"The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone."
~ Janine Benyus
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June 2009
Ask the Planet wins three prestigious parenting awards
The iParenting Media Best Products of 2009 Award, the 2009 Parents’ Choice Recommended Award, and the 2009 Creative Child MagazinePreferred Choice Award were all given to our newly-released Ask the Planet album. The reviews rave about the fun, inspiring songs about biomimicry featuring the Coyote children's choir and a suite of celebrity artists including Ani DiFranco, Bruce Cockburn, Dar Williams, Bill Harley.
Neil Harvey, Bioneers Radio Show Host/Senior producer wrote “Ask the Planet is such a beautiful, beautiful thing. I was just listening to it moments ago and I was crying! It is just fabulous. What a great thing. Amy Martin's song writing and her direction of the children's choir, and children soloists... so moving and inspiring! My favorite album of the year.”
If you haven’t heard Ask the Planet yet, it is a musical celebration of nature’s genius. Joyously written and produced, the 18 songs on this CD are designed to connect children to nature, create a sense of awe for the environment, and teach them about the concepts of biomimicry. How do we conserve our beautiful planet and have fun doing it? Ask the Planet! Visit AskThePlanetCD.org to purchase your copy now and to access our Ask the Planet curricula for use in the classroom.
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Ecological Performance Standards
By Janine Benyus, Tim McGee, and Sherry Ritter
Think of any city. With each acre developed, almost an acre’s worth of ecosystem services is lost. Roofs reflect sunlight, rather than capturing it for energy. Carbon is released into the atmosphere rather than sequestered in vegetation or soils. Buildings and streets shed rainwater into storm sewers that rush it away, rather than filtering it through wetlands or seeping through soils into ground water.
Now think about that city transformed so that it provides the same ecosystem services as the wild areas surrounding it. This new city fits into the ecosystem. We fit in. This is the basis for ecological performance standards.
Ecological Performance Standards are a new way to incorporate biomimicry into community planning. Basically, Ecological Performance Standards ask human building projects to pull their own ecological weight. Buildings, hardscapes, and landscapes of a community should work together to provide the same level of life-sustaining ecosystem services as an intact native ecosystem.
What's different is that now we're asking our buildings and infrastructure to do their part, instead of asking our green spaces to do ALL our ecosystem services for us. It's the step toward having building projects that not only meet their own needs—they actually give back to the region. Though the city may look very different from the native ecosystem, it should actually function the same way. When cities and ecosystems are functionally indistinguishable, that's when we will have truly mimicked at an ecosystem level. That's when we will be a welcome species.
The Biomimicry Institute's sister company, The Biomimicry Guild, has been working on a development project in India called Lavasa. The goal for Lavasa is a human settlement that actually enhances local ecology by functioning at least as well as a healthy, highly functioning moist deciduous forest. It’s a bold goal, but it’s the first step on the journey to fitting in.
The Guild chose a subset of relevant ecosystem services and described various indicators as measures of whether or not that ecosystem service is functioning. The Ecological Performance Standards set the aspiration goal, then describe how to set up monitoring stations to measure indicators such as gallons of water retained after a monsoon, number of native tree species regenerating, reduction in number of bare spots (soil erosion indicator), millimeters of soil created, etc.
The Lavasa development will also look to the geniuses of the moist deciduous forest—animals, plants, microbes, and systems—to learn from them how to provide these ecosystem services. These will guide innovative design of buildings, hardscapes, and landscapes.
Where possible, the Guild shaped the standards to assist those native species most in need of help, by attempting, for instance, to provide vital corridors for their shelter and migration. It is an immense honor to help support these species as they support us, and the most useful way to thank them for their unpaid services is to set ecological performance standards for ourselves.
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A message from the Executive Director, Bryony Schwan
Dear Biomimicry Friends,
It’s hard to believe that The Biomimicry Institute is moving into the latter half of our third year of operation. We have grown so much and in so many ways -- our team, AskNature, educational programs, exciting partnerships and an upcoming worldwide design challenge -- to name a few. Thank you to all who have supported us!
We welcomed three new staff members to the Institute this year. Chris Allen became the full time manager of asknature.org after launching and managing this ambitious project as a consultant. Emily Harrington, who came to us as an intern last summer, is now a full time scientific illustrator and graphic designer. And in May, Diana Lee joined the team as Development Director. Diana worked as a major donor fundraiser for many organizations and most recently with Greenpeace.
Staff continue to work on key programs…the AskNature team are continuing to develop new tools for the site and add content, and in July, we will host the third annual Biomimicry Education Summit at the Teton Science School.
New on the drawing board is the Biomimicry Green Building Design Challenge. We kicked off this challenge by asking green building experts at the Cascadia Green Building Council’s Living Futures Conference to help identify the top ten challenges they wish to solve in order to meet the promise of true living buildings, while reducing the energy and carbon footprint of the built environment.
In September, we will bring another set of experts together to frame the final challenge. Once the challenge has been identified, we will ask innovative architects, builders, materials scientists, and engaged citizens, “How would nature solve this?” and invite them to propose bio-inspired solutions to the energy deficit that buildings worldwide represent.
We are pleased to have Ashoka Changemakers as our partner. They will host the design challenge on their open-source competitions platform for systems change, enabling us to reach a vast network of social change organizations, social entrepreneurs, business entrepreneurs, as well as interested innovators/inventors from science, health, financial, academic, and government. Perhaps you will be one of those innovators! Stay tuned for further exciting developments.
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