Fractals of Change

We Are Nature

• Mary Schaub • Season 2 • Episode 35

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0:00 | 46:01

In the season's final interview episode, Mary sits down with Alexandra Bowen, founder of the Biophilic Design Community and co-creator of the Learn Biophilic Design course, to explore why the spaces we inhabit shape the people we become. Alexandra traces her path from a childhood immersed in Hawaii's natural world to the disorientation of moving to the mainland — a feeling now recognized as "green withdrawal" — and how a single potted plant on her desk reopened that connection and eventually led her into environmental design. From there the conversation moves through E.O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis, the science of fractals and awe, the measurable costs of nature-deprived buildings, and the idea — borrowed from Maori law and indigenous wisdom traditions — that nature is not a resource to manage but a relative to honor. Along the way, Alexandra and Mary trade scuba stories, talk through Google's biophilic office design, and land on a closing note for the season: not a choice between technology and nature, but a way of letting both serve our humanity.

 

✅ Key Topics

  • Green withdrawal and the origin story behind a career in environmental design (Alexandra)
  • The biophilia hypothesis and E.O. Wilson's 1984 thesis (Alexandra, Mary)
  • Fractals as "the fingerprint of nature," from tree branches to dark matter (Alexandra)
  • Awe as a recognized pattern in biophilic design, including Terrapin Bright Green's newly added 15th pattern (Alexandra)
  • The biological cost of nature deprivation: cortisol, sick building syndrome, nature-deficit disorder (Alexandra)
  • Low-cost, high-impact biophilic interventions and their measured outcomes (Alexandra)
  • Indigenous knowledge, AI, and the effort to preserve oral wisdom traditions (Alexandra, on Wanda Dela Costa's work)
  • Legal personhood for natural landscapes in New Zealand (Alexandra)
  • Slowness, ancestral wisdom, and finding balance with AI (Alexandra, Mary)
  • Google's internal biophilic design framework and office case studies (Alexandra)
  • The Biophilic Design Community and Learn Biophilic Design course (Alexandra)

 

💡 Takeaways

  • Nature connection isn't an aesthetic preference — it's a biological need with measurable physiological effects.
  • Strong biophilic design goes beyond a lobby plant; it's grounded in genius loci, the spirit of a specific place.
  • Even small, low-cost interventions — a window view, ambient nature sounds, a desk plant — can shift cognition and stress within milliseconds.
  • Treating nature as a relative rather than a resource changes how we design, build, and legislate.
  • Slowing down isn't opposed to progress; it's how we stay human while using powerful new tools like AI.

 

🎤 Memorable Quotes

  • "We are nature. People forget that very simple concept. It's simple, but it's so powerful." — Alexandra Bowen
  • "Fractals are basically the fingerprint of nature... we aren't just surrounded by these patterns, we're made of them." — Alexandra Bowen
  • "We only sustain what we love." — Amanda Sturgeon (quoted by Alexandra)
  • "Nature is not just a resource. Nature is technology and it's an ancestor." — Alexandra Bowen
  • "When you slow down and pay attention, an extraordinary world becomes visible." — Mary Schaub

 

🔗 Resources

 

Keywords

biophilic design, biophilia hypothesis, nature deficit disorder, fractals, awe, evolutionary mismatch, sick building syndrome, indigenous wisdom, slowness, biomimicry, environmental design, genius loci, legal personhood, nature connection, mental well-being, sustainable architecture, Google offices, AI and design, season finale

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub

Contact: FractalsofChange@outlook.com  

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

SPEAKER_01

What if I told you that the single most powerful thing you could do to improve your focus, reduce your stress, deepen your relationships, and strengthen your organization costs almost nothing. And we've known about it for hundreds of thousands of years. It's nature. And not in a vague go take a walkway. I mean the deliberate, evidence-based integration of nature into the spaces where we live, work, and lead. My guest today is Alexandra Brower. In addition to her day job as a program manager at Google, she's the co-founder of Biophilic Innovations Hub, a biophilic design startup and think tank, and the founder of the biophilic design community, one of the largest professional communities dedicated to integrating nature into the built environment. Alexandra holds a degree in environmental design and has spent her career building bridges between the natural world and the built one. Today's episode explores a pattern that shows up across every dimension of human life. From the individual to the relationship to the organization to society at large. We are biologically creatures of the natural world. We evolved in it. We are wired for it. And yet, we spent the last century building environments that systematically strip it out. Today, we explore what happens when we bring it back. Here's where we begin. At first, I tried to adapt. I walked city parks, sought out botanical gardens, and even made a habit of weekend hiking. But it wasn't until I placed a single potted plant on my desk that something inside me shifted. Watching its leaves unfurl day by day, I began to understand that biophilia isn't just about big forests or sweeping landscapes. It starts with the smallest of connections. This is beautiful. What was happening in your life at that point? And what did that plant do?

