 Many of us have had the experience of telling someone about a disappointment and they responded, somewhat cynically, with, “Welcome to the real world.” Or perhaps you told someone about an idea or a project you’re really excited about and they responded with, “That will never work in the real world.” In these situations, people referring to the “real world” are expressing what we’ll call the Conventional Paradigm.
A paradigm is a worldview — what you believe to be true about the world, how it works, and your role in it. The Conventional Paradigm is the dominant cultural worldview of the western developed world, dominated by capitalism and colonialism, patriarchy and supremacy. It can be characterized by six interrelated mutually reinforcing beliefs: scarcity, individualism, competition, greed, resistance, and fear. The Conventional Paradigm is full of win-lose propositions. You win through control, intimidation, secrecy, power plays, manipulation, exploitation — and by causing other people and the planet to lose. We tend to experience and express the Conventional Paradigm when we’re engaged with the “real world.” We experience and express this paradigm when we’re stressing about work, obsessing about something on social media, resisting someone else’s ideas before understanding them, or buying yet another thing we don’t need. Those of us working to forward environmental or social sustainability consider ourselves to be values-based; however, our decisions and behaviors are often driven by the current dominant cultural paradigm, even though it does not reflect our personal values. Living with the belief that you have to align yourself with the “real world” to succeed — or even survive — can lead to endless blaming and complaining, cynicism, paranoia, polarization, and shame. When we operate from this paradigm we are not our true, authentic, best selves — and we cause harm to ourselves, others, and the Earth in the process. We are not able to reflect our personal values or Nature’s Paradigm. How and when do you experience and express the Conventional Paradigm? When this happens, how does it make you feel, think, and behave? Is this who and how you want to be in the world? If you’d like to explore this further, I invite you to download the [free] Tiny Transformation Workbook which will give you tiny peeks into the “Conventional Paradigm” and the “Natural Paradigm”, and then a tiny experience of intentionally living from your Natural Paradigm. You might also be interested in the book Re-Aligning with Nature, Ecological Thinking for Radical Innovation.
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 According to the Biomimicry Institute, biomimicry is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges—and find hope. When done properly, you can use biomimicry to come up with radically innovative and sustainable solutions to virtually any problem or design challenge you can think of. In addition, practicing biomimicry can be wildly creative, inspiring, and hopeful.
Biomimicry is grounded in science, provides an effective sustainable design methodology, and allows practitioners to co-create designs that are in alignment with Nature and their own values. So what’s wrong with Biomimicry? If it is so wonderful why is it so rarely practiced and even more rarely implemented? The answer is that nothing is wrong with Biomimicry! What’s wrong is that it does not reflect and reinforce our dominant cultural paradigm. It doesn’t fit in the “real world”. What is the current dominant cultural paradigm? First, it is important to understand that a paradigm is a worldview — it is what you understand to be true about the world, how it works, and your role in it. Our current dominant cultural paradigm — what I call the Conventional Paradigm — is reflected in corporate capitalism, colonialism, and supremacy. It is characterized by six interrelated elements: scarcity, individuality, competition, greed, resistance, and fear. The Conventional Paradigm sets man above Nature, some men above other men, and most men above most women. Nature has a very different paradigm, a very different view of the world, how it works, and our role in it. Nature’s Paradigm is based on abundance, systems, synergies, trust, resilience, and curiosity. If you’ve ever been in a biomimicry workshop where magic seemed to happen, what you were experiencing, for that moment, wasn’t magic, it was the Natural Paradigm — your Natural Paradigm. When you operate from your Natural Paradigm, you not only see the bigger picture, you feel part of it. You are able to engage in emergent thinking, co-creativity, and authentic listening. Have you been wildly inspired by biomimicry, but can’t figure out how to apply it in your work or in your life? Perhaps it’s because you’ve tried to apply it within the constructs of the Conventional Paradigm. If this resonates with you, I invite you to download the [free] Tiny Transformation Workbook which will give you tiny peeks into the Conventional Paradigm and the Natural Paradigm, and then a tiny experience of intentionally living from your Natural Paradigm.  A paradigm is a worldview, what you believe to be true about the world, the way it works, and your role in it. The curious thing about a paradigm is that we’re often unaware that we have one, or how we might articulate it if we did.
