- If you haven’t noticed, we talk a lot about the water cycle here. And for good reason–from the soil to tree-top canopies, healthy ecosystems are fuel for the local and global water cycles that keep things cool. But it’s not just about rain and evaporation. A research team led by the Alfred Wegener Center found that much of 2023’s record high temperatures could be attributed to declining low-cloud cover in key regions, reducing the planet’s ability to reflect light and heat back into space.
- “…and it did all of that with the wings of an owl, the belly of a penguin, and the nose of a kingfisher.” The more-than-human world has learned what works in context over billions years. Biomimicry is the practice of studying and emulating nature’s forms, processes, and systems to solve our own challenges, ideally in a way that creates conditions conducive to all life. Even if you’re not building a bullet train, you can learn from nature in your own ecosystem – consider how other species harvest water, capture energy, recycle materials, form symbiotic relationships. What can you learn from them?
- There’s so much to love in this interview with Zoë Schlanger (author of The Light Eaters, required reading for Bio4Climate’s recent Biodiversity 11 course). But what sticks with us right now is how she bottles the desire we all have to connect with and understand the world around us, “I think that words are all we have, and for those of us who are not super acquainted with scientific jargon, we have to use these words like ‘language’ and ‘intelligence’ and ‘desire’ to talk about plants, in part because these are the metaphors that we have at hand. It’s the closest thing we can understand that gives us this little bridge of understanding between plants and ourselves.“