What is Biophilia?
By: Jaya Ramchandani
Tags: Nature, Biophilic Design, Connection, Learning, Biophilia

An Invitation to Reassess our Routines

While we have been bombarded with the practice of sustainable thinking, that is, to maintain or prevent the overexploitation of resources, we have also faced a personal crisis. Why do we do certain things? Why do we use certain materials? How do we make decisions based on the consequences that we don’t notice? How do we balance personal needs and global sustenance?

WLWG: We understand sustainability as a point of balance, which recognises the basic needs that are met for all beings, present and future. Every action of ours has an effect, every inaction has an effect too. How can we navigate this personal-global path of sustainability?

VL: We have to eat, we have to breathe. We have to physically take up space and move through it. Trying to desist from any kind of action and influence is impossible. As long as we perform action, it’s important to realise what it influences.

If you are flying or sailing to an island and have a carbon footprint because of that, well, make good use of it. We are carbon factories ourselves. Does it mean we are going to kill ourselves in order to not have a carbon footprint?

We are going to make the best with the fact that we are here and we have an effect.

I think it can be quite daunting to start realising what kind of influence it is that we have. When we realise that there are so many things that we are influencing, it’s overwhelming. It’s especially easy to forget this influence in cities. Because we are simply not seeing it. We might have parks, we have nature, but we are not aware of the influence we have on different parts of nature that we don’t see.

When someone tells you about this influence you have on nature, that we do have an influence on nature, it’s natural to say — Ah! Come on, that’s too much to think about even. I have my own problems, my own daily problems, my rent, so don’t give me that thought about my influences that I cannot see. But there is a point where we can say — I am not threatened by seeing things.

There has to be a switch where you can accept it.

Okay, give me the truth. I can take it.

I can even go through anger and depression and maybe see how I can do small things in my routine that begin to make a difference. For example, I can decide to buy from farmers instead of supermarkets — that itself is a huge influence! And it can be a big change in one’s routine. So it is a matter of navigating changes in your practices and routines.

It’s useful to have routines because they save us time. But at the same time, it is dangerous because they entrench us in ways of doing something that is not the most constructive. It’s all about reassessing things, to see in a different way and to imagine what it would be if it was designed differently. There always seems to be a threat, implied or perceived, when someone talks about changing routines.

An Invitation to See Things Differently

One of the motivations of biophilia as a practice and thinking is to see things differently.

Feminist writers, Indigenous scholars, Queer and Intersectional thinkers and doers, Post colonial and Black authors and more, since the previous century have asked us to look at different stories. Who is telling the stories? Who is they being told by? How are they being told? Stories beyond the dominant narratives that surround us. How much of the materials that we are told we need, do we actually need? How much of what we see as not nature is really nature?

WLWG: How does biophilia help us intentionally design our worldview?

VL: There is a really nice book, I don’t know you might have read it by Daniel Christian Wahl — Designing Regenerative Cultures. Design is basically a human activity that we all do. It is not something that just designers do. Design is recognising that there is a need in us, an intention to satisfy that need and finding a way to satisfy it. This involves planning and action that takes place in our environment. Because we live in an environment. Be it physical, be it ecological, be it social or economic.

We are going out and doing something to satisfy needs or perceived needs. This whole process is the design process. This is how we shape our lives. We shape it for ourselves and we shape it for others too. Sometimes we are born into things that have already been designed. Like we are born in a city, or a building or a system where we can vote or we cannot vote. We are basically born into a lot of choices that are already made for us. Or we don’t have to be born in it, but by living twenty years somewhere, a lot of choices are made for us. We might not even be aware, but they are choices someone has made.

So it is a matter of design. We are consciously manipulating our reality.

Now, when we are born into something like that or when we are a part of it without realising, this forms our worldview without even us knowing it. It forms what we perceive as normal, or expected or even natural, or we maybe see it as the only way. That kind of a worldview will obviously affect our subsequent choices, and our subsequent design decisions, our subsequent decisions of how to do things and how to make things. So it is a kind of a circle.

Worldview follows design and design follows worldview. This can go in constructive or destructive directions.

One of the core aims of actively practising biophilia is to get people to seeing things differently because this will help with anything in their lives. They will have the opportunity to influence that circle of worldview of design.

Because if you can think differently, and perceive something that has not been a part of your routine perception, then you can start asking questions and start noticing your choices and the choices others have made for you. You can ask — Ah! so what is the effect of this? Okay, so if I don’t like the effect and I am a part of this process, is there anything I can do, and how can I do it differently? How can I repair things? How can I be an agent of regeneration?

One should strive to enhance both the quality of human life and the condition of the environment we live in. If we use our natural ability to learn, if we become a little more attentive and start looking into the depths of things, we will be surprised — opposites are not really opposites, but complementaries, and we can use these complementarities to design a better, more connected life.

Biophilia, or the innate affinity towards for life, requires the affinity to be nurtured.

References

Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge.

hooks, bell, 1952-. All About Love : New Visions. New York :William Morrow, 2000.

Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. Walden ; And, Resistance to Civil Government : Authoritative Texts, Thoreau’s Journal, Reviews, and Essays in Criticism. New York :Norton, 1992.