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Niall Mac Coitir brings to life the myths, legends and folklore associated with native Irish trees, much of which persists to this day. Two main themes emerge: the tree as a marker of important places such as royal sites or holy wells, and the role of trees as sources of magical power in folk customs and traditions, such as carrying a blackthorn sta. when out walking at night to ward off evil spirits. Beautifully illustrated and imaginatively written, this mix of natural history, mythology and folklore will entertain and enlighten all interested in Ireland's trees.

Niall Mac Coitir grew up in a bilingual environment in Dublin with a love of Irish history, culture and nature instilled into him. An active member of the Irish Wildlife Trust, he works for Fingal County Council. His other books are Irish Wild Plants - Myths, Legends & Folklore (2006), Ireland's Animals - Myths, Legends & Folklore (2010) and Ireland's Birds - Myths, Legends & Folklore (2015).

Publication Date

September 2015

Format

Paperback - B-format paperback, 240 pages

Country of Origin

IRELAND

Publisher

The Collins Press

Author(s)

By Niall Mac Coitir

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IRELAND'S TREES | Myths, legends and folklore

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Niall Mac Coitir brings to life the myths, legends and folklore associated with native Irish trees, much of which persists to this day.

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Eoin starts his island voyage on Rathlin where he witnesses one of the most extraordinary leaps of faith undertaken by any animal on the planet.

RTÉ - Ireland's National Television and Radio Broadcaster

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Eoin starts his island voyage on Rathlin where he witnesses one of the most extraordinary leaps of faith undertaken by any animal on the planet. Watch Ireland's Wild Islands S01E01 on RTÉ Player for free

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Drawing on ancient techniques, artist and primitive arts instructor Nick Neddo shows you how to reconnect with nature to make and use your own all-natural art supplies. The Organic Artist encourages you to return to those days when art was made with all-natural materials, like charcoal and birch bark. Immersing you in the natural world, this book seeks to inspire creativity by connecting you to your organic roots .using nature as supplies for art , this book also introduces the concepts of awareness and perception that are foundational to the creative process. Readers will refine drawing skills , as well as increase their appreciation for the visual arts and the natural landscape.

In addition to offering a wide variety of suggestions for

Some of the projects and skills covered include the following:

Learn to find satisfaction in the natural process of transformation.

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The Organic Artist: Make Your Own Paint, Paper, Pigments, Prints and More from Nature

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encourages you to return to those days when art was made with all-natural materials, like charcoal and birch bark. Immersing you in the natural world, this book seeks to . In addition to offering a wide variety of suggestions for , this book also introduces the concepts of awareness a...

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Call of The Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees

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Watch the feature-length documentary and join the movement, inspired by environmental visionary Diana Beresford-Kroeger, to save our global forest.

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Ocean with David Attenborough | Official Website | 8 May 2025

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Ocean with David Attenborough | Official Website | 8 May 2025

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Watch the trailer, find screenings & book tickets for Ocean with David Attenborough on the official site. In cinemas 8 May 2025 brought to you by Altitude Film. Directed by: Toby Nowlan, Colin Butfield, Keith Scholey. Starring: David Attenborough

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This is an incredibly inspiring exploration of the sea’s role in the wellness of people and the planet, beautifully written by Easkey Britton – surfer, scientist and social activist. She offers a powerful female perspective on the sea and surfing, explaining what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world and how she pro

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A world expert on how trees chemically affect our environment, Diana Beresford-Kroeger has woven together ecology, ancient myth, horticulture, spirituality, science and alternative medicine in The Global Forest to capture their enormous significance to us - and our future. From enormous native Savannah trees that create their own sunscreen to hedgerows that contain and entire chain of life, this book shows us the power of the global forest. Trees absorb pollutants from the ground, comb particulates from the air and house beneficial insects. But what they do chemically in the environment is something we’re only beginning to understand. Trees not only breathe and communicate; they also reproduce, heal and even nurture, and each of these forty interlocking essays picks out a different aspect of the life of the forest, explains it and then shows why it is so vitally important. Combining the precision of a scientist with the lyricism of a poet, Diana Beresford-Kroeger has written an unforgettable work of natural history that shows how we really can save the Earth, one tree at a time.

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Buy To Speak For The Trees Book at Easons

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“A rare gift: an inspiring tale about trees, trauma and the very purpose of life.” -Andrew Nikiforuk, author of Empire of the Beetle Diana Beresford-Kroeger-a world-recognized botanist and medical biochemist-has revolutionized our understanding of the…

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One of the world's most innovative environmentalists was in the Burren last week, sharing ideas with two groundbreaking local groups.
Borneo environmental activist and co-founder of Arus Kualan indigenous schools, Plorentina 'Dessy' Elma Thyana, visited Ennistymon and Kinvara recently, where she met with representatives from HomeTree and the Kinvara Ballinderreen Tree Gang.
Dessy is a member of the Dayak people, the guardians of the Borneo rainforest, and is the first member of the Dayak people to ever visit Ireland.
The Borneo rainforest, known as the Asian Amazon, is the oldest rainforest in the world having been in existence for some 140 million years.
Dessy's first visit to Ireland is a cultural exchange and was aimed to offer a chance for Irish people to learn from an advanced indigenous culture who only knows organic, circular economic and sustainable agricultural practices.
During her time in the Burren she gave talks and joined in knowledge sharing workshops locally with HomeTree in Ennistymon and the Kinvara Ballinderreen Tree Gang, who are using the Japanese Miyawaki method to rapidly grow native Irish forest that is predicted to absorb 30 times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than traditional tree planting methods.
"Meeting Dessy was a rare and precious opportunity for our group to hear first-hand of both the riches of the Dayak Forest culture and the challenges they face from those who see the rainforest through the lens of profit," said Finola Ó Siochrú, Miyawaki Project Leader of the KB TreeGang.
"It highlighted for us the urgency of preventing the destruction of this 140 million-year old rainforest. To allow this would be to rob the earth of one of its life-sustaining lungs and the basis of survival of the Dayak peoples."
Jess Williams, Hometree Rainforest Project Manager said there are many similarities between the current situation in Ireland and Borneo.
"Hometree was delighted to collaborate with Our Story to welcome Dessy, an inspiring guest from the Borneo Rainforest," he said.
"Despite the many, many miles of ocean between Borneo and Ireland, the similarities between our cultures and work were incredible to share. We are both island peoples, and forest peoples.
"In Ireland we've all but lost our forest and we're trying desperately to reconnect with the land and the forest lore that's embedded in our culture. In Borneo they are watching as the rainforests disappear and indigenous culture disappears with it.
"The Dayak community and Dessy's project are trying to change this.
"We have so much to learn from them."
During her visit, Dessy also joined activities in UCD Innovation Academy, Down to Earth Forest School, the Galway Hooker Sailing Club, Dr Clare's apothecary, nature artist Roisin Coyle and musical instrument maker Paul Doyle.
"The Dayak people can learn a lesson from Ireland's experience of losing your forests, culture and traditional knowledge during colonisation," she said.
The visit was made possible following a trip by Irish environmentalist, founder of Our Story, Melanie Lynch, who travelled to Borneo to meet Dessy and immerse in the Dayak culture in 2021.
"The experience had a profound impact on me. As a child I was captivated by photos of the Dayak tribe and Borneo in the National Geographic. I always dreamed of travelling there one day," she said.
"I witnessed how the rainforest has been decimated by deforestation. We drove for hours through palm oil plantations before we reached the healthy rainforest.
"It made me reflect on what our ancestors endured centuries ago, watching Irish forests felled by colonisers.
"However, what's left of the breath-taking Borneo rainforest is 5 times the size of Ireland, with over 10,000 species of plants, including over 3000 tree species and 2,000 types of orchids.
"And at the heart of this ecosystem is the extraordinary Dayak culture who have lived in harmony with their environment for millennia. Now is the time we rise up to support the Dayak and the rainforest.
"There are many synergies between Dayak and Irish culture. Together we share a deep love for the earth, especially forests. The Dayak are also passionate about traditional music, dance, and crafts.
"Inspired by nature and the ornate design of ferns, the Dayak beadwork patterns are similar in style to Celtic motifs."
Dessy's father is a traditional instrument maker and he made the sapé instrument, a stringed guitar-like instrument, that Dessy played during her visit to Ireland.

Andrew Hamilton is a journalist, investigative reporter and podcaster who has been working in the media in Ireland for the past 20 years. His areas of special interest include the environment, mental health and politics.

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From Borneo to the Burren - The Clare Champion

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One of the world's most innovative environmentalists was in the Burren last week, sharing ideas with two groundbreaking local groups. Borneo environmental activist and co-founder of Arus Kualan indigenous schools, Plorentina 'Dessy' Elma Thyana, visited Ennistymon and Kinvara recently, where she met with representatives from HomeTree and the Kinvara Ballinderreen Tree Gang.

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Our Green Heart by Diana Beresford-Kroeger: 9781039009790 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER In this inspiring culmination of Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s life’s work as a botanist, biochemist, biologist and poet of the global forest, she delivers a challenge…

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The world is poorly designed. But copying nature helps.

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The world is poorly designed. But copying nature helps.

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The world is poorly designed. But copying nature helps.

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Janine Benyus has a message for inventors: When solving a design problem, look to nature first. There you'll find inspired designs for making things waterproof, aerodynamic, solar-powered and more. Here she reveals dozens of new products that take their cue from nature with spectacular results.

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50 of the World's Best Biomimicry Examples (so far)

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50 of the World's Best Biomimicry Examples (so far)

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The Best 50 Biomimicry Examples and Inventions of All Time

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Biomimicry is the practice of emulating designs from nature to solve human challenges. This is a list of our top 50 biomimicry examples and nature-inspired innovations or inventions. Each biomimicry solution has successfully been implemented in the real world.

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Nature Cards are a collection of cards featuring strategies from the natural world that inspire us with a new mindset as we approach design challenges.

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Turning the ideas of #DoughnutEconomics into action.

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How does nature ...
produce color?

Humanity faces many challenges. Nature holds
solutions. To discover them, all we have to do is
ask. Begin your search here, or explore featured
content below to learn from other species'
successful strategies and adaptations.

Youth Design Challenge Gallery

Working with groups made me feel like I made an impact on the world. Youth Design Challenge Participant

The 2023-2024 Youth Design Challenge is here! Once again, students around the world will learn to use biomimicry to address some of the biggest environmental challenges we face. Learn more and view winners' projects from 2018 to the present.

Whether it is tool use among chimpanzees or song practice among zebra finches, the process of perfecting the craft lies in diligent practice. Karuna Skariah Educator

Education isn't just about memorization, but practicing into mastery. Looking to other species, we see that long-term success is all about incorporating new knowledge into your very being.

