What's Wrong with Biomimicry?

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.