Talk about nature inspired design (Biomimicry)

Envision what our world would and could look like if we actually started reading and following the directions contained in “Life’s Operating Manual.” Co-founder with Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Guild and Biomimicry Institute, Dayna Baumeister provides an eagle’s-eye view of biomimicry breakthroughs using ecological design and nature-inspired technologies that emulate nature’s profound design sophistication. She has worked in the field of biomimicry with Janine Benyus since 1998 and designed and teaches the world’s first Biomimicry Professional Certification Program.


http://www.bioneerslive.org/VOD/VOD14/vod1602.html

Permaculture and the Flowering of Happiness

Permaculture as a way to growing happiness..

From permaculture magazine http://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/permaculture-and-flowering-happiness

Maddy reflects on what makes us happy, and finds that Nature holds abundant inspiration

The functional and the beautiful...

In these times of disruption, change and transition, all of us can be excused for sometimes feeling perplexed, challenged, even a little lost. We are watching the old world slowly disintegrate. Our financial and political systems in the West are under the greatest of duress. Our natural global resources are seriously diminished as we face not only peak oil but also peak water. Whilst the work of earth restoration has never been more important, it is still largely ignored, subsumed by the broader fears surrounding economic chaos. It is understandable that any one of us can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the scale of what is wrong.

When those dark times envelop me what do I do? I go home and walk in the woodlands or go up on to the Downs and look out over 360 degrees of countryside. I savour the light dancing on the Solent and the silvery glints from the high rises of the City of Portsmouth. I look out over my bioregion and feel gratitude that I live in such a beautiful place. I am glad it is designated as a National Park, open to anyone, celebrated and preserved for future generations.

Having got my dose of landscape expansion, I go home to my garden and enter into a connection with the natural world there too. As Emma Cooper, friend and author of The Alternative Kitchen Garden, an A-Z, said to me recently, “Just putting my hands in the soil makes me feel better.” She has certainly entertatined me with some of her wonderful experiments!

I know every tree and shrub in my garden, its habit and blossom, its coming fruits. I know where the wrens nest and where the robins stake their territories in my hedgerow, and all the species of wildflower that bloom from early January right through the year. I love to listen to the drone of insects and happen upon shy common lizards that hunt in the long meadow grasses.

You may imagine that I have a smallholding, but it is a garden (admittedly a good size), full of as many habitats and species as we can invite in. It is near the greater habitat of the wild South Downs, full of deer, foxes, badgers, owls and birds of prey. I feel a part of this land. It nurtures and feeds me and places in perspective my small concerns within the largeness of Life and its mystery.

You may also imagine that permaculture gardening is a rather functional affair, where the focus is on yields of food, fuel and medicinal plants. This is a part of it, but gardening is also my art. This last year, with climate change pressing painfully into my consciousness and with fellow businesses struggling and failing, I took sanctuary in growing and planting. Tim and I have planted many hundreds of bulbs so that next Spring they will provide the plummeting bee populations with early nectar and ourselves with balm for the soul.

For me flowers are the equivalent to happiness in nature – as well as a practical key to planting robust diverse ecologies. I grow many types of fruit and none of my trees require sprays or codling moth traps because the pests are in balance with the beneficial insects and birds.

This passion for nature and celebration of biodiversity is not just an organic technique. It is both a meditation and a way of connecting with the powerful forces of nature. It makes me feel aligned to the other kingdoms, a co-creator of a beautiful place. Most of all it makes me happy.

Happiness is one of the most powerful forces in a human life. It opens us up and encourages us to love. It brings energy and appreciation, gratitude, reverence, and the capacity to invite adventure into our lives. It is incredibly important that we nurture it – for our health, wellbeing – and also to help make us more effective and loving human beings. Above all, happiness is a skill that can be learnt.

My friend, Chris Johnstone, has taught me much about the value of happiness and the importance of nurturing it. Dr Chris is an addictions specialist who has helped thousands of people overcome their problems, and he is a happiness ‘expert’. He works with Rob Hopkins, co-founder of The Transition Movement, and Joanna Macy, the inspirational teacher and activist who developed The Work That Reconnects.

His book, Find Your Power, is not just another boring pop psychology book. It is the distillation of his rich approach, helping people to become more effective and live the life they dream of. The book is also a call to adventure at this time of deep and challenging transition. In the latest Permaculture mag – out on Wednesday 21st July – Chris shares tried and tested strategies for growing happiness.

I like the way he ends his article, "Mood isn’t just something that happens to us, it is also influenced by choices we make and strategies we can learn. By recasting happiness as something linked to skills we develop, challenges we face and relationships we value, we contribute to a cultural recovery from over-consumption and help grow instead a model of sustainability that is attractive and deeply satisfying."

Because ultimately we have to change the way we live and move beyond our dependence on relentless economic growth to fuel our economies. What and how we consume will be the most vital and empowering factor in that process of change. It really is in our hands.