SPEAKER_00

Thank you. At that point in my life, I was going through a jarring transition, I would say. So I was raised in Hawaii and surrounded by nature and mountains and beauty, and like my day-to-day was just completely immersed in the natural world. I'm listening to the ocean and the breeze and the palm trees right outside my window and the birds and just all of that. And, you know, also the sense of the plumeria. We had lots of fruit trees and flower trees and all of that. And then when I moved to the mainland, which is what we call the US for high school, suddenly there was just concrete and steel. And I felt this kind of unshakable sense of loss. And I couldn't quite explain it for a while, but it felt like I was disconnected from something from myself. And now I know it to be called Greenwood Rawl, words for it as well. And then yeah, in that quote, you know, I tried to adapt by seeking out these green spaces in my community, in my city, in my state, botanical gardens, hikes, but it felt like separate worlds, like I'm going somewhere for that versus like just being immersed in it. And then yeah, I put some I brought some plants indoors, put a plant pot on my desk. It did something really different for me. It changed and it made it like a daily relationship. And, you know, watching its leaves unfurl and move towards the light as the light went throughout the house. It just kind of changed my connection with nature a little bit. And it also showed how you can have a connection with nature outside of just like sweeping landscapes and weaking getaways. And it really does start with these kind of small daily interactions that can add up. We are biologically hardwired to need natures. Going back and feeling that withdrawal, that was a very natural thing. And some people probably don't feel it as acutely as I did because they never had as much of that in the first place. There's research that shows that true biophilia requires that sustained engagement with nature. So you need those repeated daily opportunities to interact with the natural world. They can't be these isolated, like one-off interventions. And that's how we foster that emotional attachment. That's how we improve health sustainably in long term and enhance our well-being. I ended up studying environmental design that's technically architecture school, but a focus on sustainability in design, applying sustainability to design. And I just became like really determined to understand how the spaces we inhabit and build and design our homes and our cities and our workplaces, how they shape our mental and physical well-being and how they don't most of the time. I guess that tiny little plant had a big impact. And it also showed me that nature isn't just an aesthetic, beautiful little tiny potted plant. It's actually a biological imperative. It's very fundamental.

SPEAKER_01

I've often said on this show that when you slow down and pay attention, an extraordinary world becomes visible. For me personally, this quality of noticing has been integral to changing my entire experience with nature. I walk by a tree now and it does feel like there's something there. It's not just background. What has that been like for you? Is there a quality of attention that nature requires of us as a precondition to get to what you're describing?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that quality of noticing is very essential, right? Observation and noticing what we put our energy into is it's not always easy. And sometimes it's more subconscious. And sometimes we do have to more consciously relearn this. And yeah, I mean, for a long time, my walks outside, that one 30-minute sometimes window a day to get sunlight and vitamin D and be outside was just another opportunity to multitask, you know, listening to a podcast, listening to the news, checking my phone, calling friends and family. So I realized that was kind of filling even like these quiet moments, quiet spaces, natural moments with digital noise. Still, we're already moving through such an accelerated pace in our day-to-day lives. And it's only it's only compounding. Um, I work at tech, so I think I have an interesting perspective and impact on that. But our devices are these heavy things burning holes in our pockets and compelling us to capture all the time and and digitize everything rather than fully experience it. Um, I've been really trying to change that. I can't say I'm perfect, but you know, I try to put my phone on silent or not bring it at all. Take out my ear pods, just walk slowly, try to be present, sit on a bench, like an like a cute old person. You know, I was doing that in the spring, watching the petals drifting in the sunlight and just trying to be really present in the moment. I've started to coin these as awe walks. And it shows that nature absolutely like can blow us away when we give it some of our undivided attention. And there's actually a whole robust field of study and like a very deep history of this too. For example, forest bathing in Japan. It's a practice of immersing yourself into nature to improve your health and reduce your stress and boost your well-being. And they're slow, mindful, sensory walks through nature. You're not focused on exercise, you're not focused on steps, but you get some real benefits from it, right? Like lower blood pressure, reduce cortisol, you improve your immunity, reduce your anxiety. And it's gone quite mainstream now, I will say. And they, what's really cool is they actually have forest certified, like forest bathing certified parks and stuff like that. And I think there's something called like park RX, where now doctors can subscribe, like going to the park. And there's some parks specifically for that. That's incredible. Yeah. I remember just actually recently, I was just uh, there's a small lake near my house. And I was, it was like kind of during the sunset time. I was like, oh my gosh, this is so beautiful. And I like my immediate reflex was to take out my phone and like frame the perfect shot for Instagram. And I kind of shuddered it. I was like, oh, I almost lost this moment and of me just trying to document it instead of living in it and be less fully present. And so that was an interesting reminder. Awe is something that we have in a specific framework in biophilic design. And so when we talk about translating kind of these abstract things like awe into actual design, it's actually recognized as a pattern. It's defined as a condition of vast scale or something that defines our frame of reference and shifts our perception. There is opportunity to design and bring on presence into our everyday spaces. And it doesn't require building massive indoor rainforests or anything like that, but it usually does require sustained engagement. It's one of the new patterns just introduced by Terrapin Bright Green. It's a very, very important one. So one architectural experience that comes to mind is going into the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, one of the most experiencing like moments I've ever had in my life.

