The milpa system in the Mesoamerican region: Microbiome as a human–plant–microbial continuum embedded in indigenous ecological knowledge

Abstract

French

The importance of the microscopic world in human and more than human health has been gathering momentum in recent years, particularly in human and soil microbiomes. Their potential to reconfigure human health, agriculture and ecologies is an exciting prospect which is also being exploited as a green capitalist enterprise amidst the scale and pace of destruction of the capitalist industrial system that operates globally. However, it is important to highlight that before the violent and genocidal establishment of the ongoing colonial capitalist project, an intimate relationship, a relationality forged between soils, plants, people and territories existed. Plant-soil microbial interactions in indigenous agricultural systems cannot be separated from specific human and ecosystemic practices developed over millennia. The milpa system in Mesoamerica is explored as a human–plant–microbial continuum because soil microbiomes along with their potential to reconfigure the current state of dysbiosis within these territories cannot be considered in isolation from the long-term relationalities from which they evolved.

Keywords

Agroecology microbiome restoration multispecies decolonial ecology political ecology historical agroecology Mesoamerica indigenous ecological knowledge regenerative agriculture

The soil crisis is a threat to life as we know it on this planet: ecosystems, food, water and biodiversity are all at risk. However, global reports and mainstream media are part of a context of homogenised anthropocentric frameworks in which human intervention is seen as one of the main causes for soil degradation (FAO, 2020; FAO et al., 2021; Timmis and Ramos, 2021). This narrative overlooks the hundreds of civilisational projects that humankind has developed over millennia, whilst presenting the current predominant model of production and consumption – based on the exploitation and domination of nature – as somehow inevitable.

This article seeks to challenge the Anthropocene narrative (Allewaert et al., 2020; Haraway, 2016; Haraway and Tsing, 2019; Moore, 2016; Tsing, 2015) within the soil crisis while showing that the milpa in the Mesoamerican region represents an example of alternative civilizational experiences that co-created a human–plant–microbial continuum. Therefore, soil microbiomes should not be considered in isolation from the long-term relationalities from which they evolved, human and more-than-human.

The milpa is a botanical system, a sociotechnological and ontological intervention that modifies human and more than human societies, creating and recreating cosmogonic beginnings and ends present in the Popol-Vuh, ancient codices, architecture and current day practices and rituals (López Austin, 2024; Luxton and Balam, 1993; Popol Vuh. The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya. N/D; Terán and Rasmussen, 2009; Vazquez-Cordoba and Flores Martínez, 2023). This intervention has a set of characteristics that defines it as ‘an open-field polyculture centred on maize, rotated with successive stages of woodland vegetation in a cycle of 16 to 30 years. Adaptable to the diverse ecosystems, milpa is found from sea level to highlands above 2000 m; it can be integrated with house gardens or grown some km from the family dwelling and can be intensified to respond to environmental constraints, market demands, and domestic cycles … While maize is visually dominant, it is interplanted with beans, squash and other plants from a basket of more than 90 Mesoamerican possibilities. Moreover, the multi-cropped maize field is just one stage of a recurring cycle’. (Ford and Nigh, 2015: 47).

Relationality, interactions and interdependence are terms that are revolutionising our ways of learning about microbiomes

Plant-soil microbial interactions are part of these entanglements. In the Mesoamerican region, this entanglement developed within the milpa, a sophisticated polyculture system which shaped ways of creating cultural systems, organising society and relating to the sacred while intervening landscapes and ecosystems. The indigenous ecological knowledge that underpins the milpa system is the core of the Mesoamerican cultural tradition which ‘has been conceived as a historical entity in which societies of very different origins and ages within the region, inhabiting a wide variety of geographical areas and belonging to very different linguistic families, have maintained interrelationships that have led them to share a common history stretching back thousands of years’ (Gámez Espinosa and López Austin, 2015: 14).

A range of studies in the Mesoamerican region centred on the particularities of its cosmovision, have shown that the milpa is the basis of the understanding of time and space, thus creating enduring biocultural transformations (Barrera-Bassols et al., 2006; Boege, 2010; Broda and Good-Eschelman, 2004; González et al., 2023; López Austin, 2024; Rivera-Núñez et al., 2025; Toledo and Barrera-Bassols, 2008).

Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Nahua, Tének, Wixarika and other indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America created ecological and cultural landscapes based on corn and its companion plants: beans, squash (the Three Sisters) along with a wide variety of edible or medicinal crops. Furthermore, as VanDerwarker (2022) suggests in her chapter on the role of Cycads and Phaseolus beans in Ancient Mesoamerica, it is important to study the wide variety of strategies that Mesoamerican farmers used for biological nitrogen fixation or to improve water retention and overall soil fertility.

Through deep exchange, which in western ecological thinking is commonly referred to as domestication, plants and humans changed, co-evolved and so did the microorganisms of these complex ecosystems. This multiple transformation is a strategy for soil fertility that has not been properly recognised as Indigenous Science which is an integral part of a different ontology and ways of inhabiting. Observation of natural cycles, long-term trial-and-error experimentation and recognition of vegetation responses to different management techniques are at the core of this co-evolution.

Capitalist Political Economy expanded through the exact knowledge of nature, its extraction and exploitation, which was and still is the basis of ‘amassing national wealth and hence power’ (Schiebinger, 2007: 5). After the extraction of gold and silver, another immediate concern of the colonial powers after their arrival in the New World was the exploration and classification of nature, particularly plants. This explains why the Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis, which is today known as the Codex de la Cruz-Badiano was written as early as 1552, 31 years after the conquest of México Tenochtitlan. Following the model of European herbariums, the idea was to preserve and transfer the knowledge of medicinal plants from the Mexica people through European approaches. Plant samples travelled to botanical gardens that expanded in the following centuries: ‘The sixteen hundred botanical gardens that Europeans had founded worldwide by the end of the eighteenth century were not merely idyllic bits of green intended to delight city dwellers, but experimental stations for agriculture and way stations for plant acclimatisation for domestic and global trade, rare medicaments, and cash crops’. (Schiebinger, 2007: 11). Undoubtedly, a microbial exchange was also part of this transfer.

Going in the opposite direction, the plantation model was imposed in vast regions of Abya Yala,¹ through genocide and violent dispossession of land. The destruction of pre-existing ways of inhabiting through the imposition of a European model of cultivation that privileged tilling, monocropping and deforestation, causing what Ferdinand (Ferdinand, 2022) has called the three ruptures: Ruptures in the landscape, biodiversity, and metabolic exchange. Those ruptures were necessary to pursue the imperial project of robbing nutrients, fertility and resources of other lands as described in Marx´s writing analysed by Bellamy Foster (2000). In this sense, we now understand that part of the disruption of the metabolic exchange is precisely a disruption of the plant–microbial continuum which has accelerated since the Green Revolution. As Biel (2013), who specialises in Political Economy and Systems Theory conceptualises it, this is a decline of complexity itself that has increased with industrial agriculture. Soil depletion is a reduction of complexity: ‘the interaction of different organisms, and its replacement by simplification and reductionism. The essential characteristic of non-organic agriculture is that diminishing returns caused by soil degradation are met by further artificial inputs, in other words, a positive feedback loop undermines the possibility that information from the approaching crisis will initiate some healthy negative-feedback response. The failure of one technical fix stimulates the search for the next (e.g., GMOs)’ (Biel, 2013: 143).

On this basis, a comprehensive review of the dispossession, destruction of soil fertility and health from a microbial point of view is required. It is urgent to reclaim it as part of a wider strategy to resist the occupation of existential territories of humans and nonhumans (Escobar, 2018: 218). Plant-soil microbial interactions in indigenous agricultural systems cannot be separated from specific human and ecosystemic practices developed over millennia. This is particularly relevant in the current scenario in which a ‘new agricultural revolution’(Granjou and Phillips, 2018) is envisioned, facilitated by the discovery of soil liveliness and the use of microbial life as labour to advert environmental and agricultural crises without challenging the Capitalist and Colonial System.

Undeniably, microbes are our ancestors, and they drive the very processes that allow our existence and the existence of almost everything else:

The soil microbiome is the essence of soil vitality – a world of innumerable metabolic systems mediating a vast number of chemical reactions – and the motor of soil biosphere services. Since the appearance of the first forms of life on the planet – bacteria and archaea – 3.8 billion years ago, microbes have evolved to exploit practically anything that can provide energy to drive metabolism and grow, evolutionarily radiating metabolically and phylogenetically in the process to generate the incredible diversity that currently exists, much of which can be found in soil, and that drives its multitude of processes. (Timmis and Ramos, 2021: 772–773)

Coming to terms with this long evolutionary history is a good starting point for the recognition of their capacity to animate innate materials and transform them into nutrients (Meulemans, 2020), to put them in the interplay of nutrient cycling. Recuperating soil health and fertility through the regeneration of the soil food web based on these understandings is a practical endeavour linked to the reconstitution of the soil-plants-people and knowledge-territories.

