Boulder Again

Boulder Again returns to the city the book opened in. It begins with the two obituaries that followed Albert Bartlett’s death in 2013 — the beloved physics professor of the Daily Camera and the movement hero of John Tanton’s The Social Contract — and sets aside the unanswerable question of whether Bartlett was an ecofascist for a more revealing one: what his bacteria in a bottle leaves out. Read as a micro-macro isomorphism, the thought experiment strips from real bacteria exactly what lebensraum imaginaries strip from human communities — feedback, coordination, memory, and survival: quorum sensing, CRISPR-Cas immune memory, persister cells, horizontal gene transfer. The chapter pairs the five resistance traditions of the preceding chapter with these biological capacities — guarding against biological determinism as it goes — then grounds the argument in Boulder’s own terrain: the Cheyenne and Arapaho, the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre as the local precedent for what the architecture produces under stress, and a deep-time coda of Flatirons, fire, and heat. It closes by turning the nativist question of who belongs into the question of what the valley owes the people a warming world will send.

From §The Bottle: What the Thought Experiment Assumes, mid-chapter:

Bartlett’s “greatest shortcoming” thought experiment assumes a great deal. The bottle is closed. The medium is uniform. The bacteria are incapable of communication, adaptation, or behavioral change. The resources are simple and exhaustible. The growth is only exponential, with a fixed doubling time. There is no immune system, no environmental feedback, no genetic recombination, no symbiotic relationship, no quorum sensing, no biofilm formation, no horizontal gene transfer, no diauxic shift, no stress response, and no memory. Bartlett’s bacteria are abstract counters whose only relevant property is their ability to double, and the bottle is an abstract container whose only relevant property is its finite capacity. The thought experiment is mathematically rigorous and biologically false at every step.

Four properties of real bacterial populations, stripped from the bottle, organize the biology the experiment refuses. Feedback is the property by which populations respond to their own outputs: bacteria detect accumulated waste, depleted nutrients, and chemical signals from their neighbors, and adjust metabolism, growth rate, and gene expression accordingly. Coordination is the property by which they act collectively — quorum sensing, first described in the 1970s and now understood as ubiquitous across the bacterial domain, lets bacteria read population density and switch behaviors together once a threshold concentration is reached. Memory is carried in CRISPR-Cas systems, a bacterial adaptive immunity that encodes sequences from past phage attacks and transmits the record across generations. And survival persists through persister cells, spores, biofilms, and horizontal gene transfer. What the bottle deletes from bacteria is precisely what lebensraum imaginaries delete from human communities.