Toward a care for Arctic microbes

Amid a thawing Arctic, scientists continue to discover and reanimate frozen ancient microbes taken from glaciers and permafrost to study their effects on ecosystems and global warming. Interpreting these scientific practices as a form of care for human health and climate change elucidates the ethical obligations, affective states, and practical labor of these scientists. I argue that care must also be ‘unsettled’ by examining the ways this kind of care emerges from biosecurity governance that seeks to imagine catastrophe in the future and actualize it in the present through practices of preparation. Unsettling these scientific care practices also demonstrates how they generate fear of microbes and the Arctic that fit within the antimicrobial history of biosecurity. I argue that to unsettle the care practices of these scientists is to shift attention toward the care of Arctic microbes as quintessential to the care of Arctic lives and livelihoods, both humans and nonhumans alike. To do so I turn to ethnographic research with scientists and bioartists that centralize microbes in their work and draw attention to the contingencies of care immanent to microbial worlds.