What's new?

Is anything ever really new? We, the people, we make new things, or at least rearrange components and forms so profoundly that they do not look like anything they were made of. Like a car, a tank, a missile, or hyperscale data centers.

In nature, on the other hand, while the specific forms and arrangements of things may change, the underlying processes and fundamental elements remain relatively consistent, leading to renewal rather than entirely new creations. 'New´ things things in nature can be tracked back easily (often also visually) to what ´they came from'.

This simple design principle is quite phenomenal. It means that every time we the people make something really new, we break the cycle or complete circularity, we create something that becomes removed from its natural flow.

Yet nature is the perfect infrastructure and carries all of us. We have not built it and it has not cost a single penny. 

For the time being, we are also not incorporating nature structurally into our accounting system to assign a value to it, just keep relying on it for all our fancy endeavors that break the cycle.

But here's the catch. We are nature. So every time we break the cycle, we 'shoot ourselves in the foot'. Can we rethink how we make things so that in every design, we mimic nature? Maybe learning from nature rather that primarily just extracting from it is our 'simple, but not easy'  way out of the current speed train to trouble?

Learn about biomimicry and natural design principles. Start small and concrete. Many small changes, nature-inclusive solutions can and will add up to reduced pressures on our planetary boundaries. Think about how whale fins inspired wind turbines, or photosynthesis solar panels. Being in tune with nature, observing it carefully can be not only mindful and meditative, but give room to creativity, too.