When materials that comprise living systems are subjected to repeated loads, they can weaken over time. This is called fatigue and it can lead to cracks and eventually failure. However, fatigue doesn't occur just anywhere on a material; the cracks usually start in areas subjected to elevated local stresses. Therefore, living systems often employ shapes, materials, and/or smooth transitions to decrease the potential for fatigue. An example of using shape is found in brown algae, an intertidal seaweed. Rather than being bent by the constant flow forces of waves and currents, its shape causes it to be pulled. This reduces stress by roughly 800 times compared to another species that bends with the flow, ultimately reducing structural fatigue.

Featured Pages for October 2023

Enjoy a hand-picked selection of pages, including seasonally themed, recently updated, or newly added Biological Strategies, Innovations, and more.

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Innovation Inspired by Nature - AskNature

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Watch Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy | Netflix Official Site

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This subversive documentary unpacks the tricks brands use to keep their customers consuming — and the real impact they have on our lives and the world.

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How to transform apocalypse fatigue into action on global warming

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How to transform apocalypse fatigue into action on global warming

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Transcript of "How to transform apocalypse fatigue into action on global warming"

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TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: The biggest obstacle to dealing with climate disruptions lies between your ears, says psychologist and economist Per Espen Stokes. He's spent years studying the defenses we use to avoid thinking about the demise of our planet -- and figuring out a new way of talking about global warming that keeps us from shutting down.

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What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures

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What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures

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What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: 9780593229361 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “With a thoughtfully curated series of essays, poetry, and conversations, the brilliant scientist and climate expert Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has assembled a group…

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GOAL NextGen is proud to present Cards for Humanity, a thought-provoking party game for people who care about the future.

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Award-winning director Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film) embarks on a journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them rapidly into the mainstream. Structured as a visual letter to his 4-year-old daughter, Damon blends traditional documentary with dramatised sequences and high-end visual effects to create a vision board of how these solutions could regenerate the world for future generations.

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Award-winning director Damon Gameau embarks on a journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them rapidly into the mainstream.

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Ministry of Imagination Manifesto released as the world goes to the polls.

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And so 'The Ministry of Imagination Manifesto: an imagination-based manifesto for times that need one' was born. We've painstakingly edited together all the policies, under subject headings, and the whole thing has been beautifully designed by Capella Andrean of The Creative Bloc. You can download it here. Please share it far and wide.

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Rob Hopkins (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World

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How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World - Kindle edition by Hopkins, Rob. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World.

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Rediscovering Darwin: The Rest of Darwin's Theory and Why We Need It Today

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Rediscovering Darwin: The Rest of Darwin's Theory and Why We Need It Today

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David Loye is an internationally known psychologist, evolutionary systems scientist, author of thirty books including the national award winning The Healing of a Nation and Darwin's Lost Theory. Originally a very young newsman in the Edward R. Murrow days, he became a scientist in his 40s, member of the Princeton and UCLA School of Medicine faculties, and co-founder of three international organizations for updating and expanding evolution studies: The General Evolution Research Group, The Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, and with cultural evolution theorist and well-known author of The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler, The Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org).

Over the past 30 years he has been involved with scientists in many fields and countries in developing the cutting edge fields of chaos, complexity, integral, and evolutionary systems theory (see www.davidloye.com). He is best known for his discovery of the long buried higher order love and moral sense rest of Darwin's theory versus the survival of the fittest, selfish gene, and now winner versus loser mindset driving our species and planet toward destruction.

His pioneering study of Darwin grew out of the development of his moral transformation theory along with three final books on Darwin. A notable fact about creativity at an advanced age is that he completed and published this book at 93, with two more underway. Rediscovering Darwin, is stripped down to the gripping story of the discovery of the long buried higher order rest of Darwin's theory of evolution.

After time to complete the next step for this work in progress, Reconstructing Darwin will add the notes, references, index, and wedding of both halves of Darwin's theory hailed by the remarkable body of scientists, thinkers and activists whose reviews open this book.

Further underway, Revolutionizing Darwin will report the results of Loye's ongoing development and testing of new ways of measuring and advancing human evolution.

He is a World War II veteran married to a Holocaust survivor-Riane Eisler, of whom he writes in this and other books. They live in California.

======================

David Loye's latest book is

"Rediscovering Darwin: The Rest of Darwin's Theory and Why We Need it Today"

(Scheduled for release on Feb 1, 2018)

Hailed as a breakthrough in twelve pages of pre-publication reviews by leading evolutionary thinkers, this new book has been rushed into print for impact in the wake of both the honoring and the dishonoring of Darwin's and Lincoln's birthday on February 12.

The book weaves three gripping stories into a compelling single account. First a new perspective on the startling discovery of the long-buried rest of Darwin's theory of evolution. Then the mystery of how and why it was lost for over 100 years. And now-in the sharp contrast between the recovered rest of Darwin and the worst of Trump-the urgent need for an update in theory and social action.

Haunting in similarity to the threat of nuclear annihilation we face today, Rediscovering Darwin opens during the tension of the Cold War. With the mindset of "survival of the fittest" driving the U.S. and Russia toward nuclear oblivion, a handful of scientists from both sides meet secretly in Budapest.

Psychologist and evolutionary systems scientist David Loye-there in the secret meeting from the U.S. side, and author of this book-takes us into the still little known story of how, in a world desperate for order out of chaos, they decided to see if they could use chaos theory to replace "survival of the fittest" with a better theory of evolution.

In haunting contrast to what became the Darwin of "survival of the fittest,""selfish genes," and now the manic rampage of "winners versus losers," an international advance research group found these six factors to "speed the evolution of our species" in the"lost" rest of Darwin: his long-ignored higher-order understanding of sex, love, community, the drive of the moral sense as primary in evolution, his long-ignored case for spirituality and the place and function of the positive teachings of religion in evolution, and how in what he wrote of "the morality of women," Darwin even became a cautious forerunner of male support for the women's movement.

Stage by stage, Rediscovering Darwin shows how, beginning in the 19th century then spanning the 20th into the 21st century, the rest of Darwin was wiped off the slate of history- but is now being reclaimed by a rising alliance of scientists and social activists.

In vivid portraits, many well known by name and the hopeful new excitement of their works and following, one can meet- and get to know and join -Darwin's new heirs and heiresses opening the way to a better future for our battered species and planet.

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Rediscovering Darwin: The Rest of Darwin's Theory and Why We Need It Today

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Rediscovering Darwin: The Rest of Darwin's Theory and Why We Need It Today [Loye, David] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Rediscovering Darwin: The Rest of Darwin's Theory and Why We Need It Today

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Kelly D. Parker: The art of persuasive storytelling | TED Talk

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“Storytelling is one of the most powerful marketing and leadership tools there is,” says communications expert Kelly D. Parker. She explains how stories make proposals of all kinds more memorable — and shows how you can craft a compelling narrative to connect, persuade and drive meaningful action.

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Watch TV Series on RTÉ Player: https://www.rte.ie/player/series/back-from-the-brink/10001699-00-0000?epguid=IH10004820-24-0002

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John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

INTERVIEW

Robin Wall Kimmerer, the bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, recently published The Serviceberry, which explores the economies of nature. In an e360 interview, the Native American ecologist discusses reciprocity, gratitude, and aligning human law with ecological law.

Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, published in 2013, explored how humans intersect with and depend upon the rest of the living world. A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer is a Western-trained botanist who teaches plant ecology and ethnobotany at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her award-winning book, which has sold more than 2 million copies, argued that environmental problem-solving must incorporate multiple streams of evidence from both Western and Indigenous science.

In November, Kimmerer published her third book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which positions the ethic of reciprocity, or gift economies, as a counterpoint to market economies, which she describes as rooted "in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources."

In an interview with author Mary Evelyn Tucker for Yale Environment 360, Kimmerer notes that both Western and Indigenous ecological knowledge need to be braided together for imagining and implementing environmental solutions. But Indigenous environmental knowledge, Kimmerer says, "is also associated with the understanding that we are learning from nature, not that we are learning about nature. Knowledge is always coupled to responsibility and to ethics."

Yale Environment 360: Can you talk about how you came to write this new book?

Robin Wall Kimmerer: A few years ago, [ Emergence Magazine] asked if I would write an article about economics. I accepted the challenge because as a botanist and an ecologist, I have some familiarity with the economy of nature, but only questions about human economy. Most of us, I think, are perhaps like me: We're just embedded in this economy without really a sense of why it is the way it is. What are the assumptions? I feel deeply complicit and kind of entrapped in rapacious capitalism as it is practiced in the United States, but I had honestly never really interrogated it from the perspective of ecology.

Subscribe to the E360 Newsletter for weekly updates delivered to your inbox. Sign Up.

So that's what The Serviceberry attempts to do. It's really more asking questions, saying I understand how the world of the serviceberry tree - in all of its relations with pollinators and dispersers and sun and soil and microbes - is engaged in a circular economy, where there's no such thing as waste, where the notion of hoarding and accumulation and individual gain that are so pervasive in Western capitalist economics, they just make no sense in the economy of nature.

I wanted to have people think about why we have constructed an economy that actively harms what we love and damages our ability to sustain our lives and the lives of our more-than-human relatives.

"The language of natural resources suggests we own them, we deserve them, whereas I want to remember that it's a gift."

e360: You identify gratitude and reciprocity as the response to a gift economy. Can you share a little bit more of what this means?

Kimmerer: It's so tied to our language - in the limitations and the constraints that the English language puts on us for thinking about the world. In the case of berries and soil and birds and water, in the academic world where I live, we call those things natural resources, meaning that they're objects just waiting to be converted into something that we will value, as opposed to intrinsically being valuable for themselves. And the language of natural resources suggests that we own them, that we deserve them, whereas I want to remember that it's a gift. We haven't earned berries. We have not earned oxygen to breathe. We can't buy it. It is not a commodity. It's not a natural resource. To me, it's a gift from the natural world.

And I wanted to imagine what a gift economy would look like. And here we go back to Indigenous science and to Indigenous knowledge because there are wonderful antecedents to our contemporary economic models in Indigenous economies. And for the most part, they are based on circular economies, they're based on a kind of biomimicry from the natural world. They're based on reciprocity. The currency of an economy is not money. The currency of those gift economies is gratitude. And there's trust that when you have more than you need, you will share it with me because we have this currency of reciprocal relationship. That's how the natural world works. Many traditional economies are based in that kind of thinking.

e360: As you say in your book, we are kin to everything. So this is a huge shift in worldview. How are we going to make it?

