Ecosystem, sweet ecosystem: What if we studied the indoors as an environment all its own?
WHEN WE talk about the environment, what are we talking about? Understanding ecosystems is crucial to our health and the sustainability of our society, and studying them usually means venturing out into natural spaces. In recent decades, urban ecology has broadened this picture to include life in city streets and neighborhoods. But we have always seen the environment as involving the outside world.
Indoor spaces, by contrast, feel separate, sterile, and static. We don’t see the air in a room as part of our climate, or cleaning products as part of a geochemical cycle. And forget about biology in the indoors: ads assure us that every time we wipe the counter, we’re destroying 99 percent of germs, and that’s how we prefer it.
But a growing movement of scientists and engineers is arguing that it’s time to rethink our assumptions about what an environment is, and to give our indoor environments the same scrutiny we give nature. When it comes to our individual lives, the indoor environment may be the one that matters the most: we in the developed world spend an average of 23 hours out of every day inside. Microbiologists are now teaming up with architects, engineers, and indoor air researchers to start to better understand the ecosystems that surround us every day, and whose contents are largely invisible to the eye.
The “indoor ecology” movement is a fairly young phenomenon, but it is already starting to yield a picture that’s surprisingly intricate and diverse: A cubic centimeter of indoor air contains a thousand tiny pieces of solid or liquid material; a similar volume of house dust is a landscape of fibers, pollen, skin, and hair. Besides ourselves, and our pets, and our plants, this crowded environment is home to an ecosystem of microbial life – bacteria, fungi, viruses – that float freely or form tightly knit communities on surfaces and objects. And their lives are shaped by building materials, furniture, and the indoor climate – light, moisture, temperature….