Greetings!
The other day, a friend of mine asked me what I do for a living. I didn’t give a good response in the moment (full disclosure, I said: “I worry…”). But I gave the question more thought and realized that what I really do is read instructions, share what the instructions are telling me, and listen for feedback on what this means for others.
Instructions come in many forms. There are the digital maps with voiced instructions telling us which way to turn and when. There are the wordless IKEA assembly instructions that take us from a disintegrated pile of parts to a complete, functional whole via androgynous blob-people and an appropriately sized Allen key. I am open to those instructions.
But the manual I’m focused on through my work is the one for life itself, instructing us on how to create the conditions for people to thrive within a healthy biosphere. There are academic disciplines – biomimicry, deep ecology and international development, for example – that explore aspects of this in great depth. Yet this needn’t be a silo of academia since it pertains to all of us and is the instruction manual to what might be more generally termed “common sense”, should such sense be a little more common.
In answering my friend about what I do for a living, I realized that the trail of breadcrumbs I’ve been leaving behind while blogging, tweeting and instagramming are simply a review of life’s instruction manual, one I believe we’d do well to keep handy. I also realized that in my professional conversations, including the occasion where organizations grant me a chance to speak at their events, I am parsing out one page or another of the instruction manual, and listening for feedback to understand it better in the future for having interacted with the audience.
With a nod to the proper scholars I’ll borrow Biomimicry 3.8’s framework to point out several instructions from what are known as “Life’s Principles” (in bold below) as they’ve recently emerged in my work. These are references to the principles that have enabled life to evolve over 3.8 billion years, so we humans have a little catching up to do in terms of reading the manual.
For example, evolving to survive includes reshuffling information and integrating the unexpected. David George Haskell’s Songs of Trees, explored in the first installment in the #SeasonInBookHeaven series on the blog, does exactly that, both as a work of literature that shifts the reader’s perspective in unexpected directions, and by highlighting how plant and animal species have applied this evolutionary approach to get where they are today in spite of some tough odds.
Kristen Ohlson’s book, The Soil Will Save Us, also explored in the #SeasonInBookHeaven series, offers guidance on how regenerative agriculture leverages cyclical processes and cultivates cooperative relationships among soil microorganisms to arrive at “the very first carbon trading scheme”. It is this ability to be locally attuned and responsive that will help us address global warming if we follow the instructions.
The economic teachings of Kate Raworth illustrate how to integrate development with growth so that the economy works to serve people rather than the other way around. Her book Doughnut Economics was the back-to-school edition of the blog’s #SeasonInBookHeaven, and shows how to combine modular and nested components of social systems to successfully evolve into the future.
I recently co-authored a paper, Our Carbon Future, that underscores the emergence of a new, exponential phase of resource-efficient and low energy-use processes, as well as applying multi-functional design across industrial sectors in order to create economic prosperity while reversing global warming. This paper proposes that the next wave of industrial practice also entails life-friendly chemistry, as chemical companies and other industries seek to generate value in a future where we lower the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (not just slow the rate of increasing concentration).
One of my favorite principles that I’m always on the lookout for is to replicate strategies that work and one of my earliest blog pieces, Acorn as Innovation Instructor, explores this theme. It could serve as a straightforward example of building from the bottom up but it also puts forward the notion of using readily available materials and energy, while maintaining integrity through self renewal as one of those strategies that work – for acorns becoming oaks, just as for other living innovators.
And so while current reality does sometimes make me worry, I remind myself that the real work isn’t worrying, it’s reading the instructions. The step-by-step manual and all the necessary tools came with the kit. Now whether or not we follow the instructions is up to us.
Yours in connectedness,
Lorraine