SPEAKER_01

It sounds as you're as you're talking, it's it's like the antidote to everything that we're challenged with right now. And yes, a little bit in and off balancing some of tech's intensity and and demand, this attention economy that we find ourselves in, and really just lack of presence at scale, right? Like we're all really struggling with it. And you're describing this awe as something that's so much bigger and pulls us out of that. It's so fascinating that biophilia is is driving something that could really maybe help make us all more balanced. This is a great place to pause and lay a foundation for listeners hearing biophilic design for the first time. Because I think for many of us, if you work in an office environment or you go to a shop, there's a plant in the corner. And that's not really what we're talking about. Can you tell us what is biophilic design?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you're right. I started with a plant in the corner. So it definitely has its place, but that's not necessarily how we think about it. And it is a massive misconception. It's a very big blanket term. But on a personal level, I define biophil biophilic design as the effort to weave together the landscapes of man for nature and nature for the benefit of both. And so to me, this goes back to my own experience from moving to Hawaii to the mainland, experiencing that loss and that green withdrawal, realizing that nature isn't just the luxury that we can go visit on the weekends, just go to that local park or whatever. It's actually a biological imperative. And now as a mom, I look at my daughter growing up in a very screen-mediated world, and I want her to feel the earth beneath her feet and experience that profound awe that I did growing up. Biophilic design is about reclaiming that deep daily connection to the natural world and hopefully integrating it seamlessly into our everyday habits, habitats, lifestyle. Ideally, you're doing more than just sticking a potted plant in a lobby or in your house and just calling it a day. Biophilic design is the intellectual evidence-based attempt to correct the evolutionary mismatch between our very ancient nature-tuned biology and all this modern indoor environments that we find ourselves in. Biophilic design applies the biophilia hypothesis, which was popularized by Eo Wilson. He said humans have an innate genetic affinity for nature. And Stephen Keller, one of the pioneers in the field, defined biophilic design as biophilia applied to the design and development of the human environment. So it's about moving away from superficial approaches where nature might be an aesthetic afterthought. We're wanting to fundamentally change spaces to integrate biological systems into the architecture, into the spaces we're inhabiting. This environment that we're in is an extension of the living systems around us.

SPEAKER_01

Something that's happened to me personally over the years is how it feels in my nervous system. I have started gardening. Now it's the nice weather here finally. So gardening will become a part of my daily ritual at least once a day, sometimes twice a day. And starting the day in the garden, and I cut my peonies this morning. They're over here.

SPEAKER_00

Lovely.

SPEAKER_01

It is such a different energy to start the day doing that. I feel happier, I feel healthier, more balanced. So it's almost, I guess, a way of thinking that nature isn't something I go out into, but I'm sort of reconnecting. It's like literally, it is us, right? Is that sort of what your hypothesis is talking about?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we are nature. People forget that very simple concept. It's simple, but it's so powerful. Yeah, you talk about like branches and fractals and neural networks and all of that. Yeah, there's this really interesting quote, because I also love the science and the physics behind things too. Even if I don't understand all of it, same. It's fun to like know that it's there. But Galileo said something like, the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. So it's very much to your point. Yeah, I mean, fractals are basically the fingerprint of nature and they're patterns that repeat at different scales. There's tree branches that mirror our neural networks, but it goes a lot further as well. Like apparently our lungs are fractals, our blood networks are fractals, and researchers are actually finding that the way our DNA is folded up is a fractal pattern and it goes beyond the planet too. So, like the distribution of the stars in the sky are fractals on my LinkedIn community, biophilic design. I recently interviewed Dr. Richard Taylor, who is a physics professor at the University of Oregon, and we talked about fractals. And he even speculates that dark matter actually could just be giant fractals. So nature doesn't just stick to one size, it's very beautifully complex and decadent, and it's pretty much fractals all the way down. Our biology is a fractal, and we aren't just surrounded by these patterns. We're made of them.

