Take My Biomimicry Life’s Principles Challenge!

Never have I been able to sit down with a design, go through the Life’s Principles (LPs) evaluation and check off every single box. Until last night.

I had the honor last weekend of seeing a screening of the film Sustainable as a part of the Chicago region’s One Earth Film Festival. In the filmmakers’ words, Sustainable is “a film about the land, the people who work it and what must be done to sustain it for future generations.” But to be more specific, the film follows a family in central Illinois who made the conscious decision to farm sustainably. They happened to meet the famous chef Rick Bayless as he was trying to find the type of high quality local food he found in Mexico, and you might say that the rest is history. This family now coordinates a group of family farmers to provide many of the top chefs in Chicago with sustainable local foods on a weekly basis, and there is significant collaboration between farmers and chefs all while significantly improving the farmland/environment – it is a win-win-win situation.

I am not a film critic, but in my amateur opinion I do highly recommend it to everyone and anyone – and fortunately it’s available to a wide audience as it’s available on Netflix and Amazon (yay!).

Of course, this is a biomimicry blog, so I was going to sit down to write about the film topic in the context of Life’s Principles (or Nature’s Unifying Patterns) – how we use biomimicry not just during the brainstorming creative phase, but also through the entire design process (and for existing designs) by using LPs as an evaluation tool.

Used with permission from Biomimicry 3.8.
Used with permission from Biomimicry 3.8.

At every step in the biomimcry process we can use LPs to ask critical questions that help us to think more holistically about the entire context of a design to identify opportunities for improvements that we might not otherwise see. And while many LPs are pretty self-explanatory, having someone on your team with a deep understanding of all twenty-six LPs can be incredibly useful during this type of evaluation. Being able to practice using LPs for evaluation forces you to realize what you do or actually don’t understand about each LP and only makes you a stronger biomimic.

So.

THE CHALLENGE

When I sat down and took a look at my sheet of all twenty-six LPs, I literally could check off each one when thinking about how these pioneers of the sustainable local food movement in Chicago have grown (and continue to grow) and operate their farm, business and network – their sustainable food movement.

My challenge then to you is, after you watch the film Sustainable, can you come up with at least one example about the farm and the movement they are cultivating that demonstrates each LP (or Nature’s Unifying Patterns if that is what you are more familiar with)? (Find a quick guide explaining Life’s Principles here.) Can you brainstorm other opportunities/improvements?

I realize blogs are often a one-way street, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. Will you share and contribute your thoughts and ideas to the evolving sustainable food movement? (caveat – your ideas have to have a rationale using at least one LP or NUP!) Please feel free to either leave them in a comment below or send them to me in an email at rachel@rachelhahs.com. Let’s collaborate, have fun, use our collective expertise to help valuable movements like this one. Let’s change our story together!

 

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