Filippo Bertoni

The thesis explores what living together can offer in rethinking political theory and in creating a space in which "politics" is not just a matter between people, but also with nature. These lessons about living together emerge from fieldwork around practices in which worms are central. Thus, the work focuses on ecologists who, in turn, examine worms; and worms amateurs who learn to collect and identify them in the field. Composting, and the waste-eating of earthworms are also experimented with. The "living together " that worms unearth is about eating and being eaten - a set of relations and practices that has so far been neglected by political theory with its emphasis on agreement.

The logistics of natural history sustained natural history's capacity to acquire, classify and preserve specimens. This mobilization of nature established complex supplychains, encompassing naturalists, colonial officers, museum curators, and many others, that materialized distinct global infrastructures. In suggesting the notion of Logistical Natures, this special issue renders the intersection of (critical) logistics and nature productive in two ways. First, the essays explore the logistics of natural history and analyze how large-scale, mostly colonial, infrastructures shaped knowledge, practices, and material culture within natural history. Second, Logistical Natures draws attention to the natural history of logistics for these infrastructures, such as postal services, military infrastructures, and railway systems, were also productive of new kinds of nature. Logistical Natures analyzes how modes of circulation materialized as (and in) the bodies, including people and specimens, and knowledge practices of natural history.

Scientists' research interests are often skewed toward charismatic organisms, but quantifying research biases is challenging. By combining bibliometric data with trait-based approaches and using a well-studied alpine flora as a case study, we demonstrate that morphological and colour traits, as well as range size, have significantly more impact on species choice for wild flowering plants than traits related to ecology and rarity. These biases should be taken into account to inform more objective plant conservation efforts. Throughout human history, plants have played the role of silent partners in the growth of virtually every civilization 1. Humans have exploited wild plants and crops as sources of food 2 , used trees as combustible material and to craft manufactured goods 1,3 and taken inspiration from the beauty of flowers for poetic and artistic endeavours 4,5. Since the birth of modern science, plants have also become the subjects of intense investigation. As scientists systematically studied the natural history of plants 6 , they soon realized that many of these species could function as model organisms to address fundamental scientific questions 7. Edward O. Wilson famously stated that '[…] for every scientific question, there is the ideal study system to test it' and thus, the choice of a researcher to study one species or another is often driven by functional criteria (for example, ploidy level for genetics studies and ease of growth under controlled conditions). Still, outside of the laboratory or the greenhouse, field scientists may be challenged in their choice of focus organisms by concerns that exceed strictly scientific research interests. As a result, when plant scientists select to study a specific wild plant among the pool of species available in a given study region, it may be that factors unrelated to the biological question end up influencing species choice and introducing biases in the research outcome. Whereas this is not a problem per se, a disparity in scientific attention towards certain species may become a concern in conservation biology, where it is paramount to ensure a 'level playing field' in selecting conservation priorities 8,9. Given their global diversity 10 and ecological importance 11,12 , plants should be prominent in conservation biology's effort to curb species loss under mounting anthropogenic pressures 13-15. Yet, it is well documented that plants receive less attention and consequently less funding in conservation than do animals 16,17. This particular case of taxonomic bias has been connected to 'plant blindness' 18 or 'plant awareness disparity' 19 , two terms proposed to indicate the lack of awareness for plants. Associated with both the evolutionary

Picocyanobacteria of the genus Synechococcus are major contributors to global primary production and nutrient cycles due to their oxygenic photoautotrophy, their abundance, and the extensive distribution made possible by their wide-ranging biochemical capabilities. The recent recovery and isolation of strains from the deep euxinic waters of the Black Sea encouraged us to expand our analysis of their adaptability also beyond the photic zone of aquatic environments. To this end, we quantified the total abundance and distribution of Synechococcus along the whole vertical profile of the Black Sea by flow cytometry, and analyzed the data obtained in light of key environmental factors. Furthermore, we designed phylotype-specific primers using the genomes of two new epipelagic coastal strains-first described here-and of two previously described mesopelagic strains, analyzed their presence/abundance by qPCR, and tested this parameter also in metagenomes from two stations at different depths. Together, whole genome sequencing, metagenomics and qPCR techniques provide us with a higher resolution of Synechococcus dynamics in the Black Sea. Both phylotypes analyzed are abundant and successful in epipelagic coastal waters; but while the newly described epipelagic strains are specifically adapted to this environment, the strains previously isolated in mesopelagic waters are able, in low numbers, to withstand the aphotic and oxygen depleted conditions of deep layers. This heterogeneity allows different Synechococcus phylotypes to occupy different niches and underscores the importance of a more detailed characterization of the abundance, distribution, and dynamics of individual populations of these picocyanobacteria.

