In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson shares: “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.” These cycles are not about eventually doing more through increased efficiency,[2] but about equilibrium and relationship. This sense of balance allows us to deepen our vitality, practicing our sacred attunement to ourselves and the worlds around us. Through what Zazu, my 11-year old son, calls “deep noticing,” we can learn strategies to embrace this healing—developing self-care and community-care tools that revitalize health and racial equity in the face of the normalcy of exponential technological growth. Throughout Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my multicultural climate-justice book, I explore multiple manifestations of the science and art of biomimicry: emulating nature's equilibrium through nature-based design.
However, when deployed by massive-scale institutions (such as the US military, university science departments' R&D, Agribusiness, and Big Pharma), biomimetic practices are deformed through maladaptive strategies.[3] Although many “scientists” claim the radiation-EMF argument is a faulty one, NASA is simultaneously conducting research on the EMFs of spider feet in relation to space walking; and, military engineers are applying beetle’s EMF-evolutionary strategies in designs for military infrared radiation detectors.[4] What if our educational institutions invested in listening to and learning from nature, not just co-opting nature as does the military? Building infrastructure that reflects our bioelectrical nature can be a guide to help us develop climate-chaos resiliency. If we embrace how our more-than-human kin learn, we can develop a healthier, more equitable world through co-relational infrastructures; we can remember that we are bioelectrical systems that must maintain a delicate balance as we use electrochemical activity and electrochemical signals to move through time and space.
This form of adaptation means we are conscious of our relationships to the shifting worlds around us—a commitment to embodying and employing our epigenetic potential.[5] Behavioral epigenetics focuses on environmental stimuli that regulate gene activities while “fostering social connections [that] can enable your cells to thrive” (138). In contrast with gene myopia (the dominant scientific dogma that claims our health/well-being is controlled only by genes), engaging “life-enhancing epigenetic plasticity of human development” guides us to take collective action rooted in epigenetic mechanisms that can radically alter our individual bodies, social bodies, and the body of our planet. In the context of epigenetics and co-evolutionary biology, I am proposing that we reflect on animal and plant cycles—many of which are radically deteriorating due to EMF infiltration. (I will continue this investigation of EMFs next month in the context of the ubiquitous 5G rollout).
Click the image to enlarge.
Click the image to enlarge.
Zazu (five years ago at age 6) and I with Kamila, the glorious flying fox with a six-foot wingspan. Click the image to enlarge.
Evolution does not unfold through pre-existing material structures. As I wrote in last month's Mother Pelican essay, “Captured Agency, Captive Audience: Shifting from Industry-Funded Science to Cultural Biomimicry”: Science, like nature, is not governed by transcendent, immutable laws. Rather, both evolve through habits. In The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & The Habits of Nature,Rupert Sheldrake cites philosopher C.S. Peirc e who challenged the idea that nature evolves through “fixed and changeless laws imposed on the universe.” In contrast to such teleologies implicit in our status-quo thinking about science and nature, Peirce wrote about the “laws of nature” as habits. This epigenetic perspective invites biomimetic innovation as integral to our evolution—a co-evolutionary, relational practice that challenges reductive mechanistic scientific models.
Biomimicry models could help us reduce the usage of fossil-fuel generated heat sources and artificial cooling (air conditioning). If we were to apply these earth technologies as biomimicry models we could recreate our entire architectural engineering and agricultural infrastructures. Ancestral animism from a variety of cultures could be our guide. For example, many plants enter a state of dormancy to protect themselves from both extreme cold (freeze) and extreme heat (drought). A dormant tree secretes a sugary liquid that protects it from freezing inside. Tiny leaf blankets wrap around tree buds. The tree pauses. Insect dormancy is called diapause, animal dormancy is called hibernation. Torpor is a short-term period of sleep during which animals reduce their body temperature to save energy. While hibernation and torpor are forms of co-existence with cold, estivation manifests as coexistence with heat.
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For example, during a drought, earthworms, mosquitos, land crabs, tortoises, and salamanders can go through estivation. Brumation is dormancy in reptiles and amphibians. Droughts can force crocodiles into brumation—they burrow into the side of a riverbank until the drought passes. This kind of interspecies consciousness invites us to adapt passive solar architecture from cold-blooded animals who use the sun to help themselves keep warm and use the earth to help protect themselves from the sun.
In Zazu Dreams, I cite numerous cross-cultural, cross-temporal relationships that echo more-than-human ecosystems by applying symbiotic nature-based technologies and indigenous wisdoms. Ranging from 9th century Iraqi aquifers (qanats) to modern Moroccan passive-solar structures, environmentally-conscious infrastructure, non-polluting architecture (without air-conditioning) continues to be used to mitigate the desert heat. For example, buildings include tall wind towers (absolutely not wind turbines) with angles that catch air currents and circulate them inside. (Endnote 149).
Click the image to enlarge.
Click the image to enlarge.
Architectural possibilities for radical environmental justice include the work of
Iranian-born American architect, writer, and humanitarian Nader Khalili who focused on housing for refugees, disaster victims, and the colonized poor. He taught them how to use the earth beneath their feet.
Like cosmologist Stephen Hawking who professed that everything we need to know is already with us, Khalili believed that “Everything we need to build is in us, and in the place.”
Israeli-born Canadian architect, urban designer, educator, theorist, and Syrian-Jewish author Moshe Safdie and Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, the Middle East’s Father of Sustainable Architecture, also pioneered a concept that benefits every ecosystem on a global scale: “architecture for the poor” (Endnote 284). New Gourna Village is a housing project that evolved out of tomb raiding and is based on the ancient Nubian vault technique.[7] Again, intuition and transmutation rooted in traditional techniques are at the forefront of a regenerative lexicon that can uproot the foundations of the Anthropocene—leading to a modern convivencia[8](conviviality/hospitality/symbiosis).
