JANINE BENYUS on Redesigning Society Based on Nature ⌠ENCORE⌡ /71

Photo by Olena Shmahalo

Photo by Olena Shmahalo

This week we are excited to feature an encore episode chosen by our Podcast Editor and Producer Andrew Storrs. Andrew calls the lands of Joshua Tree, California, home and is drawn to environmental activism & education at this critical moment in our planet's history. He is deeply inspired by the work of Janine Benyus and the concepts of Biomimicry.

In an age of natural exploitation and capitalism, the redundancy of a term like “biomimicry” might be lost on the Western minded psyche. The irony lies in that as a species functioning from the Westward expansion of the settler colonial mindset, we have veered so far off the path of right relation that we have to define a technology of mimicry to invite the right relations.

The answers we seek, the key to a life sustaining world, are literally all around us. The severance from seven generations thinking has left us drowning in a falsehood of limitlessness, and here we stand at a crossroads of the potentiality for life as we know it on Earth coming to a hard stop. Biomimicry offers us insight into what it might look like to be in alignment with the flow of life. Wondering what success looks like beyond our children, beyond our children’s children, but to the entire web of inextricably linked beings– seven generations beyond this very moment. What does this earth look like in year 2218?

Janine Benyus

Janine Benyus

Janine Benyus is the Co-founder of Biomimicry Institute. She is a biologist, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Janine encourages us to live by the questions, “What would nature do here?” And, “What wouldn’t nature do here?” Join us to listen as she expounds upon the power of Biomimicry as a profound force for regeneration.

♫ Music is "Conflated" by Vide Geiger and "Garden of Dreams" by Samuela.