Beating the Odds by Imitating the 6 Billion Year Old Master

Here are a few highlights from the inspiring July Education Summit put on by the Biomimicry Institute:

From Janine Benyus, the Founder: What happens when you compare yourself to Paris Hilton versus Nelson Mandela? Who you compare yourself to changes you. Let’s use Nature as our Measure: It foster cooperative relationships. It leverages interdependence. It’s resilient. It practices benign manufacturing. It has feedback loops. It adapts and evolves. It integrates cyclic processes. It creates environments conducive to life. It is locally attuned and responsive. In any endeavor, ask “What would Nature do? What wouldn’t Nature do?” Instead of heat, beat and treat, how about FLOCK and AWE! How about designing cities that are as generous as ecosystems, which have a surplus of services, such as storing carbon and filtering and storing water. Lavasa, India is trying to do just that.

Exciting Applications of Biomimicry:

The U.S. Green Building Certifiers is using fungal connectivity as a model for communication.

The Department of Energy just granted $122 million to research artificial photosynthesis, which could produce all the energy the planet needs without pollution and very inexpensively. This is truly revolutionary.

Slime molds are being studied to figure out the most efficient routes around cities.

Portland-based Brightworks, which develops intelligent strategies for sustainability, is envisioning a new economic system modeled on the way that fungus moves resources around to the areas that need them the most.

Students at Innovation Space (a part of Arizona State University) are solving real problems with teams made up of majors in design, biology, business and marketing. Is that smart or what?

All this intelligent, elegant thought, rooted in the systems that have taken six billion years to evolve, gives me more hope than I’ve felt in years. And I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s going on! Find out more by going to AskNature.org, especially if you up against the odds.

The Singing Tree as a tool to Beat the Odds

This Child Singing Tree is focusing on some of the odds children are up against:

1:6 UNESCO reports that one in six children in the world are not in school, but are working to support their families

1:170 The Department of Justice estimates that 1 in 170 of American youth are currently at risk of becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation

1:2 According to international anti-narcotics agencies, Myanmar has most heavily armed drug-trafficking organization in the world. More than half of this 20,000-strong army consists of children, many of them 10- or 12-years-old.

I am excited to report Unity Through Creativity hired its first teen employee, joined by a teen volunteer, to work on the current Singing Tree this summer. We have begun UTC’s dream of employing young to do something real about combating poverty. Lili and Detroit of Santa Rosa helped to prepare the image of the world by painting it, gridding it and cutting it. Yesterday I sent 50 pieces to Cheryl Perara in Toronto. She is founder of One Child and will be taking the pieces for young girls and boys who are survivors of the sex trade in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand on July 1st.

With this 12′ x 8′ mural, which will be made by over 800 people, we hope to bring awareness to the possibility of a world without Poverty, the Child Sex Trade or Child Soldiers, – a world where children are nourished to grow their talents and give their gifts. If you’d like to participate, and/or have a group of people who’d like to contribute artwork for this purpose, contact me. The Child Singing Tree will be displayed in US Congress in 2011 and will be exhibited in high-traffic public places as well as online to help decrease the exploitation of children.

Consulting Nature When the Odds Are Beating Us

Last week I heard that 500 teachers were being let go in Cleveland. The heartache of the superintendent had me in tears. My beloved Waldorf-inspired Novato Charter School is dangerously in the red because of budget cuts for the first time in its 14 year history. My position as middle school art teacher was cut, at the same time that Arts & Ethics Academy was denied the continuation of its charter because of ugly backroom politics. I won’t be teaching art to those beautiful, young, at-risk high school students next year, either. Some of them will be attending high schools with 3000 students where the first thing waiting for them will be severe beatings if they don’t join a gang. My job loss is a small blip compared to the prospects of violence facing my students, and virtually nothing compared to the shrimpers and fisherman in Louisiana who may see their livelihoods changed forever. The European airline industry is in terrible risk because of the impact of the Icelandic volcano combined with the recession. Israel and Gaza are deadlocked into a deadly lose-lose relationship where the odds seem to be beating everyone into the ground, every day.

Surrounded by so much bad news, I always turn to Nature. An Irish poet on PBS last week said just the words I needed to hear. Looking upon the harsh coastal landscape of Ireland in the cold months, he said “What the barrenness of winter shows us is that bleakness is never as bleak as it looks. Deep down in the freezing stillness, there is new life waiting to be born. And we see it every spring.” My spring is growing a non-profit, which has laid dormant for nine years, Unity Through Creativity. It’s mission is to help make the world safer through the power of creativity and community, no matter what the odds. I and others have been doing the work of it, including the Singing Trees, and now people are coming forward and the organization is taking on a life of its own. Water self-organizes into clouds, rain, rivers, oceans and reforms again, when needed, into clouds. When the odds are beating us, we know it’s time to re-organize into new clouds, new forms, new life.