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In the company of nature: (Re)connecting in Australia

It’s without a doubt an inspiring educational experience to snorkel through Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, full of giants clams, corals, sea turtles, and countless other fascinating organisms. Nearby swims a set of instructors, who point out that the tissue inside the giant clams–some that are close to four feet wide–are blue because of photosynthetic algae growing inside. The algae makes sugars for the clam to feed on, producing a series of iridescent dots that form vertical rows that seem to be swallowed by the clam. The dots help reflect light into the clam, so the algae can continue to better carry out their photosynthesis work.

Later in Daintree Rainforest, you watch a troop of green ants carefully constructing its nest out of leaves. The building material? A sticky silk they’ve squeezed out of larvae to help latch the leaves together. Massive stag horn ferns float high overhead, where they capture nutrients and water without soil, having adapted to the higher and drier tree tops to survive and thrive.  

The spongy, pencil-like aerial roots of the mangroves that were also explored, called pneumatophores, served as the inspiration for a snorkel design tailored to help asthmatics swim more easily.

The participants in our most recent Discover Nature’s Genius immersion workshop, September 5-10 in Cape Tribulation, Queensland, Australia, were fully inundated with ideas about how to utilize innovation inspired by nature during their five-day stay in Australia. It was an experience that not only provided a deep dive into biomimicry methodology learning, but an up-close-and-deeply-personal experience of (re)connecting with nature.

Considering the human-nature connection

That’s where workshop instructor Thomas Baumeister’s human-nature connection work comes in. The human-nature connection concept delves into questions like, What is nature? What does it look like and how can we wrap our mind and arms around the notion of nature? From there, you ask, what is my personal connection with nature?

While participants were busy learning, Thomas was watching as the lessons turned into something more for the participants.

“It’s well documented, the more time you spend outdoors and the more time you spend having meaningful, purposeful experiences, the more transformative it becomes,” Thomas said. “All we’re doing is allowing that to take place, and helping people find words to express that.”

Thomas led an exercise during the workshop to help people express the importance of their experiences during the workshop that allowed them to (re)connect with nature. It’s a fairly informal process that gives everyone a chance to reflect with the help of a facilitator, who can in turn help them find the words to explain the profoundness of their experiences. 

First, Thomas listened.Then, “you give them little insights and allow them to reflect and tell stories. It’s how we communicate and share experiences,” he said. “This makes sure we’re not just acquiring methodology, but we also develop a narrative, and a story. Through story is how we evolve…  find your own narrative.”

For Tim Angus, a senior architect at Grimshaw in Australia, it was perfect way to complement the technical learning of the workshop.

“I found the discussion really surprising, enlightening, and exciting. For me, it really helped validate the powerful emotional experience we were all going through,” Tim said. “Revealing of the wonder of how the natural world works is no small thing! If we could find a way to somehow share this wonder more widely, then maybe we’d be having less of a struggle toward a sustainable existence.”

The essential elements of biomimicry

The human-nature connection piece of the workshop helped more fully bridge the connection between the essential elements of biomimicry: emulate, ethos, and (re)connect. Emulate is to understand and apply what you’ve learned, technically and intellectually. Ethos defines underlying philosophy for why we practice biomimicry.

(Re)connect is “all about the experience, ultimately coming to love something,” Thomas said.

Laura Stevens, a professor at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands, has already used what she learned during the workshops to challenge her students to consider nature’s genius in their studies and work. She recently asked them, “Wouldn’t it be nice if cities were built like rain forests? Even in tropical heat, they stay cool all the way through…” which drew from inspiration from Tim’s explanation of the qualities of a rainforest that could be incorporated into city designs.

“What we saw in this immersion workshop was a validcation of the… biomimicry circles. It was beautiful,” Thomas said.

Laura agreed that the human-nature connection considerations will have a lasting effect. 

“Thomas Baumeister’s storytelling was indeed profound,” she said, “helping us to bring our ideas home, to use them in our own practices, and for doing good for humans, showing how everyone/-thing wins when we consider the human-nature connection.”

Thomas will expand on his human-nature connection explorations during a new class offering for the Master’s of Science in Biomimicry and biomimicry Graduate Certficiate programs run in partnership through Biomimicry 3.8 and Arizona State University Online. Learn more here.

Learn more about biomimicry and Biomimicry 3.8, connect with us on FacebookTwitter (follow @Biomimicry38) and LinkedIn

 

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