For Creatives Seeking Emergent and Regenerative Future Foresight
Thought this week
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.
Alvin Toffler
Revolve Evolve
I took a few weeks off from the Futuring Dispatch to complete my certification and am now officially a Certified Biomimicry Educator, part of a global and growing community of biomimics. The final graduation presentation will be shared with you as soon as I have the recording.
The Learning Journey and Futuring Ecology I've created Future Wild: When Nature Becomes the Futurist, is a child of Rewilding Futures (2021) and the World Building Framework (2023). In over a decade of advising leading brands and institutions in fashion and the creative fields all the way to tech, innovation, health and travel, speaking to audiences, university lecturing and mentoring all the way to the grassroots work of activism, community and school leadership with Trend Atelier, we land where we always were:Nature, with us within it, feeds our souls, teaches us adaptation and limitless innovation.
The practice of Biomimicry and Life's Principles will be fully integrated across the Strategic Foresight, Creative Foresight, Collaborations as well as Futures Literacy pillars of my Regenerative Futures Architect work.
Looking back, this was our 2022 mantra in the Trend Atelier community:
We are searching for new ideals (and ideologies) to hospice our current dominating system within the fashion, creative and innovation industry which still serves linear and limitless growth agendas. Future Wild: When Nature Becomes the Futurist requires going against the current status quo. It's wild, but it isn't. We are nature and to quote Janine Benyus who popularised Biomimicry and co-founded the Biomimicry Institute:
We can learn to come home to this planet.
Janine Benyus
When you peel all the layers, so much of everything boils down to education. To become architects of change, shifts, or seeds (however you want to frame it), putting ourselves in a learning and humbling mindset (in the era of internalised micro-scamming) becomes unavoidable.
Future Wild: When Nature Becomes the Futurist is a learning journey for boots on the ground challenges most professionals and humans are experiencing in the field of the creative industry, fashion, foresight and innovation who want their work, their teams, their impact to fuel the shift change we need. They often know the why, but can't figure out the how.
Some of us may feel cynical, after much encountered resistance. But everyone knows this is it. The urgency of our times is thick and palpable, as we navigate critical environmental, technological, scientific and social tipping points. The collision between the old system and the new paradigm has the same energetic release of tectonic plates rubbing against each other. The question is who will define and architect atop those new landscapes? The urgency is to ensure this planetary project management serves our people, planet and future generations.
Our primal nature and our mother nature is built to meet this challenge. Ingeniously circular, quantum, in constant motion and regenerating for new or evolving conditions. The most sophisticated communication, design, organisational, and automation system of energy, life, death and flow there will ever be.
Linear is goneand understanding this is core to how we build our physical and soulful worlds: exchange flows, cultural values, technologies, identities and experiences for futures that could serve the global human project, and harmonise with our earth's operating system.
In Biomimicry local context is fundamental. There is no 1 size fits all solution. We build, scaffold shifts and plant seeds over a lifetime, and beyond our lifetimes. We quiet our cleverness and learn to walk again.
In my next Futuring Dispatch I'll start sharing more about Future Wild: When Nature Becomes the Futurist so that you can test the Futuring Ecology I've been generating and regenerate it in your own way.
For now, to dive deeper into how understanding and internalising living systems is reshaping design, law and governance, I'll leave you with my most recent Tomorrow column for Spur Beyond Human Design: The Multispecies Revolution.
As always, thank you for being here. It means the world to me that you choose to spend the time reading this. Much gratitude to Rebecca MacKinnon and Jess Berliner my Learn Biomimicry mentors. Studying with you and our Quetzals Cohort has been transformational - with witnessing how you teach a masterclass in itself. Thank you to the people who got involved along the journey and took the time to provide key feedback (long list to come in the next issue), and to my Biomimicry co-pilot Leane Fernandes.
Beyond Human Design: The Multispecies Revolution
Credit: Spur Magazine Tomorrow Column by Geraldine Wharry
Back in 2023 I wrote about Interspecies Harmony, a movement for design and society that fosters multispecies wellbeing. The movement is accelerating and it seemed fitting to follow up 2 years later. Challenging our one-sided relationship with Mother Earth isn't new. Indigenous cultures have ancient awareness of being at one with nature. The Global Alliance for Rights of Nature Timeline shows the first legal ideas in 1972 with law professor Christopher Stone’s seminal article, “Should trees have standing – toward legal rights for natural objects.” Check 2025 and you’ll see the acceleration is clear: from New Zealand's Taranaki Mountain gaining legal rights to Brazil's Constitutional Amendment recognizing Nature as subject of fundamental rights.
