ongoing microbial moment, and reviewing recent scholarly work on fermentation that proposes an essential fermentation politics. The article then develops a framework for political zymology, articulating four dimensions for differentiating fermentations-ecology, microbiopolitics, political economy, and cultural politics-and, in doing so, defetishizing it. In conclusion, the article discusses the value of political zymology as a domain-specific subset of political ecology and gestures toward an additional, complementary mode of political zymology of collaboration across disciplines and professions.

While microbes have primarily been viewed as pathogens, contemporary microbiome science and microbial ecology increasingly emphasize their non-pathogenic and symbiotic roles in shaping ecosystems and the health of all life forms. In doing so, they advance more nuanced understandings of the complexity of inter-related biological worlds. Yet, as scientific conceptions shift toward relational, functional, and ecological approaches in microbiology, this transformation has yet to be reflected in international legal frameworks governing interactions among humans, microbes and their environments. In response, we propose two post-anthropocentric approaches to microbial rights: Rights to Microbes, advocating for the protection of microbial functions instrumental for the survival of all life forms; and Rights of Microbes, which calls for recognizing the intrinsic and relational values of microbes as integral to planetary processes, and as deserving of rights in and of themselves. We explore the respective potentials of both approaches as different ways of prioritizing microbial rights.

BACKGROUND:Rapid advances in microbiome science have sparked clinical and commercial enthusiasm for interventions, yet translation into practice risks outpacing both mechanistic understanding and the infrastructure required for safe adoption. OBJECTIVES:To outline a coordinated research, clinical, social, and policy agenda for advancing safe, effective, and equitable microbiome-based interventions. SOURCES:We convened an interdisciplinary Royal Society-funded expert workshop (Leeds, UK, October 2024) with international leaders in microbiome science, clinical trials, regulation, and social science. Thematic analysis of workshop discussions and written contributions identified priority domains for translation. CONTENT:Three intersecting priorities emerged: scientific credibility, practical viability, and stakeholder engagement. Scientific credibility demands investment in multiomic and strain-level characterization of host-microbiome interactions on a large scale, benchmarking of clinical and microbiological endpoints, and harmonization of trial conduct and reporting. Clinical adoption requires fit-for-purpose regulation, diversified investment to address funding bottlenecks, and coordinated capacity building. Meaningful stakeholder engagement with clinicians, patients, policymakers, and the public is essential to foster confidence, develop clinically relevant research questions, and ensure equitable implementation of any new technology. IMPLICATIONS:To realize the clinical impact of microbiome interventions, sustained collaboration across disciplines is essential. This review offers a translational roadmap and actionable priorities to accelerate safe, effective, and equitable microbiome-based interventions-ensuring the field fulfils its clinical potential and delivers real-world impact.

Beavers have emerged as the flagship species for rewilding in Britain. Absent from the landscape since the sixteenth century, legal and illegal releases across the British countryside have driven rapid increases in their population and range and, with this proliferation, it is widely anticipated that beavers will soon colonise British cities, including London. A growing population now borders the city and is expected to expand and establish in London's waterways in the not-too-distant future. In anticipation of this re-beavered urban future, a cohort of urban rewilders seeks to prepare Londoners to welcome the rodent's imminent return by reintroducing beavers to the city. At Paradise Fields in Ealing, west London, they have designed and staged a high-profile experiment in how to live well with a family of reintroduced beavers in an urban environment called the Ealing Beaver Project. In this paper, we argue that this evidences a new type of prefigurative urban ecological politics that leverages encounters with urban wildlife to forge new (re)wilded (human and nonhuman) citizens and to experiment with new forms of urban wildlife management. In doing so it also prefigures what we term 'municipal wildness', whereby the wild is positioned as a universal public good delivered via collaboration between the local state and civil society. Prefigurative urban ecological politics describes political programmes that summon the future to anticipate and nurture desired configurations of urban socio-ecological relations in the present. The paper develops a conceptual framework for studying this new mode of urban rewilding and then deploys it to critically analyse beaver reintroduction in London.