A note on art

After being touched by a film, I wonder what is art about, and seems one thing I know: it's an attempt to touch our deepest truth. That place. Just that relative and personal truth.
As a Man, I'm creative. I have impulses to express myself and doing it just by doing something, and I have a need to comprehend. Not knowing. As knowledge seems like something one keeps in a closed reservoir, and I can't keep it. Things find meaning in the flowing. Perhaps is there when comprehension comes into scene, once, looks like things are not to be kept, as they are to be let in, and let out. Or should I say, things are meant to flow through?
Well, I find art in human expression. Meant to be art or not. Trying to get out of concrete defined dialogues, trying to come out of the wide range of doorways. Something that can't be kept, something that got in and suffered transformation.
I recently watched this film, called "Pi", by Darren Aronovsky. There, a scientist called Max is struggling madness around some pattern he realized often in nature. It was about the "golden ratio". Entrepreneurs were expecting huge profit from that because the pattern was also present in stock market; some Jewish Rabbis were expecting the name of god in the solution of the riddle. But madness and despair were taking over Max. He was not interested and he was not prepared. He just couldn't avoid the pursuit.
In one of his visits to a mathematician friend he was told:
"-You remember Archimedes from Siracuse, uh?
The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he has received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time, it tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks. Insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on it. And finally, his equally exhausted wife (she's forced to share her bed with this genius), she convinces him to take a bath, to relax. While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bathwater rise. Displacement... A way to determine volume! And thus, a way to determine density! Weight over volume! And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams Eureka! And thus, overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's palace to report the discovery.
Now, what is the moral of the story?
-That breakthrough will come..., Max answers.
-Wrong! The point of the story is the wife. You listen to your wife, she will give you perspective meaning, you need to take a break, you need to take a bath or you will get nowhere. There will be no order, only chaos.
Go home Max, and you take a bath."

A story from our visit to the beach during experience week

My blog post about an experience of connecting with nature that happened in a 5 minute visit to the beach..
http://amysheartpath.blogspot.com/2011/10/butterfly-of-consciousness.html

Mushroom man

Here's Paul Stamets giving a talk similar to the one we were lucky enough to see at Findhorn
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html

Turkey Tail mushroom is being used to cure cancer

Bioneers conference

The Bioneers is an organisation inspiring a shift to live on earth in ways that honour the web of life, each other and future generations. Here's a link to video archive of the conference http://www.bioneerslive.org/ - lots of interesting and inspiring people

Nature as our teacher

There are some great eco-design principles on the Center for Eco-literacy website  http://www.ecoliteracy.org/nature-our-teacher/ecological-principles (copied below) these are a great addition to the permaculture design principles. http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles.php and can be used as 'thinking tools' to apply to ourselves and to our life projects whatever they may be...

Creating communities that are compatible with nature's processes for sustaining life requires basic ecological knowledge.

We need, says Center for Ecoliteracy cofounder Fritjof Capra, to teach our children — and our political and corporate leaders — fundamental facts of life:

• Matter cycles continually through the web of life.
• Most of the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun.
• Diversity assures resilience.
• One species' waste is another species' food.
• Life did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.

NATURE'S PATTERNS AND PROCESSES

Understanding these facts arises from understanding the patterns and processes by which nature sustains life. In its work with teachers and schools, the Center for Ecoliteracy has identified several of the most important of these. It has helped teachers identify places in the curriculum where students can learn about them.

They include networks, nested systems, cycles, flows, development, and dynamic balance.

Networks
All living things in an ecosystem are interconnected through networks of relationship. They depend on this web of life to survive. For example: In a garden, a network of pollinators promotes genetic diversity; plants, in turn, provide nectar and pollen to the pollinators.

Nested Systems
Nature is made up of systems that are nested within systems. Each individual system is an integrated whole and—at the same time — part of larger systems. Changes within a system can affect the sustainability of the systems that are nested within it as well as the larger systems in which it exists. For example: Cells are nested within organs within organisms within ecosystems.

Cycles
Members of an ecological community depend on the exchange of resources in continual cycles. Cycles within an ecosystem intersect with larger regional and global cycles. For example: Water cycles through a garden and is also part of the global water cycle.

Flows
Each organism needs a continual flow of energy to stay alive. The constant flow of energy from the sun to Earth sustains life and drives most ecological cycles. For example: Energy flows through a food web when a plant converts the sun's energy through photosynthesis, a mouse eats the plant, a snake eats the mouse, and a hawk eats the snake. In each transfer, some energy is lost as heat, requiring an ongoing energy flow into the system.

Development
All life — from individual organisms to species to ecosystems — changes over time. Individuals develop and learn, species adapt and evolve, and organisms in ecosystems coevolve. For example: Hummingbirds and honeysuckle flowers have developed in ways that benefit each other; the hummingbird's color vision and slender bill coincide with the colors and shapes of the flowers.

Dynamic Balance
Ecological communities act as feedback loops, so that the community maintains a relatively steady state that also has continual fluctuations. This dynamic balance provides resiliency in the face of ecosystem change. For example: Ladybugs in a garden eat aphids. When the aphid population falls, some ladybugs die off, which permits the aphid population to rise again, which supports more ladybugs. The populations of the individual species rise and fall, but balance within the system allows them to thrive together.