Kimmerer: When we think about economic systems, there is this assumption underlying capitalism that participants in the market economy will work to advance their self-interest. This is just fundamental. Well, okay, we'll accept that. But what are the boundaries of the self? If we define the self to be just an individual and their material needs in the world, that's one kind of economy.

But what if we recognize that the self is very permeable? I am permeated by the plants that are feeding me. I'm permeable with the atmosphere, with the water. I am so not disconnected from the mycorrhizal network in the woods outside my house. We're all part of this. So then I want to say, "Oh, okay, what would an economy look like if we advanced self-interest when the self is expanded to our natural kinfolk?" That interests me deeply. Now we're talking about ecological economics, about how we not only foster our own wellbeing but the wellbeing of everyone in the system.

"There's judgment and memory and learning in organisms that we have previously dismissed as really beneath our attention."

e360: In the last 10 to 15 years, there has been a growing awareness coming from various sciences - including ecology, biology, botany, and animal behavior - of the multiple intelligences and communicating capacities of plants, trees, and forests, as well as birds, fish, and mammals. Indigenous peoples, of course, have understood this for a long time. Can you reflect on how this understanding of multiple intelligences is emerging now, and what are its implications for our relationship to nature?

How African communities are taking lead on protecting wildlife. Read more.

Kimmerer: When we think about the world as not a warehouse of commodities but this wonderful community of persons all with their own kinds of intelligences - chickadee language, the constant communication that plants and fungi are undergoing, the senses of animals and the way that they inhabit and understand the world - [that is] so much deeper and richer and different than our own.

We used to simply dismiss this intelligence as the "other," and in the Western tradition, "other" almost always is translated as inferior, lesser than. But this explosion of science and thought that you're referring to is telling us something really different. There's judgment and memory and learning in organisms that we have previously dismissed as really beneath our attention.

Rarely do I have the sense that I want to live forever, but I wouldn't mind seeing where this revolution goes because it has such deep implications for how we live when we finally realize that we are not alone here, and that there are intelligences all around us that could really help us all.

e360: I want to just draw you out on the rights of nature. As you know, Taranaki Maunga, a mountain, the Whanganui River, and Te Urewera National Park have been given legal personhood in New Zealand. How do we connect this incredible way of knowing that is kin-based and relational and then saying, "There's rights here"?

Kimmerer: The notion that a river, who the Maori consider to be their ancestor, should have rights of self-determination, that the river ought to decide whether it's going to be dammed or whether it's okay to spew toxins into it, oughtn't the river to have a voice? So rights of nature is an acknowledgement and pathway to hearing the voices of self-determination by other beings who have an intrinsic right to live their lives. And I'm very excited about it. To me, the rights-of-nature movement is a political and legal flowering of this notion of kin-centric relations and the intelligence of nature.

I do have some questions, though, in that rights of nature is very much framed in Western legal frameworks. Whereas in my experience, what we're really talking about is not so much rights but mutual responsibilities. So I have a little reluctance in centering Western legal thinking rather than sort of a reciprocal justice framing.

"The extent to which we can have human law be aligned with ecological law - so much the better."

The body of law that interests me most is natural law, [which asks] what are those principles that govern our life support systems and govern our relationships from individual to the cosmos? And the extent to which we can have human law be aligned with ecological law - so much the better. But that requires a huge worldview shift, as you mentioned earlier, which is very, very slow in coming. So rights-of-nature frameworks, I think, can be a very effective stopgap while we're on our way to a worldview change, as I think we must be. If we don't [change], we as a species will not survive here. So it seems to me that we will be going down that path or no path at all.

e360: And promoting this shift in worldview is at the core of the work you're engaged in now?

Kimmerer: Yes. The erasure of language, of culture, of ethics, of Indigenous science, of traditional ecological knowledge, all of that is part of my history, as is the powerful movement, which is afoot, of resilience and resurgence and revitalization to decolonize that history as best we can and participate in the healing and the recovery of identity, knowledge, land care, and language. All those things inform my work as a writer. And that story informs the founding of our Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, because this is all the healing work that needs to be done.

e360: Many Indigenous peoples have this profound sense that we come from the stars. Cosmologists have also helped us to understand that the elements of life come out of the explosion of stars. Can you speak a little about the connection of the cosmos, Earth, and humans that is embraced by both Indigenous peoples and scientists?

Kimmerer: I can scarcely grasp the deep time of the cosmos, but a deep time that feels very relevant to me is the deep time of life on Earth. And within the plant kingdom, the beings that I have spent most of my career studying are the mosses, the most ancient. They were the first plants to come out on land. Every climate change that has ever happened on this planet, they have experienced. All the shifting of continents they have experienced, and they're still here. Ninety-nine point nine percent of all beings, all species who ever evolved, are extinct. But as the world has changed, mosses have persisted. That's deep time success.

And what I love to think about what they're teaching us is "What does it mean to be successful?" Is it being the biggest, the most powerful, the most obvious? All those hallmarks that in the West we say, "Oh, that's what it means to be successful." Wait: These are plants that are a centimeter tall, but they live everywhere on the planet. There are hundreds of thousands of kinds of them. Their metric of success is persistence and beauty and longevity and making the world better wherever they are.

"Organisms who do not change when the environment changes are doomed."

They are birthplaces of all kinds of ecological communities. They give more than they take. They collaborate more than they compete. For me, that is just one tiny, literally, example out of deep time. What do we have to learn from listening to ancient beings?

e360: And how does this incredible example of adaptation over time relate to us?

On Navajo lands, ancient ways are restoring the parched earth. Read more.

Kimmerer: Organisms who do not change when the environment changes are doomed, right? It's resilience, it's reading the constraints, and sifting among all of the fabulous diversity of solutions that are out there from this genetic storehouse of diversity. Which one of these things is going to be successful in a changed environment? We know from evolution that the raw material of evolution and adaptation is genetic diversity. So as we think about an evolving culture, a culture evolving towards sustainability, what's the raw material there? Diversity. Cultural diversity is going to help us find our way. There's so many different ways to be and shape our relationships that capitalism tends to try to make things all the same. It's a great homogenizing force because of so-called efficiency. But resilience requires diversity, adaptation requires diversity, and we best not forget that.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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Reciprocity: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Natural World

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Robin Wall Kimmerer, the bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, recently published The Serviceberry, which explores the economies of nature. In an e360 interview, the Native American ecologist discusses reciprocity, gratitude, and aligning human law with ecological law.

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The Little Book of Wild Gardening is a guide for anyone wanting to garden in a more sustainable, natural way. Working with nature benefits not just the garden, but also the gardener, wildlife and the wider environment. Divided into sections for different garden areas - including lawns, flower beds, edibles, trees and w

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The National Biodiversity Data Centre works to make biodiversity data and information more freely available in order to better understand and assist the protection of Ireland’s biodiversity.

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'A hymn of love to the world ... A journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together.

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

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'A hymn of love to the world ... A journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science.

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We are Ireland's biodiversity education organisation for young people. Our aim is to empower the next generation to help nature by giving them the support they need.

This is important for two reasons. Firstly, to nurture the mental and physical wellbeing of our young people through outdoor learning. Secondly, to rewild the next generation through improved eco-literacy and their involvement in hands-on nature projects.

We're about creating real, lasting impact and work with Ireland's leading businesses, charities and public bodies to deliver this. Uniquely, our campaigns cover the whole island of Ireland, north and south, and are fully inclusive across the entire education system including pre-school, primary, secondary and homeschool.

Education is our core function and we have assembled a superb team of specialists - including Ireland's first ever Biodiversity Education Officer network. Additionally, as Ireland's largest provider of outdoor learning resources we provide everything needed, from teaching kits to workshops, school gardens to outdoor classrooms. We also coordinate the Nature Hero Award, the national mark of excellence in outdoor education.

As an independent, innovative, highly effective social enterprise we work to our own remit while reinvesting our profits to rewild land across Ireland.​

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Inspiring Children, Protecting Nature - Ireland's biodiversity youth training organisation. Nature Conservation for Kids - Caomhnú an dúlra do pháistí in Éirinn - Biodiversity Projects, Resources and Workshops for Schools across Ireland.

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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Author), John Burgoyne (Illustrator)

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The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance

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The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance : Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Burgoyne, John: Amazon.ie: Books

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Dearbhala Ledwidge: Local Authority Tidy Towns Pollinator Award

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Biodiversity Ireland - National Biodiversity Data Centre

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Biodiversity Ireland is the newsletter of the National Biodiversity Data Centre.

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IRELAND’S WILD PLANTS | Myths, legends and folklore

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IRELAND’S WILD PLANTS Myths, legends and folklore Author: By Niall Mac Coitir Format: Paperback 410 pages Publication date: September 2015 Category: Irish Wild Plants and Wildflowers Ireland’s wild plants have been part of our culture and folklore from the earliest times, featuring in the Brehon Laws, early Irish poet

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Native Irish Wildflower seedballs. All designed to #bringthebeesback

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Watch The Eternal Song - The Eternal Song

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Join The Eternal Song film premiere and 7-Day Gathering with Indigenous Voices to connect with ancestral wisdom and healing.

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" Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults is my new favorite book! What a great way for young people (and anyone, really) to learn about our healing medicines. Chii miigwech!" - Angeline Boulley, #1 NYT Bestselling author of Firekeeper's Daughter Booklist

"[F]illed with legends, reminiscences, bits of history, sidebars, drawings, and gentle challenges to readers, encouraging them to consider making changes in their actions, beliefs, and values. Truly, a lovely, calming addition for collections." -

"A book that is entirely in a class of its own, this belongs in every collection for teens." - starred, School Library Journal

"Both an urgent, essential call to action and an uplifting love letter." - starred, Kirkus Reviews

"Gray Smith's adaptation makes this visionary exploration of Indigenous connections to the land, to plants and to storytelling and story-making accessible to a whole new readership and hopefully will inspire young people to rise to the challenges of the Climate Crisis." - Jeffrey Canton, Children's Book Columnist, The Globe and Mail

"Smith smartly streamlines language while staying true to the narrative's core concepts by adding brief sidebars that explain featured terminology, pose reflection questions, and highlight important passages, inviting collaborative discussion and acting as a call to action." - starred, Publishers Weekly

"This beautiful, imaginative revisioning is a gift to our children that teaches them how to follow the path of our ancestors."- Diane Wilson, author of The Seed Keeper

"Urging a look toward history and tradition to teach us how to answer the questions of the future, Gray Smith adapts Wall Kimmerer's wisdom for a new, hungry audience." - Foreword Reviews

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her first book, Gathering Moss , was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. Her writings have appeared in Orion , Whole Terrain , and numerous scientific journals. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.Monique Gray Smith is a mom, an award winning, bestselling author, and professional consultant. Her recent writing includes Speaking our Truth: A Journey of Reconciliation , My Heart Fills with Happiness , . Monique is Cree and Scottish and lives in Victoria, Canada.

