Conservation Tends to Ignore the Most Common Type of Life

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Conservationists pride themselves on protecting all of Earth’s life, not just the flashy panda bears and tigers. The field has focused on obscure desert pupfish, insects, and modest little herbaceous plants. But conservationists seldom put bacteria on a tote bag, even though most life is microscopic. Earth has something like a trillion species of bacteria, fungi, archaea, and protozoa—the families of life grouped under the general heading of “microbes.” The sea is a soup of microbes, the soil a wonderland of imperceptible life; even the is alive. Hundreds of millions of viruses and tens of millions of bacteria that float through the air are deposited on every square meter of Earth every day. We’re living in an “English drizzle of microbes,” Kent Redford, a consulting conservationist in Maine who previously held a top post at the Wildlife Conservation