Soil crisis and the probiotic turn

Soil degradation threatens agricultural productivity and therefore food security, biodiversity and ecosystem health. Less understood than climate change and biodiversity loss, it is identified as a global challenge by the United Nations Rio Conventions ( The State of Food and Agriculture. Addressing Land Degradation Across Landholding Scales. 2025 ). According to the Soil Atlas Report, ‘around one-third of soils worldwide are degraded’ (FAO, 2020: 12). This degradation is an urgent matter precisely because of the time scale required for soil formation. The generation of 3 mm of topsoil takes a century (Timmis and Ramos, 2021: 770) and agriculture depends on topsoil.

The same Soil Atlas 2024 report identifies both human intervention and natural causes as the main reasons for this looming crisis. However, it is important to detangle the meaning of ‘Human intervention’ because this conceptualisation echoes the Anthropocene narrative which erases the diversity of ontologies and ways of inhabiting this planet. This is relevant because though soil erosion and degradation are an emergency, the predominant discourse in natural and agricultural sciences remains anchored on the narrative that human intervention is to blame, and not a specific kind of human intervention, particular to a system of production and consumption, a linear way of relating to nature based on dominance. This productive system is, overall, based on the exploitation of human labour, non-human labour and nature. In this context, soil is presented as a homogeneous civilizational residue (Krzywoszynska and Marchesi, 2020: 19) without a historical narrative that establishes the different processes of soil formation or degradation.

This exploitation of different kinds of labour and materialities has managerial practices that promote oil inputs, acceleration of yields and linear processes that disrupt natural cycles. The way in which the nitrogen cycle has been interrupted in the pursue of increasing yields and its disastrous consequences is a good example of this. Undoubtedly, food production increased as a result in the 20th century, but it is widely accepted now that this productive system is not sustainable in the long run. Nitrogen-based fertilisers used in agricultural production are manufactured using large quantities of fossil fuels, but only 40% of these inorganic fertilisers are absorbed by crops (Umar et al., 2020); the rest volatilises, polluting the atmosphere, or runs off, contaminating rivers, lakes and oceans, thus causing the proliferation of algae and dead zones. The increase in algae is an evident result of excessive nitrogen in the sea, but there are other consequences that can lead to changes in overall ecosystem function (Bernhard, 2010; Huddel et al., 2020; Melillo, 2021).

The disruption in natural cycles has caused what in biological terms is considered a state of dysbiosis which has consequences for human and more than human health: ‘Dysfunctional and pathological microbiome disequilibrium, that gives rise to various blowbacks. These are the unintended consequences of past rounds of agricultural modernisation and include amplified greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, anti-microbial resistance, zoonotic disease spill-over, and other indirect impacts on human health’. (Cusworth et al., 2025: 1)

Calculating the damage to ecosystems and life on Earth of any of the consequences of agricultural modernisation is a challenge. Furthermore, as Patel (2012) argues, the current food system is fragile due to its inherent systemic and structural vulnerabilities.

However, the Green Revolution model is undergoing a metamorphosis, adapting itself to a changing environment through the adoption of certain microbiological understandings for this transformation. Disaster is, once again, being turned into a profit-making opportunity with consequences that are difficult to predict.

It is also important to highlight that the imposition of this productive model through technological packages and modes of production that are integral to the Capitalist and Colonial System, also encountered resistance in many parts of the globe. For example, as Astier et al. (2017: 331) note, the imposition of the agroindustrial model in Mexico and India, the first countries that underwent this intrusion (Shiva, 2002) that promoted modernising agricultural practices to increase productivity was met with resistance on the ground and within academia with important figures such as Hernández-Xolocotzi and Gómez-Pompa (Gliessman, 2013). Social and indigenous movements across the globe such as the Zapatistas, La Vía Campesina, the Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) peasant movement in India, Cultive Resistencia in Brazil have been defending traditional knowledge and practices that oppose the imposition of the resource-depleting agroindustrial model. In some cases, defending land and territories implies maintaining and promoting alternative and non-capitalist, non-colonial ways of knowing and living. There are plenty of examples in the Global North and South.

