The Integral Landscape Café

Via landscape architecture &sustainability

This one-day intensive workshop will lead participants into experiencing transformative processes first hand and head-on. It focuses on the mechanisms of change, including how our individual and collective beliefs can create ...

When you think of nature as it applies to building design, however, there is a new “nature” within a building. It is a concept termed biomimicry, which literally means to mimic life.

 

Applied biomimicry can be utilized in three ways or in a combination of these three ways:

Form - such as mimicking dragonfly wings to create lightweight structures;

 

Processes -such as mimicking photosynthesis to capture solar energy;

 

Systems-such as building wall systems that mimic the homeostasis in organisms which allows them to regulate their internal conditions such as temperature

So I studied biology, in search of the pattern of thriving living systems. And at the same, I studied all the theories about what makes organizations thrive, or succeed.  Now, for some reason, every biologist tells a different and very complicated story about how life works.  And the same is true in organizational theory.  But when you step back and look at them all together, you see that they're all telling the same basic story.  At every level of human activity, it’s the same simple pattern.

And this pattern suggests a very different guiding story.

Biomimicry: Very Intelligent Design

Biomimicry or biomimetics refers to the direct study of nature, its organisms, ecosystems, and processes to inspire solutions to anthropogenic problems.

The Courage to Change
"It is one thing to look objectively at change or to study it at a distance, in an attempt to both understand and shape it. Yet it is another thing to look at how we ourselves approach change – i.e. do we embrace change, or do we resist it? Is it exciting, or is it frightening? While the blind spots and limitations of others are often directly visible to us, it is less commonto look at our own assumptions and beliefs, our areas of discomfort and anxiety, and our fears, including the shadows that cover emotions that we would prefer to hide. This can make one feel quite vulnerable, and most people will find good reasons, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid this at all costs.” From “The Courage to Change: Adaptation from the Inside-Out” by Karen O’Brien – coming soon in Moser and Boykoff’s new book, “Successful Adaptation to Climate Change: Linking Science to Policy in a Rapidly Changing World”.http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415525008/   ;

Via Karen O'Brien

Alliance for Wild Ethics is a consortium of individuals and organizations working to ease the spreading devastation of the animate earth through a rapid transformation of culture. We employ the arts, often in tandem with the natural sciences, to provoke deeply felt shifts in the human experience of nature. Motivated by a love for the more-than-human collective of life, and for human life as an integral part of that wider collective, we work to revitalize local, face-to-face community – and to integrate our communities perceptually, practically, and imaginatively into the earthly bioregions that surround and support them.

 

 

As humans we are remarkably good at conceiving the world as a collection of objects, their geometric attributes, and the ways they can be taken apart and re-assembled to do spectacular things (either perform marvelous tasks for us, or provide an aesthetic spectacle, or both). This way of designing underlies much of our powerful technology—yet as modern science reminds us, it’s an incomplete way. Critical systemic effects have to be integrated into the process of design, without which we are likely to trigger operational failures and even disasters.

Today we are experiencing just these kinds of failures in large-scale systems like ecology. As designers (of any kind) we must learn to manage environments not just as collections of objects, but also as connected fields with essential features of geometric organization, extending dynamically through time as well as space. This is a key lesson from the relatively recent understanding of the dynamics of “complex adaptive systems,” and from applications in fields like biology and ecology.

At his carpet company, Ray Anderson has increased sales and doubled profits while turning the traditional "take / make / waste" industrial system on its head. In a gentle, understated way, he shares a powerful vision for sustainable commerce.