Thinking biologically

Employing ecological thinking

Description

Thinking biologically involves applying principles from biological systems—such as adaptation, interdependence, and resilience—to address complex problems. This strategy emphasizes understanding living systems’ dynamics to design solutions that are sustainable, regenerative, and responsive to change. By mimicking natural processes, it remedies issues like resource depletion, ecosystem degradation, and inefficiency, fostering approaches that integrate diversity, feedback, and cyclical resource use for more robust and adaptive outcomes in human systems.

Context

The components of ecosystems - climates, watersheds, soils, organisms, biochemical processes - are known to be "connected," "linked", and "interdependent". These are all ways of describing the principle of integration in natural systems. Ecosystems are commonly described as a web in which the activities of one organism, or the outcome of one process, influence hundreds of other activities and processes. Through integration, each component of the system can serve and be served by other components, thereby increasing the efficiency and viability of the overall system.

Claim

Humans and human society are most often pictured as machines and most imagery about how human society works is largely mechanistic. Thinking in biological terms opens up creative possibilities.