We All Need to Be Bio-Literate
What if we could see the world through the language of life?
You’re going shopping and you spot a t-shirt that you want to buy. Imagine having a kind of super vision or cognition that allows you to see how that t-shirt was made, from where and how the cotton plant was grown, to who picked and processed the cotton into yarn, to where it was shipped to be made into a t-shirt. How much fossil fuel was used to transport that t-shirt to the store, how much water polluted in the color dying process. You might just set it back down and decide you’re happier with the shirt you’re wearing now. That kind of vision is what Álvaro Cedeño Molinari describes as being bio-literate. Having the ability to understand the language of life.
We need to start thinking about everything from a systems point of view, not come up with isolated solutions for isolated problems. Nature functions as a whole. We do, too. A tight muscle in our back can lead to knee aches. If we just focus on treating the knee problem, it would never go away. The same goes with the climate crisis we now face. Take the soil. There are so many moving parts to the soil that keeps it functioning perfectly as a whole — insects, earthworms, microbes, fungi, roots, water, clay, organic material, carbon, nitrogen; the list goes on! Remove any one of these important players and we suddenly have a problem. Speaking the language of life is truly seeing life, nature, and indeed, everything as whole systems.
Taking that to a societal or community level, bio-literacy enables us to create more holistic solutions for complex problems. City planning may now include wildlife corridors, helping larger mammals, birds, butterflies, and bees migrate safely. We might put in bio-filtration gardens to treat and move water back into our groundwater, instead of concrete sidewalks. We might just create better channels for local, beyond-organic growers to sell their food, instead of relying on big agricultural corporations to control our food sovereignty.
On a global level, we might start to see our planet as a whole, not forests to be chopped down, rare metals to be mined, petroleum to be pumped up from underground. We might start thinking about climate action and policies as more than capturing (and measuring) carbon and reaching net zero, but restoring ecosystems, rehabilitating biodiversity, enriching our soil, composting, reducing waste, re-valorizing indigenous wisdom and knowledge, and more.
So put on your bio-literacy glasses. What do you see?
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