You Hold Me Up , Lucy and Lola , Tilly: A Story of Hope and Resilience , When We Are Kind , I Hope, and Tilly and the Crazy Eights Nicole Neidhardt is a Diné (Navajo) artist of Kiiyaa'áanii clan. She received her MFA from OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario, and a bachelor of fine arts with a business minor from the University of Victoria. She is the cofounder of the Innovative Young Indigenous Leaders Symposium, alongside Gina Mowatt, and is the cofounder of Groundswell Climate Collective, a group that is fighting the climate crisis through resiliency and artwork. She currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

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Buy Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Monique Gray Smith, Nicole Neidhardt (ISBN: 9781728458991) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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Ireland’s Birds, MacCoitir | Myths, legends and folklore

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Birds have been important symbols in our art and culture for thousands of years. They have inspired poets and painters, and feature in many place names and legends. In this book, Niall Mac Coitir draws together the mythology, legends and folklore of Ireland’s birds, both wild and domestic. The birds are presented in se

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We are exploring one key element of the climate crisis by asking a very basic question – who is protecting our forests?

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Weaving a patchwork of safe havens for Nature globally, in our gardens, schools, public spaces and beyond.

Here are some initial steps you can take right now in your own garden/yard/land to build an Ark! Visit our How To Build An Ark section for even more details for each step.

Step 1. Give at least half of your garden or land back to nature. If not half, as much as you can manage. Try to grow as much of your own organic food as possible in the other half. Protect and guide your Ark to re-wild through natures natural processes and it will become a more and more complex ecosystem over time. All land is welcome, even a window box full of local soil that allows the native weed seeds to flourish and provide food and reproductive partners for the insects is great!

Step 2. Put up a sign saying
"THIS IS AN ARK - www.wearetheark.org "
This simple action removes the shame that people feel about having a messy garden, and replaces it with pride that you're doing something important to help all the creatures we are supposed to share the planet with. The website is set up to explain to interested neighbours what is happening there on your Ark and why it is necessary.

Step 3. Remove any non-native 'Invasive plants'. This is difficult on a large scale but on our individual patches of earth, we can manage it easily enough by hand and through borrowed grazers or heavy sheet mulching. These plants do not move at 100MPH. There is NO place for chemicals in an ark, they cause many more problems than they solve and are very destructive to life on all levels.

Step 4. Step in and provide any ecosystem services that we may need to provide due to the absence of the full circle of life. The aim is to create as many different habitats as possible in the land you have, habitats that would normally be created by keystone species which are missing from our island Arks. This develops as diverse an ecosystem as possible on your patch. If you have the space, consider creating multiple habitats such as an Ark meadow, a bare earth bank, piles of deadwood, a wildlife pond, a scrubby thorny thicket, a mature native woodland, a dry-stone wall etc.

Step 5. Native plants are the foundation stone to any ecosystem. Arks are based on the native plants in your part of the world, wherever you may be. After careful observation of your Ark, if your soil is damaged or devoid of growth, the weed seed bank may be absent. In that case, sow an Ark meadow or a wildflower meadow to reboot the system and slowly introduce as many native plants as possible. Only use locally sourced native organic seeds, cuttings and plants (if possible) as these are vital genetic material for the local insect populations and have not been grown with poisons. Building your Ark involves careful mimicking of nature's natural processes.

Step 6. Make holes in your boundaries to allow wildlife to pass through. Learn to share your patches of this earth.

Step 7. ARK Lighting. The blue and white toned lighting which is now in standard use, is one of the major factors in biodiversity collapse. Please aim for darkness or make sure all your ARK lights are red in tone (Doesn't affect them nearly as much). Make sure the outdoor lights are motion sensor only so that they only come on for short times when you need them and allow darkness to prevail in between.

Step 8. Get together with like-minded folk and approach your councils and home owners associations, your schools and university campuses and ask for support to turn more and more park and public land into Arks.

Step 9. Please mark your Ark on our map of Arks so that we can eventually try and connect up the dots with wildlife corridors in our future vision for this movement.

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Weaving a patchwork of safe havens for Nature globally, in our gardens, schools, public spaces and beyond. Here are some initial steps you can take right now in your own garden/yard/land to build an Ark! Visit our How To Build An Ark section for even more details for each step.

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Buy Restoring The Kinship Worldview Book at Easons

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Selected speeches from 28 Indigenous leaders from around the world--vital kincentric wisdom necessary for our times. Indigenous worldviews, and the knowledge they confer, are critical for human survival and the wellbeing of future generations. Editors…

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The Goddess Timeline by Constance Tippett

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The Goddess Timeline by Constance Tippett

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The Goddess Timeline is a chronological record of archaeological images of women and goddesses on a uniform time scale from 30,000 BCE to the present.

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Set of four posters [Click each image for higher resolution]

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‎The Wayfinders : Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

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Cessair vs Eve: The Power of Storytelling

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Cessair vs Eve: The Power of Storytelling

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- THE POWER OF STORYTELLING: CESSAIR VS. EVE —

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The Power of Storytelling: Cessair vs. Eve Not many people know that the first person ever to come to Ireland was a woman. But that’s what we’re told in the Lebor Gabála Érenn ( The Book of the Taking of Ireland , also known as The Book of Invasions ), which was written in medieval times to prov

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How you - specifically you - can help with climate solutions:

To find your meaningful and bespoke way to help address the climate crisis, draw your own Climate Action Venn Diagram.

1. What are you good at? Think about your skills, resources, and networks. What are your areas of expertise? Who and what do you have access to? What can you bring to the table?

2. What is the work that needs doing? Think about system-level change. Are there particular climate and justice solutions that interest you? Maybe starting a composting program, protecting forests, or getting climate candidates elected? Heaps of options.

3. What brings you joy and satisfaction? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Don't pick things that make you miserable and will burn you out! This is the long haul - find things that enliven and energize you.

The TED talk below is a 10-minute answer to the question "What can I do to help address the climate crisis?" The short answer is "get to the heart of your climate Venn!" and the talk lays out a deeper answer. [Click below to play video]

[If you're familiar with the Japanese concept of Ikigai, think of this as a simplified, climate-focused version of that.]

The goal is to be in the heart of your Venn diagram, where these three circles overlap, for as many minutes of your life as you can. That will create way more progress on climate solutions than if each of us get sucked into obsessing about our individual carbon footprints.

Yes, the climate challenge is enormous. We need to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, agriculture, transportation, industry, and buildings. We must protect and restore ecosystems. We have to change society, policy, economy, and culture. This is about transformation.

Also yes: there is something meaningful each of us can contribute to climate solutions. This is the work of our lifetimes.

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Climate Action Venn Diagrams - Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

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To find your meaningful and bespoke way to help address the climate crisis, draw your own Climate Action Venn Diagram. What are you good at? Think about your skills, resources, and networks. What are your areas of expertise? Who and what do you have access to? What can you bring to the table?

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A Kindred World Educational Research Project

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Watch on RTE player: https://www.rte.ie/player/series/futureville-ireland/10007371-00-0000?epguid=IP10007372-01-0001

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The Difference Between Empathy and Compassion by Matthieu Ricard

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The Difference Between Empathy and Compassion by Matthieu Ricard

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The Difference Between Empathy and Compassion by Matthieu Ricard

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21 Stories of Transition: How a Movement of Communities is coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world.

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The Work That Reconnects Network

nurtures a regenerative and thriving world for all beings by providing support, connection and inspiration to the global Work That Reconnects community.

Welcome to the
Work That Reconnects Network

We are a global community of facilitators, emerging facilitators and people inspired by the Work That Reconnects (WTR) who are weaving connections, uplifting creative expressions of the Work and collaborating in service to the Great Turning.

The Work That Reconnects helps people around the world discover and experience their innate connections with each other and the self-healing powers of the web of life, transforming despair and overwhelm into inspired, collaborative action.

-Joanna Macy

What is the Work That Reconnects?

The Work That Reconnects is an inspiring, interactive group process for anyone who longs to serve the healing of our world in a more powerful and effective way.

What's Happening in the Network

Stay connected with the WTR Network by following our blog, checking out the Webinar & Conversation Café program and reading the most current issue of the Deep Times Journal

Join the Work That Reconnects Network

Whether you're brand new to the WTR or a long-time facilitator, becoming a member of the WTR Network allows you to connect with others, deepen your practice and strengthen resilience.

WTR Resources

Our Resource Library offers a wealth of information about WTR and an abundant collection of WTR practices, videos, music, poetry, books and research papers for newcomers and experienced facilitators alike.

Support the Network

Together we create and sustain the WTR Network through our donations, creative contributions and all of the various ways that we weave connections with each other in service to the Great Turning.

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The Work That Reconnects Network nurtures a regenerative and thriving world for all beings by providing support, connection and inspiration to the global Work That Reconnects community. We are a global community of facilitators, emerging facilitators and people inspired by the Work That Reconnects (WTR) who are weaving connections, uplifting creative expressions of the Work and collaborating in service to the Great Turning.

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Domination vs Partnership Scale by Dr. Riane Eisler

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Domination vs Partnership Scale by Dr. Riane Eisler

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Download more resources: https://centerforpartnership.org/media-kit/

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1. Riane Eislers Domination Partnership Social Scale

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The creators of the Netflix Documentary Brave Blue World are set to release a groundbreaking new documentary in 2024. ‘Our Blue World’ will explore humanity’s profound relationship with water and reveal how human agency can help rebalance the planet’s water systems.

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Ecophilosopher Joanna Macy PhD is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and the environment, she interweaves her scholarship with six decades of activism. Now in her nineties, she lives in California.

Resilience specialist Dr. Chris Johnstone has a background in medicine, mental health promotion, and the psychology of change. He is known internationally for his online resilience training work, which has attracted participants from more than sixty countries. Heading towards sixty, he lives in Scotland.

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Ecophilosopher Joanna Macy PhD is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and the environment, she interweaves her scholarship with six decades of activism. Now in her nineties, she lives in California.

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Synopsis

What are the best ways of resolving the ecological, economic, and social problems we are facing? Documentary filmmakers Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent set out to meet pioneers who are reinventing agriculture, energy, the economy, democracy, and education, to see what the world of tomorrow could be.

Our take

While climate change can leave us feeling helpless, this César-winning, solution-focused documentary from Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent is an eye-opening beacon of hope. Travelling through ten different countries, the film calls for a mobilization of human resources in the face of incoming storms.

