npm 4: biophilic design

  

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In "Buildings Designed for Life," Amanda Sturgeon reminds us that it's only in the last hundred years that humans became primarily inside creatures who spend 90% of our time indoors. She envisions a built environment that remembers that buildings are "actually, rightfully, human habitats," and that for thousands of years we built our homes in, around and through nature, not removed from it. Philia, love--and bio, life--demand a new way of designing buildings that connect and respond to their environment.  Augie's fairy house made me wish I were that small, that free.

 

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My project for NPM 2022:

 

This month I'm "Mak[ing] human stories to move human beings.  Human stories are more powerful for inciting action than counting carbon or detailing melting glaciers." (Favianna Rodriguez, from her essay "Harnessing Cultural Power," in ALL WE CAN SAVE.)

My challenge to myself is to center our fabulous, ferocious human stories in the poems I write in response to ALL WE CAN SAVE--not my standard approach to writing, which usually centers...well, me.

"It isn't a matter of moving climate change further up our priority list. The reason we care about [climate change] is because it affects everything that's already at the top of our priority list: our health, our families, our jobs and the economy, the well-being of our communities... To care about a changing climate we don't have to be a tree hugger or an environmentalist (though it certainly helps); as long as we are humans alive today, then who we already are, and what we already care about, gives us all the reasons we need."

Katharine Hayhoe, "How to Talk About Climate Change,"

ALL WE CAN SAVE: TRUTH, COURAGE, AND SOLUTIONS FOR THE CLIMATE CRISIS