Our current dominant cultural paradigm — what I’m calling the Conventional Paradigm — is reflected in corporate capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy. This worldview is based on a belief in and valuing scarcity, individuality, competition, greed, resistance, and fear. This paradigm is what drives our behaviors and decisions when we engage with the “real world”. It is the paradigm that allows us to more or less ignore the rampant exploitation of peoples and places all over the world that make our lifestyles possible, because we understand profit and growth to be imperatives. Most of us subscribe to this paradigm when we’re engaging with the world as professionals and as consumers. We may blame and complain, and even feel shame, but we adhere to its assumptions and rules. What else are you going to do? What else is there? That’s the bottom line, right? But there is something else. There is an alternative worldview. That’s the paradigm that exists in Nature, what I’m calling Nature’s Paradigm. Nature’s Paradigm, which emerged over billions of years of evolution, is based on a belief in and valuing abundance, systems, synergies, trust, resilience, and curiosity. This is how life on Earth managed to diversify and spread from simple microorganisms in the sea to the millions of different species of organisms that now live across all continents and oceans. It wasn’t easy. There have been far more evolutionary failures than successes, so what has emerged not only follows Life’s Principles and Nature’s Unifying Patterns, but also Nature’s Paradigm. If humans want to survive on this Earth, then we have to re-learn how to follow not only Nature’s principles and patterns, but also Nature’s Paradigm. The wonderful thing is that we already know how. Since humans are biological beings, Nature’s paradigm is our natural paradigm. It is our worldview when we are not engaged as professionals or consumers, when we are being our authentic selves. The other wonderful thing is that living — and working and consuming — from our Natural Paradigm will allow us, individually and collectively, to create the kind of world we’d all love to live in. If this resonates with you, I invite you to download the [free] Tiny Transformation Workbook which will give you tiny peeks into the “Conventional Paradigm” and the “Natural Paradigm”, and then a tiny experience of intentionally living from your Natural Paradigm.  Hi friends, colleagues, and like-minded souls!
I haven't posted anything in some time because I’ve been working on a new venture that I’d like to share with you. I’m calling the new venture Wild Hazel [wildhazel.net]. The flagship program is called Re-Aligning with Nature, Tapping into the Power of Your Natural Paradigm. It’s a sort of biomimicry for the soul. As you know, our current cultural, societal, and economic paradigms are human constructs that are self-serving, self-reinforcing, and damaging to people and the planet. They do not reflect, support, or reinforce basic human values or nature’s principles. I believe that we need as many of us as possible to recognize how we’re subscribing to this damaging “Conventional Paradigm” and that there's an alternative — the “Natural Paradigm.” The Natural Paradigm reflects Nature’s understanding of the world, how it works, and our role in it. It’s reflected in Life’s Principles, Nature’s Unifying Patterns, and Native American philosophy. Because you and I are biological beings, Nature’s Paradigm is our natural paradigm. It is what you believe to be true about the world, how it works, and your role in it when you are your true, authentic self — when you are your best self. You are operating from your Natural Paradigm when you’re enjoying a stunning sunset, engrossed in a creative project, playing with your kids, or helping a friend. It is my belief that the only way for us to address the personal, environmental, and social challenges that we have created for ourselves is to begin living from our Natural Paradigm. This will give us new clarity about the world, the way it really works, and our appropriate role in it. It will also, beautifully, empower us to tap into the individual and collective inspiration, creativity, and wisdom that already exists within ourselves as natural living beings. If this resonates with you, I invite you to download the [free] Tiny Transformation Workbook which will give you tiny peeks into the “Conventional Paradigm” and the “Natural Paradigm”, and then a tiny experience of intentionally living from your Natural Paradigm.  image: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/nasa-earth-data-helps-scientists-to-understand-our-home-planet/ It is well understood by now that we need not worry about saving the planet. The Earth, and the complexity of life that calls it home, will outlive us. Life on Earth first emerged in a seemingly toxic atmosphere, and went on to survive ice ages and meteors, tectonic shifts and drifts. The diversity and disbursement of flora and fauna have changed dramatically over the past few billion years, but life has managed to continue. Human-induced climate change, biodiversity loss, mass extinction, ecosystem destruction, macro and micro plastics, and forever chemicals will — already are — changing conditions for life on Earth, but life in some form will go on. It is well understood, then, that we need not worry about saving the planet, but we do need to worry about saving ourselves, humankind.