Filth is a material and a semiotic category that has long been used to classify and govern the human and the nonhuman world. Undesired social groups and forms of life are elided with disgusting elements of the environment to justify their suppression or eradication. The science and the management of filth have been central to modernity and have profoundly shaped urban life. The rise of microbiology revealed the microbial origins of some diseases, empowering visions of the sanitary city in both the metropole and the colony. This drove substantial investments in sanitation, hygiene, and the removal of animals and agriculture. However, recent research on the human microbiome has demonstrated the salutary role of some microbes for human well-being. It highlights the value of forms of material previously categorized as filth and calls for a recalibration of modern, antibiotic hygiene practices and modes of architecture and urban planning. This new microbiology is driving a nascent, probiotic turn in urban theory that overlaps with a wider appreciation of the beneficial role of nature in the urban environment, and the development of more affirmative models of urban hospitality premised on living with social difference. This review and perspective examines these connected developments, explores their implications for urban political ecology, and outlines a new research agenda. It starts with a chronology of the shifting material and semiotic relationships with filth in science and society, before identifying six key research questions to guide an interrogation of this new chapter in the storied history of filth and the city.

Rewilding has become established as a new mode of nature conservation. There is a growing body of science, ambitious landscape-scale plans, and increasing political will. But until recently, cities and the urban were neglected; the idea of urban rewilding seen as oxymoronic. Of late, however, there has been a shift, with growing enthusiasm amongst metropolitan authorities, civil society, and citizens in major cities like London, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne, as well as smaller cities around the world. Noting a dearth of research on urban rewilding, this paper proffers an agenda for future geographical research into this emerging mode of urban nature conservation. The paper deploys the spatial-optical metaphor of diffraction, which originates in feminist science studies, to explore how rewilding as a socioecological practice developed in rural areas is changed when it encounters the urban, drawing on recent work in urban theory to trace how the urban might inform a new model of rewilding better equipped for the novel ecosystems and political configurations of the increasingly urban Anthropocene. It begins by defining how the sociomaterial urban fabric diffracts rewilding's practices and principles. It then examines how the distinct political economy of cities shapes the power dynamics of urban rewilding. The aesthetic dimensions of urban rewilding are then highlighted as important factors shaping how this emerging mode of urban nature recovery unfolds. In conclusion, we note how the nascency of urban rewilding presents opportunities for geographers to prefigure a progressive mode of Anthropocene conservation, and we advocate an affirmative style of critique that allies with practitioners and policy-makers. We establish future priorities for research into urban rewilding, including exploring minoritarian cultures of nature, comparative analysis of diverse cases, and examination of rural-urban linkages.

This chapter traces a genealogy of work in animal geography that has emerged in the last decade. It helps to identify the rich and plural character of the subdiscipline by mapping the different forms of animal geography that have emerged from the diverse ways in which geographers have become and continue to be interested in animals. The chapter discusses some of the implications of the more-than-human turn in the discipline, some of the surprising absences in the current work, and suggests some opportunities for future research. The author's aim in the chapter is to present an overview, illustrated with indicative examples. Recent animal geography can be disaggregated according to Philo and Wilbert's (2000) useful distinction between work concerned primarily with either "animal spaces" or "beastly places.".

A rising interest in nature recovery has expanded the focus of conservation beyond protected areas to encompass a range of terrestrial and marine areas, from forests, fields, and farms, to cities, coasts and oceans. These expansions create new practical and theoretical contestations regarding how, why, and for whom nature recovery projects should be pursued. Such contestations are particularly pronounced in Scotland, a country with a long history of struggles over land rights, widespread loss of natural habitats, and highly unequal land ownership patterns. This paper examines how different framings of justice, and different approaches to nature recovery, interact to either entrench or redress past and present injustices in a range of Scottish examples. We argue that multispecies conceptions of justice that eschew human-centric framings provide a normative basis for recovering nature, while multi-dimensional framings of justice as distributive, procedural and recognitional help specify a range of requirements for social change. Both frames highlight injustices in current trajectories and the need for alternative approaches to deliver a just transition in nature recovery. We outline a three-step process for further research on justice issues and for developing policy recommendations. This entails 1) historicising contexts, 2) considering both multispecies and multi-dimensional understandings of justice, and 3) uncovering alternative nature recovery strategies that might more explicitly foreground justice considerations.

In this paper, we put forward a case for repair by showing how food security, rural economic resilience, ecological restoration, and environmental justice can be achieved through a repaired agricultural microbiome. Microbial repair must reverse the damage done by legacies of agricultural intensification to restore the microbiome’s ability to deliver key agricultural and societal functions. This project demands collaboration from diverse food system actors building on different types of knowledge.

