Biomimicry

The night is coming. The veil that separates the world of the living from the realm of the dead now grows thin. Spirits gather and soon will cross this dark divide to fill shadowy streets and abandoned yards with visions of the ghastly, the ghostly, and the ghoulish. Can’t wait! But while we do, here’s some news of the strange and the weird to mark the world’s spookiest holiday and the one of the its oldest pagan traditions…

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is back in the news with word that the feds want to study this maelstrom of muck with an eye toward a possible clean-up. Those familiar with the incredibly disconcerting and wholly freakish twice-Texas-sized patch of floating trash, however, say that not only is cleanup pretty much impossible even conducting basic research is likely to prove vexing. How about we just take the zillions of dollars and man-hours we might spend here and devote them to preventing garbage from entering ocean ecosystems in the first place?

Halloween marks the boundary between summer and winter, or light and dark, an important annual milestone given the impact we’ve learned light can have on human health. Indeed studies have shown that people who work out-of-sync with natural day-night cycles are at risk for all kinds of maladies from depression to breast cancer. The impact is so great that the World Health Organization will declare in December that shift work is a “probable carcinogen.” In other words, the graveyard shift could actually put you there. I think it’s time to shift our 24/7 economy back to something a little more civilized.

Things are moving. Ideas are raining through the biosphere, percolating through the substrata, reaching down into the cultural aquifer where everyone can tap them and take a good long drink. Some days it’s hard to keep up with all these emergent memes. Feels like being in one of those game show money booths where high speed fans whip up a storm of $100 bills and you try to grab as many as you can. But do these embryonic notions represent lasting trends or only ephemeral fads? Me thinks the former because each one seems to be building itself in some way on those that have come before. Then it turns into a foundation for something that follows, and in this way a new vision is evolving faster than hope would previously allow. Grabbed like snowflakes from the building gale, here are some recent portents that a storm of change is coming just in time…

Great moments in pure genius: How does a simple three inch lump of black wax slash carbon dioxide emissions from one of humanity’s biggest sources? Like this.

Nice house. Nice car. Nice life. No power bills. No carbon footprint. No atmospheric impact.. We can do this
It is possible.

Now imagine this: No garbage. No trash. No waste. Anywhere. Ever.
We can do that, too.

Out in the woods, we’re losing less than we used to. And slowing the pendulum is the first thing that happens before it swings in the other better direction.

There’s even a much-needed breath of fresh air in the marbled halls, where we’re beginning to remember what it looks like when common sense and leadership replace delusional self-interested hackery.

As the poet said… The answers, my friends, are blowing in the wind.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but being here has definitely changed me. It's more than the learning and it's more than the experience. I feel moved. Moved to a new place. I am moved to a greater connection with this earth, moved toward a greater appreciation of all things in nature, moved to get out of the 'burbs, moved to convince the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival to compost their trash next year, moved to buy more organic, moved to remove plastic from our house, moved to get my daughters outside every day, and so much more.

An incredible day today. Meaty, relevant and exhausting. We heard some great biology stories today and Dan, Daron and I are all pretty weirded out. Jeffrey, did you have a conversation with Dayna and Janine about what we are doing back at the Seventh Gen ranch? We talked a lot about telling a story, not just giving facts and figures. What a great day. I love my job!

Mimicking nature in product design? How cool is that? Biology? Product Design? I'm a quality geek (sans the pocket protector), how will this relate to what I do?

Good News! The Seventh Generation Team has made it all the way to Great Falls, Montana and from there to a brief thought of civilization named Dupuyer (which Dan Googled and found means 'bison back fat' in French). All of us were active at 4:00AM this morning and now that it is midnight our time, Penny and I are pretty drained. Dan however is ready for a hike.

I am hours away from my flight from Burlington, Vermont (my home and headquarters of Seventh Generation) to Great Falls, Montana- the closest commercial airport to the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch in Dupuyer, MT. That's where I'll be participating in the 6 day workshop: Biologists at the Design Table (BaDT). There I'll be joining 2 other co-workers (Penny and Dan) and from the looks of it, 13 other participants.

Camel's Hump VT State Park is one
of the more pronounced mountain tops in the Northern Vermont Green Mountains, and we 7th Geners
(people from the marketing, consumer relations and corporate consciousness departments) flowed
to the mountain today - to climb, to talk, to resonate, to find relevance, to practice our biomimicing for future products,
to thought-explore the way-out future, and to find one another in the acting of nature...

The discussions were shallow and deep and local and global and scared and happy and beating
the beat of our breaths and the nature flowing in and out of our consciousness.

It is amazing how much can be found out of the habit of just doing the office-work-meeting maze...

Goodtime for All...Happy weekend.

WR

We recently conducted our first in series of biomimicry design charettes to begin to think about the process of innovating some of our products using designs inspired by nature.

Dayna Baumeister, PhD from the The Biomimicry Guild led the charette. It was fascinating - brain stimulating and a day of great discovery...good times for all...here is a blurb on the process and a v-log of the charette.