Biomimicry

A student behind a mask nervously provides a caveat before showing her work, I don’t think I did it right.  The illustration depicts a fairy under great big ferns in winter snd summer seasons. The assignment was to let a natural object move you to creation. To mimic the characteristics and/or functionality of a natural being literally or conceptually. Biomimicry. When she spoke, there was a softness that embodied her words. I like the way snow looks on fern leaves. And I miss the snow. 

Last week we covered the absence of snow cover. How the warming climate altars seasons, shrinks winters, and decreases snowfall. How our oceans and water bodies do 93% of the work absorbing our heat, including atypical 56 degree weather in NYC’s February.  I to miss the snow, greatly. 

“Gone are the days of snow

laying on the thicket of fern that

sleeps under the duvet

like me

before I awakened to a white morning of

serenity.”

• Karlotte, Sustainable Systems student, Parsons freshman 

Tears well up in her eyes. Like the fern itself, her art and heart are purifying.  It takes a brave soul to turn betrayal into beauty.  

Gone are the days of apathy.

Is all I can think. When life so precious blinks before me. 

Gone are the days of not enough. 

We’ve seen what we’re capable of. 

One way I think of weather versus climate, is emotion versus temperament. Day to day fluctuating weather conditions are like human emotions; rainy, sunny, cloudy, happy, sad, angry. We can all, more or less, experience them. Climates, however, are patterns over time that become localized temperaments.

My student’s climate is sensitive. A humble heart sponge. 

Gone are the days of seeing 36,000 lives lost in Syria and Türkiye over the inter-web and not zooming out to our geophysical interconnected web. 

Droughts displaced Syrians during civil unrest resulting in millions on precarious fault lines. We cannot separate from climate change. Nor isolate disaster and call it purely “natural”.  And yet who I am?

Without the cold to keep me in check, my temperature rises. When I hear It doesn’t relate. This weather is nice. It’s so hard not to throw stones.

Every week I feel inadequate to teach this class. 

Until someone smart says, you don’t need to be a climate scientist, ecologist, economist, biologist, architect, anthropologist. You bring something, they bring something and you work together. 

The stone soup of 2023. 

The way we’re able to be in relationship, is because of our difference. 

A poem for my student who did it right:

Here are the days of curious listening 

Ear to the Earth’s floor

Every morning a new tagline to mourn 

And I wonder how to be still 

As soft as the NYC streets blanketed with snow 

Like you

Illustration credit: Karlotte, student at Parsons The New School