Human-induced inequities mean that the peoples of the global south, as well as black and brown people everywhere — those that did not initiate this destruction — are and will continue to be hit first and hit hardest. But none of us are safe. Even in the most affluent countries, babies are born with myriad unnatural chemicals in their bodies. Sperm counts are down and cancer rates are up. Floods and fires take turns consuming real estate. While the physical threats are real, increasing, and inescapable, there is another sort of threat that is both a cause and an effect of our own making that we tend to ignore. That is the existential threat of our dominant cultural paradigm — what we believe to be true about the world, the way it works, and our role in it. If you grew up in and live in the western developed world, you will, no doubt, leave the Earth worse off than when you found it, regardless of how you choose to live, what you choose to buy, and what you choose to do for a living. Whether you consume 5 times or just twice what the Earth can sustain, you’re still part of the problem. We all are. That is because almost all of our ‘sustainable’ products, processes, principles, practices, and policies are created in and require leveraging an economic system that is dependent on burning fossil fuels and exploiting peoples and places around the world for profit. I am not being righteous or judgmental. Far from it. I am as depressed as the rest of you about the state of the world and the damage I have caused. I live in a big house and drive an electric car. I love to travel. I buy “sustainable” personal care products that come in plastic containers. I’m too cheap to always buy local and organic. So I’m writing this from, I believe, a shared sense of desperation and desire to do something impactful and effective. I’m also coming from a place of empathy. Empathy for you, for myself, for them, for us, and for Nature. When I started searching for sustainable solutions early in my career as a civil engineer, I was focused on technical solutions. I later expanded my search to include frameworks and philosophies, tools and strategies. I wanted to find something that was based in science and actionable, but that also resonated with my soul. Biomimicry — innovation inspired by Nature — seemed to be the thing I was looking for. If we designed all of our products, processes, and even policies to emulate Nature’s strategies and to follow Nature’s rules for sustainability, then surely we could create a sustainable and even beautiful human-made world. As I spent more time working with and teaching biomimicry, I encountered numerous barriers — the same barriers that suppress most radical ideas and innovations. But I also saw how simply being exposed to the concept of biomimicry gave people surprisingly wild hope. Often after a workshop, participants would be so enthusiastic, so positive, so inspired, so bursting with possibilities, it was like watching people fall in love. After a while, I realized that is exactly what was going on. People were falling in love. They were falling in love with life, with curiosity, with emergent thinking, with systems thinking, with co-creativity. For just a little while, they got to see the world, how it works, and their role in it from Nature’s perspective, from Nature’s paradigm. Unfortunately, when they tried to bring this perspective back to the “real world”, the resistance and rejection were all too predictable: That will never work in the real world. As a practitioner of biomimicry I faced this often myself, and it was incredibly frustrating. How could something with so much potential be so discounted, and even ridiculed, by those in power? I wanted to understand why. What is it about the “real world” that makes implementing biomimicry almost impossible? Colleagues and I explored the innovation process, looking for potential failure points. We evaluated business models, organizational structures, and leadership styles against Nature’s strategies and systems. We came up with new nature-inspired principles, processes, and practices. These all seemed to be scientifically sound and were certainly inspiring, but something important was still missing, something deeper. What was missing was an understanding of the underlying paradigm, the belief and value system that drives behaviors and decision-making. The Conventional Paradigm — the dominant cultural paradigm of the “real world” — is based on valuing scarcity, individuality, competition, greed, resistance, and fear. This paradigm is reflected in capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, Christianity, Enlightenment, Manifest Destiny. This paradigm separates and elevates man above Nature, some men above others, and all men above all women. It requires people to be selfish and paranoid, exploitative and victimized. The curious, and in this case sad, thing about dominant cultural paradigms is that we are often unaware of them, unaware that we subscribe to them even when they are at odds with our personal values. It is my belief that sustainability solutions that emerge from and engage with the Conventional Paradigm can never be successful. They always do more harm than good. By contrast, Nature’s Paradigm values abundance, systems, synergies, trust, resilience, and curiosity. Evolution has eliminated species that didn’t reflect and express these beliefs. The result is life that creates conditions for life and that adapts and evolves. Each and every living thing is interconnected and interdependent. Life is based on respect and reciprocity in an “ecology of caring.” All are valued, empowered, and equipped to participate, to contribute, and to regenerate. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. What’s the answer? It is my belief that the only way for us to address the personal, environmental, and social challenges that we have created for ourselves is to begin living from our Natural Paradigm, to re-align ourselves with Nature. Living from our Natural Paradigm will give us new clarity about the world, the way it really works, and our appropriate role in it. It also, beautifully, empowers us to tap into the individual and collective inspiration, creativity, and wisdom that already exists within ourselves as natural living beings. It will allow us to save ourselves, humankind. |
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March 2023
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