GREAT ADAPTATIONS

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Plants respond to changing environments by adapting (if they survive), and so do humans. It just doesn’t look like it sometimes. Stoicism and all.

We adapt as a first response to external information, and then, piggy-backed on the process of adaptation, we innovate. Adaptation is like that initial shrink-back when you touch the feelers of a snail (that might be a Northern-California-centric thing), and then the innovation is when the snail turns slightly to go around you. I’m trying to keep things simple today.

What follows are solutions to problems which affect us all, and while they’re all brilliant, many of them need tending to keep up with the world’s constant morphing.

1. The compass. (China did it, although they were using it to decide which way their houses should face)

2. Paper. (105 A.D. Another bow to China, they pulled this one off. They also created the first newspaper in 700 A.D. Now if they could just figure out free speech.)

3. The use of bamboo in building. (Fast growing, no pesticides, beautiful, strong)

4. Continuous closed loop algae bioreactors as super cost-effective fuel source. (Development from Vertigro, check it out.)

5. Light emitting diode, the LED. (Still coming into its own, probably the light of the future, lasts forever, and is almost cheaper than fluorescent now.)

6. The Earth Charter. (The global consensual statement on the meaning of sustainability, created from the input of over 5000 people from cultures across the world. Completed in the year 2000)

7. Float glass. (1959! The technique that gave us a pane of glass that doesn’t distort. Most glass still made this way.)

8. Locofocos: the early match. (1836 patent granted for friction matches called locofocos, to a guy from Springfield, Massachusetts. Sweden made the safety match, of course, and Joshua Pusey created book matches a few years later.)

9. Smoke detector. (1969. Check your battery.)

10. The ladder fire truck. (It just took a few years after the match was invented for this necessity to arise.) 1868, Daniel Hayes invented the Hayes truck.

11. This is my personal favorite: The application of physics to describe a vacuum as not empty, but actually as highly organizing and constantly communicating. (Nassim Haramein, The Resonance Project, 2001)

Help me build this list – send your favorite adaptation or innovation in the “Reply To” area below.

Happy morphing!

Suzanna