The Black Sea is the largest meromictic sea with a reservoir of anoxic water extending from 100 to 1000 m depth. These deeper layers are characterised by a poorly understood fluorescence signal called "deep red fluorescence", a chlorophyll a-(Chl a) like signal found in deep dark oceanic waters. In two cruises, we repeatedly found up to 10 3 cells ml −1 of picocyanobacteria at 750 m depth in these waters and isolated two phycoerythrin-rich Synechococcus sp. strains (BS55D and BS56D). Tests on BS56D revealed its high adaptability, involving the accumulation of Chl a in anoxic/dark conditions and its capacity to photosynthesise when re-exposed to light. Whole-genome sequencing of the two strains showed the presence of genes that confirms the putative ability of our strains to survive in harsh mesopelagic environments. This discovery provides new evidence to support early speculations associating the "deep red fluorescence" signal to viable picocyanobacteria populations in the deep oxygen-depleted oceans, suggesting a reconsideration of the ecological role of a viable stock of Synechococcus in dark deep waters.

The Iberian Pyrite Belt is a vast geological formation spreading over 250 kilometers across Southern Portugal and Spain, rich in iron sulfides, and many other precious minerals. Its ores have fuelled empires for millennia, from Imperial Rome, to Habsburg Spain, to Victorian England, and gave birth to the mining multinational Rio Tinto Group. But how can a landscape fuel an empire? The language we often use to talk about this extractive relation between empires and landscapes – which turn them into resources – seems to inevitably lead us back into industrial modernity.
Yet, the ores of Rio Tinto also feed a complex and delicate underground microbial ecosystem. A team of astrobiologists from the Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid studies these extremophiles as possible analogs for life under the surface of Mars. The microorganisms they are interested in are chemolithotrophs, which means they metabolize the minerals in the ore for the energy and nutrients they need. Can these metabolic relations with the inorganic help us articulate empires, resources, landscapes and extraction differently? If we take the Iberian Pyrite Belt seriously as a Mars analog, can we similarly think of the specific metabolic relationality of its chemolithotrophs and the planetary relationality of the sciences that shaped Earth and Mars as we know them as analogs to imagine extraction? With these questions in mind, this presentation ethnographically explores the metabolic transformativity of the earthly togetherness of microbes, and its excesses – byproducts, life forms, and forms of living. Simultaneously, it weaves this relationality back, via a naturecultural history of the scarred landscape, to the imperial extraction inscribed in the stratigraphy of the mines, with the eccentric shadow of the Red Planet to remind us of the incompleteness of this comparison.

Global warming has been shown to strongly influence inland water systems, producing noticeable increases in water temperatures. Rising temperatures, especially when combined with widespread nutrient pollution, directly favour the growth of toxic cyanobacteria. Climate changes have also altered natural water level fluctuations increasing the probability of extreme events as dry periods followed by heavy rains. The massive appearance of Dolichospermum lemmermannii ( = planktonic Anabaena), a toxic species absent from the pelagic zone of the subalpine oligotrophic Lake Maggiore before 2005, could be a consequence of the unusual fluctuations of lake level in recent years. We hypothesized that these fluctuations may favour the cyanobacterium as result of nutrient pulses from the biofilms formed in the littoral zone when the lake level is high. To help verify this, we exposed artificial substrates in the lake, and evaluated their nutrient enrichment and release after desiccation, together with measurements of fluctuations in lake level, precipitation and D.lemmermannii population. The highest percentage of P release and the lowest C:P molar ratio of released nutrients coincided with the summer appearance of the D.lemmermannii bloom. The P pulse indicates that fluctuations in level counteract nutrient limitation in this lake and it is suggested that this may apply more widely to other oligotrophic lakes. In view of the predicted increase in water level fluctuations due to climate change, it is important to try to minimize such fluctuations in order to mitigate the occurrence of cyanobacterial blooms.

