The question becomes, in what other ways are they influencing us? A fleet of humans carefully tending a field of crops can certainly start to look like an army of plant symbionts, diligently serving the plants’ needs. I think about Vavilovian mimicry: we didn’t domesticate oats; oats domesticated us. When I look at a field of cabbage or pumpkin or blueberries, I wonder: Have they conscripted a symbiont, and is that symbiont us? But of course we both benefit from that particular form of coercion. Perhaps that’s the way to think about all these layered entanglements: they can be seen as
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