SPEAKER_01

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01

So it's so exciting. It feels like, you know, the mysteries of the world, of ourselves, of our universe, right? There was a Danish longitudinal study that followed more than 900,000 people found that those with the least exposure to green space during childhood had up to a 55% higher risk of developing a psychiatric disorder in adults. Wow. So depression, mood, eating disorder, schizophrenia. Adults in nature-deprived environments show measurable deficits in attention and working memory, elevated cortisol, and a weakened immune function. And there's even emerging evidence that connection to nature can partially buffer the harm of social isolation, producing well-being benefits that rival some forms of human connection. And we do know that there's a loneliness epidemic. And when I sit with all of this, and then some of the other statistics that I've found on your great community is that employees in environments with natural elements reported around 15% higher well-being and 6% higher productivity. So these aren't gains that come from perks or programs or free bagels in the cafeteria on Monday, but it's from the design of the space itself. So much is in there. I'm wondering if you see the thread connecting our disconnection from nature, paralleling what's happening as this epidemic of us being disconnected from one another.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, they're the same. It's the same crisis. And I love, I love all this data. That's why I love this feel too, because yeah, it's so beautiful bringing nature indoors and it feels right, but also like we have all of this really cool data and science and physics to back it up. But yeah, it's the exact same. So essentially it's like a biological mismatch, and they compound that with the fact that I think the average American spends 90% of our time indoors and we're in pretty sterile boxes. Wow. Not really connected to the earth or in nature at all. And then that inherently fragments our connection with one another, with ourselves. But there's something called the international style of modern architecture, and it basically treats a building as an isolated object. You have a site, you plop the box on the site, you turn on the AC, it's identical. They're hermetically sealed glass boxes, nothing to do with where the site is or context or culture or anything like that. It numbs our senses, it erases community identity. It doesn't come from place. Amos Rathaport, he defined place as the people and the cultures who dwell there. And if we ignore all of these worldviews and rituals, we're just gonna foster isolation rather than belonging. Designers are looking to heal that disconnection and stop, again, treating nature like superficial decoration. There's a lot of actionable design frameworks and certifications to turn these concepts into reality. One approach is like biophilic charrette. And so before you even do any design at all, walk the site, figure out how nature works here and how you can connect with it. Amanda Sturgeon stated, we only sustain what we love. And so when you're actually designing for the site, what architects call genus loci, which translates to spirit of the place, honoring that spirit of that local spot, you actually create buildings that feel like they grew out of the community, out of the ecology. That's where humanity and nature can thrive together. You're not just building another random building structure. You're building it from the foundation of the social community, of the biological community, of the natural community. And that's the way to affect that disconnection.

SPEAKER_01

I saw a documentary some years ago. It was Ken Burns about New York, and he spoke about some of the expansionism from Robert Moses, where they leveled communities and small neighborhoods and put in giant high-rises. And as you're describing, you're separated from your neighbors. There's really no nature at all. Maybe a tiny courtyard. All the things you need to do during the day in a smaller environment where it's integrated with nature in your community, you have to interact with each other and you have to interact with nature. In some neighborhoods in the city, it's like we're in a giant aquarium. What does chronic nature deprivation look like at a biological level? What's it doing to us inside?

SPEAKER_00

At a biological level, there's so much happening. And generally, I like to think about it as an evolutionary mismatch. You know, for like 99.9% of human history, our operating system has been with the natural world. And like I said, we spend 90% of our time indoors, trapped in modern architectural boxes. So our brains and our visual systems and our cortisol levels and everything spent 600 million years evolving to these like natural geometries. And now we're placed into these like little boxes with straight lines and squares and circles and all this. And our brain is not fluent in these artificial shapes. And so walking indoors is like being taken out of the land and being forced to speak a different language. There's a subconscious strain constantly because we're trying to process this built environment. And it actually causes a lot of psychological and physiological stress, and that creates chronic issues. When your body's always stressed, it can lead to depression and high blood pressure, leaky gut, and hormone imbalances. This is a really well-studied phenomena. Researchers coined it as sick building syndrome. Occupants experience very acute, measurable health issues, decreased creativity, higher rates of childhood obesity, attention issues. And so designers, architects have power to proactively build restorative habitats. This actually acts as a preventative medicine.

