Work Like Nature

Sustainability lessons from ecosystems for your job or business

Lea Elliott

• Publisher: Naturehood Ecological Consulting
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780995200111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Nachhaltige Entwicklung

Do you want to take action at work that will benefit you, your job and your community as much as it helps the environment? Lea Elliott’s Work Like Nature presents lessons from nature to help you make sense of sustainability and start making a difference.

These ecosystem ideas are illustrated through inspiring stories from Vancouver-area green innovators. See how these bright thinkers from a variety of disciplines work like nature to benefit the environment and, surprisingly, to win at their job or business.

You’ll see how a city secures its energy needs, a community designs a dynamic waterfront, and an entrepreneur protects our oceans. You’ll also discover how a diversity of flowers growing in a blueberry field fortifies our food supply, how turning manure into renewable natural gas can in fact protect our water, and how views of nature make us healthier. Exercises and examples in each chapter will help you apply these lessons to your own work.

By simply looking outside, you can gain insights to help you protect the environment, grow the green economy, build resilient communities and do work you’re proud of.

If you enjoyed Hawken’s Ecology of Commerce, Braungart and McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle or Benyus’s Biomimicry you’ll love Work Like Nature.

Chapter 1. Work With Nature’s Services

It’s time to start my work day. I push open my wooden office door and flip on the light switch. The wool carpet cushions my steps as I walk to my white wood desk. I sit down on a chair made of tightly woven dark fabric that covers foam and is supported by rigid plastic. I’m comfortable in my jeans and cotton shirt. I type this opening paragraph on the black keys of my silver laptop. As I work, I eat my fresh, cold breakfast of blueberries, yogurt and oats. I sip my hot coffee and cool water. Outside my glass window and at my desk, plants calm and energize me.

Can you guess how many points of contact I had with nature from my morning in the office? Six? Ten? In fact, I was embraced by nature at least twenty-five times.

A long list of natural resources fuelled my work. On the farm, sheep were sheared to weave my wool carpet, cotton seeds were picked for my clothes, coffee was picked for my espresso, a cow was milked to make my yogurt, oats were threshed for my cereal and blueberries were harvested to top off my breakfast, respectively.

In the woods, lumber was harvested to build my office, my desk and my door. Thanks to the water cycle, a lake of rain gave me water, and a dammed river produced my electricity. Inside and out, plants rejuvenated me, cleansed my air and filtered my water.

From the earth, natural gas was piped to warm my office, oil was pumped to make my chair, more than a dozen metals were mined to manufacture my computer, and sand was excavated to form my window.

In the office, I used a fraction of the lengthy list of free services that nature gives us each and everyday. Although I counted twenty-five of them, there are likely more. From this simple quick peek at any part of my day—or yours—it’s clear we are 100 percent dependent on the bounty of nature.

Nature provides

The benefits you and I receive from nature are often called ecosystem services, which I’ve divided into three categories: provision, process and cultural.

Nature’s provision services

Nature’s provision services are physical things you can touch and see and that are harvested from nature to meet our needs, such as:

• Fibres to make our carpets, chairs and clothes.
• Construction materials to build our buildings.
• Energy to heat our offices and to transport our goods from place to place.
• Food to keep us fuelled.
• Water to hydrate us.

When we think of “nature’s services,” we often picture the physical things like those listed above first. In my morning, I relied on many provision services: water to drink, blueberries to eat, cotton for my jeans, wood for my desk and natural gas to heat my office.

Nature’s process services

The provisions we harvest from nature are easy to understand because we interact with them everyday, but the processes that ecosystems perform are more obscure. Some process services support us and give us life, like oxygen production and crop pollination. Other process services regulate our environment and keep us safe. For example, coastal wetlands mitigate storm waves, and water uptake by trees helps prevent flooding. Even though process services are vital to our survival, they are easy to disregard.

In my morning, plants produced my oxygen, soil and plants filtered my water, and my blueberries, cotton and coffee were pollinated by insects.

Nature’s cultural services

While nature’s provisions and processes sustain us, we actually receive a lot from “being in” or “looking at” nature. These are called cultural services. Nature’s cultural services are the spiritual, cognitive, recreational, and aesthetic enrichment people gain from nature.

In my morning, the plants inside my office and outside my window energized and calmed me. My shoulders relaxed and my mood lightened when I looked at the bright tree leaves and heard the sweet bird call of a chickadee.