We have to learn to design as nature. The first step in this process is to accept that as biological beings we are participants in and expressions of natural processes.
New Governance and Decision-Making Models
In his 1990 book ‘The Natural Contract’ Michel Serres identified a fundamental flaw dating back to the 1700s Age of Enlightenment when we started creating fair human exchange through social contracts yet entirely neglected the natural world, turning it into a subject of appropriation, in an era busy colonising new territories and communities.
The World Economic Forum acknowledges our systemic crisis centuries’ old origins. During 2025’s Open Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, in Making the Case for Nature, Mindahi Crescencio Bastida Munoz, Coordinator for Earth Elders, questioned how it was possible that we live in a world where “corporations have more rights than the rivers, the mountains, the sea”. Legal personhood for nature addresses this absurdity.
The legacy of Serres’ Natural contract lives on. Moral Imaginations’ Interspecies Council methodology is a template for civil assemblies where civilians embody different species in decision-making processes. For example, when someone channels a tufted duck, they observe how humans partition areas in ways that would be incomprehensible to other species. Since its creation in 2021, the UK government hosted its first interspecies council in February 2024, as part of a Water Post 2043 project, exploring non-human perspectives in water policy. The results are profound, acting as an equalizer to find common goals.
The key is to stop these efforts from becoming ornamental. Research by activist-lawyer María Ximena González-Serrano on Colombian rivers shows rights frameworks fail to dismantle legal arrangements enabling extractive projects often driven by ruling class interests. In Is ‘legal personhood’ a tool or a distraction for Māori relationships with nature? Monica Evans highlights the risk that aligning traditional worldviews with Western legal instruments may entrench unhelpful paradigms. Indigenous voices are also raising critical concerns with Māori expert Jessica Hutchings arguing that humankind is the "youngest sibling," and that "elevating natural features through human personhood status feels presumptuous and likely ineffective."
The continuous stream of breakthrough initiatives, and its debates, show how we now require new forms of leadership and education to implement effectively.
Leadership and Learning Frameworks
Education and communities of practice are multiplying. The Institute of Natural Law connects students, specialists, activists, high profile leaders and wisdom keepers to organize for multispecies socio-political and ecological justice, shifting from "the illusion of separateness towards the awareness of Natural Law". The Bio-Leadership Fellowship connects 300 Fellows globally to change the story of leadership, as “a human mycelium” supporting nature-centred innovation to build resilience, systemic awareness, and deeper connection to natural life.
In the emerging field of Multispecies Studies, academics, Scientists, farmers, indigenous peoples, and artists are developing new methodologies for studying what constitutes life beyond human-centric frameworks and how we can better inhabit shared spaces. The field focuses on developing "Arts of Attentiveness": ways of noticing and responding to the non-human world that could reshape how we understand our place within larger ecological systems.
Design for Multispecies Thriving
The Future Observatory’s issue ‘More Than Human’ asks: "What does it mean to design not just for ourselves, but for other species and for the health of natural systems?”. Featuring Studio Ossidiana’s Manual for More-than-Human Design six principles emerge, from 'Be animal, be human' to Design for proximity, design for distance.' In ‘Entering The Neo-Natural”, creative, insights and strategy agency Space Doctors challenges the separation between nature and society:
This separation limits our understanding of how intertwined these worlds are - of the ways flora and fauna can be a part of our social and cultural life, and the ways we are inextricably part of theirs.
Space Doctors
The proliferation of research, thought leadership and practical tools to upskill designers and leaders never stops, with recently the Design Council’s Skills for Planet blueprint which places nature as a stakeholder as a key principles.
The work of placing nature-as-key-collaborator from a biomimicry perspective is facing a wave of momentum. Ehab Sayed's Biohm research lab of designers, engineers, scientists, and business innovators from around the globe creates high-impact and high-performance solutions that harness the power of mycelium collaboration. Nature’s intelligence is also being mimicked in computational systems designed for multispecies interactions. In 2024, designers and researchers at Delft University in the Netherlands identified three distinct types of multispecies incorporating livinginteractive organisms within human-made technology. Their work strives to facilitate connectivity, collaboration and reciprocity between multispecies and computers.
Collective Flourishing
To secure humanity's future by integrating harmonious strategies into socio-economic systems, what is the vision? At a time when there is so much conflict and economic challenges, don’t lose hope. True good is happening and perhaps Thomas Berry’s vision of an Ecozoic era, a new age of mutually enhancing Human-Earth relations, will fully come to life. For Fashion’s future this is a moral choice, that informs how we ideate, design, produce, shop, follow legislation. We need new terms of agreement, because our wellbeing will thrive when we experience our interconnectedness with all living systems.