SPEAKER_01

I want to shift because we're talking about own experience, and we've both been sharing a lot of data that's really meaningful. I'd like to understand what you've seen in practice when someone introduces even minimal biophilic elements into a space they're in. So is there more support on the opposite of how this can be mitigated?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's actually very empowering and surprising that when you introduce like even minimal biophilic elements at incredible speed and scale, stuff begins to shift. And there's a lot of positive physiological responses. And it doesn't necessarily take weeks or months to build up. It can be triggered in milliseconds. One thing from my previous podcast with Dr. Richard Taylor, he conducted some super cool research with NASA. They wanted to help astronauts heading out into deep space feel less stress. And so they found projecting images of mid-complexity fractals on the walls of a mock-up space station reduced the astronaut stress levels by 60%. And this was like in milliseconds of seeing it. And so you can definitely introduce minimal or low to no cost biophilic elements into everyday spaces. And there are tangible, measurable shifts in human cognition, in productivity, and in health. One example is just the view and the layout. Rearrange your desk, rearrange office workers, have access to the views. Make sure that you design a little window with a view. So that can actually increase 15% increase in. Mental function right there. Solving problems 7% faster, right there with a seated view of vegetation. Thinking about airflow, providing natural ventilation, 57% reduction in sickness absence. Done. Acoustics and scent. That's pretty cheap. You can like even zero architectural changes, right? Or, you know, there's a lot more complex things you can put in the HVAC system, but there's cheaper ways to ambient nature sounds on headphones. That's free. Uh incorporating natural scents. Maybe there's a garden and you have a window open, you can smell. Apparently, rosemary has been shown to increase working memory of children in classrooms.

SPEAKER_01

Incredible.

SPEAKER_00

Pretty cool.

SPEAKER_01

So incredible.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, there's also lots of healthcare outcomes. Just placing someone in a bright, sunlit room, 26 to 41% reduction in length of stay. And just something as simple, like I said, aromatherapy post-surgery results in patients needing 56% fewer pain relief medications. I mean, go back to like, holy wow, we are nature, right? Proof is in the pudding a little bit. So when people ask what shifts around, my answer is like our entire biological baseline, right? Our business. What does it shift around? Yeah. Yeah. You know, going back to the evolutionary thing, we evolved with nature and our systems and our brains evolved. And so we inherently thirst for this connection. So when we're presented with it, we see shifts really quickly. And designers can implement this stuff really minimally, right? Yeah. It's really beautiful, actually, and empowering. It's it really is.

SPEAKER_01

And it and it validates an argument I was having with my partner at home because he's like, you in the beginning, before I started gardening, he's like, you kill all these indoor plants. I was really struggling with indoor plants for some reason. And he's like, let's get the silk plants. He kept going, I was like, no, we and he was just like, but you don't have to worry about watering them, they're not gonna die. Yeah. And I'm like, but that's not the point. I do have them now all around my office. And it is a different energy, but there's something about nurturing and caring and slowing down that I think is really important. That, yeah, it is quote unquote a burden that I have to take care of them. But I think that there's something important for humans when we have to care and nurture for something else. You've written about the value of slowness, that a tree doesn't rush to grow, a seed doesn't bloom overnight. There's a lot of wisdom and resilience in that patience. And it like directly counter to how most of us in the West are living. I'd love to talk about how slowness aligns to thriving. And what do we lose when we only operate at machine speed? And how does maybe nature help us repattern when we slow down?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's really astute observations. Yeah, it's a tight rope, right? Kind of gotta navigate it carefully. I mean, full disclosure, I work at Google and I've been in high-tech corporate environments for pretty much my entire career. So I am a little bit biased, but I feel like, you know, we do have to embrace some of the speed and some of the technology. And I am a techno optimist in some ways. Um, and I know the AI, there's a lot going on around AI. Uh, the CEO of Nvidia said that AI is not going to take your job. The person who uses AI is gonna take your job. So in my own work, when I think about using technology and using AI, you always invite AI to the table, but you're always there. A human always needs to stay in the loop. So as AI and software and technology and all of these tools are advancing and taking more of our time, we can't forget that we aren't machines. We can't lose our essential human intuition. And we really have to balance all of the culture and the technology and understand that some of the most advanced technology that we have is actually the wisdom of nature and the ancestral wisdom of indigenous peoples. And to just remember that nature has 3.8 billion years of research and development and technology. So we don't need to constantly be reinventing the wheel either. There is a real value of slowing down in this digital age, especially with this AI race and everything. And it and it goes far beyond me just like taking a break from my screen and going out for 30 minutes. I really think more and more it's about connecting with the profound ancient idea that nature is not just a resource. Nature is technology and it's an ancestor that we can learn from. And then that kind of shifts our perspective that it's like a relative. It's not a piece of property. And that changes our relationship and our sense of respect for it. And going back to being slow and being present, you wouldn't just sprint past your grandma and just check your phone. You would sit down with them, you would listen with them, you would spend quality time with them. Same with nature. We should do that because they're our ancestor, right? So slowing down makes us present with our oldest relatives. And then, you know, to see this in practice, actually, one example is New Zealand with agreements with the Maori people. They passed legislation that granted legal personhood to natural landscapes, including mountains and forests and rivers. Not going to try to pronounce the landscapes' names, but they didn't just label it as a protected park. They legally recognized them as living entities and rights similar to a human person. It's just beautiful. It's a beautiful example of treating our environment as a relative and shared lineage that we must honor. And so, do when I do look to the future, there is a balance that we have to strike. I love the brilliance of technology at times and the progress and the fast change. It's really fun. And we can use that to optimize some very archaic designs and way of thinking in cities and buildings and culture. But at the foundation, everything really has to start from us and that in human intuition and drawing from that deep ancestral wisdom. That's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01

