The potential importance of the built-environment microbiome and its impact on human health.

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.

On Disease Configurations, Black-Grass Blowback, and Probiotic Pest Management.

This article explores approaches to managing pests that are being developed in response to the faltering effectiveness of antibiotic regimes of chemical control. It focuses on black-grass (), an endemic plant in European agriculture that has emerged as a serious yield-robber with increasing levels of herbicidal resistance. Following farmers and agronomists who have developed "integrated" approaches to black-grass management, the article identifies approaches to biosecurity that do not target unwanted life so much as they modulate ecological systems in their entirety.

Green rebranding: Regenerative agriculture, future-pasts, and the naturalisation of livestock.

Anxieties around the relationship between livestock agriculture and the environmental crisis are driving sustained discussions about the place of beef and dairy farming in a sustainable food system. Proposed solutions range from 'clean-cow' sustainable intensification to 'no-cow', animal free futures, both of which encourage a disruptive break with past practice. This paper reviews the alternative proposition of regenerative agriculture that naturalises beef and dairy production by invoking the past to justify future, nature-based solutions.

Veganuary and the vegan sausage (t)rolls: conflict and commercial engagement in online climate-diet discourse.

Social media platforms have become critical venues for a wide spectrum of influence campaigns, from activism to advertising. Sometimes these two ends overlap and it remains unknown how the latter might impact the former. Situated within contemporary scholarship on vegan activism, this work examines corporate involvement with the Veganuary 2019 campaign on Twitter, as well as the antagonistic backlash it received.

When you wish upon a (GWP) star: Environmental governance and the reflexive performativity of global warming metrics.

The metrics used in environmental management are performative. That is, the tools deployed to classify and measure the natural world interact with the things they were designed to observe. The idea of performativity also captures the way these interactions shape or distort the governance activities that metrics are used to inform.

Immaterial animals and financialized forests: Asset manager capitalism, ESG integration and the politics of livestock.

This article uses interviews with responsible investment professionals to examine the extent to which institutional equity investors, and specifically 'universal owners' with highly diversified shareholdings, engage with public issues associated with livestock agriculture. As share ownership becomes increasingly concentrated, and the market for Environmental, Social and Governance investment products grows, these investors are increasingly involved in governing the activities of publicly traded corporations (including leading agribusinesses). This paper brings together political economy and marketization studies research to explore how universal owners become concerned about particular environmental and ethical problems, why they overlook other public concerns, and in what ways their selective engagement with ethico-political issues might be altering the content of food politics.

Vegan food geographies and the rise of Big Veganism.

Veganism is the subject of an increasingly diverse body of social scientific research, yet it remains relatively understudied in geography. Meanwhile, contemporary cultural commentaries note how veganism has gone mainstream, with critics warning of veganism's corporate nature - expressed in the rise of what we term 'Big Veganism'. We argue that food geographers are well placed to examine these trends.

Controversy around climate change reports: a case study of Twitter responses to the 2019 IPCC report on land.

Unlabelled: In August 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), which generated extensive societal debate and interest in mainstream and social media. Using computational and conceptual text analysis, we examined more than 6,000 English-language posts on Twitter to establish the relative presence of different topics. Then, we assessed their levels of toxicity and sentiment polarity as an indication of contention and controversy.

Palatable disruption: the politics of plant milk.

Plant-based milk alternatives-or -have surged in popularity over the past ten years. We consider the politics and consumer subjectivities fostered by mylks as part of the broader trend towards 'plant-based' food. We demonstrate how mylk companies inherit and strategically deploy positive framings of milk as wholesome and convenient, as well as negative framings of dairy as environmentally damaging and cruel, to position plant-based as the 'better' alternative.

Animal Research beyond the Laboratory: Report from a Workshop on Places Other than Licensed Establishments (POLEs) in the UK.

Research involving animals that occurs outside the laboratory raises an array of unique challenges. With regard to UK legislation, however, it receives only limited attention in terms of official guidelines, support, and statistics, which are unsurprisingly orientated towards the laboratory environment in which the majority of animal research takes place. In September 2019, four social scientists from the Animal Research Nexus program gathered together a group of 13 experts to discuss nonlaboratory research under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act (A(SP)A) of 1986 (mirroring European Union (EU) Directive 2010/63/EU), which is the primary mechanism for regulating animal research in the UK.

Framing the future of food: The contested promises of alternative proteins.

This paper offers a critical examination of the narrative landscape that has emerged with a new movement of alternative proteins intended as substitutes for conventional meat, milk and other animal-based food products. The alternative protein approaches analysed include edible insects, plant-based proteins and cellular agriculture, the latter of which encompasses 'cultured' or 'clean' meat, milk and egg products produced in vitro via cell-science methods. We build on previous research that has analysed the promissory narratives specific to cultured/clean meat by examining the key promises that have worked across the broader alternative protein movement.

Dairy intensification: Drivers, impacts and alternatives.

Dairy production systems have rapidly intensified over the past several decades. Dairy farms in many world regions are larger and concentrated in fewer hands. Higher productivity can increase overall economic gains but also incurs site-specific social and environmental costs.

Meat consumption, health, and the environment.

Both the global average per capita consumption of meat and the total amount of meat consumed are rising, driven by increasing average individual incomes and by population growth. The consumption of different types of meat and meat products has substantial effects on people's health, and livestock production can have major negative effects on the environment. Here, we explore the evidence base for these assertions and the options policy-makers have should they wish to intervene to affect population meat consumption.

Hookworms Make Us Human: The Microbiome, Eco-immunology, and a Probiotic Turn in Western Health Care.

Historians of science have identified an ecological turn underway in immunology, driven by the mapping of the human microbiome and wider environmentalist anxieties. A figure is emerging of the human as a holobiont, composed of microbes and threatened by both microbial excess and microbial absence. Antimicrobial approaches to germ warfare are being supplemented by probiotic approaches to restoring microbial life.

The microbiome and its publics: A participatory approach for engaging publics with the microbiome and its implications for health and hygiene.

Our project to engage members of the public with metagenomics of microbiota in their households yielded interesting results about their perception of health and hygiene. These findings could direct health‐oriented research and help scientists to navigate the social contexts or microbiome research. [Image: see text]

The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed.

The scientific proposal that the Earth has entered a new epoch as a result of human activities - the Anthropocene - has catalysed a flurry of intellectual activity. I introduce and review the rich, inchoate and multi-disciplinary diversity of this Anthropo-scene. I identify five ways in which the concept of the Anthropocene has been mobilized: scientific question, intellectual zeitgeist, ideological provocation, new ontologies and science fiction.

Urban reconciliation ecology: the potential of living roofs and walls.

Reconciling human and non-human use of urban regions to support biological conservation represents a major challenge for the 21st century. The concept of reconciliation ecology, by which the anthropogenic environment may be modified to encourage non-human use and biodiversity preservation without compromising societal utilization, potentially represents an appropriate paradigm for urban conservation given the generally poor opportunities that exist for reserve establishment and ecological restoration in urban areas. Two habitat improvement techniques with great potential for reconciliation ecology in urban areas are the installation of living roofs and walls, which have been shown to support a range of taxa at local scales.