Upcoming AskNature Hive Events
📖 November 21 — Hive Lit Club: Outgrowing Modernity
12:00 PM PT
Dear kin-in-curiosity,
Outgrowing Modernity is not a book of neat answers. It’s a compost heap—messy, smelly, alive with micro-organisms of thought. Before we gather, here are a few provocations to roll around in your mind, body, and soil. No need to respond neatly—just let them stir, linger, or rot as they will.
Five Pebbles for the Path
- 1. The Bone-Deep Question: What shifts when you know—in your bones, not just in your mind—that collapse is already here?
- 2. The Sobriety Test: Vanessa invites us into emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and intergenerational responsibility. Which of these do you resist the most? Could that resistance itself be a teacher?
- 3. The Entanglement Dare: Modernity whispers: “you are separate, independent.” What happens if you begin instead from the factuality of entanglement—that you are metabolically woven into fungi, ancestors, strangers, even algorithms?
- 4. The Failure Invitation: What failure (personal, collective, ecological) might you let teach you if you stopped trying to fix, hide, or erase it?
- 5. The Trickster Question: What if what we need is not clarity but compost? Not resolution but rupture? How does that land in your body?
Bring your tangles, resist tidy answers, and let’s stretch together into the strange, tender work of outgrowing modernity.
Hosted by Hive member Sue Lyle.
🌍 December 11 — Biomaterials and the Future of Manufacturing: Lessons from Tim McGee
11:00 AM PT
Join us for a conversation with Tim McGee, who will explore how manufacturing and materials can draw inspiration from living systems; from mussel byssal threads that produce self-healing fibers to cable bacteria that hint at future electronic systems. Grounded in 3.8 billion years of nature’s strategies, his work reveals how biology can spark a materials revolution, offering new ways to build resilience while reshaping our relationship with the living world.
For over a decade, Tim has guided organizations in turning biological insight into real-world innovation, using biomimicry to connect science with the technologies shaping our future.
📖 December 12 — Hive Lit Club: Nature-Inspired Political Coalition Agreement
12:00 PM PT
How might political coalitions work if they followed the same principles that make ecosystems thrive? In Nature-Inspired Political Coalition Agreement: A Biomimicry Blueprint for Collaborative Governance, author Gamelihle Sibanda invites readers to imagine a new kind of political cooperation: one modeled after the resilience, reciprocity, and balance found in nature.
In this session, we’ll explore how biomimicry can offer a practical framework for building more adaptive, equitable, and regenerative forms of governance. Together, we’ll unpack key ideas such as distributed leadership, mutualistic relationships, feedback loops, and the importance of diversity in sustaining healthy systems, both ecological and political.
Hosted by Hive member Dorna Schroeter.
🐝 December 17 — Social Swarm
2:00 PM PT
Join fellow biomimics from around the world for an informal networking session focused on community building and shared inspiration. This is a space to connect, exchange ideas, and spark collaborations grounded in our collective hope for a future shaped by nature’s wisdom. Whether you’re a seasoned practitioner or just beginning your journey, come as you are—curious, creative, and committed to designing a better world together.
Hosted by AskNature Hive Manager Lily Urmann.
🌍 January 15 — Wolfish Wisdom and Rewilding our Stories: A Conversation with Erica Berry
1:00 PM PT
A virtual gathering with Wolfish author Erica Berry invites us to rewild our imaginations and reweave our connections with the living world. Drawing from her acclaimed debut, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, Berry explores how inherited myths shape our understanding of wildness, fear, and belonging. Her reflections encourage us to listen differently: to the earth, to our animal kin, and to the stories that have guided and constrained us.
Together, we’ll consider biomimicry not just as design, but as a way of being: learning from nature’s patterns and relationships to inspire healing, creativity, and renewal. Whether you come as a writer, designer, nature lover, or seeker of connection, this event offers space for reflection and reimagining our place within the greater web of life.
Berry’s essays rooted in ecology and emotion have appeared in The New York Times, Orion, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Aeon, and more.
Hosted by AskNature Director Camilo Garzón.
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