Whether connecting schools to farms in France, daylighting rivers in Mexico, or rewilding grasslands in Patagonia, we’re learning how to ‘do’ biodiversity well. Fifteen minute read.
Illustration © BAFU | Pierre Dubois, collectif Marie-Louise
This text was commissioned by the Swiss Ministry of the Environment, FOEN. It is also available online in these other languages:
German Biodiversität nach dem Bottom-up-Prinzip
Italian Biodiversità dal basso verso l’alt
French Biodiversité : une politique de terrain https://umwelt-schweiz.ch/fr/innovations/john-thackara
“The world has failed to arrest the steep decline of nature. The world must act fast to avert catastrophe”.
These recent headlines have been dispiriting – but they are also misleading.
High Level Meetings and international summits may indeed be an imperfect model of change – but at ground level, a million positive projects tell a different story.
Whether connecting schools to farms in France, daylighting rivers in Mexico, or rewilding grasslands in Patagonia, we’re learning how to ‘do’ biodiversity well.
Ecological Restoration Camps are a notable example. More than 26,000
Sensory Orders
For an exhibition called Sensory Orders at Laznia Centre for Contemporary Arts, in Gdansk, 32 artists, designers and writers were asked: “What sensory conditions are you are working with under present conditions? What sensory orders do you see emerging in the social-political environment around us?”
My theory of change is borrowed from Ilya Prigogene: “When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system”. As a writer, my work therefore involves a search for small islands of coherence – that I can later describe – in which social and ecological relationships thrive together. My aim as a curator is similar: I strive to enable embodied encounters with situations (or ‘islands’) in which we feel ourselves to be part of nature, rather than separate from it. This work is therefore not symbolic, like ‘systems thinking’. It’s more field work, than head work. I want people to experience relational ecologies, not just think about them. The artist Eva Bakkeslett describes this process – the cultivation of ecological and social connectivity – as social fermentation.