IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

72 Chapter 3
such as walking, biking, or boating are excluded from the most influential
databases, thereby skewing wildly policy considerations of the best mobility
mix. And we use time gained by speed in order to travel further. We
don’t choose explicitly between more mobility or less—we simply build
the components, or the infrastructures, that we think we’ll need in the
future. Small actions can have big effects. Once we get it into our collective
heads that predict and provide is a hopeless way to deal with mobility, and
revalorize the here and now, we’ll be motivated to start looking for alternatives
and try out small alternative steps. One alternative is all around us,
ready for inspection. This system is the result of 3.8 billion years of iterative,
trial-and-error design—so we can safely assume it’s an optimized solution.
As Janine Benyus explains in Biomimicry, biological communities, by
and large, are localized or closely connected in time and space. Energy flux
is low, distances proximate. ‘‘Nature doesn’t commute to work.’’ 56