Mycelium Monthly #2 Wintering, Biomimicry, Regenerating Politics and the EU Nature Restoration Law.
Regenerative news, learnings and experiences from last month.
Welcome to the Mycelium Monthly — a short but sweet synthesis of my regenerative experiences, experiments and learnings from last month.
Wintering ♾️
Each year I feel more connected to the seasons. Feeling the rhythm of life. Winter is here in Norway. It’s time for reflection and renewal. Preparing for new shoots. Two resources I absolutely love and always use to pause and reflect on life are Theory U Guided Journaling ✍️ and The Wayfinder Mandala 🖌️ Some more resources that were recommended by my network are the YearCompass, The Wheel of Life and the Past Year Review. What helps you to retreat and reflect?
Life’s Principles 🧬
Biomimicry 3.8 released an update to their Life Principles — design lessons from nature. With over 3.8 billion years of R&D, living systems have so much to teach us about solving challenges in sustainable and regenerative ways. Based on the recognition that Life on Earth is interconnected and interdependent, and subject to the same set of operating conditions, Life’s Principles represent the overarching patterns found amongst the species surviving and thriving on Earth. If we want to create communities, organizations or products that are life-affirming, we need to design according to Life's Principles — as Life creates conditions conducive to life.
Would you like to work as nature and apply the methods and tools of Biomimicry within your company or for your products, services and value chains? The founder of BiomimicryNorway and my brilliant friend Michel Wolfstirn just released the online course Design with Biomimicry! 🐜
Simple Rules for a Complex World 🐦⬛
Murmuration: one of nature’s greatest displays. Thousands of starlings fly in swooping, intricately coordinated patterns through the sky. Centimetres apart. Turning at high speeds. Moving in perfect synchrony. Without ever colliding. HOW? After years of research, scientists concluded the following. Starlings follow one simple rule: pay attention to the seven nearest neighbours. No more, no less. Simple rules for a complex world. Starlings remind us that there is a balance between having enough good information to make decisions, and learning to filter out the rest.
Restoring broken politics 👂
The dramatic win of far-right & anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders at the Dutch elections sent shockwaves throughout Europe — a symptom of our larger connection crisis. In this age of polarization, disconnection and separation, I found wisdom in the words of my hero Paul Hawken in his recent TED Talk on how ‘Regeneration can restore a broken world’; a plea for empathy, deep listening, reciprocity, community and to restore the broken relationships to heal the divides between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
“Regeneration means listening intently and respectfully to all the voices, not just the human voices, and stitching together the connections that have separated us from each other and from the natural world… We need to become regenerative cultural farmers and plant seeds of understanding in everything we do and wherever we go.”
— Paul Hawken
Join the Regeneration, put life at the center of every action and decision, and explore the world’s largest listing of interconnected climate solutions at regeneration.org.
The EU Nature Restoration Law 📃
The EU Nature restoration law strikes a landmark deal to restore at least 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030, 30% of habitat areas in poor condition by 2030, 60% by 2040, and 90% by 2050. Moreover, Commonland, The Nature Conservancy, Gold Standard & Climate-KIC just published the policy brief ‘Towards financing large-scale holistic landscape restoration in Europe’, with recommendations for EU policy actors to attain inspirational, social, natural and financial returns 🍀
What regenerative news, learnings and experiences do you have to share?
Let us know in the conversation in the comments! 👇
I love the starling analogy for how to focus our energy! Thank you