Despite this resistance, the destruction of soil fertility and health and the imposition of the agroindustrial model are extensive. The Green Revolution was followed by a whole range of developmental policies first and then trade agreements such as the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement for North America have strong agricultural chapters that continue deepening land concentration, labour exploitation and the technification of the food production chain. Simultaneously, the understanding of soils and soil-plant interactions has changed dramatically in the last few decades. This new revolution in agriculture is based on the recognition of microbes as biological catalysts of soil fertility and plant health. This could be a way out of the time conundrum of topsoil formation described above. Theoretically, the objective of increasing crop yields could coexist with maintaining soil fertility. Furthermore, soils have a significant potential for carbon sequestration that could reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration by more than 20% (Lal, 2011).

Transforming our relationship with soils, learning and understanding how soil–plant interactions work, restoring microbiomes, are undoubtedly some of the most important actions we can take in agriculture and ecosystem restoration. However, the question here would be how these radical changes are being adapted and used to maintain or develop even further the Capitalist and Colonial System or if they could, somehow be used to recuperate and promote autonomy, other world views and practices towards the liberation of Mother Earth.

Reversing dysbiosis as a green capitalist enterprise

The optimism for a new agricultural revolution based on microbiomes in general and in the soil microbiome in particular (Granjou and Phillips, p.17) has permeated different societal strata. From soil scientists and microbiologists that are now being incorporated into different transdisciplinary research teams, to art, films, podcasts, books, schools and farmer-led-movements, it is undeniable that we are witnessing a change in paradigms. The Probiotic Turn (Lorimer, 2020) is unfolding in front of our eyes. However, as the same authors argue, it is important to acknowledge that: ‘the newer understanding of the living agency or energy of soil is leaving us with a vision of soil and its microbiota as a lively, but controllable, resource-turned-technology in the service of humans’ (Granjou and Phillips, 2018: 15).

This is aligned with the ongoing discourse of nature-based solutions that do not necessarily challenge the colonial, capitalist and patriarchal system. We can describe this as ‘another technofix that allows us to continue business as usual in which microbiomes are turned into biocapital (patented and owned in corporate property regimes’ (Lorimer, 2020: 253). It becomes urgent to recognise that while microbiomes do hold the potential to reconfigure our very own holobiont bodies, agriculture and ecologies, this process is not necessarily a revolutionary, radical or liberatory endeavour per se. As Latour (2018) reminds us of the diverse array of human and nonhuman forces through which soils are assembled, in practical terms, the dominant capitalist and colonial order operate through positivist science which has been focused on the ecological work provided by keystone species or in the interaction of some consortia in order to reconfigure agriculture and ecologies. This is, attempting to reverse dysbiosis as a green capitalist enterprise, or improving soils as a ‘more successful enrolment in processes of capital’ (Krzywoszynska et al., 2022: 25).

A clear example of this is how Bayer is investing heavily and promoting regenerative agriculture through a combination of chemical, biological, genetic and digital technologies. Soil health is at its core. The discourse is clearly focused on climate change, ecosystem regeneration, biological innovation and soil health, all propelled by meteoric growth in this market:

‘The potential of biologicals in agriculture is just unfolding. The sector has seen meteoric growth, and it is expected to grow further, more than doubling in size to 30 billion euros by 2035. Bayer's partnership approach to biological innovation aims to accelerate the development of an entire ecosystem of biological solutions in the coming years with some exciting innovations that support our regenerative ambitions’ (Bayer Global, s. f.).²

Through the language of sustainability and resilience, another strategy has been crafted to profit from the devastation created by the same techno-capitalist system. This is a characteristic of most nature-based climate solutions that are being promoted by corporations and multilateral agencies in the genocidal times of the 21st century. Another outstanding feature of this green capitalist enterprise is biopiracy applied to microbiome research, specifically in indigenous and traditional agroecosystems (Cusworth et al., 2025: 2; Granjou and Phillips, 2018). These reservoirs of microbes, plants and humans were developed over millennia of interactions. Soil bioprospecting tries to isolate microorganisms or consortia to reproduce them and scale up their use in commercial agriculture. This is one of the potentials of biologicals in agriculture, as promoted by Bayer.

