Life's Principles

Life's Principles: A Low growing wide branching tree

This morning I headed out to my spot in the park under gray overcast skies. I sat down in an area dominated by these interesting low growing trees. I don't think these trees are actually that low but compared to the giant eucalyptus and spruce trees in the park they look tiny. As I sat their I decided that these trees were like apartment buildings in a city. They were providing homes to many of the organisms in this system. From birds and squirrels to insects, lichens and mosses. As such I decided to dedicate this post to these organisms and some of the ways they seem to exemplify natures principles.

my spot

1) Optimizing rather than Maximising:These trees grow relatively close to the ground in some places their trunks grow parallel to the hill side. They seem to be seeking sun light. I peculate that this strategy, of reaching and spreading allows them to really efficiently harvest sunlight. The are very efficiently "fitting form to function".-Fitting form to function to optimize available space could be applied to the solar industry or what about designing cities to maximise horizontal and vertical space to ensure every one access to sunlight, fresh air, water and other resources while drastically reducing our foot print.2) Leveraging Interdependence:The branches, leaves, bark and stabilized hill side, that these trees provide are a home to many plants and animals. The trees in turn rely on nutrients provided from the break down of the "waste" these animals and plants produce.-This kind of systems thinking could help us redefine our systems for manufacturing, distribution and consumption. possibly resulting communities that function in cycles with this type of interdependence where local resources (possibly waste), is manufacture locally for local consumption.
3) Benign manufacturing: This tree constructs it self from available, renewable and non-toxic resources at ambient temperature. This tree does this because it has no choice.-Neither do we! We are going to make this planet uninhabitable, even for us, if we don't follow natures example and manufacture every thing in benign ways.

Leaf buds

4) Locally attuned and responsive: This tree times it's growth to correspond with availability of resources such as sunlight and water. Both are readily available now as the days get longer and spring brings copious rain. These trees are covered in buds and new leaves, very "resourceful and opportunistic". Even as I write this it starts to rain.

raindrops on my note book

-Just in time manufacturing can allow manufacturers to respond to demand and avoid over stock. As 3D printers and other rapid production techniques advance we will be more and more able to respond really quickly to changing local demands.

5) Integrates cyclic process: This tree recaptures and utilizes the "waste' of many organisms it supports. Even it's own leaves, which are broken down by other organisms, provide nutrients that the tree uses to produce new leaves. Over and over again.
-Much like benign manufacturing, cyclic process must be integrated into all our production flows. Our insistence an maximising through put of resources in our economies means we are on a trajectory to run out of resources. Mining our landfills for resources and hopefully putting these resources into cycles.

6) Resilient: The leaves of these trees are a prefect example of redundancy. Many, many leaves means the tree can afford to loss some with out catastrophe.
-Imagine a solar power system for your house that only needed half of its cells to provide enough energy for your needs. How much more reliable would system like this be than one that had to run all it's cells? Storms, clouds no problem!

Thanks