Biomimicry, a Concept of Ultimate N | 4min snip from COMPLEXITY

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Katherine Collins on Better Investing Through Biomimicry

COMPLEXITY

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Biomimicry, a Concept of Ultimate N

Biomimicry offers us some strategies for starting to untie the knot into which we have tangled all of civilization and the biosphere. In your book, you talk about recognizing ourselves as part of nature, rather than as set aside from it in some way. I'd love to hear you riffon on that a bit and give us some examples of the different kinds of creatures like ino. To the extent that we have created in our efforts to control the world,that we have created a new wilderness that exists in this deeply abstracted realm of financ agents.

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We are all investors: we all make choices, all the time, about our allocation of time, calories, attention… Even our bodies, our behavior and anatomy, represent investment in specific strategies for navigating an evolving world. And yet most people treat the world of finance as if it is somehow separate from the rest of life — including people who design the tools of finance, or who come up with economic theories. Many of the human world’s problems can be traced back to this fundamental error, and, by extension, many of the problems we create for other life-forms on this planet. What changes when we take the time to pause, and listen, and reflect on how the biosphere already works? How do we balance innovation with sustainability, or growth with resource distribution? Could a careful study of nature not only lead to better business outcomes but also help us heal the living world?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we talk to SFI’s new Board Chair Katherine Collins, Head of Sustainable Investing at Putnam, about insights encoded in her book, The Nature of Investing. We discuss how investing has transformed in the 21st Century and what new challenges have emerged because of it; the tragedy of value capture; the push and pull between sustainability and efficiency; the consequential differences between risk and uncertainty, problems and mysteries; how multiple timescales interact to produce complexity in the market; balancing growth and development; and what all this means for those who want to do good and not just well with their investments…

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Podcast theme music by Mitch Mignano.

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