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What are the best ways of resolving the ecological, economic, and social problems we are facing? Documentary filmmakers Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent set out to meet pioneers who are reinventing agriculture, energy, the economy, democracy, and education, to see what the world of tomorrow could be.

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Intro_Image courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency

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Now with an updated epilogue celebrating the 30th anniversary of this groundbreaking and increasingly relevent book. \“May be the most significant wor…

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On Being Podcast: Biomimicry, an Operating Manual for Earthlings

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On Being Podcast: Biomimicry, an Operating Manual for Earthlings

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Krista Tippett: A few years ago, the term "biomimicry" started turning up as I moved around the world. I'll meet someone in a field that has nothing linear to do with the natural world - but someone creative and inquisitive and also usually markedly kind - who is remaking, revitalizing their world in some corner. Biomimicry is not a science per se, though it works with science. It's a design discipline that takes the natural world as mentor and teacher, inviting the intelligence and wisdom of biology and ecology around tables where previously only engineering and construction and material sciences sat. Biomimicry inquires into the mechanisms by which nature solves problems - and by the way, performs what appear to us as miracles in every second all around: running on sunlight, fitting form to function, recycling everything, relentlessly creating "conditions conducive to life." As Janine Benyus puts it, "we are surrounded by geniuses." She launched this way of seeing and imagining as a field with her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Today she teaches and consults with all kinds of projects and organizations, including major corporations, as you'll hear.

There is a quiet, redemptive story of our time in this conversation - a radical way of approaching the gravest of our problems by attending to how original vitality functions. I for one am grateful to have been let in on this unfolding parallel universe in our midst, and it is shifting the way I see almost everything about our possible futures.
[music: "Seven League Boots" by Zoë Keating]
I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

Janine Benyus is co-founder of the non-profit, Biomimicry Institute, and of Biomimicry 3.8, a B Corp consultancy. This conversation was part of The Great Northern Festival and held at Mia, the Minneapolis Institute of Art. We were welcomed by The Great Northern's Executive and Artistic Director, Kate Nordstrum.
[applause]
Tippett: Hello. Thank you so much, Kate. It's really wonderful. We've had the most incredible experiences with Great Northern. And I'm so excited to be here with Janine Benyus.

I also want to say I realized as I walked in that I was supposed to prepare a formal introduction of Janine, which I failed to do. But what you're going to get instead is a deep dive into who she is and what she does and brings into our world. And so we can just go straight into it. And if I have left out some really important thing that you want everybody to know, you throw it into the conversation.

Janine Benyus: I doubt you'll do that.

Tippett: So you have made your home in Montana, but you grew up in New Jersey. You ended up studying forestry, you wanted to become a natural history writer, and your road to and beyond Biomimicry wound through investigations of ecosystems and the secret language of animals and wildlife habitats and being a zoo lover. And I'm really curious about how you might be able to trace the roots of these curiosities and this passion in your earliest life, in the life of your childhood.

Benyus: That is so present to me every day, actually. It was New Jersey and it was the suburbs and my parents, they knew they had this wild child. [audience laughs] And so bless them for always putting me at the wild edge of wherever that suburb was heading next. And we moved several times. They kept moving me out. The suburbs would come and roll over us and we'd move out. My dad was then commuting so far into the city. And I look back and I think I know now what they did. But I always had a ravine behind me. And then there was a meadow called Sir Morton Rom Field. Those places I knew so well. Because, you know, that was church. I'd wriggle out of my mom's arms in the morning, she'd hand me a lunch bag and I'd be gone until she rang and rang and rang the bell.

So I got to know, especially this old field, this old New England kind of field that grows back - very diverse and a lot of organisms living there. And I knew where they all lived. I spent enough time out there by myself. I knew who was going to have babies, where the rabbits were going to have babies. And they've been down low for a while. And here's where a cocoon is going to become a butterfly. It was Wind in the Willows to me. Every day I'd rush out there to find out how everybody was doing in the neighborhood, seriously.

And then one day I started to see the signs. I saw these little metal wire posts with flags on them and cigarette butts and footprints. And I was reading Sherlock Holmes, so I made plaster of paris out of the footprints. [audience laughter] And I gathered up the cigarette butts and my mother thought I was smoking because I had them in a thing. And what it was, was phase two of my subdivision. So this comes directly watching for a summer a bulldozer take off everything, including the topsoil, replace it with turf.

Tippett: Did you watch that more than once, it sounds like?

Benyus: That's the one that I really, really remember. I think my parents knew that it was coming and they would move us, but that one I lived through. And I said to myself, "If the guys in the trucks knew the neighborhood as well as I did and knew the community members as well as I did, they would find a different way of doing this."

Tippett: And your community members were the other creatures alongside the human creatures?

Benyus: Yeah, right. So I thought I'd write about it.

Tippett: How would you begin to define what biomimicry is?

Benyus: I will give you the writerly definition that's tucked into the book, which is, "the conscious emulation of life's genius." And it's also - it's an innovation practice where the people who make our world, the designers and the engineers and the architects and the construction workers, when they go to solve a problem, they say, "What in the natural world has already solved this problem?" And then they try to emulate that organism or that ecosystem and hopefully come up with something that helps us live here more gracefully.

Tippett: This is from the Biomimicry book, which was published in, was it 1998?

Benyus: '97.

Tippett: '97? Okay. "So far we've lived by the grace of green plants and we owe both our lives and our lifestyles to them." And a few sentences later, you write, "For my money, the discovery of fire, as ballyhooed as it was, was vastly overrated." [laughter] So take us into your way of seeing those things.

Benyus: Well, the way we power ourselves now is with fire. We burn up ancient photosynthesis - oil and coal. Fossil fuels are these organisms that did get their life from the sun. All life, except for some sulfur vent critters at the bottom of the ocean, all life comes from the light of the sun. And somehow we had all of these examples around us of how to power ourselves with the sun, but instead, somebody dug up ancient photosynthesis and we started to light it on fire. What it's been for us is like putting all your furniture into your house, closing every window and door, and lighting it. And that photosynthesis was the first paper - artificial photosynthesis was the first paper I collected because I thought, "Surely people do solar cells by looking at leaves." And they don't.

Tippett: Well, you say the first paper you collected.

Benyus: First paper I collected for the book, yeah.

Tippett: Oh, that you collected from the book.

Benyus: That I collected for the book. Because I said, "Is there anybody in the natural world trying to emulate these geniuses?" And I knew that fire was very powerful. But it was also very violent compared to this silent powerhouse that is the photosynthetic reaction center. This little wishbone-shaped molecule that grabs light photons, two photons femtoseconds apart and takes our out-breath - carbon dioxide, and water, and some minerals - and makes sugars and starches, and then gives us back oxygen. So for a biologist, there's nothing more poetic really than photosynthesis. It's just so beautiful in its symbiotic exchange: you give me carbon dioxide and I'll breathe out some oxygen for you.

Tippett: I was thinking also about when I spoke with Robin Wall Kimmerer, and she talks about how she has "photosynthesis envy." So this is just her variation on what you're saying to us. And again, what we're talking about is so obvious, so given, and so miraculous. So she said, "I have photosynthesis envy. The ability to take these non-living elements of the world, air and light and water, and turn them into food that can then be shared with the whole rest of the world, to turn them into medicine that is medicine for people and for trees and for soil. And we cannot even approach the kind of creativity that they have."

Benyus: No, it's true. I love her, too.

Tippett: That's what you've been...

Benyus: I love her.

Tippett: ...bringing into the light.

Benyus: The thing is, that as I was researching more and more - the next group of papers - I was reading about materials and how we make materials by heating them up to high temperatures, high pressures. "Heat, beat, and treat," is what it's called. If you are a material scientist, and you were at a conference, you were about to present a new polymer, I would say to you in the hallway, "What's the heat, beat, and treat on it?" Because that's the formula.

Whereas in photosynthesis, you have the sun. Super powerful. Light source. And then it just has these electrons lifted and they go one molecule at a time, they hop. And that's this sort of subtle, non-violent way to make things. There's this beautiful sort of controlled heat. And when we eat, it's combustion, but it's controlled. There's this elegance because everything had to be done in your soft body. It had to be life-friendly.

Tippett: Weren't you also the poetry editor at Rutgers when you were a student?

Benyus: [laughs] You did do your research.

Tippett: I did. Well, also, you are poetic. So I want to read - there's a list from the book of basically fundamental observations behind biomimicry, which also I think is poetic in its clarity and compression and elegance.

"Nature runs on sunlight.
Nature uses only the energy it needs.
Nature fits form to function.
Nature recycles everything.
Nature rewards cooperation.
Nature banks on diversity.
Nature demands local expertise.
Nature curbs excesses from within.
Nature taps the power of limits."

Benyus: Yeah.

Tippett: Has that list altered at all since you first started writing this down?

Benyus: There are about 26 of them now.

Tippett: Okay.

Benyus: "Life's Principles." What we decided when we went on this journey to try to help designers make things, power themselves, and build things the way nature does, we realized that a shallow imitation - if you were going to imitate, for instance, how a spider makes its silk, you might just wind up kind of cheating and taking the genetic material, the genes from a spider and putting them into a goat and milking out the protein. That's shallow, very shallow biomimicry. So what we realized was that it's not just the material itself; it's how it's made, and it's how the spider fits into its watershed and into its biome that really, if we want a truly regenerative world, we have to mimic at all those levels. So we came up with an extension of that list called Life's Principles, which is what all organisms have in common.

Tippett: But to think that you can do that in 27 lines, is that what you said?

Benyus: 26.

Tippett: 26. And also that "life creates conditions conducive to life."

Benyus: Yeah.

Tippett: There is Wes Jackson, the agronomist, geneticist, Land Institute, wonderful human being. I think you quoted him saying, given this, what we're describing, the notion of talking about the natural world as a resource "becomes obscene."

Benyus: That's right. Once you see nature as mentor, gratitude tempers greed, and the notion of resources becomes obscene.

Tippett: So you wrote this book, you did not realize I think that you were kind of giving rise to a field, really. But it's interesting to me that you started tracking this, what you would then call biomimicry and what is now called biomimicry, in 1990. Where you saw it was in the academy, being funded by the military and space agencies and departments of energy, which is so fascinating, isn't it? Because those are also places of power. They were paying attention to this and keeping it to themselves.

And then it seems that what you realized after you published the book is that the people who were really reading it and taking it in were designers.

Benyus: Yeah.

Tippett: And so it was kind of an evolution that you realized that what you had actually described were design principles. A new kind of design discipline.

