Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat until the fish are extinct.
Inspire a man to teach respect for the fish, and his children will eat forever. – Anonymous
Ok. So, the anonymous quote above is me (I searched on the internet, but couldn’t find anyone else who already said something equivalent enough). The point is, any teacher or parent understands that education is at the heart of the cultural and behavioral change necessary for humanity to become a sustainable species.
Education isn’t just another category of human activity, like transportation or dining out, it’s a category of human activity that defines many, many other categories of human activity. Education (not just school, but all education) is the Hox gene of human culture, a superstructure that shapes everything we think and do, and can think and do. That’s the primary reason why we believe educators who teach about biomimicry are so important, and why this Biomimicry Education Network is so vital.
I was once invited to speak to 600 students at a high school in Atlanta, Georgia. During a tour of the LEED certified school, a display panel just inside the front door of the building caught my eye. The panel showed a variety of real-time building performance information, such as how much energy the building was using, from what sources, and so forth.
You can think of the map on the Biomimicry Education Network homepage as a similar display, a dashboard for biomimicry education, illustrating in real-time how well biomimicry education is performing. Though its current form is a bit rough, we hope to continually improve it. Some of our ideas are of the housekeeping sort (smaller pins!); others are incremental (e.g., displaying quantitative information on a side panel, such as the number of members, etc). We’d also like to explore pushing the envelop of network illustration, innovating new ways to display the network in action.
For instance, what if we displayed network growth by new pins having a different color for a period of time (e.g., 3 months)? When two people represented by the pins connect, could we display a line between the pins for, say, a day?
What does the network think? Do you have ideas for how we can improve the BEN dashboard? Please, send them to us! We’d love to see them. Together, let’s create an engaging and informative real-time visualization of our network in action – this vital network of educators integrating biomimicry into their educational practices, and, in the process, changing human culture and behavior in the next generation.
TAKE A LOOK! Check out some enjoyable biomimicry-related videos and information on mycelium networks: http://greengineers.wikispaces.com/MYCELIUM
Photo credit: Hopkinsii, Flicker Creative Commons
