A Love of Life - Amanda Sturgeon Is Making The Wild Available

Welcome to or welcome back to the Finding Nature podcast. My name is Nathan Robertson-Ball and this is my show where each week I go longer form with the people who are on the vanguard of driving and delivering work that matters in pursuit of safer, healthier and more just futures. This show is about examining and exploring our inner nature, our relationships to others and our place in the world as custodians of the future to come and the ancestors we follow. I love getting to do this, having conversations with and learning from brilliant people every week, and sharing their stories and successes, mindsets and mistakes as part of our collective desire to be the change we want to see in the world.

Amanda Sturgeon is today’s guest. She is the CEO of the Biomimicry Institute, as well as a Ted speaker, book author and one of the world’s foremost experts and practitioners on biophilic design and biomimicry. Amanda describes her mission as to connect people with nature, and over the course of her career as an architect and then as the CEO of multiple not-for-profit organisations looking to scale the integration of nature and natural systems into the urban landscape, she has and continues to grow her influence and the impact of her work.

It’s easy to talk about ideas and concepts like natural capital or circularity, and the proliferation of reports and talks and consulting services offering to help you and whoever else will listen how their latest series of boxes and arrows and speculative economic forecasts are a panacea to environmental degradation and offer commercial booms. I’m not opposed to legitimate win-win propositions, and today Amanda and I get into the deep scientific and R&D processes that are often needed to re-define or even revolutionise an entire supply chain - from fashion to building materials to how we organise systems of collaboration and information sharing. The work required to re-naturalise assets, communities and entire regions doesn’t sit on the pages of documents but in the real and challenging work of investigation, applying the scientific method and the process of bringing a new technology to market. Amanda and I talk at length about that today and the enormous source of inspiration and wisdom the non human world holds for how we live, and what’s possible if we appreciate nature as both guide and teacher.

We cover a lot of ground in this chat, from Amanda’s quest in her early 20s to explore Australia and the profound effects that’s had on her life since, the remarkable breakthroughs that are possible when we learn from nature’s three plus billion years of evolution, the emerging ecosystem of investment in biophilic design and how all of us need and benefit from re-connecting with nature, each other and ourselves.

Amanda’s work fundamentally is about encouraging us to appreciate our place in the world, our relationships to others and the ways we want to live and be. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

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