The conceptual hijacking of Regenerative Agriculture should be identified as such, but that does not mean that improving soil health and fertility are not urgent endeavours to counterbalance environmental disaster while increasing the quantity and quality of food for humans and non-humans. How can we recuperate the relationality in the web of life, occupying our space as weavers and carers, as carers and gardeners while abandoning our anthropocentrism? How can we embed anticolonial, antipatriarchal and anticapitalist practices in this microbiome revolution? Under what conditions can we relate to microorganisms and microbiomes in ways that challenge our anthropocentric views and practices? What interventions, solidarities and apparatuses make space for alternative and democratic forms of entanglement and inter-dependance?

These are complex questions which will not be solved individually or intellectually. Collective action for reorganising human existence is both necessary and urgent. Thankfully, there is a tradition of rebellion against the capitalist colonial order that has preserved the same traditional and indigenous ecosystems that are now being targeted for bioprospecting. These pockets of biodiversity where either too difficult to reach geographically or considered of low interest, a low priority until recently. Different modes of colonialism allowed for their continuous existence. Learning from traditions that have sustained and reproduced life for millennia is not romanticising the past. In fact, it represents an effort to understand and communicate with those interactions, microorganisms–soil–plants–humans through a more complex way of perceiving. One of the traditions that has created biodiversity in Abya Yala, is the milpa polyculture system, which can be described as a human–plant continuum.

The milpa system in the Mesoamerican region: human–plant–microbial continuum

The milpa is the heart of landscape design and intervention in the Mesoamerican region. In this area, ecological diversity is mirrored by cultural and linguistic diversity. Through a myriad of ecological niches in this macroregion, the milpa system established a dialectical logic more than 5000 years ago (Terán and Rasmussen, 2009). Heterogeneous processes weave together social and cosmological life cycles based on the diversity created by this ‘co-evolution of the human–plant continuum’ (Barrera-Bassols et al., 2006: 125). Through different interventions that are adapted to diverse ecological niches, a variety of cultures flourished: through chinampas, metepantle, lama-bordos and milpas as the centre of the Maya Forest garden and many more.

Chinampa farming is probably one of the most well-known ancient techniques of Mesoamerica. They are raised garden plots in the lakes of Xochimilco and Chalco, created by weaving together sticks and roots of aquatic plants that are able to retain soil (McDonough, 2024). They involved a combination of labour, knowledge and skill. Metepantle is an ancient system that has been used for more than 3000 years in Tlaxcala, Hidalgo, Estado de México and Oaxaca, characterised by the creation of channels or ditches on the borders, created by using different species of agaves. In the centre of this space, the milpa co-exists with fruit trees. This system controls soil erosion, contributes to water retention and improves soil fertility (FAO, s. f.; Matias Mondragón, 2022).

Lama-bordo terraces were developed at least 3500 years ago by the Mixteca people in the Mixteca Alta region and ‘differ from hillside contour terraces as they are cross-channel check dams (water and sediment traps) transverse to stream valleys (Johnson and Renwick, 1969; Spores, 1969)’ (Leigh et al., 2013: 4107). In recent research conducted in the GMA has highlighted microbial diversity adapted to the different environmental niches created by these Mixtec practices (Martínez-Núñez and Orozco-Ramírez, 2024).

These are just a few examples of the human–plant continuum that increased soil fertility and microbial diversity and should therefore be understood as a human–plant–microbial continuum: ‘In the coevolution process, inhabitants select seeds resistant to environmental conditions and biotic factors, preserving the germplasm and increasing soil fertility and microbial richness by establishing various types of crops’ (Rojas-Sanchez et al., 2025: 3). Human labour was invested through different types of intervention such as seed and plant selection, soil exchange, mulching, successional intercropping, pruning, and so on. As in other cultures that are closer to the land as a daily practice, the distinction between land and soil is often blurred. Though land-soil-Mother Earth has distinguishable physical and biological characteristics, it is also a supra-natural being. Learning to be in dialogue with these distinct forces, which in turn are also twined with the water cycle is what humanises people in the Mesoamerican world. Or to be more precise, what makes us milperos: people who co-produce milpa, capable of dialogue with the natural world, with its entities to produce food while ensuring the reproduction of the web of life. Milpa, rain, soil and all the different entities around this complex are a web, a macro societal being. This is described in detail for diverse Mesoamerican cultures in Mundos de Maíz (González et al., 2023).

