“Seeing nature at work kindles our capacity to learn, to situate ourselves, to do more, better” Randall R. Anway, New Tapestry, LLC
Time in nature brings clarity, as if our feelings and thoughts have been read in the way only a mother can. With just a couple of weeks till the 80th birthday of the best Mom in the whole universe, thanks are due to Mother Nature. How does she do it?
Innovators interested in the ways of nature find their way to the Biomimicry Guild for natural models to apply to today's challenges in "commerce, governance, science, art, religion and the cosmos". Randall Anway, Sustainable Building Advisor and Architect of New Tapestry LLC, focuses on these principals.
“Life’s patterns matter..earth works without us, we need to learn from it.”
For those of us interested in “doing more with less, handling change and uncertainty, dealing with persistent limitations, using what is readily available and creating abundance”, the mentor is Mother Nature.
Part of the challenge of teaching biomimicry is discussing it. It needs a new language. So much is riding on language now. A recent article on preventative care for Alzheimers describes a void in the language of preventative treatment. In legislatures, we are tripping over legal and religious language referring to natural human behavior. All of this is being added to a system trying to educate, govern and heal in multiple tongues undergoing massive budget cuts.
So what are we to do with this set of limitations? Recently, I have been learning ways to recall musical rhythms. This deals with the part of the brain that looks for patterns, the left brain. Its favorite pattern is the list. Rattling off a list is easy in your own tongue. Doing so in a new one, not so easy. We know the more languages you learn, the faster you pick them up. Presumably this contributes to a faster absorption rate of patterns of all kinds.
Replicating immersion helps language learning. Once, despite broken French at the time, I surprisingly recalled a poem from a new Arab friend met on the TGV. Later, by forcing myself to sit in the front of class, I got an A in what I had anticipated to be a boring pre-Renaissance style class. The same immersion was applied to grasping vocabulary of synthetic financial instruments, international tax, and computer coding.
No need to wait on Washington here either, we can begin by again moving to the front, where new language is urgently needed and activate our pattern makers - "using information instead of energy" like mother and nature.
www.new-tapestry.com/
www.biomimicryguild.com/guild_about_us.html
from Transformational Infrastructure*
What do you think? Is it an education issue when children are demoralized by schools in disrepair? According to the American Society of Civil Engineer’s (ASCE) 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, spending on the nation’s schools fell $9 billion in 3 years from ’04-07. The NEA’s best estimate to bring nation’s schools into good repair is $322 billion.What about jobs? Is it readying the workforce for the new economy when nearly half of American households are without access to bus or rail transit, and only 25% have what they consider to be a good transportation option? Instead, Americans spend 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic at a cost to the economy of $78.2 billion or $710 per motorist.In terms of job creation, over 190,000 jobs are created in redevelopment of brownfield sites, yet funding for cleanup of the worst toxic waste sites has declined to its lowest level since ‘86.Do you think infrastructure impacts health & safety when drinking water is unavailable? Leaking pipes lose an estimated 7 billion gallons of clean drinking water a day. How about when · there is a growing volume of electronic hazardous waste · 50 year old levees pose augmented risk to failure · $7 billion in unfunded maintenance of parkland impacts air quality These are just a few of the alarming conditions that gave our nation a “D” on the 09 Report Card described by Andrew Herrmann, ASCE,
Friday at Transformational Infrastructure presented by the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute and CUNY Institute for Urban Systems. An estimated 15 categories need a 5 -year investment at $2.2 trillion. Key infrastructure solutions proposed: · Increase federal leadership to address the crisis· Promote sustainability & resilience to protect the natural environment & withstand hazards.· Develop national, state & regional plans that focus on system-wide results· Address life-cycle costs & ongoing maintenance to meet the needs of current & future users.· Increase & improve investment from all stakeholders.The disconnect in our old-style, silo thinking about education, jobs, health and security with regard to infrastructure does not serve our national interest. These issues are connected. We know this - we’ve advised it. When an individual neglects home in the face of crisis abroad, there’s a cost. So it is for a nation. It is time to do for ourselves what we are doing elsewhere for others.For more information: http://www.asce.org reportcard. For further information about Transformational Infrastructure a conference presented by the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute and CUNY Institute for Urban Systems go to http://baruch.cuny.edu/realestate
