Professor David Farrier

And it's a brilliant question.

I wish I had an answer.

Although,

might have to talk to someone from super use mightn't i that would be really good i mean i would listen to that um definitely um i just can't imagine how wonderful it would be to be uh taught in an environment like that you mentioned janine benyus of course and you know and you've spoken to michael paulin who i spoke to as well who's been very generous for this time and i'm huge fan of his work and his ideas he he spoke to me a lot about janine benyus's ideas uh i heard

an opportunity to speak to her on Zoom as well.

And of course, her core idea is not just that we, you know, we follow nature's model, you know, that we take the ideas and pull them into our own orbit, but, you know, that nature becomes our mentor.

And what a wonderful space in which to learn that lesson, you know, to make that...

okay right um i mean i i think for me it it comes down to what are the questions we're asking ourselves whenever we do anything whenever we try to come up with any solution any you know any new invention possibility initiative what's the you know what are the questions that are guiding this and um

Something that really emerged out of the book, and it did come out of, you know, it particularly came into focus in the conversations I had with Maori conservationists, but I realised it was there throughout, was how does this thing, the question is, how does this thing, whatever it is, whatever idea it is, how does it, does it even, foster a greater sense of relationship and connection?

How does doing this increase our sense of relation?

And if we took that question into the heart of

policymaking into the heart of our questions about energy, how we make our cities, what our material environment looks like.

Are we content surrounding ourselves with plastic, a material that by design cuts us off from our sense of connection to the living world, that is designed to disappear from our touch, to be mute, to not declare itself as coming from anywhere, to be

silent about its history and its future a path that exists in the moment of use that's designed and it's anti-organic exactly it cuts us off from the food that we eat which might otherwise deteriorate or smell or leak yeah are we content with that or could we have a material environment that actually you know is made from bioplastics and actually these substances would feel organic and would you know would actually connect us more to the living world could we have a revolution in our

everyday sense world in that sense.

These kind of connections about how might we foster a greater sense of relationship, it touches on everything.

In the book, it touches really strongly on how we cultivate a sense of time.

Our sense of time is so central to the decisions we make or that we don't make, to things we give our attention to, or that it's governed by clock time.

And yet, you know, in the natural world, time is an immensely intricate process of coordination between living things.

All of them have their own expressions of time and that have evolved to mesh and to work together.