Transcription
Here we are in the winter of 2006. There's frost on the ground, and the Northern Hemisphere is pumping out carbon dioxide at an alarming rate. It looks like the end time. Day by day, the red and yellow plumes of invisible smoke get worse.
But something almost magical is about to happen. As the snow begins to melt, trees spring to life, and the deciduous forests of the north begin to breathe in the plumes of carbon dioxide in the air. The natural world has cleaned up our mess. That is until the fall comes, and the trees lose their leaves and lie dormant for another winter.
Earth, and more specifically trees and plant matter, easily achieve what we nearly grasp at achieving: regulating and absorbing carbon dioxide on a mass scale in order to prevent exchanging climate. So when we search for solutions to human-caused climate change, might it not be better to look toward nature for the solution?
That is precisely what biomimicry suggests. But biomimicry might offer much more than just good design. It could also point towards a way to organize movements and relationships that seek resilient communities and structural change. In most cases, biomimicry has overwhelmingly been applied to design, from studying the water-shedding properties of a lotus flower in order to develop self-cleaning materials for buildings or cars, to emulating spider webs, which ounce for ounce are five times as strong as steel.
In short, as the biomimicry Institute founder Janine Benyus explains, "When you ask how to be better adapted to this planet, there are no better models than the species that have preceded us for billions of years." So, biomimicry can be explored as a method to resolve material, architectural, and general design problems by emulating species that have developed elegant solutions with a low environmental impact.
But an often overlooked element of biomimicry is nature's potential to help us understand how to best structure a political movement, individual relationships, and communities. And this is the key takeaway from author and activist Adrian Marie Brown's *Emergent Strategy*, which foregrounds learning and understanding from nature as a method to create lasting social change.
Take, for example, Brown's recognition of the communal power of ants. Ants have come together to survive, and they form, they basically create a foundation of their own bodies, like a bottom layer of their own bodies, that then other ants climb on top of and climb on top of until they create this floating mound that then is able to make sure that the majority of them survive until they come across something that is higher ground.
So here, we can look towards the processes of resilience in the natural world, not just as a way to invent new materials or better building layouts, but also as a way to understand how to best live and thrive in a local community that has been ravaged by natural disasters. The ants reveal that one way in which to survive a drastic change in weather or ideological shift in government is not to push each other down. Instead, cooperative and collective action can lead to the survival of the whole community.
But we can also zoom in and out of the natural world and learn from the brilliant formation of fractals that occur everywhere in the environment. A spiraling fern looks almost exactly the same close-up as it does zoomed out. The same can be applied to the repetitive complexity of Romanesco broccoli. Fractals reveal nature's tendency for repetition, from the smallest level of a microbiome all the way up to the universal level of a galaxy. If it doesn't work well on a small scale, it won't function on a large scale.
And Adrian Marie Brown once again, poignantly, points out that human relationships, specifically our desires for democratic systems, could function at a much better level if we mirror the effectiveness of fractals in nature. So, we talked about the experiment of democracy, for instance. I often will ask people, "How many people here would say your immediate family functions as a really functional democracy?" How many people, if you add your extended family? So your racist uncle, your grandmother. What about your whole community? So I say this to say that then we look at the federal level, like, "This democracy is not working. They don't know how to do government right." It's like, "No, none of us do."
Beyond sharkskin medical gear and quieter bullet trains modeled after the bills of kingfishers, biomimicry offers solutions to environmental and social problems that have been tested over millions of years. Adrienne Marie Brown shows us that looking towards the solutions of species and ecosystems might just help us solve some of the larger problems our planet is facing, such as climate change.
As we look towards the natural world, then, it should be as a species that is very young. We have so much to learn from others that have refined their systems for thousands and millions of years. As Janine Benyus reveals, "Life creates conditions conducive to life," and that's also the design brief for us right now. We have to learn how to do that.
This is a difficult task, but maybe a place to start is a quote from sci-fi and visionary fiction author Octavia Butler that Adrian-Marie Browne brings to life: "All successful life is adaptable, opportunistic, tenacious, interconnected, and fecund." Understand this. Use. Save. God.
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