Emerging from the question of how to live together with our planet, more-than-human approaches to interspecies relations have often presented ‘cozy’ versions of conviviality (Whatmore 2002; Haraway 2008; Hinchliffe 2010). This was usually set against a (supposedly) exclusionary politics of nature, in a move that betrayed a still largely humanist ethics. From the focus on friendly companions, to the attention to practices of care or living-together, the notion of companion species and their entanglements with humans has been polarized towards a pleasant and ‘nice’ version of coexistence. But, dealing with composting, it becomes clear that relations with the environment are never so neat and clean. What are, then, the modes of being together with the ‘dirty’ side of the ‘green’? What practices emerge at the mundane interstices of the ‘big picture’ of a functional ecology? Wasting, eating, rotting, consuming, transforming and becoming-with are brought together in a variety of ways in practices of composting-with earthworms. Reporting on our own and others’ attempts to ‘live-together’ with earthworms, this paper tracks the non-relations and asymmetries of the transformations of more-than-human materialities inside (and outside) domestic composting bins. We argue that the example of living-together with dung earthworms sheds light on the interplays between attachment and detachment (Candea 2010), shifting the notion of conviviality from a green and comfortable ‘democratic collective’ (Latour 2004) to a messy, yet constantly productive and on-going coexistence

Earthworms and soil combine in an ecotoxicological experiment in the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. To determine the effects of a toxic compound produced by genetically modified broccoli, ecotoxicologists use the earthworm in a standardized test to understand the conditions of the soil. In the experiment a variety of elements are brought together and associated in a stable network, but the worm and the soil do not only associate; rather, the worm emerges entangled in different kinds of relations with the soil, both as bioindicator and as bioturbator. Eating provides a good tool to analyze these relations: keeping close to the tangible materialities of the lab practices, eating highlights the complex, asymmetrical relationality of worm and soil. This pushes the understanding of association that circulates in social theory, bringing back its original critical stance towards given notions of liberal, autonomous agents with renewed empirical strength. Thus eating not only frames worms that emerge from the practices of ecotoxicologists as bioindicators and as bioturbators, but it also offers a different language for what has been called the ‘politics of nature’, or how to bring nature into politics without accepting it as a given. In responding to the question on how to live with our planet, eating reminds us that we would do well to start from practices instead of agency in framing our ‘politics of nature’.

Rio Tinto, in the South West of Spain, is a landmark point in the history of the mining industry. Today, it is also well known as a Mars analog. This presentation follows the research practices of a team of astrobiologists that are digging boreholes in the Spanish mining site in order to extract data on subsurface life to be used in shaping searches for life on the red planet.
But the metaphor of extraction is too easy. The relations between scientific practices and the activities of mining corporations are not so simple. Instead, the specificities of this case point towards a more complicated pattern. One that is not only made of similarities, but also of significant differences. One that pushes us to take the metaphor seriously and, simultaneously, to tame and complicate it.
The landscape of Rio Tinto, then, emerges as a space where uneasy relations are negotiated, made and unmade, and where science and mining weave with and repel each other. This allows me to imagine how extraction can be put to use in our theorization. In fact, it both relocates the practices of extracting in specific materialsemiotic context and it adapts to and thrives in the cracks between astrobiology and mining. Both the extractive industry and scientific research emerge transformed from these encounters, opening up what extraction could be, and the logic it might carry with it.

This presentation follows the work of a team of soil scientists from Wageningen University studying the impact of earthworms on greenhouse gases emissions from soils. Following their research, we will learn about earthworms and climate change, but also about how the objects of scientific practice push systems theories with their centrifugal and exorbitant unruliness. In the process, we will also discuss one of the ways in which social sciences can engage with natural sciences in a time in which calls for interdisciplinary cooperation in face of environmental change are omnipresent.

The ethnographic effort of grasping the multiplicity of nature even where mononaturalism should be produced has already pointed out how we cannot think about nature as unitary when we consider the practices that enact it. Using fieldwork with earthworm scientists and ethnographic experiments with vermicomposting, I will offer a specific set of such multiplicity. Considering the earthworms and the togetherness that practices can afford us (worms and humans, and all sort of others), I will then try to offer a tentative answer (and, yet again, a number of new questions) to the question often voiced by those who are faced with such multiplicity: so what?