Nature can improve our well-being. It’s worthwhile to keep and restore nature where we work. Researchers in Japan studied 280 participants across 24 forests and found that a 15-minute forest walk lowered their cortisol (a stress hormone) along with their pulse rate and blood pressure. Walking in a concrete urban environment did not have the same effect.

Teachers should note that nature makes us smarter: A University of Georgia study found that school-aged students from seventy-one U.S. public schools who had nature views from their classrooms scored higher in language, reading and math.

To further explain the concept of nature’s services, let’s look at three examples of what we reap when we nurture these services. We’ll meet a scientist studying pollinators, a horticultural therapist connecting people to nature, and a community designing its waterfront to work with nature. You’ll see how, by caring for nature’s services, they simultaneously protect nature, nurture their patients’ health, improve their residents’ safety, reduce their costs and increase their revenue.

Crop insurance: nature

To learn about the benefits farmers can receive from protecting nature, I visited Dr. Elizabeth Elle, a Simon Fraser University (SFU) researcher. Elle and her students are studying how pollination, a process service, affects the provision of my breakfast blueberries. Elle warmly welcomed me to her office to talk about her work and how nature’s pollination services can provide blueberry farmers with a kind of crop insurance.

Pollination by bees is essential for blueberry production. Blueberry farmers aren’t the only ones who rely on this service: “One out of every three bites we eat is thanks to the bees,” said Elle.

The global value of the pollination service of animal pollinators is estimated to be $200 billion each year. We have bees and other pollinators to thank for the juicy blueberries on our cereal, the sweet strawberries in our ice cream and the crunchy cucumber in our salad.

Elle wondered: can blueberry farmers rely solely on rented commercial honey bee hives for pollination or do they need help from wild bumble bees?

For some crops, like early flowering almonds, farmers need honey bees because native pollinators haven’t yet emerged when the flowers need pollinating. On the other hand, Californian watermelons, which are farmed beside natural areas, can depend 100 percent on pollination by wild bees. The wild bees nest and eat in the adjacent natural areas even when the watermelons aren’t flowering. Watermelon farmers don’t need to incur the extra cost of renting honey bee hives.

Fraser Valley blueberries are different from almonds and watermelons. The blueberry fields are typically large monocultures where, to maximize yields, bushes are planted anywhere farm equipment can reach. Often, blueberry fields don’t have natural areas adjacent to them. To counteract this isolation, blueberry farmers rent commercial honey bee hives when their blueberries are flowering.

This solution isn’t the best from an evolutionary standpoint. “A blueberry flower is like a salt shaker. You have to shake it to get the pollen out. Wild bumble bees shake the flower and pollen comes shooting out,” said Elle. The wild bumble bee’s vibration moves pollen to its body. The bee carries the pollen with her and leaves some on the next flower she visits. Because honey bees have shorter tongues and don’t buzz their bodies individually, they are less effective blueberry pollinators compared to wild bumble bees.

“Per visit, bumble bees are four times more effective than honey bees in the pollination of low bush blueberries,” said Elle.

But honey bees live in hives of tens of thousands compared to bumble bee hives of a few hundred. Were honey bees getting the job done with their sheer numbers? Elle and her students set out to pollinate some blueberry flowers to answer this question.

The researchers held “fake bumble bees” (which were really electric toothbrushes) to the blueberry flowers to mimic the motion of a bumble bee. They caught the pollen in a shallow dish and dabbed it on another flower with a little paintbrush. When every flower on a branch was hand pollinated the researchers netted the branch to keep out other pollinators. Other branches in the field were left for the rented honey bees and any stray wild bees that happened by.

In July, Elle and her students returned to the fields to see if there was a difference between the blueberries on the “bumble-bee-mimicked toothbrush-pollinated” branches and the “left to their own devices” branches. If the weight of berries grown on the “toothbrush-pollinated” branches was greater than the “left to their own devices” branches, then Elle would know that the bees on the farms (both rented honey bees and the wild populations of bees) were not getting the job done and farmers are losing out.

It turns out that the bees weren’t as busy as their reputation would have us believe. The toothbrush-pollinated branches had the most fruit. Elle and her student Lindsey Button calculated that farmers lost between $19,274 and $45,467 per hectare (between $7,800 and $18,400 per acre) in revenue because of insufficient pollination, depending on the cultivar. If the flowers had been fully pollinated, farmers would have had higher yields and more cash in their pockets.