And it reminds me this tension of opposites. And I talked about polarity earlier this season, which is somehow we always get ourselves into an either or, right? And it's okay. Like I love technology as well. I'm concerned a little bit about data centers and how it's affecting the environment, not to mention jobs and all of that. But why can't we marry those two things together? Why can't we re-retain this linkage to our ancestral wisdom and then and then add this modern technology and insights into it? Why, you know, I mean, I kind of have an answer, why somewhat cynically, that nature's become this commodity that we kind of extract for purposes for commercial gain. And I think we somehow just lost the thread of what we're what we're trying to do. Somehow we got so ahead of ourselves with commercialization that we forgot, as you like you you've said, this is our medicine, this is a connection. I want to shift and talk about conflict. And I did some research around this, and nature has historically been a reset mechanisms for humans. And going back to our ancestral lineage, ancient cultures used shared labor on land, ritual and landscape, time and wilderness as part of how they navigated rupture and rebuilt trust. I'm wondering, is there anything in biophilic design practice that draws on that tradition, a way to use the environment itself as a conflict resolution tool? And certainly in these days where it feels like there's a lot of polarity and conflict, could this, is there some sort of wisdom in this that we can find?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's a really awesome question. I actually just thought of something though on the last topic about ancestral wisdom and an interesting technology overlap. Wanda Della Costa, who's an Indigenous architect, she was saying how a lot of indigenous cultures they pass down knowledge through telling storytelling. And that means that there's not a lot of written text on this beautiful knowledge. And so AI is not really touching it and it's not on Google and it's not written anywhere because it's not passed down like that. And so AI models are not being trained with all of this indigenous wisdom. And so she's actually working on creating an AI model and training it on and creating a repository of indigenous wisdom and writing it down. I thought that was really cool. That's fantastic. Yeah. But uh yeah, I mean, by life, I I've been dancing between all between those extremes a lot. I actually just shifted my role at Google, but for the past over five years, I worked in high-stakes incident response and privacy and cybersecurity. Oh wow. Yeah. A little busy, a little intense. I'm also a ice hockey goalie. I love scuba diving and I also used to rock climb at a competitive level. So I like to do things that are hard and like adrenaline. Apparently. Yeah. Um, when you're an active incident commander, or you know, when you're 60 feet underwater scuba diving, you are operating in a reality where the stakes can be really high. That intense high stakes pressure, it does make you sharper. Sometimes it doesn't. But learning how to handle it, maintain like a non-anxious presence, wrap a process around the ambiguity and chaos as much as possible. It is absolutely a skill that you can practice and get better at. And your relationship with nature isn't always peace and quiet, right? Nature is the ultimate training ground for honing that skill and that pressure. Rock climbing, I transitioned from indoor to outdoor, actually on rock faces, profoundly humbling, profoundly humbling. Nature reminds you all the time that you are not in control, you're not in control on the mountain or the ocean, 60 feet, 100 feet, whatever, underwater. You're only in control of your own response. And uh, you know, researchers have also noted that we consider human beings to kind of be a battery with cognitive and emotional energy. And natural environments actually are the charging station too. In biomimicry, they have something called like life's core principles. It's really, really beautiful. One is to adapt to changing conditions and to maintain integrity through self-renewal. And so nature really teaches us both how to survive crisis with that non-anxious presence and then also how to actively recharge and renew ourselves. But sometimes, like a baby bird, it pushes us out of the nest and says, Okay, you gotta learn to fly now.

SPEAKER_01

How impressive all the things that you do. I've been diving for a while too, and to your exact point, it forces you to be very present. One little tiny story. I had been diving for a while. I guess I was getting a little bit too confident, and nature decided to remind me. I think I was the last person in the group, and the dive master sends me back up. I'm doing my surface stop, and I decide I'm not gonna hold on to the thing because I want to be cool and I can do it. And so I'm looking at my watch, and next thing I know, I turn around and the boat's gone because I guess the the waves had picked up and I hadn't realized I had drifted away. And then all of a sudden I'm like, okay, don't you know, don't get excited, it'll be fine. And I ended up, you know, there they teach you you have to swim a little bit. And if you can't see the boat, then slowly, slowly ascend. And so that's what I did. And there was a whole boat full of people like far away looking for me and then screaming, there she is, there she is, you know, with my tail between my legs. I I swam back and I just thought, and to this day, it was such an important lesson, and luckily a pretty benign one, that you know, in in the face of nature, no matter how many dives you've had or where you've gone, you have to have this humbleness. And in some Eastern spiritual traditions, that beginner mind, right? It's sort of like it's so wise in how it teaches you. So thank you for indulging me. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it was, you know, there's these lessons, and it's so it's again this this nod to some greater wisdom that's there.