Benyus: Yeah. It's interesting because I look back now and I see that I named the chapters questions. "How will we heal ourselves?" "How will we store what we learn?" "How will we conduct business?" And boldly saying "will": "How will we?" It was almost like we were so far from everything I was writing about in the natural world. But that hope that's bared out on that page, that table of contents, is the "will." "How will we" do this, someday?

And I was writing another book when I started to get calls from the people who make our world, the designers and the architects and the chemists. And they said, "Please bring your biologists to the design table." And I said, "What biologists?" [laughter] I'm in my pajamas writing my next book. But they did know that. They read that literally: how will we?

Tippett: I almost feel like as you're talking about that, that you were surprised at yourself, that you're wondering, where did that come from in you, that conviction.

Benyus: And I started in 1990. And the thing was that I didn't know how we made our world because I had been educated in one stream, which biologists are and ecologists are. We learn about how life works, the rest of nature works. And then everybody that picked up on biomimicry, they got put into another stream, which was the world. I had never taken a factory tour. I do now. I take factory tours and I see how we make stuff and I see how we do what we do. And we had been educated separately and then biomimicry was like this estuary, like this salt and fresh coming together or this fertile crescent where these two disciplines came together. And I saw it. And it was such a faint signal when I was doing the book. It was just bench scientists doing this.

Tippett: Yeah. Well, it was the last century after all.
[audience laughter]
Benyus: It was way last century, yeah. Our century. The last century. Anyway, so I was surprised.

Tippett: Well, so here's one way you described it that I loved. You said that you wrote it and then you found, as you say, it's a faint signal, but then you found biomimics, you found "fascinating people working at the edge of their disciplines in the fertile crest between intellectual habitats." If there's one thing I've heard in these 20 years of talking to people who found ways to shift some part of the world on its axis, it's all that change happens in the margins. It's not happening above the radar, in the headlines. And so that makes such sense to me. So who were these people in these fertile crests and what were they doing, what were they making or doing differently?

Benyus: Oh my gosh. Well, they were - the material scientists were studying spiders and studying rhino horns and studying abalone shells. They were seeing how life makes things without kilns, right? And how is that possible? The thing was, when you go to meet with these people, they're in such a reverential state because it's hard to be a botanist or be a solar cell manufacturer and try to mimic a leaf. It's hard work. It was people like Wes Jackson who was saying it's not just the problem "in" agriculture, it's the problem "of" agriculture. And it's these annual plants that we plant the same thing for miles in a monoculture. This was seen as wild-eyed.

He went to the prairie next door, the Konza Prairie in Kansas. And said he literally took scissors and cut the plants. And there's this wild diversity, hundreds of species - not 12, not two, hundreds. But when he cut them and he looked at them, he started to see a pattern and he pulled, he said, "Okay, there's legumes. Those are the nitrogen fixers." Like pea plants. "And then there's composites like the sunflowers, and then there's cool season grasses and warm season grasses." And when he saw that pattern, he went, "Oh my, perhaps we should have those four things." And our crops fall into those, by the way - maybe we should plant them together in this part of the world. In the tropics, it's going to look like a three-story forest.

Tippett: You mentioned abalone, which you've written a lot about, which is really fascinating also as kind of an example of something that occurs in nature that we would think couldn't be. Just that example, what that is, and also what people were doing with it.

Benyus: Yeah. Well, the mother of pearl on the inside of an abalone shell, or there's lots of shellfish who have this, and that mother of pearl, believe it or not, it's twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics that you have in your engines, in jet engines. It's super tough. So you think, if it's this tough against cracks and against any kind of impact that you would give it, then it must be really, really hard, right? What you find is that the puff pastry is mineral, it's calcium carbonate like chalk, which is not very tough. And then in between the layers of puff pastry, there's this gooey sort of protein, which is very - again, everything was a paradigm shift as I would find the way we do it.

So what the critter does is it's this soft-bodied critter, and so it's got to fill the ceiling, and there's seawater. And so it releases these proteins into the seawater, and they self-assemble, because of the way they're shaped and their charges, they self-assemble into a very thin sheet. And there are these positive and negative charges in particular places. And then the minerals from the seawater precipitate out, they land on the landing sites, calcium and carbonate are also charged, and they self-assemble into a rhombohedral crystal, which is one of 14 kinds of crystals, but it's the strongest one. And then there's a layer of protein, and then there's a layer of mineral. So it's the seawater, what's already in the seawater gets pulled in and coaxed into form, to self-assemble this amazing material.

Tippett: What have you found designers making as a result of that, being mentored by that?

Benyus: Exactly. Well, that is now being formed into a glass that is extremely, extremely tough. So it's layer-by-layer glass, transparent. The interesting thing about it is that there's no fossil fuels being burnt to create this glass. When I say glass to you, you think fire, don't you? It's not. And that's everything in the natural world. Because it's all made in or around the body, they've found a different way.
[music: "On the Hour" by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett: You call the scientific method or paradigm that you use with your colleagues the way of "muddy knees and epiphanies." [laughs] So would you describe...

Benyus: Yeah. That's our North Star compass. That's our compass in our company.

Tippett: Okay. Describe that scientific method to us.

Benyus: "Muddy knees and epiphanies." [laughs] What happens if we're lucky, and the way we prefer to have it happen is that when we - and we, I'm talking right now about Biomimicry 3.8, it's a consultancy. It's an interesting thing to hire us. We immediately want to take you outside. Even if it's in the suburban area around you. I know how to find stuff in suburbs.

Tippett: Yes, you do.
[audience laughs]
Benyus: But if we're lucky, we get to go to Costa Rica, we get to go all over the world in beautiful, beautiful places, and we take folks out. When we were looking for a compass statement, "muddy knees and epiphanies" came from one time we took some wastewater engineers out to the Galápagos Islands, and they were pretty resistant. We were on a boat for seven days together, and they were like, "Why are we here? This is a boondoggle." And I said, "Well, what do you guys do?" And they said, "Well, we filter stuff out of water." And I said, "Well, let's go snorkeling, because everything in this ocean is filtering salt out of water because it lives on fresh water and it lives in saltwater. Everything is a membrane." And that got their attention. That got their attention.

And then when we would go to the islands - before that, they'd get out, they'd take some pictures and they would jump back on the boat. But after they started to really look at these organisms as their mentors and their engineering peers or mentors, they were just on their knees. Just on their knees having epiphanies. I walked by this guy named Paul, and he was looking at a mangrove, and he was a pretty buttoned-up guy, engineer, and he was crying. Had tears streaming down his face. I stood next to him looking at the mangrove, and I could get that. It's a pretty spectacular thing. And he said, "How is it that in my education, I've been doing this work for 30 years, 40 years, I'm a desalination expert. I filter salt from water, and this plant has its roots in saltwater and it's solar powered and it's desalinating." He said, "I'm crying because it's beautiful and because no one ever told me."

Tippett: This is such a statement also about how paltry our definition and approach to innovation has been. Innovation is not always progress. You wrote, all the activities that caused pollution were in their origins lionized as progress. What we did with food, turning food into something that comes out of cans and boxes was incredible progress.

Benyus: That's right.

Tippett: Isn't it just, in this context, just absurd and hilarious, if it weren't so absurd, that we talk about farm to table as this incredible invention [laughter] and then charge a lot of money for it?

Benyus: I know. I know. Exactly. Exactly. We've really gotten far, far away from, well, the real source of our health and our wealth. We've gotten so far away from where these gifts actually come from. I should say this right up front because I don't think biomimicry is new. It's new to us in Western industrial culture.

Tippett: Right. It's new to the scientific method.

Benyus: It's new. People who lived really embodied in their places did biomimicry naturally. In this part of the world, they would watch snowshoe hares and they'd say, "Do you ever look at snowshoes? It kind of looks like the footprint of a snowshoe hare." Or maybe we're going to make a chisel and you look at the beaver's teeth. This is not new, but I call it a re-membering. As in...

Tippett: With a hyphen.

Benyus: ...being dis-membered. It's a re-membering. And that's why I say, "Name anything we can learn from the natural world." Except maybe our ethics and our morals. But name how to communicate, how to cooperate, how to heal. Anything we're actually trying to do, somebody on this planet has already tried to do it. And the thing for me that I think goes back to your original question is, I was hoping that the guys in the bulldozers would develop this radical empathy that I had for these organisms. Because if you spend long enough, you realize, you see them tuck their kids into bed at night.

Tippett: The organisms?

Benyus: Yeah. And you realize, "Oh, okay, now I'm watching them get food, they're hungry. I do that, too. I'm watching them bathe. I'm watching them make their houses." Right? And so the false separation between you and the rest of the natural world falls away when you get this radical empathy. And nothing creates that like biomimicry.

Tippett: Yeah, but that formation to that empathy and that just looking and paying attention to those organisms is kind of trained out of us. It's not just that we don't get that formation, it's that we get the opposite. I'm such a big believer in the power of questions, and you said your chapters are questions. We're so fixated on answers and our solutions, but it's really when our questions change, which science knows and also in a life. It's when our questions change that so much is possible. So I've been thinking in these last years about - you know how basically I think culturally we ask, essentially capitalist questions are our starting point, just instinctively: what, how soon, how much.

And I just - I've been paying attention to the questions in your chapter that you mentioned, other questions you've thrown out there like, "What's worth doing? How shall we live here?" Or this was a lovely podcast, the Wild podcast that you did, For The Wild podcast, the questions, "What would nature do here? What wouldn't nature do here?"

Benyus: Yeah. There's this set of questions that we ask because biomimicry looks at nature as model for emulating, measure to judge the rightness of our innovations - that Life's Principles - and mentor. And the questions that go with that are, "What would nature do here?" And "here" is the most important part of that.

Tippett: So wherever that "here" is.

Benyus: Because that's context. "What would nature do here? What wouldn't nature do here is that measure part. And then why and why not?" That's the mentor part. That's the part where if you have a mentor at work, you've been there a while, something weird happens, you don't know what it is, you go in, close the door, say to the mentor, "Why did that just happen?" "Oh, let me tell you about that."

So life knows how to live here over 3.8 billion years, it does. And we have spent 250 years of Western science asking about nature. And now, we are starting to ask to learn from nature. It's exciting. It's a completely different way to do science, to learn from rather than just about. That's the switch. That's really the profound switch. And it calls on us to sit down, get out our notebooks, and pay attention in a whole different way than when we were just measuring in natural history.

My field started with, you went out in the jungle and the first thing you did, you didn't ask, you shot it and bring it back. Our natural history museums are full of drawers. And that was when they were asking the "what" question - what are you? Not, how do you live here?

Tippett: Someplace else you said our job is to get out of being this role of manager, we've been managing the natural world, but helpers. And then how you explain, that is, being a helper would say, "What do these microbes need?"