Click the image to enlarge.
Architect Julia Watson (author of Lo—TEK, Design by Radical Indigenism) focuses on nature-based technologies for climate-resilience. Both Watson and Zazu Dreams explore deep time, symbiotic technologies of the Ma’dan Marsh Arabs of the Tigris & Euphrates rivers who use qasab reeds not only as building material but also as food.
HUMAN EXCEPTIONALISM VS. BIOCULTURAL RESTORATION
Ranging from beavers to bowerbirds, adaptive models are the foundation for co-beneficial interrelationships. Non-hierarchical electrical communication patterns in nature can be used as models for human interactions as we evolve toward ecological justice and ethical efficiency. This movement is rooted in spiritual practices and everyday-life choices echoing Thoreau's practice of “living deliberately.” It resonates with geologian, Thomas Berry’s concept of the Ecozoic—in which humans share mutually beneficial relationships with the world around them. Intellectually, structurally, and spiritually, we integrate with our natural environment, rather than compete with it. Renouncing the Anthropocene as we shift into the Ecozoic Era[9] means that we honor the sentient abilities (electromagnetic cellular consciousness) of animals, plants, trees and the organic intelligence of these more-than-humans, our kin. We all are by nature electrical beings—animated by our electromagnetic fields. This understanding intersects with Suzanne Simard's (called “the Rachel Carson of our time”) research on the intimacy of how trees communicate through intricate webs of mycelium.[10]
Since we now know that plants’ nervous systems are totally decentralized, that the plant functions as a total brain, we can use this model to reconceptualize industrialized economics sustained by Western-imperialist Descartian mind/body hierarchy—a false dichotomy that reifies body-phobia and ethnocentric destructive ecological choices.
A recent article published in a philosophy journal presented the predicament of a group of graduate chemistry students. The students had become accustomed to conducting their experiments in a virtual reality, but when they returned to real world lab experiments, they found they were incapable of coping with the multiple variables inherent in the unpredictability of our material world. Their false sense of control and habituated perfectionism left them powerless to address the actual messiness of their lived environments. For example, a beaker breaking during an experiment threw the students into a state of disequilibrium. Stripped of their capacity to think for themselves, to adapt, and to draw from their own instinct and creative responses, they panicked.[11]
This erasure of intellectual imagination (whether in our earth body or our human/ animal bodies) is consistent with our mechanized world that resists co-existing conflicting complexities.[12] As it is currently being misused, digital technology reifies what Vandana Shiva calls our “monoculture of the mind.” Precisely because globally we are increasingly industrial-techno-dependent (thus unprepared to respond to the unpredictable) in order to confront an ever-encroaching biocide, we must urgently embody an interspecies approach to climate-crisis mitigation: technologies that work with nature.
Interspecial epigenetics challenge how behavioral engineering results in the construction of desire and manufactured consent. Embodying biomimicry models[13] can guide us to weave together ecological and human rights with simultaneous individual, community, and infrastructural changes. When we heighten the intensity between the collective memory of morphic resonance[14] and biomimicry we can shift our evolutionary trajectory toward the Ecozoic. Like the practice of embodying intuition as a sixth sense, morphic resonance is unfettered by socialized illusions of mind-body dichotomies. Echoing plant intelligence and other forms of decolonized, decentralized thinking, the interplay between biomimicry and morphic resonance inhabit and continually regenerate the Ecozoic.
Creative collaboration becomes integral to dignified living choices that develop daily-work patterns rooted in equilibrium. When we practice equilibrium (cultural diversity in relation to biodiversity: the pluriverse), we can individually and collectively unlearn what we think we know while tapping into the fertility and beauty of nature's cycles as well as our own curiosity and ever-evolving interconnectivity.
[2] See my detailed analysis of Jevon’s Paradox. Industrial-capitalism's addiction to efficiency mimics the corporate-coopted concept of sustainability. Robin Wall Kimmerer unravels this manifestation of sustainability through a “model of dominion and control:” land seen as property to be possessed, “natural resources” and “ecosystem services.”
[3] This maladaptation is reminiscent of traditional anthropological disciplines in which “primitive” subjects are positioned as specimens in a petri dish, and are analyzed through a utilitarian, extractive-economy lens.
[5] Epigenetics means “on the gene” and was originally defined within the context of stress within various environments that can negatively “impact an individual's physiology so deeply that those biological scars are actually inherited by the next several generations” The Ultimate History of Inheritance: Epigenetics by Richard Francis cited in SEED + SPARK: Using Nature as a Model to Reimagine How we Learn and Live (209). Like Bruce Lipton, I use the term to refer to extraordinarily positive transformations that can lead to intergenerational, interspecies, and transcultural emancipation.
[11] Like university science departments, art departments are equally falling into the perverse entanglement of the machineries of a modern state. Enrollment for drawing and painting classes has radically dropped. Dwindling traditional art classes are being replaced by new media and design courses—too often students no longer believe they “need” the human body to study drawing or painting (Julia, professional nude model).
[13] See my “Sacred Attunement: Shmita as Cultural Biomimicry” in Tikkun Magazine.
[14] See https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance. Morphogenesis is the biological process that initiates the transformation of patterns in living organisms “inherent not only in genes, but also habits of development and behavior from past members of their own species and also from the long series of of ancestral species form which their species has arisen” (Sheldrake 71).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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