SPEAKER_00

And then also you're there to help support others too, right? So then you can be that calm person that knows how to deal if an emergency or if a crisis comes up as well, and you need those people.

SPEAKER_01

Uh, you had mentioned you you work at Google. So I live in and work in New York City, and I ride my bike along this wonderful waterfront esplanade on the Hudson River that they've spent so many years making. It's so beautiful. There's so much, so much life there. Uh, and I ride past Google's campuses, which is around Pier 57 and St. John's Terminal, and the building is phenomenal and it stands out like a wonderful exception to the rule. There's so much uh green space, right even on the building itself, in line with whatever is appropriate that you could share. Could you talk a little bit about your company's approach to nature? Because they seem to have bought into biophilic design from what I can see, even from the street.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, they have gone all in. Pretty much every Google building has biophilic design elements. New York City is such amazing examples. Google is very data-driven. They're not just guessing what makes a space look good and what makes employees productive. Everything is guided by an internal biophilic design framework and it's integrated into the architecture itself as much as possible. Sometimes they're retrofitting, sometimes they're building having world-renowned starchitects, star architects like Jark Ingalls, design from the ground up, which is really cool. Google does view humans as an integral part of nature, and they understand the impact in how people function. And there's a whole bunch of things that they target, like mood and problem solving and cognitive function and things like that. And they do know and recognize that these environments are very stressful. They're very information rich, and there's a lot of coping and critical thinking that needs to happen. But also, we need some intellectual restoration, some comfort. I know that New York City specifically, they did a redesign. And yeah, they brought an engineer to figure out how to bring biophilia into the interior spaces. There's multiple floor green walls. They wanted to see how they could incorporate biophilic design elements to optimize for social connection, not just like pure efficiency. In one of the buildings in California that I used to work in, they actually thought about acoustics. So they do a lot of acoustic design. They have dedicated massage and chill-out rooms. They're very data-driven and they know that this affects the bottom line and it helps create more productive, healthy spaces for their employees. And they've gone all in. I do really appreciate Google for that. Yeah. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

And if anyone needs a better rubber stamp on such a successful and reputable organization, I want to be sensitive of our time. But before we go, I'd love to hear more about your biophilic design course and the community you've built, who it's for, and how folks might get involved. Because you said something earlier, which is so important. And I think especially in times where we all feel somewhat powerless to some of these very big existential problems, we can't sit down and solve the healthcare crisis. But there's some things, as you said, that we can do. And so I try to always talk about things that we can take away, and they might seem or feel small, but I don't need to be an architect to understand biophilic design. I can, as you said, think about my immediate space, my home, even my desk and my cubicle. And I was even noticing that my current screensaver has all these pictures of rhododendron in bloom. I chose that. As you said, that even looking at that wallpaper makes a little difference. So I'd love to hear more.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think we all should be empowered for sure and not, it can be overwhelming. I understand that, but there's a lot of free and cheap ways that you can design it and things that you can bring into your environment. I was reading an article in the journal of Biophilic Design, and it's a great journal. It was around how someone was visiting their sick mother in the hospital, and she wasn't really recovering very well. You know, it's just like one of those regular sterile environments. So she bought in, she brought in plants, potted plants and flowers and like more nice cozy blankets that are earth-toned and printed out really big pictures of nature and just put it everywhere. And apparently she recovered super quickly. And the doctors were like, whoa, what has happened with this recovery trajectory? Wow. So yeah, there's a lot that can be done there for sure. There is a lot of disheartening things in our society. I totally understand. For me, especially, yeah, water is really important to me growing up in Hawaii. I do have a very big passion for water. So seeing polluted rivers and waterways and how we manage rainfall events and stuff like that. But generally, a lot of us live in concrete jungles and there's just a growing disattachment between people and nature, like we're almost on two separate trajectories. And basically, this disattachment from nature and leaving Hawaii and then studying sustainable design. When I graduated, it was really hard to find a job doing this sort of thing. Biophilic design was very niche 15 years ago, but it's up and coming, which is really exciting. So I created the biophilic design community on LinkedIn back in college because I wanted to give hope to myself, really, and to inspire myself that people are actually doing this. This is a thing. This does work at any scale, at in any climate, at any budget, all around the world. And I wanted to connect with other people who are doing things and real things and boots on the ground. So I wanted to really make a space for professionals and enthusiasts. And that's the same with my course. My community is around 130,000 people. Yeah, we have a newsletter. So definitely check it out. I really do, yeah, again, just want to give people hope and remind us that we're not alone to restore the balance between the built-in natural world. And then I had my daughter Amelia, who's almost two years old, and she kind of put a fire up my back of what is the world that she's gonna be inhabiting and made me want to rediscover some of this and just to shout it from the rooftops. So I created the Learn Biophilic Design course and it really distilled everything that I've learned in architecture school and then everything from running and managing the community and just my own experiences, but I wanted to make it in a really approachable format. I really think that architecture and design can be a little snooty and be a little walled-gardened.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And I really didn't want this to just be for specialized people who have access to formal education and stuff like that. It's very multidisciplinary. If you live in a home or you work in an office, it can relate to you, right? And so I really wanted to make it highly accessible and practical and inspiring for anyone to take ownership of the spaces that they inhabit really at any scale. But saying that, you do have interior designers and architects and are learning how to apply biophilic design into their projects as well, because I do have very specific frameworks that also are good for that audience, too. But I wanted to make sure that other folks who don't have architecture degrees can also have access to this. But yeah, that's essentially why I created the community in college and why I created my course.