Benyus: Right. I have a forestry degree as well as an English literature degree. So I've always been straddling those two worlds. Natural resource management. As if.
[audience laughs]
Tippett: Yeah.

Benyus: As if we could. And so this great humbling, the more you know. I've spent my whole life reading about organisms and learning about them and living in and amongst them. And the more you know, the more you realize, all you can do is try to be hospitable. Literally, help the helpers.

So Laura and I, we bought a hardscrabble piece of land in Montana, and we have been part of 32 years of that land regenerating itself. And what I can tell you is setting a banquet for the real helpers, helping the helpers, is, what would the microbes want now? Literally creating the conditions conducive to life and then life heals it.

Tippett: So much to talk about. You dedicated the Biomimicry book, "for the mentors on the Tangled Bank." Was that in this place?

Benyus: That's from Darwin. In Origin of the Species. Darwin, who's never said "survival of the fittest," by the way.

Tippett: Okay. No, you said he didn't say "fittest," he said "fit."

Benyus: He said "fit." Herbert Spencer, who was a political scientist at that time...

Tippett: But that is incredible. Let's stop and take that in because we built our entire society around "survival of the fittest."

Benyus: I know. I know. I'm so glad I'm getting this out. [audience laughs] This is what I wanted to talk about. You asked and you got it out. Thank you. Seriously, we have built our whole society around this. He did not say that. He said, "survival of the fit." Which means: fit to place, fit to your community. Because he understood, studying evolution and all, coming up with natural selection - he understood that organisms don't just move into a place; they co-create a place and then the place creates them, and then they create the place. And so that's this idea of - I also think of it as a homecoming, like coming back to fittedness. To fittedness, so that the habitat changes. It changes all the time. And so you have to go - and then as an organism, like humans: conditions have changed. I'm no longer fit to this place, but I'm going to evolve my behaviors, and physiologically, I'm going to evolve to become more and more at home here.
[music: "Town Market" by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett: Okay, in case you are incredulous at this last stunning idea because you, like I, read the words "survival of the fittest" in the edition of On the Origin of Species that you were assigned in school - here's some deeper context. That phrase was not in Darwin's original text. But his contemporary, the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer, who Janine began to mention, was a popularizer of applying Darwin's ideas to the human social sphere - social Darwinism. And Darwin himself eventually borrowed and added Spencer's words "survival of the fittest" starting with the fifth edition of his history-making work.
[music: "Town Market" by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett: This is all such a refreshing and redemptive reframing of - none of these words are big enough - but the ecological calling before us as a species in this century to orient around the genius that is there to mentor us, to orient around what is conducive to life and how we already live on a planet that knows how to do that.

Benyus: Yeah. It's relieving.

Tippett: Hmm?

Benyus: It's relieving...

Tippett: It's relieving.

Benyus: ...to know, to remember that we live on a competent planet. [audience laughs] And we're part of it, and we're young.

Tippett: We're young. Yeah. What is it you say, our "experimental youth as a species" is what we've been in. I've thought about this, too: how do humans learn? How do young humans learn? They do take things apart before they put them back together again.

Benyus: Yes.

Tippett: However, they usually don't burn the house down.

Benyus: Yeah. I call us toddlers with matches. [audience laughs] It's not something you want to see. We're experimenting. Back to fire.

Tippett: Back to fire.

Benyus: Yeah.

Tippett: The Aspen Institute asked you once, is biomimetic innovation powerful enough to - what did they say? - solve, probably, climate change? [laughs] Your answer started with, you said, of course, "mimicking life's genius is absolutely part of the solution." You said, "After all, only humans see carbon dioxide as the poison of our era, the rest of nature sees it as a building block."

Benyus: [laughs] That's right. That's the thing. And if you look into deep time on the Earth, there were some other really scary moments, like this big oxidation event that happened where these organisms started to photosynthesize and put oxygen into the air and too much. It's a really reactive thing. But then other organisms came along and said, "Wow! Look at all this oxygen. Maybe we can use it to respire, to combust our food." And so we have a lot of carbon dioxide in the air right now, legacy carbon dioxide.

Tippett: Legacy carbon dioxide. [laughs]

Benyus: Yeah. And we need to get it down. It's real simple, stop emitting it right now. But then you're going to have to pull that back home, that carbon dioxide. It came out of our soils, we burned it out of these fossil fuels, but it actually is carbon and most things are made of carbon. And so what we need to do is figure out how to take carbon dioxide. One of the things we need to do, take carbon dioxide and use sunlight to do what plants do, which is to make our world with that carbon dioxide.

Tippett: You said, what is it? "Plants use carbon to make sugar, starches and cellulose." I didn't know all this. "Corals use carbon to build reefs, mollusks use carbon to manufacture their shells. Nature's been writing the book on carbon chemistry for billions of years, and suddenly it's required reading for humanity."
[audience laughs]
Benyus: Yeah.

Tippett: That's you.

Benyus: Yeah. And there are six pathways that we know of how to take carbon dioxide and put it with other things to make things. Right now, if you go to San Francisco Airport, there's a terminal that has all of its rock aggregate and all of its concrete is made with carbon dioxide that's sequestered using the - it's a guy named Brent Constantz, who is a coral reef expert.

Tippett: So he's a biomimic?

Benyus: He's a biomimic and he has a company called Blue Planet. And he takes CO2 out of smokestacks, uses the coral reef recipe in mild conditions, aqueous conditions, and takes seawater or brine from desalination plants. And takes those minerals. Those minerals precipitate out to be concrete and rock aggregate, which means no more driving a truck to a face of old limestone and mining it away. No more digging up aggregate. The waste product is brine from a desalination plant and CO2 from a smokestack. And that's happening now, and people are making plastics out of CO2. So it's happening, still not as widespread as fossil fuel plastics.

Tippett: Yeah. It's still not happening at an ecosystem level, we haven't created that as an ecosystem.

Benyus: Yeah. I'm really impatient with the toddler. [audience laughs] But you got to just keep pointing at what is obvious. I'm the queen of the obvious with this. This is not hard science.

Tippett: I think that's probably part of the problem because it feels too good to be true. Do you know what I mean? It feels like it can't be that obvious.

Benyus: Yeah, I know. The big question is: why wasn't this our first instinct?

Tippett: Well, as you said, it was the first instinct of plenty of people.

Benyus: Plenty of people.

Tippett: But not at least in this industrialized Western world over the last few hundred years.

Benyus: No. And we are very...

Tippett: We're the ones who are burning the house down.

Benyus: Yeah. And we're very entranced by our technologies. My goodness. I mean, just now, just very recently, we're seeing the unintended consequences. But can you imagine how - I have this set of, you remember stamps, like ink stamps?

Tippett: Yes, I do.

Benyus: I collect ones that have to do with progress. So people used to like, "Oh, I think I'll decorate my stationary." And it was a factory with a smokestack, and smoke coming out of it. And that was a good thing. We believed that. We were like, "Wow! No more vagaries, no more hunger, no more strife." You can understand how we did it, why we went that way. But as we were progressing, why we didn't ask these elders is a deeper human question.

Tippett: I have so many things I want to talk to you about, and I'm realizing I can't, I'm not going to get to all of them. I would like to read this to you. It's possibly a detour, but it's just something that fascinated me.

You wrote this: "If you look at the periodic table of elements, 90% of the human body only uses six of those 118 things, only the ones that are safe. And then reconfigures that tiny subset into millions of outrageously interesting designs. Every time we humans need a new function, we make a new material. That's why we have 350 polymers. Life doesn't. Life says we have polysaccharides and we have proteins. What can we do with them? Life doesn't import anything in on ships. In human-made design, we use almost all of the periodic table because we can, even the toxic stuff. But life doesn't. It only uses the ones on the light part of the table, the non-toxic ones. To me, that's the operating manual for how to be an earthling, for us to be the positive contributors instead of the invasive species." I think you said this at Bioneers: "The chemistry is right there."

Benyus: Yeah, it's right there. And when you look at that kind of chemistry, what you do realize is that while the materials are simple, they're a Lego set so that they can be used again and put together in different ways. So life adds design to matter. We add high heats and pressure and stuff to matter. Life adds design. It's just how it's laid up that makes it strong or stretchy. And when you look at that chemistry, it's amazing by itself, but what's really amazing is that the chemistry itself winds up enhancing the place where the organism lives and where the organism's offspring is going to have to live.

So the chemistry itself builds soil, the chemistry cleans air, it cleans water. As you get deeper into it, you realize that the way it gives back, the way these organisms in the process of living their lives sweeten the Earth and make of this place an Eden. Biomimicry begins with this sort of journey to - it's the hero's journey. It's, "Here's how we do it. We're in trouble. Oh look, there's help." And it's even deeper than that. Not only is it cool chemistry, but it's chemistry that contributes and that gives back and that enhances. And that's beneficent. It's not just safe, it literally creates conditions conducive to life.

Tippett: You have said, "The whole time we are evolving, beauty [has always been a] signal of the good," too.

Benyus: Yes. That's what's really interesting. We are so close to what we used to be when we knew the embodied wisdom of living in place. We're so close to that. I love learning about evolutionary psychology and biophilia and how men, too, but women particularly love flowers. And what they think now is because as we went foraging and gathering, we would look for flowers because in two weeks it would be food. It would be fruit.

Sparkling water. We love to put our houses near water. Sparkling water means there's oxygen in it and it won't make our babies sick. Beauty is the signal of the good. And you can take people now, modern people now and say, give them pictures of healthy forests and slightly diseased forests and they will know, "something's wrong with that forest." We, deep in ourselves, if we start listening to that cellular truth, which used to keep us alive, we will create beautiful things in beautiful ways. I do believe - and I've watched over all these years people's reaction to biomimicry and it's overwhelming. People are yearning. They're like, "Oh my gosh, I used to do this." Right? "I used to do this."

Tippett: Right.

Benyus: And so when we see something in the natural world, it's not just its ratio or its form that's beautiful. It's beautiful because it's healthy. It's beautiful because of the way it's done. And we want to be, I think instinctively, to be fit to our place. We want to be part of that beauty. That means not just superficial beauty.
[music: "November Mist" by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett: I think so much about how there's a lot of despair, there's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of depression. There are a lot of obvious reasons for that. But I think at a cellular level, the distress of our world, of the microbes, of the water, of the forests is we also feel that distress, that distress is in us because we are of this. And it's such a gift for you to remind us that we are also of...

Benyus: Yeah. I mean...

Tippett: ...this beauty, this...