Microbes exist everywhere on, in and around us. They are both ubiquitous and largely invisible, at least until they make their presence, or absence, felt. Recent years have seen a heightened sensitivity to microbial threats in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to antibiotics. At the same time, there is also a growing interest in the microbiome as a source of ‘wild immunology’. From this viewpoint, the human body is comprised of, embedded within, and dependent on its exposure to an ecosystem of microbes, and the absence of such exposure is linked to the development of auto-immune conditions such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Inspired by an emerging body of work in the humanities and social sciences which looks to engage with so-called lay knowledge and understandings of microbial forms (including bacteria, viruses, and fungi) and processes (such as contagion or digestion), this Field Note explores the piloting of ‘body mapping’ as a research method to engage with families to explore their collective understanding of their children’s microbiome.

With its focus on the species level of the Anthropos, there is growing concern that the Anthropocene analytic lacks the conceptual nuance needed to grapple with the unevenly distributed harms and responsibilities tied up with issues of biodiversity loss, global warming, and land use change. Conceptual variants like the patchy Anthropocene have been proposed to better capture the justice implications of these socio‐ecological crises, directing attention to their spatially ubiquitous yet context‐specific character. The figure of the plantation has come to play an important role in this scholarship due to the contribution intensive agriculture had made to these interlinking crises. Through empirical study of the regenerative agricultural movement, this paper reflects on how regenerative farmers use different sites (fields, soils, livestock stomachs) to apprehend their agro‐ethical responsibilities to more‐than‐human actors both near to and far from the landscapes they manage. Our aims here are two‐fold. First, we provide a more affirmative account of agricultural management than is currently offered by plantation farming: a model of food production that is not just ‘in’ the Anthropocene, but ‘for’ it. Second, we contribute to ongoing discussions unfolding in the social sciences around the tools needed to conceptualise the interlinking spatial and justice aspects of the Anthropocene transition. By bringing the patchy analytic into conversation with more established geographic writing on scale, volume, and horizontal connections, we show the merit of juxtaposing multiple models of spatial relation as a way of gaining ethical and conceptual traction on complex socio‐ecological issues. We argue that the ‘polymorphic’ spatial imaginaries of regenerative agriculturalists can offer some guidance on the tools needed to attend to the specificity of local Anthropocene outcomes in relation to socio‐ecological forces actuating the world at much greater spatio‐temporal scales.

There is increasing evidence that interactions between microbes and their hosts not only play a role in determining health and disease but also in emotions, thought, and behavior. Built environments greatly influence microbiome exposures because of their built-in highly specific microbiomes coproduced with myriad metaorganisms including humans, pets, plants, rodents, and insects. Seemingly static built structures host complex ecologies of microorganisms that are only starting to be mapped. These microbial ecologies of built environments are directly and interdependently affected by social, spatial, and technological norms. Advances in technology have made these organisms visible and forced the scientific community and architects to rethink gene-environment and microbe interactions respectively. Thus, built environment design must consider the microbiome, and research involving host-microbiome interaction must consider the built-environment. This paradigm shift becomes increasingly important as evidence grows that contemporary built environments are steadily reducing the microbial diversity essential for human health, well-being, and resilience while accelerating the symptoms of human chronic diseases including environmental allergies, and other more life-altering diseases. New models of design are required to balance maximizing exposure to microbial diversity while minimizing exposure to human-associated diseases. Sustained trans-disciplinary research across time (evolutionary, historical, and generational) and space (cultural and geographical) is needed to develop experimental design protocols that address multigenerational multispecies health and health equity in built environments.

Abstract The concept of ‘peopled landscapes’ is based on the notion that it is not possible, nor socially or politically desirable, to remove people from the environment in the era of the Anthropocene. As such, it is necessary to document and develop ways to coexist and flourish. This review examines emergent scholarship about peopled landscapes and biodiversity conservation by considering invasive plant management and rewilding as social processes. While invasive plant management and rewilding are often understood as separate, thinking through social scientific research and examples from Australia and the UK, we demonstrate how both forms of human action in landscapes can be more usefully understood as social relations with nature involving social change and social action. Drawing attention to agency, practices and capacity, we show how diverse forms of human and nonhuman actions are recognised, attributed or acknowledged in biodiversity conservation in peopled landscapes. In practice, centring the idea of peopled landscapes (rather than conceiving of the environment as where the impact of people is minimised) shows how invasive plant management and rewilding can be understood as related responses to environmental problems. Flourishing and coexistence in peopled landscapes require recognition of the diverse human and nonhuman agencies that shape the politics of acceptable action, and illustrate the inseparability of environmental and social justice. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.