Tag: OpenChannelFlow

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Beavers

Whenever we ask the question, “What if every time we built something, the world got better?” — my mind jumps to beavers.

Beavers often catch the imagination of people interested in regenerative design because they show how one species, while meeting its own needs, can have a disproportionately positive impact on their environment.

In the UK, beavers were hunted to extinction, but where they are reintroduced they are creating stacked, multiple benefits in their ecosystems. To protect their homes — or lodges — beavers dam rivers to raise the water level, creating a defensive moat. To build these dams, beavers fell trees, remove their branches, drag them into the riverbed and hold them down with mud and stones. Incredibly, where the trees are too far away for them to be moved, beavers have been seen to dig a canal which they then use to float their materials to site.

Where beavers build their dams, aquatic and invertebrate life goes up. The flow of water is slowed and downstream flooding is reduced. The land around beaver dams stays wetter, which increases the amount of carbon dioxide it can sequester. In droughts you can see from the air where beavers are active — these are the places that stay greener for longer.

Beavers are examples of what ecologists call a keystone species — leading to a massively positive impact on their ecosystems.

It is ironic that where once we hunted them to extinction, we are now inviting them back to manage our flood defences and increase the resilience of our living systems. I wonder who they’ll invoice?

This post is an extract from the Motif Library in the Pattern Book for Regenerative Design. 

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The song of the river

In this sequence of posts I’m collecting questions that can help me build a regenerative design palette. In regenerative design we use the living world as a design guide. This goes beyond mimicking living forms — beyond biomimicry — to understanding how  underlying systems work, the processes that give rise to form and that enable living systems to thrive in balance. 

Next on my list: how is information stored in this system?

We often think of information as facts or data — something that can be written down or recorded. The invention of computer memory, which stores information in sequences of ones and zeros, exerts a powerful influence of cultural understanding of what information is.

But the Oxford English Dictionary entry for information includes other definitions that can broaden our understanding and what we look for in living systems.  Information can also be what is expressed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.

DNA is perhaps the living world’s most impressive information code, with a base of four rather than our binary two. But this is only the starting point for thinking about natural memory. 

Tree rings store the story of rainfall and prevailing wind. Wider rings correlate with wetter years; asymmetric ones show the dominant direction of wind. And at a larger scale still, information sequences are also expressed in the shape of the hills, storing information through their form about the sequence of geological events over hundreds of thousands of years. 

At the Regenerative Design Lab, Bill Sharpe offered a beautiful way to think about this. In any system with flow, there are structures that shape the movement — like a river’s banks. But the flow is also shaping the structure — the water gradually re-sculpting the path of the river. 

I think of the river as a stylus. The banks are the groove of an LP. Together they play the song of the river.  A record of what has been played before — one that is updated with every performance. 

Our ecosystems are a rich record library of everything that has happened in a place. What happens, what used to happen, what no longer happens, what could happen again.

Information in genetic bases, in strata, in layers of growth, in physical form, in ways we are only beginning to notice, and I’m sure in many more that we haven’t.