Benyus: ...it is our malaise. It's our malaise, I do think. We're beginning to pay attention to it. And I think the local food movement is the first part of that and the health and wellness movement is the first part of that. And I've watched us ask a lot more of our designs, whether it's the way we do agriculture. We're asking more and more and more of those designs. It's not enough for an iPhone to be beautiful, we don't want it leaching chemicals into our hands.

Tippett: But I also think, we haven't named this yet, you are also being approached by and working with Boeing and Jaguar and Google and Nike and General Mills and Procter & Gamble and on and on and on.

Benyus: Yeah. People who make our world.

Tippett: That's a story that is not being told. It's hard to imagine how this is all landing in those corporations, but maybe tell us about a project that you know about right now or something you've seen happen that would be unexpected.

Benyus: It's been 25 years. We call it "roller skating in the halls of power." And we go where the impacts are big. So for instance, now, two of our biggest clients is Ford Motor Company and Microsoft. And we're not doing product design there or process design. We do a lot of manufacturing design. We're not doing that. We're taking the biggest artifact that humans make, which is our built world. The factories, the corporate headquarters, warehouses. In Microsoft's case, it's data centers.

Microsoft is building 30 to 50 data centers a year. They are big. They are like giant big boxes. They are a giant parking lot and a giant flat building. What we're doing there is we actually call it "factory as a forest." As ecologists, we go in and we say, "You are going to be building this here." And we say, "If you weren't building it here, this would be this particular kind of forest, this particular kind of ecological land type." And then we go and we find the healthiest version of that we can, called a reference habitat. It's our elder in system form. And we measure that to find out the ecological gifts, how much water is being cleaned by that site, how much that forest - how much air is being cleaned, how cool the air is, how much soil is being built, nutrients cycled, how much wildlife's being supported.

These are the ecological gifts that that forest right next door is giving you. And that's about, well, some of these are huge, 4,200 acres. The new Ford plants, 4,200 acres. Or, four acres. We come back and we say, "Acre for acre, here's how much carbon you have to store, here's how much water you have to clean."

Tippett: Really?

Benyus: Here's how much - it's ecological performance standards because engineers are used to meeting standards. So what we're saying is you want to be truly biomimetic, you've got to function like the wildland next door. By function, I mean the gifts. Because as an ecologist, what I know is health: you literally know whether a forest is healthy by all the things it gives away. Dirty water comes in, it cleans the water and sends it downstream, cleans the air, sends it downwind, creates habitats these wildlife migrate through. Well, that's a big ask of a giant data center and a giant parking lot.

Tippett: [laughs] We are so happy to know that you're working on that.
[audience laughs]
Benyus: That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. We're working on 20 projects right now around the world. And here's the thing. We're about to welcome about three billion more humans to the planet. Most of them are going to be in cities. So between now and 2050, we're going to be building the equivalent of a city for one million people every five days. So it's getting done this way - they do it differently - or not. We're trying to intervene. As Donella Meadows would say, we're trying to intervene in the system where we can bring nature's wisdom to the places that need it the most, which are numerous places, but certainly the built world, our nest.

Tippett: You've been involved in a number of film projects and I'd say if people are interested in this, there's a lot out there. One of them begins with people reflecting on that moment of the Earthrise image, which really for new generations does not have the resonance. But in the late 20th century, this moment of seeing the Earth from the outside, seeing the planet, the "big blue marble." I wonder what you think the equivalent of the Earthrise image is for our generation in time. I think it's not looking up at the stars.

Benyus: I don't think so either. I don't think - No.

Tippett: What for you, what would that image be that changed everything or that changes everything, that puts everything into context?

Benyus: It would be a before and after picture. And it would be us looking, say, from above, at a place that we have pillaged, and taken apart, and it's hardly breathing. And then, human beings come in and they learn to help the helpers. And the other picture is that it's pulsing with life. It's green, it's fecund, it's generative. Fragrant air, clear sparkling streams, and us living among it, in it, in a new way. It's a miracle when land heals. For us to be part of that miracle is what we need right now to heal us or heal ourselves.

Tippett: To heal ourselves. I remember you telling the story about your land that you helped. You helped the helpers to bring it back to life. And you tell the story about you had duckweed, but no ducks. [laughs] And over time, the creatures came back and a moose came. So here was your metric for health. I think you said it was like the king or queen had come to visit.

Benyus: Oh, it was a visitation for sure.

Tippett: That was nature's sign.

Benyus: Oh man, yeah. You wake up in the morning, the pond is right there. And we woke up and a moose came walking out of the pond, like where he is right there, just walking out of the pond, and they're huge. We kind of had to look up through the windows like this at it. He walked in the front yard, and then we have pasture so we have a fence. Big lodge ball pine fence. And he just, he just, stepped over it. [audience laughs] He didn't jump over it. He lifted a leg and just stepped over it. And then went to our other pond that we'd also worked really hard on to make good for him. And he stayed. He stayed three days. In the - there were no trees when we got there, we planted all these trees. Where the stream comes out, we planted all these trees and now they're gigantic. Do it today. And he slept there. Oh man, I was like, "whoa." Yeah.

Tippett: We're drawing to a close. Here's the thing between those before and after pictures, and they need to be all over the place. Pictures of all kinds of places. And we're in that in-between space where some of it is happening, everybody doesn't know these things yet. Somebody very beloved to both of us named Azita who's here tonight told me that you have a great story about one of the last Tahitian Wayfinders that you spoke with.

Benyus: Yeah.

Tippett: About what do you do when you don't know where you're going, how do we summon that imagination. Would you share that story with us?

Benyus: Yes, I will. Naomi Thompson [ Editor's note: Janine is referring to Nainoa Thompson], as a young man, native Hawaiian, he was mentored by one of the last Wayfinders, which are people that used to get into these canoe-like boats, and then head out into the ocean for thousands of miles. And out of a whole ocean, they were able to find land. They were able to find Tahiti. And they had all kinds of amazing - this is before sextants. This is like, how did they do this? And so his mentor, Mau, was teaching him and he was about to go off on a journey, to Tahiti, a modern-day journey. And Mau took him out to the shoreline and they were standing there looking out into the ocean. And Mau said to him, "Can you see the island? Can you see Tahiti?" And he said, "No. No, I can't see it." He said, "In my mind's eye, I can." And he said, "That's how you'll find it. Keep it in your mind's eye."

Tippett: I'd like to read the final paragraph of Biomimicry, your book, which shows that you were the poetry editor again. [laughs] "The good news is that we'll have plenty of help. We are surrounded by geniuses. They are everywhere with us breathing the same air, drinking the same round river of water, moving on limbs built from the same blood and bone. Learning from them will take only stillness on our part, a quieting of the voices of our own cleverness. Into this quiet will come a cacophony of earthly sounds, a symphony of good sense."

Benyus: May it be so.

Tippett: Janine Benyus, thank you so much for what you do and for being with us tonight.

Benyus: Never have I had a conversation like this. Thank you. Thank you.
[applause] [music: "Eventide" by Gautam Shrikishan]
Tippett: Janine Benyus is the author of several books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She is the co-founder of the non-profit, Biomimicry Institute. She also co-founded Biomimicry 3.8, a consulting and training company.

Our conversation was part of The Great Northern Festival: a celebration of Minnesota's signature cold, creative winters. You can learn more at TheGreatNorthernFestival.com.

Special thanks this week to Kate Nordstrum, Lillie Benowitz, Jasa McKenzie, and Kurt Engh with The Great Northern. And also thanks to Mia, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which hosted this conversation.

The On Being Project is: Chris Heagle, Laurén Drommerhausen, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Colleen Scheck, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Gautam Srikishan, April Adamson, Ashley Her, Amy Chatelaine, Romy Nehme, Cameron Mussar, Kayla Edwards, Juliana Lewis, and Tiffany Champion.

On Being is an independent nonprofit production of The On Being Project. We are located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. Our closing music was composed by Gautam Srikishan. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

Our funding partners include:

The Hearthland Foundation. Helping to build a more just, equitable and connected America - one creative act at a time.

The Fetzer Institute, supporting a movement of organizations applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Find them at fetzer.org.

Kalliopeia Foundation. Dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on Earth. Learn more at kalliopeia.org.

The Osprey Foundation - a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives.

And the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family foundation dedicated to its founders' interests in religion, community development, and education.

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Janine Benyus - Biomimicry, an Operating Manual for Earthlings | The On Being Project

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The naturalist/innovator in a parallel universe of solutions design, which might shift the way you see almost everything about our possible futures.

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Archive of Futures by the Futurium in Berlin 

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Archive of Futures by the Futurium in Berlin 

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A captivating exploration of climate change that uses nine different emotions to better understand the science, history, and future of our evolving planet
S…

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What is colonialism? | The History of Racism

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Fusing cold water surfing, dance & poetry, Easkey Britton explores a synodic month from a female perspective. Taking us on an emotive journey through the places in-between, where instability reigns supreme. Embracing the imperfections as we connect with ourselves and the environment around us.

Winner Best Short Film - Shoreshots Surf Film Festival 2018
Winner Best Cinematography - San Diego Surf Film Festival 2018
Winner Best Cinematography - Richard Harris International Film Festival 2018
Winner Best Short Film - Save the Waves Film Festival 2018

Directed by Andrew Kaineder
Starring Easkey Britton
Produced by Matt Smith
Written and voiced by Easkey Britton
Music and Sound by Joseph Franklin / Onic Studio
Additional footage by Chris McClean and Clem Mcinerny

Special thanks to Tom and all the crew at Finisterre 
& Iian Miller from Unique Ascent.

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We are excited to share the Biomimicry DesignLens diagrams with you via a Creative Commons (CC) license. Please follow the guidelines listed below before using any of the diagrams or icons contained in the folder.

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Our strength lies in being soft like water. This book is about the power we gain by connecting to water. It’s about how we can restore our relationship with the world’s different bodies of water, and by doing so, restore both the water and ourselves. By sharing Easkey’s own experiences as surfer and marine scientist, a

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An expression of our intimate relationship with the ocean through its life giving properties, the interconnections with our lives and the healing potential of a blue wave of change. From our Ocean Literacy work.  
Original concept was hatched by Dan and Dan in a 24hr blast of riffing, writing, walking and surfing in Cornwall. Then realised through a generous collaboration with Chris McClean and his magic archive, some extra footage from Calum Creasy, the voice of Amy Greenhough, a beautiful sonic gift from Matt Hales and Davide Rossi (Escape Goat by Soren Lorenson, published by BMG) and sound design from John Sampson. With Easkey Britton in the final shot.



Find out more at www.weareocean.blue

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The documentary shows how three young women - Irish pro surfer Easkey, Iranian pro snowboarder Mona and Iranian diver Shalha are introducing a new spo…