“The days are past when a farmer can do nothing and magically get a crop. They have to put honey bees in or enhance for native bees. Actually both is best. They’ll get insurance if they do both,” said Elle.

Health insurance: nature

The benefits of eating a diet rich in fresh produce, like blueberries, is well documented. A study of 93,600 women aged 25 to 42 found that participants who ate blueberries or strawberries at least three times per week were thirty-four percent less likely to have a heart attack than those who didn’t. Berries lower your blood pressure and make the walls of your blood vessels more elastic. Eating healthy foods, along with drinking lots of water, getting a good night’s sleep and exercising vigorously likely all make your daily should-do list, but what about getting a dose of “Vitamin N”?

I joined Shelagh Smith, a horticultural therapist, to learn more about the benefits of Vitamin N or time in nature. Horticultural therapists are experts in promoting well-being by connecting people to plants. “Nature gives us what we need. I see over and over again that working with plants brings people alive,” said Smith.

Smith works with other healthcare providers to benefit the well-being of: people living in long-term care facilities, people with mental health issues, and at-risk youth. Smith introduces her clients to nature and plants. Together they arrange flowers, grow food, and take mindful nature walks. She’s witnessed how:

• A garden can draw reluctant new residents into life in their new home.
• Arranging flowers with stroke patients shows them they are still very capable despite limitations.
• A focused walk in nature can both calm and energize her clients.

Even in her own life, Smith has experienced the benefit of Vitamin N. For several years, Smith was working more than full-time and was stressed from juggling teaching, working with clients and supporting her ailing parents.

“I became like a robot, crossing things off my to-do list. I lost my passion for life, my joy,” said Smith. She knew that spending more time in nature would probably help, but she had gotten out of the habit. “Then one day I did it. I stopped on the deck as I arrived home, and took a few moments to look at the greenery and the mountains in the distance. Right away I could feel myself relaxing. That success motivated me to try it again and again and again. Until it became a habit. I’ve been doing this every day for three years now.”

Smith didn’t need to take long romps every day through pristine nature. Short, regular moments to look at nature were enough. The research supports this idea that looking at a view of nature for a short time or even a photograph has a positive effect.

Talking with Smith and studying the research reminds me of how spending time in nature has always energized me. As a child, I walked through a beautiful forest to elementary school. As a teenager, I explored quiet ocean bays by rowboat. As a field biologist, I spent my work days searching for bird nests. More recently, I re-energize myself in the garden. I’ve always thought, that’s just what works for me, but this isn’t true for most people. I’m glad to have learned otherwise.

I’m a nature lover, but to find out there’s definitive research showing that nature lovers aren’t the only ones who benefit from staring at the trees out their window took me by surprise.

One of the first to study the influence of nature on our health was Dr. Roger Ulrich, a university health and architecture researcher. He published a landmark study titled View Through a Window in the journal Science. Ulrich found that patients who had gall bladder surgery had shorter hospital stays and used less pain medication if their rooms looked onto a natural setting instead of a brick wall. Since Ulrich’s first paper, research across countries and disciplines continues to link positive mental and physical health outcomes to time in nature.

Time in nature can support healthy individuals too. Japanese researcher Qing Li measured immune indicators in his study participants’ urine and blood. Li found that after spending a few days in a forest environment, the participants’ immune function increased. The increased immune function lasted for more than thirty days after visiting the forest. In contrast, participants who took a few days off in an urban environment didn’t experience improved immune function.

The empirical benefits of Vitamin N are changing how patients are treated. For example, B.C. Women’s Hospital and B.C. Children’s Hospital are undergoing a major renovation. The project is guided by Ulrich’s research and a desire to improve care for patients and their families. Eleanor Lee, who is responsible for the project’s design, said, “one of the project goals is to help patients connect with nature. Every patient room will have natural daylight. Every patient will have a view.” This is in stark contrast to the current architecture of many windowless patient rooms.

Storm insurance: nature

A nature-rich landscape is important for our health, but did you know it can also keep us safe from the forces of nature?

West Vancouver, located across the harbour from the city of Vancouver, is a community squeezed between snow-capped mountains and the sea. Its long urban shoreline is a mixture of sandy beaches, rocky shores, grassy parks, seaside trails and luxury homes. Much of its expansive waterfront has been altered over the last 100 years. With these changes, cultural services from nature have been lost, like a long beach to stroll along, shady streams to play in, and diverse tide pools to explore. Process services from nature have also been degraded, lik...