What can nature teach us about healing the planet: an innovator’s perspective
December 3, 2021
COP26 is over. All the national leaders, big business, NGOs, philanthropists, and activists have gone home. And now, it’s time to do the work. With renewed commitments in place and nothing short of our planet’s health at stake, it’s squarely on the shoulders of our designers, architects, chemists, biologists, physicists and engineers to make the giant leaps needed.
While I don’t have all the answers, one thing I can tell you is that no one of those groups can create the future on their own. But when you bring different perspectives together—and intentionally drive to a horizon point— that's when you achieve transformational change.
At least that’s been my experience. Every single time I've built a multi-disciplinary team and facilitated a focused process of discover-design-develop, we have identified a flag beyond any one of our individual views, leapfrogging at least five or seven years ahead of where we would have been otherwise.
Perspective drives progress
When it comes to healing the planet, there’s no better perspective I can think to bring to the innovation table than nature itself.
Nature is one of my happy places. There’s always been this innate calling for me to go to the beach, climb a mountain, paddle down a river, ride my bike, and especially to venture out into the forest. Surrounded by towering maples and pines and lots of things I can’t name, it was always easy to appreciate the beauty and the grandeur. But I’ve never truly understood the tiny—often microscopic—levels of life underneath the forest floor. The bajillion things in the soil and the roots that distinguish a forest from a stand of trees.
Then I was introduced to biomimicry.
I’ve been innovating in sustainability for 20 years but studying nature at the functional level and using it as a model for how we design the future has transformed me. Now every time I dig up a shovel full of earth, I can’t help but wonder, “What world is this?” When I see the iconic photographs of Earth taken from space, I no longer see our planet as a rock with water on it. Now I see it as the breathing, pulsing, complex organism it is.
And when I go to work inventing the future, I now start by asking “what would nature do?”
Using nature as the guide and the goal
We've spent the past couple hundred years unintentionally degrading this high-performance regenerative system. We now have ten years to fix what we broke — as much for our sake as anyone's. Everything we do on a micro and macro level will matter. Net-zero emissions is a step in the right direction, but we already know it’s not enough. And if the goal is to get the system back in balance, we can't do that by only tweaking one lever.
So rather than asking ‘how do we get to net zero emissions’ let’s ask ‘how do we become net positive’? And not just with respect to carbon dioxide, but with the entire ecosystem. Because that's how nature would view this. To me, that’s asking ‘how do we create things? How do we add value? How do we make one plus one equal three?’
The way I see it, if we aim for net zero there's no way we'll reach net positive. So set your innovation sights farther. Together we can leap to the horizon we actually want and need.
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For an insider look at how our team is using biomimicry at the innovation table, check out our recent feature in FastCompany.
