I returned to the beach today; while I would have preferred to be in shorts and flip-flops, I wore a knit hat and a puffy vest. Did I miss something? Have I been in a coma for the last six months, completely missing summer? I know the ice is gone, but c'mon! This "spring" needs to sprung.
Thankfully the forest is more resilient than me. It's been wearing flip-flops and shorts, in the form of buds and flowers, for the last week. Frost or not, nature is going for it. I respect that.
This week I'm studying "life's principles" - a set of common characteristics intricately wrapped up in the biological practices of every living creature. As I walked through my observatory, I looked for signs of these principles like a child would playing a game of hide and seek. Only, as I begin to play, I realized that this version was ten times easier than any game I ever played.
My first find I already alluded to. The ice melted, the leaves are budding and birds have returned to the forest surrounding Hidden Beach. Life integrates cyclic processes. Buried in this forest is an infinite amount of feedback loops that respond to one another informing the bugs, trees, water, plants, etc. to prepare for spring. The cycle looks something like this:
The complexity of my drawing is about as accurate as the models we use to predict inflation. If we could imitate the system of feedback loops that nature uses to launch spring we could turn our monetary policy into something so accurate that it would likely become unnecessary.
I nearly tripped over the second "principle of life."
This is a picture of a decaying stump. Nature leverages interdependence - a piece of one living thing is important to another. In this case the forest is recycling a fallen tree. What was once dropping leaves on the ground, is now a hotel for bugs and worms. Eventually it will be completely absorbed into the ground leaving its nutrients to future saplings.
Can you image if we used 100% of the resources we encounter on a daily basis? What if we used 100% of just one resource, like water? Imagine a house where cooking water is filtered and reused for bathing water, which is then turned into toilet water and finally used to as water to heat the house. Some of these processes already exist, but none have reached the threshold of efficiency produced by nature.
I noticed another decaying stump right next to a piece of concrete.
This one was particularly frustrating. How have we taken biological materials (like sand, cement and water) and turned it into something that doesn't decay? Nature uses life friendly materials that quickly deconstruct and redistribute into the environment.
Styrofoam is one of my least favorite things (I hate the sound and the feel, plus it takes about 5000 years to decompose). Every time you, or I, get a coffee in the wrong cup we leave a legacy of trash that will be around thousands of years after we die. What if we created all common products with natural materials that decompose in a few years, rather than a few thousand years? That's the type of legacy that I want to leave.
Nature is resourceful; biological species rarely serve a single purpose. Instead they serve many purposes that benefit other species in the area. A cotton wood tree is a good example of multifunctional design:
In the fall the tree drops its leaves, which creates food and shelter for bugs and worms living on the ground. The bugs and worms produce food that enriches the soil around the tree. The trees roots become stronger and are able to better protect the soil from erosion.
How many companies exist to serve a single purpose? What if our auto manufactures shared their research in safety to inspire other products? Or, what if they leveraged their skills in aerodynamics to create better bikes? I challenge mass producers to squeeze more value from their research and resources and be more like the tree.
Life is locally attuned and responsive. It's opportunistic - taking advantage of any room to get ahead. Take a look at this grainy picture:
I found this budding plant at waste level. I noticed very few buds looking up. In a month the tops of the trees (a hundred feet up) will be covered with leaves. At that point, this plant will have much less sunlight than it is currently enjoying. It's getting ahead.
What if we could stop a pandemic before it started? It would be incredible if early indicators could trigger the growth of antibodies long before the disease ever had time to proliferate. This is possible if we can learn to leverage biology's opportunistic nature.
My final observation brings me back to Part I of "If you're not learning, you're not paying attention." Hidden Beach is overrun with cotton wood trees (scroll down for more pictures). This redundancy can be found throughout the phylum of biological species. Nature likes to make copies of things that work, so if one goes down others carry on the processes assigned to that species.
We're starting to get this, but the work is not done. When Japan was struck by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake five power sources went down, each designed to back up the others in the case of a large earthquake. What engineers failed to plan for was the surge of water that inevitably whipped out the final power source responsible for cooling the radioactive materials.
Focusing on one of "life's principles" can save a city, focusing on all of the principles can save the world.
