Hidden Nature

Hidden Nature

    This morning finds me up early, early enough to witness the slow increase in volume of the birds outside, at first only one or two, then more as others wake up, the sky barely starting to light, the earth rotating ever downward to once again bathe in the sun's energy in the space that I live.  The time this morning is 4:30, the first chirp of the first bird I head coming soon after that.  Within a half hour, it would appear that several dozen birds had awoken, early birds so to speak, each awake well ahead of the majority of the avian symphony, which comes around 5:15 or so (which is generally well ahead of the human symphony of noise soon to awaken, cars starting, garages opening, traffic flowing).  The birds, it turns out, are quite competitive...this early in the spring, the "songs" I'm hearing are probably anything but (those will come later once families are underway and babies are hatching); the vocalizations are for the most part actually threats and warnings and displays all meant to draw a mate...sort of like the bright red feathers which, for the most part, take a lot of work (also done to draw a mate, the darkening of the feathers' colors in many birds such as cardinals)...spot a not-so-bright yellow bill on a bird (difficult for us humans but easy for a bird) and that bird is likely not healthy (it's all about color).

    Two things came along that brought about this thinking on my part, one from a business and another from an explorer in a yard.  And from both, I discovered that once again I actually knew very little about the natural world, the world I gaze at daily and have apparently learned to slowly go blind to.  Of course, we all admire the spectacular sunset (or if camping, the beautiful sunrise), sometimes even taking the time to step out and see the stars or the moon rising (of course, none of those things really happen since it is really our earth's steady rotation downward that give us the illusion of the other celestial objects rising or setting).  But walk a dog and notice how many smells it picks up, sometimes spending 15 or 30 seconds just stopping at one spot...what's there, beyond the actual chemical smell?  Scientists tell us that the dog discovers an entire diary there, the type of dog, the message the dog was leaving, the concentration of the urine divulging everything that the earlier dog wanted to say.  If the message is that of a tough, don't-invade-my-space sort of message, your dog will likely leave its own "message" right over that spot (if it's a hello-it's-me type of message, the dog will likely just move on without marking it).

    Okay, we can't really know if that is correct or not.  But venture deeper into the world just outside your porch or back patio door and you'll find an equally mysterious world.  Earthworms (an invasive species) churning our soil but destroying our trees and forests; pill bugs or sowbugs to some (also an invasive species) not having lungs but gills and carrying their babies in a translucent pouch; squirrels (yes, another invasive species for the most part) rather easily distinguishing between red oak acorns and white oak acorns, remembering where they buried their thousands of harvested meals with an accuracy rate of 95%; and grass lawns now becoming something that takes more money to maintain than is spent on growing crops (at least in the U.S.).  Birds navigating entirely different constellation maps (tests run in planetariums) than that which they grew up with.  How is it all done?

    Janine Benyus asked the same question, her curiosity of nature slipping directly into her fascination with nature's design abilities.  Nearly 20 years ago, she published some of her discoveries in a book, Biomimicry 3.8, which attempted to show the benefit of incorporating some of nature's natural patterns into our everyday lives and products.  As she says in her TED Talk: If I could reveal anything that is hidden from us, at least in modern cultures, it would be to reveal something that we've forgotten, that we used to know as well as we knew our own names.  And that is that we live in a competent universe, that we are part of a brilliant planet, and that we are surrounded by genius.  Biomimicry is a new discipline that tries to learn from those geniuses, and take advice from them, design advice...Imagine designing spring.  Imagine that orchestration.  Imagine, and if you haven't done this in a while, do.  Imagine the timing, the coordination, all without top-down laws, or policies, or climate change protocols.  This happens every year.  There is lots of showing off.  There is lots of love in the air.  There's lots of grand openings.  And the organisms, I promise you, have all of their priorities in order.  And she recently appeared again in a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek saying that "...the idea of man vs. nature is nonsense."  The assumption is that we are not nature.  But we are nature, and once that separation goes away, as you start looking at these organisms as consummate chemists and inventors, it changes our relationship with the rest of the natural world.  It puts us in the role of student rather than conqueror.
   
    In the piece, she shows examples her design consulting firm has created, mimicking the bill of the hummingbird to reduce noise on Japan's bullet train (and increasing energy efficiency in the process), mimicking our bone structure to help build the Airbus 320, mimicking humpback whales to produce new designs for wind turbines, mimicking the feet of gecko lizards to create adhesive-free carpet tiles...and more (one part of her talk describes an example of the structure of a shark's skin repelling bacteria and its mimicry now being put to use in hospitals).  But all of this is just the beginning.  Author Hannah Holmes decided not to create a design firm but to simply take a year to just be outside in her backyard, to get on her knees and crawl through her bushes and just un-scientifically (even though she is a science and nature writer) observe the world of nature around her...and what she found was fascinating, good enough to put into a book she would write, Suburban Safari.  That earthworm destruction and pill bug terrorizing going on and (to those who study such things) stressing our trees and wrecking our forests...it all has to do with nitrogen.  It's all around us (78% of our atmosphere is composed of nitrogen) but our poor trees...battling our changing air and fighting another equally-devastating battle below ground.  How?  How much do we understand?  It's a changing world out there...and by out there I'm meaning right outside your door, even the paved sidewalk and street in front of you.  My morning bird calls were just a small fraction of the world waiting to be discovered, a world I knew little about...a world just a step outside (imagine the world inside your house).  From mice to chickadees, magpies to poorly-cut grass (which actually uses 25% less water than that of neatly-trimmed grass)...it's all there, and coming in the next post.