As most ‘turns’ in the social and human sciences, the “species turn” emerges from and with a deep and broad question. This has to do with life in a relational and ongoing world, one in which all sorts of entities are entangled in multiple and complex becoming-withs. The centrality of life to this question, then, is immediately evident. But, what is life? In this paper I offer a specific and situated answer, in the tradition of material semiotics, by looking at a particular practice. This is the Iberian Pyritic Belt Subsurface Life detection (IPBSL), a research project of the Centro de Astrobiologìa of Madrid University that is searching for subsurface life forms in the depths the Tinto River basin. Attending to the research practices of IPBSL, the paper explores the notion of life emerging from astrobiologists digging for life. Searching for life, here, means searching for (traces of) biological activity. This notion unhinges life from its textbook definitions, bounded and rendered dogmatic by their own generalizations and their removal from practices. Simultaneously, it reminds us that life is never completely fluid and out of bounds. Rather, it is (inter)dependent on the specific affordances of situated materialities. This offers us the empirical grounds to take on Deleuzian agencement and, yet, to stress the importance of the boundedness of material enactments of life in practices. In this way, we are reminded that the question of what life is cannot be answered in a univocal and definitive way, but rather in multiple, empirical and situated ones. Simultaneously, this allows us to diffract the question asked by the species turn in more specific ways.

Vegetable comes from the Latin vegetare, meaning to live, grow, enliven, be active. It is then particularly interesting to notice the shift in meaning that characterized the term in the XIX century, to indicate a passive state. Plant life, hence, emerges as an interesting site to rethink the classic opposition between activity and passivity. This will provide a fertile ground to map the turn to practices and its implications. Considering very divergent growth practices (from hi-tech laboratory-controlled urban farming, to botanical gardens, to modern greenhouse systems) this talk will trace the specificity of humans and of their concerns to ultimately ask questions of ethics and politics that concern our living with this planet.

What is life? To answer this question within STS, we should be attentive to the practices that allow to ask it and the specific affordances of different answers. To do so, this paper follows the activities of the Iberian Pyritic Belt Subsurface Life detection project (IPBSL), a research project of the Centro de Astrobiologìa of Madrid University that is searching for subsurface life forms in the subsoil of the area of the Tinto River. Attending to the research practices of IPBSL, the paper explores the notion of life in the version enacted by astrobiologists digging for life. Searching for life, here, means searching for (traces of) biological activity. This notion unhinges life from its textbook definitions, bounded and rendered dogmatic by their own generalizations and their removal from practices. Simultaneously, it reminds us that life is never completely fluid and out of bounds. Rather, it is (inter)dependent on the specific affordances of situated materialities. This offers us the empirical grounds to take on Deleuzian agencement and, yet, to stress the importance of the boundedness of material enactments of life in practices. In this way, we are reminded that the question of what life is cannot be answered in a univocal and definitive way, but rather in multiple, empirical and situated ones.

Contrasting care for plants in a botanical garden and a hi-tech urban farming lab, this paper considers the material semiotic entanglements of plants and humans. On our way to (or away from) a ‘greener’ Earth, this paper will not only reshape our ideas about growing plants, but also about what it can mean to be human in a naturecultural world.


In face of talks about a looming environmental crisis, concerns about desirable ways to live 'together with' nature are spreading widely. Notably, particular consideration is given to practices of food production and environmental management. Within these, and parallel to the current focus on meat production or fishery, forestry and agriculture constitute a field in which much debates, activism, local practices and technological innovations have recently emerged.
Plants have been a bio-geo-chemical force in shaping our planet and our species, while being reciprocally and deeply transformed: like Pollan's apple (2001) that seduced man into being diffused throughout the planet, plants are increasingly intertwining with Earth's 'greener' future. To map different ways of caring for plants, this paper follows the relations between different species, juxtaposing a botanical garden and a techno scientific lab which promises to offer a solution to urban farming through hi-tech environmental chambers and led lights. In the entanglements that care produces, man emerges as an absent/presence: growing plants, humans are hovering as carers, knowers, consumers, masters, and/or eaters. Simultaneously, the plants also stem as critical actors, shaping the ways in which the care (and production) relations afford to grow. In this sense, material semiotics not only allows our ethnographies to have a different grasp of 'naturecultures' and their ongoing entanglements, but also to shape a different understanding of what it is to be human, how and whom with this is or can be done, and what this requires and affords.

