Today is a good day to return to blogging after a long hiatus. It’s a good day because it’s the global Blog Action Day, whereby bloggers worldwide are asked to chime in on the topic of climate change.
My environmental conscience has grown tremendously over the past year or so. Maybe it had to do with being diagnosed with asthma and feeling the direct effect of hydrocarbon pollution on my ability to breathe without having to put effort into it. Maybe it was moving to Cambodia: there might be less pollution in poor countries but it’s more in your face, with mounds of trash everywhere you look and deforestation fires everywhere (I took the photo above in Laos this past March). Maybe it was the massive upsurge of media attention to global warming that had an impact. Whatever it was, it worked and apart from a few changes in personal habits (giving up my A/C unit in Cambodia not the least of them), I’m mulling over a switch to environmental journalism, if I could just find the job.
Much is being written now about causes and consequences of global warming, but I fear we’ve gotten to the point where everyone whose mind could be changed has been. For an even larger change to occur, we need to find living solutions that are more green without forcing people in developed countries to give up their comforts… because they won’t, you won’t, I won’t, at least not in a major way, let’s face it. And more importantly, we need to find solutions that allow people in poorer countries to improve their lot without worsening the planet’s. I’ve been educating myself about such solutions and found hope in the brand new field of biomimicry, which consists of getting inspiration from nature’s own design to engineer the future tools of human life: buildings that work like trees, trains like birds, textiles like butterflies, etc… It’s something engineers have certainly done before, but now there’s a systematic attempt to look to nature first. The website asknature.org has a catalogue of nature’s solutions to many problems under the sun, open to any inventor seeking inspiration. Our disconnect with nature is our downfall, and there’s a way to go back to it without moving back into caves and giving up centuries of progress.
So for this Blog Action Day, I ask you to set aside 17 minutes and 39 seconds to watch this inspiring talk by Janine Benyus, who’s doing much to raise the media profile of biomimicry these days. (Note: I’ve been trying to focus my work as a TED volunteer translator onto environmental topics, so I’ve translated this talk into French but it still needs a reviewer before TED publishes the subtitles. Anyone knowing French out there wanna help?)
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