Planetary Dysbiosis

 Planetary Dysbiosis


Created by Aubrey Lieberman in collaboration with ChatGPT 5.1 turbo — November 2025


In medicine, gastrointestinal dysbiosis describes what happens when the delicate ecology of the gut—billions of organisms in dynamic balance—falls out of alignment. A shift in diet, toxins, or antibiotics can cause one species to dominate, and the system’s elegant self-regulation falters. The result is inflammation, metabolic confusion, and the slow unraveling of harmony.


The moment I encountered this concept, I thought of the planet. Earth’s biosphere was never designed to accommodate a single species with the power to alter oceans, atmosphere, soil, and climate in a geological instant. Natural law evolved to manage variation, competition, and slow drift—not an abrupt, globally dominant primate whose ingenuity outpaced its ecological wisdom. What we now call the environmental crisis is, in biological terms, planetary dysbiosis: an imbalance created not by malice but by speed, scale, and the absence of time for adaptive counterforces to arise.


The cure cannot be passive. Just as dysbiosis in the gut often requires deliberate intervention—dietary shifts, restored microbial diversity, and targeted therapeutics—planetary dysbiosis requires engineering solutions, social innovation, and a rebalancing of human behavior with the larger living world. We are the problem, but uniquely, we are also the only possible treatment. The task is not to return to some imagined natural equilibrium but to create a new, stable one—an engineered harmony in a world transformed by us.


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Bibliography

Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza. 2003.

Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet. 1998.

Wilson, E. O. The Diversity of Life. 1992.

Rockström, Johan et al. “Planetary Boundaries.” Nature. 2009.

Steffen, Will et al. The Anthropocene Review. 2015.

Pollan, Michael. Cooked. 2013.

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