SPEAKER_01

That's so it's so inspiring and something, and some number of people who've come on here who have started something because it was something they needed. And I always find that those are the things that are successful. It's like you create what you need or needed as a child or when you were younger, or you need now. Um, most likely someone else needs it too. And so you're you're not just healing yourself, you're healing the world. And as we were talking about today, just how important this is to our humanity, to our mental well-being, to our physical well-being, not just how it makes us feel, but this is the food we eat. This is the food our food eats. This is this is us. We are entwined with this. And so you shouting it from the mountaintops is so important. It's courageous and it's so easy right now to shut down. And you could have easily just been someone who posted pictures of flowers on your Instagram feed. I'm sure running a community like you're running with an a, you know, a very successful career is a lot.

SPEAKER_00

And so I want to and now with AI too, I'm really trying to balance like how much AI do I put out there? What's AI slop? What can you trust now? Because yeah, you can you can ask AI. It definitely has a place in the design process, right? Especially in the ideation process, you want to get someone inspired. Take a picture of like a room and then put that into Gemini. Sorry, I'm a Google person, so I'm gonna say this, put it into Gemini and say, like, how do I add more nature into this or make what biophilic design elements can I pull into this? And it can create a rendering for you. And that can really help if you're trying to pitch a project because not everyone is a some people need that visualization, but I am seeing some like kind of AI slop and like some stuff that I'm just like, I don't know if that's functionally gonna work very well, or you're not really respecting natural laws and stuff like that. So it there's a balance too with all the technology coming out. We need each other, right?

SPEAKER_01

We're not humans are not completely replaceable. We're we I maybe the other side of this, just to end on a more philosophical note, is when AI can take care of a certain amount of the work that we used to do, it frees us up to maybe reconnect with our humanity and and nature. And unless Gemini is going to be out in the garden and weeding for me, yeah, I need to do it. And how can we maybe look at this more broadly and stop finding that there's only these two polar choices that we have? Yeah. I this has just been so wonderful, and there's so many things I want to talk to you about. But as we wrap up, is there anything else that you want people to know or walk away with? Something that we haven't touched on that feels important to you.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. You're not alone. Thanks for listening. Please connect with me on my LinkedIn. Send me something that you're inspired by so I can share it. Sometimes folks share, like, there was this one thread that we posted, and then people just shared pictures of their garden. I was like, oh my gosh, this is so fun. What they're growing. I guess people ask me if I could paint a magic brush with biophilia. What would I want? And I guess my dream goal for all of this would be that the lines between the built environment and the wild would be blurred, right? And going back to that nature deficit that I was feeling, I just really don't want those lines. I don't want us to have to go to a park to experience nature. I want to be inhibiting nature every day. And I want my my daughter to feel every day and have that connection. And just to remind folks that we're not separate from nature and we are nature. And yeah, that's about it.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I'm gonna put links to your LinkedIn and your course, your community. I'm a member. I can tell you once you start to connect to this stuff, finding community with other people who get it is also another wonderful opportunity to connect with people. And then there's so much out there that's negative. Sharing a picture of the first time you've ever grown a rose and having people congratulate you and tell you it's beautiful, that this is the kind of energy and community that we absolutely want to build. So thank you so much. Uh it's been a pleasure talking to you. I I'm really inspired by everything you do.

SPEAKER_00

And thanks again for your time today. Thank you for the great questions. And yeah, this was really nice. I love connecting with folks who are like minded, and I'm just seeing more and more folks interested in biophilia and biophilic design, and it's giving me even more hope. And we need more of it, not less. And there's room for everyone. There's infinite abundance and room for everyone. Wonderful. Thank you.

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Mary Schaub

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