The field of biodiversity conservation has recently been criticized as relying on a fixist view of the living world in which existing species constitute at the same time targets of conservation efforts and static states of reference, which is in apparent disagreement with evolutionary dynamics. We reviewed the prominent role of species as conservation units and the common benchmark approach to conservation that aims to use past biodiversity as a reference to conserve current biodiversity. We found that the species approach is justified by the discrepancy between the time scales of macroevolution and human influence and that biodiversity benchmarks are based on reference processes rather than fixed reference states. Overall, we argue that the ethical and theoretical frameworks underlying conservation research are based on macroevolutionary processes, such as extinction dynamics. Current species, phylogenetic, community, and functional conservation approaches constitute short-term responses to short-term human effects on these reference processes, and these approaches are consistent with evolutionary principles.

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With Microbes shows the diversity of human-microbe relationships and their dynamism, through detailed ethnographies of the relationships between humans, animals, plants, and microbes. The objective is to look at situated practices: categories mobilized by people to talk about their relationships with microbes, their practices and actions, stories people tell about microbes and materialities that are specific to them. Therefore, the volume is just as much on scientific practices of living-with-microbes as it about other ways of engaging with them. The introduction develops the notion of 'withnessing' to understand these relations. Ethnographic contributions of the book present diverse forms of microbial encounters that open up new perspectives, showing how humans and microbes compose common worlds together. Crucially, the authors and editors of this project put forward new vocabulary for describing the human-more-than-human nexus without dichotomizing between nature and culture, subject and object, human and other, etc. This is a move away from an approach that stresses on terms, entities, and individual organisms, to attend to the relationships between human-microbe entanglements, how they develop and by which they exist.