“Biomimicry offers this way of saying, ‘Look around you: 3.8 billion years of essentially research and development.'” ~ Sara El Sayed

I keep my eyes open for disciplines that incorporate curiosity in systematic ways — that seek to seek with fresh eyes — to discover stories from the raw materials around us.

That led me to biomimicry, the conscious emulation of nature’s genius.

Nature has been solving life’s problems for a long time.

What might we learn by attending to those solutions? Might we train ourselves to look more closely?

What do we notice, when we observe carefully what nature is doing?

Sara Aly El Sayed, Director of the Biomimicry Center and Assistant Research Professor at the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University, has thoughts!

Think about what it means to create nutrient-dense food, to create foods that have health benefits that maybe we’ve lost a little bit because we’ve industrialized our food systems and we’ve forgotten that these place-based solutions that are grown out of curiosity, trial and error, experimentation, and working in community can actually benefit us a lot more.

We talked about (mal)adaptive innovation, being in connection with nature and the ethos of honoring Earth, emulating childlike curiosity in our exploration, complexity, what we can learn by following the thing, the benefits of trying new foods, two-eyed seeing, the dark underbelly of intrusive curiosity pointing to our need for curiosity guardrails, and reinforcing feedback loops for good — or not!

Listen to Ep. 343: Curiosity & Biomimicry: Learning from the Genius of Nature, with Sara El Sayed

Learn more about Sara El Sayed, the Biomimicry Center and the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Check out this Introduction to two-Eyed Seeing.

I really enjoyed understanding the idea of “following the thing” through Sara’s research on fermentation.

So many fun directions I could send you connected to this conversation! Try one of these: Natural Curiosity & Indigenous Perspectives of Inquiry, with Alysse Kennedy & Aleksa Nitsis; Cultivating a Curious Palate, with Jack Zhang; Curiosity Lessons from Solutions Journalism, with Mónica Quesada Cordero; and Ode to Crows, with Colleen & John Marzluff.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “A Palace of Cedar” by The Pine Barrens, via Blue Dot Sessions.

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