Finally Becoming a Biomimic
Digital collage by Geraldine Wharry
Thought this week
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
I took a few weeks off from the Futuring Dispatch (my newsletter since 2013 if you’re new here) to complete my certification and am now officially a Certified Biomimicry Educator, part of a global and growing community of biomimics. The final graduation presentation will be shared with you as soon as I have the recording.
The Learning Journey and Futuring Ecology I've created Future Wild: When Nature Becomes the Futurist, is a child of Rewilding Futures (2021) and the World Building Framework (2023). In over a decade of advising leading brands and institutions in fashion and the creative fields all the way to tech, innovation, health and travel, speaking to audiences, university lecturing and mentoring all the way to the grassroots work of activism, community and school leadership with Trend Atelier, we land where we always were: Nature, with us within it, feeds our souls, teaches us adaptation and limitless innovation.
The practice of Biomimicry and Life's Principles will be fully integrated across the Strategic Foresight, Creative Foresight, Collaborations as well as Futures Literacy pillars of my Regenerative Futures Architect work.
Looking back, this was our 2022 mantra in the Trend Atelier community:
We are searching for new ideals (and ideologies) to hospice our current dominating system within the fashion, creative and innovation industry which still serves linear and limitless growth agendas. Future Wild: When Nature Becomes the Futurist requires going against the current status quo. It's wild, but it isn't. We are nature and to quote Janine Benyus who popularised Biomimicry and co-founded the Biomimicry Institute:
“We can learn to come home to this planet.”
When you peel all the layers, so much of everything boils down to education. To become architects of change, shifts, or seeds (however you want to frame it), putting ourselves in a learning and humbling mindset (in the era of internalised micro-scamming) becomes unavoidable.
Future Wild: When Nature Becomes the Futurist is a learning journey for boots on the ground challenges most professionals and humans are experiencing in the field of the creative industry, fashion, foresight and innovation who want their work, their teams, their impact to fuel the shift change we need. They often know the why, but can't figure out the how.
Some of us may feel cynical, after much encountered resistance. But everyone knows this is it. The urgency of our times is thick and palpable, as we navigate critical environmental, technological, scientific and social tipping points. The collision between the old system and the new paradigm has the same energetic release of tectonic plates rubbing against each other. The question is who will define and architect atop those new landscapes? The urgency is to ensure this planetary project management serves our people, planet and future generations.
Our primal nature and our mother nature is built to meet this challenge. Ingeniously circular, quantum, in constant motion and regenerating for new or evolving conditions. The most sophisticated communication, design, organisational, and automation system of energy, life, death and flow there will ever be.
Linear is gone and understanding this is core to how we build our physical and soulful worlds: exchange flows, cultural values, technologies, identities and experiences for futures that could serve the global human project, and harmonise with our earth's operating system.
In Biomimicry local context is fundamental. There is no 1 size fits all solution. We build, scaffold shifts and plant seeds over a lifetime, and beyond our lifetimes. We quiet our cleverness and learn to walk again.
In my next Futuring Dispatch I'll start sharing more about Future Wild: When Nature Becomes the Futurist so that you can test the Futuring Ecology I've been generating and regenerate it in your own way.
For now, to dive deeper into how understanding and internalising living systems is reshaping design, law and governance, I'll leave you with my most recent Tomorrow column for Spur Beyond Human Design: The Multispecies Revolution.
As always, thank you for being here. It means the world to me that you choose to spend the time reading this. Much gratitude to Rebecca MacKinnon and Jess Berliner my Learn Biomimicry mentors. Studying with you and our Quetzals Cohort has been transformational - with witnessing how you teach a masterclass in itself. Thank you to the people who got involved along the journey and took the time to provide key feedback (long list to come in the next issue), and to my Biomimicry co-pilot Leane Fernandes.
By Geraldine Wharry