In biology, race is not an official taxonomic unit; in fact, the lowest rank in taxonomy is that of species. Yet, notwithstanding its widespread use, also the notion of species is a very problematic one. The problem of how to define and use this notion dates back to Darwin’s times and is still not resolved. Following this issue in contemporary debates between biology and philosophy of science, this talk takes a stroll through research practices to shed light on what came to be called “the problem of species”. A number of different cases will show how species do not refer to one single entity, but multiple divergent practices. By considering the ways in which scientists deal with the category of species, I argue, more alternatives emerge to tinker with the ir/relevance of race.

In social sciences, approaches to hard sciences tend to present these as naturalist, i.e. anchored to the belief in a coherent and closed universe in which natural laws operate. This idea of an objectivist science has been the dialogical opposite pole of social sciences, particularly the qualitative ones. Considering naturalist science ethnographically, asks the question whether this idea is grounded in the actual practices of scientists or not and what alternative ways of engaging with science emerge from them. To do this, I will try to understand what the relation between worms and their environment is.

From ecotoxicologists studying the effect of toxic compounds on the soil, to curators taking care of specimens in museum collections, to ecologists teaching amateurs how to recognize different species, a number of scientists are everyday working with earthworms. In these scientific contexts, which animate Western naturalist science, what a worm is and how it relates with its environment come into being in many complicated ways. As we will follow these practices, what 'naturalist science' is will multiply and emerge oftentimes as incoherent. Still, some of the practices of scientists also take care of holding together these incoherences. From these multiple naturalisms, their gaps, and the work put into holding them together, a different way to engage with science takes shape, one that is not (overly) critical, but attempts to 'take science seriously'.

Short Abstract

Following scientific practices mobilizing earthworms, the relationship between earth and worm emerges in multiple versions. At the same time, the category of ‘Euroamerican naturalism’ is complicated and articulated in a number of alternative ways.

Long Abstract

"It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world", wrote Darwin in 1881. Paradoxically, he was not talking of humans, but of earthworms. Their activity was so important to him, that he dedicated his last book to these annelids.
Also for this reason earthworms had a central role in the history of biology in the unfolding of organism-environment relationships. From this vantage point I contrast this history with the practices of different scientists. From ecotoxicologists studying - through earthworms - the effect of toxic compounds on the soil, to curators taking care of earthworm specimens in museum collections, to ecologists teaching amateurs how to recognize earthworm species, a number of scientists are everyday working with worms. In these scientific contexts, in which Euroamerican naturalism should be found, the relation between worm and soil comes into being in many com-plicated ways; tinkering with the practices of scientists and their multispecies collectives, the object of 'Euroamerican naturalism' comes to be made multiple and, often, incoherent. In this sense, taking the practices of science seriously does not mean accepting the narrative of sciences uncritically, but attending to their always different situatedness. The multispecies collectives in which science is made unfold naturalism in different ways, enacting the earthworm and its environment in a variety of relations. By attending to these collectives, not only the relationships between organism and environment emerge as complex, but also the object of 'Euroamerican naturalism' ends up being more articulated.

The crisis in Italian anthropology, which for socio-economical and cultural-historical reasons dates back  to 1989, seems to be paradigmatic of a wider and more diffused crisis in our discipline. Its chronic exclusion from the public discourse generates a twofold reaction among anthropology students: either abandoning the field or trying to find less closed niches within institutions, moving towards what might be considered “empowering” anthropology. Nevertheless in Italy more than anywhere else this tendency is also – and mostly – an empowerment of anthropology itself, disclosing a self-referential spiral falling deeper and deeper and losing many students. This crisis within the discipline is better understood as part of the context of the worldwide crisis and requires therefore new solutions. Today looking towards literary criticism may lead us toward a possible solution: Wu Ming's debate on the New Italian Epic suggests a path to overcome this crisis, through a different approach to literary reality, one that seems to bypass post-modernism, with a gaze towards possible futures. My work examines this way out and its potential through the study of anthropology students' hopes and their reactions to the crisis that  affects their lives, I will merge this approach with a different way of perceiving the anthropologist’s engagement with their subject as well as comprehending their position, trying to create a method in which the distinction between subject and object fades to co-construct needs and answers to these needs, even in our discipline and in the shapes that it is about to take.