Learning of the Ecology

Humans live surrounded by organisms, which some can be seen with naked eyes, some other need the help of tools to be revealed. They are living, thriving, and withering around us. Even though we're living side by side with them, we often take them for granted, and it's even more apparent in this anthropocene era. 

We live our days forgetting that what we do will impact them greatly. Forgetting that our impact can be a lot more aggressive than what they're able to impact us. As a creator, we create without considering them in our cradle to cradle process. Creating with plastics so massive we forgot that the natural organism won't be able to digest such artificial elements. After decades of ignorance in creation, here we are, a few degrees to an irreversible withering of our environment. 

Microplastics Photograph by David Liitschwager

The learning of our environment and its organism, or the subject of ecology, is important to everyone in today's and future productive generation. It should be one of our tools of survival, and creation is part of the practice for survival. Environment and its organism condition should not become an additional or external factor that's not considered in our ideas and execution. It should be one of the defining internal factors that affects our creative decisions. 

Why? Because the significance lies in comprehending the workings of our surroundings, we ensure for ourselves that we'll have a planet to live, we learn to live in harmony and peace with everything around us, extending beyond our fellow human beings. 

Those who learned ecology, along with other novel concepts, for the sake of business progress, won't be at loss either. The understanding can and will also open doors to more "magical" solutions, and innovative products which with some vivacity will bring many profits– in time. 

We've seen ecology inspired products around for some time, for example, a water repellent and anti-bacterial metal surface that can repel liquids by mimicking the lotus leaf surface, the TresClean. The application of the material in industrial and consumer scale, say for the use of producing saucepan will greatly reduce the use of chemical cleaning products, and water.  

The velcro we've widely used took inspiration from burdock plants which have a system of hooks that are capable of attaching themselves to loops of thread. With the existence of velcro we can stick and re-stick something hundreds of thousands of times without having to use glue that will deplete a lot sooner overtime.

Arctium/Burdock (top) as the inspiration for the invention of Velcro fasteners (bottom), Image Source Flickr

Being inspired by ecology can take several angles, while the TresClean and Velcro borrows the physical character and interaction of natural things, we can also borrow natural interaction and condition for our socio-cultural based solutions. 

For example, the seasonal based food and culinary industry. Organisms around us grow and consume by responding to each other, and what's available around them. Bees find indigenous nectar that surrounds them to make honey that tastes distinct to where the bees live. Bears find fishes in the river near their den, helping the population of the whole food chain in check. When adapted in a human's lifestyle it means we eat what the land nearby us produce, and we produce with materials from the same land. The practice inserts us in the food chain and within the greater organisms' relationship.  In the economic and sustainability sense, we can reduce the cost and impact of transporting the produce from faraway land. We can also find uniqueness, or positioning per se, as the materials we use will be distinct to our environment. Far different results from the results of creative gentrification that we can often see around us today. 

One such evidence is the Handep Haruei products. The brand decides to produce and create with materials and object common in remote villages in Kalimantan, the villages where the products are created by artisans with deep knowledge and long tradition of basket weaving. Handep Haruei plant a tree for every purchase made.

Handep Products, Image Source Handep

This is similar to birds and other animals who eat from trees' produce and their droppings contain seeds that will increase the number of trees in their area, replanting the food they've eaten. 

That being said, it’s important for designers, creators and all stakeholders to learn ecology. We might have learned some of its basics until high school, and up until university degree if we choose to specialize in it. But with the needs of the world, we need to enrich our learning material from the basic level of learning its behavior to the level of how humans play a role to create harmonious relationships with nature. 

The language of ecology should be on the same level of importance with universal languages of the 21st century such as the coding language. Yet it seems that the general progress of education is lacking in speed. Especially in Indonesia where methods of learning are very text-book based, and the updates on the text-book itself of course need to be reviewed rigorously before widespread use.

We need more active, thinking-based education, where inquiry and debate is encouraged to make haste in learning for our environment. From there design and other industries can be hastened as well in realigning our creation with nature's demands.