(Basic Books, 2018)
A book I'm very much looking forward to reading when published in the UK later this month is Rob Dunn's Never Home Alone, which is a natural history of the domestic environment that indicates that there is a huge number of other species sharing our indoor space - perhaps over two hundred thousand.
Many of these plants and creatures are, of course, microscopic, but almost all are completely overlooked, even when visible to the naked eye. And many are performing a vitally beneficial role, so best to put down the anti-bacterial spray:
"Some of these species help our immune systems to function. Others help to control and compete with pathogens and pests. Many are potential sources of new enzymes or drugs. A few can help ferment new kinds of beers and breads. And thousands carry out ecological processes of value to humanity such as keeping our tap water free of pathogens. Most of the life in our homes is either benign or good."
We destroy these things, therefore, at our peril: we simply couldn't survive in a sterile universe even if it were possible to create such; we should encourage the biodiversity that exists within our own homes (and bodies) and accept that - whether we like it or not - human life is always full of (and reliant upon) other forms of life.
Further, it would be sensible to understand our domestic flora and fauna a little better than we do for the simple reason that we now mostly live indoors. Dunn tells us, for example, that the average child in the developed world spends 93% of his or her time in a building or vehicle and suggests that this reveals "a radical new stage in the cultural evolution of our species".
We have become stay-at-home man, or Homo indoorus, as he puts it. And if evolution is going to continue anywhere, it's more likely to be at the back of the fridge or in our central heating systems, than in what remains of the great outdoors where the background extinction rate of species is ever-accelerating.
Note: Rob Dunn is a professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen.
See: Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live, (Basic Books, 2018). The lines quoted here are from the Prologue.