For the Mazateca people (as they were called by the nahuas) or rather, the Shuta eńima or Chjota Én Na, a nation, an ethnic group that inhabits a sierra in Oaxaca, being shuta enima is a collective identity based on being part of this human–plant continuum, is a synonym of being milpero, working in the forest, reproducing it by working in the mountains:

‘According to the elder Ramos, being a shuta enima involves working in the forest. I would like to highlight the importance of work in the creation of identity. It is about the transformation of nature – the forest – through human action. The “we” work – even though planting is sometimes an individual action – has the village or villages behind it. In effect, work strategies are based primarily on the organisation of the community – but also on the experience that arises from working in the mountains, as well as collective knowledge, the transmission of the management of certain ecosystems, and the way of approaching nature’ (Boege, 1988: 26).

Becoming a shuta enima is not only technological or practical task, instead, it is a complex experiential knowledge achieved by practice, storytelling and participation in communal life. A semantic corpus of cultural and cosmogonic enactment that takes place in every growing cycle. Obtaining a good harvest is also related to the dialogue, the harmony that the human community can achieve with the spiritual beings that are inherent to plants and everything that exists in what we call nature (Freidel et al., 1995; López Austin, 2024; Nations, 2023), since such a concept does not really exist in this cosmogonic view.

Corn cannot grow without human intervention. If an ear of corn is simply left on the ground, it will not grow. It needs to be sown. In the same way, humans in this area cannot live without corn. It is present in every meal, in every celebration. After the harvest, the grains of corn will be carefully selected: some will become food and some will go back into the soil, to start a journey through the underworld. From there, they must re-emerge through an alchemical process in which different forces intervene to achieve the miracle of germination. All these symbolic, ontological elements are also within the human–plant continuum which should also be extended to the microbiome. Therefore, soil microbiomes along with their potential to reconfigure the current state of dysbiosis within these territories cannot be considered in isolation from the long-term relationalities from which they evolved. Ford and Nigh (2015) demonstrated that some of the solutions for our current environmental disasters in the tropical areas of Mesoamerica, are actually rooted in the wisdom of practices from the past: successional stages of plants in the high-performance Maya milpa are particularly relevant to the regeneration of the forest garden, something the Maya gardeners achieved through labour and sophisticated knowledge. However, our understanding of succession below, in the soil in these complex ecosystems is still poor and fragmented.

Furthermore, emerging research on plant-microbe interactions suggests that crop modernisation has had an impact on the structure and functions of plant-associated microbes, altering plant and soil health. Therefore, ‘milpas could serve as a model for understanding plant–microbe interactions and the effect of modernization’ (Gastélum et al., 2022: 5583). Other emergent research suggests that there is a decrease in the diversity of the corn microbiome, particularly in the case of modern hybrid varieties (Bernal, 2025). In contrast, native corn and particularly teocintle, the ancestor of corn, maintain microbial consortia which have an impact on resistance to pests and soil resilience (Hernandez-Garcia et al., 2025).

Conclusion

It is not without a terrible irony that while Bayer, BioN2 and other enterprises are seeking to increase research and then obtain patents of plant traits and microbial associations in Mesoamerica, government agencies continue to distribute hybrid maize seeds, oil-based fertilisers and pesticides that continue destroying millennial history. The highly controversial and still unresolved research on olotón-type corn (Kloppenburg et al., 2024) plant germplasm and its microbial symbionts is an excellent example of the ongoing battle to commodify what is, in fact, a carefully crafted entanglement of interdependence and mutual nurturing. This human–plant–microbial continuum is the result of indigenous science, which should be understood as the result of rigorous research, experimentation and problem solving conducted over millennia (McDonough, 2024), a complete system of knowledge that was able to transform landscapes and increase biodiversity. In this sense, it is clear that: ‘the greatest threat to the future of life is the loss of traditional ecological knowledge, of which the milpa forest garden is one of our most significant examples’ (Ford y Nigh, 2015: 174). The relationship between the wild, the uncultivated and what has been selected and nurtured over long periods is fundamental.

If we have a chance to reverse the existing socioecological disaster and the concurrent dysbiosis of our ecosystems, it's fundamental to preserve this knowledge and promote a people-led dialogue between western science and indigenous science to study and maintain this human–plant–microbial continuum.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Rita Valencia

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical consideration

The author(s) declared that ethical approval was not necessary for this study.

Notes

Author biography

Rita Valencia is a Post-Doctoral researcher focusing on historical agroecology, people-soil relations and indigenous knowledge systems. Founding member of Nepantla Tierra Viva.

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