Resilience in the Midwest: How does nature buffer high speed winds?

Those of us who live in the American Upper Midwest have it pretty good. 

Although we rarely take the time to acknowledge it, comparatively to other more vulnerable regions in the globe, we are living in an ideal location. We live in the breadbasket and grow more than enough food to feed ourselves. We’re well above sea level, so we will not be affected by anticipated sea level rise. And we have the world’s largest accessible freshwater body – the Great Lakes – in our back yard. But, we still have our own forms of adversity with which we need to contend - and the tornado that flattened homes outside of Peoria, Illinois, this weekend proves that even inland areas must adapt to the challenge of increasing storm intensity.

Chris Walker, Chicago Tribune, Nov. 18, 2013

According to the Chicago Climate Action Plan, it is likely our region will experience a variety of disturbances, including stronger, but infrequent, storms causing wind damage, widespread flooding and/or intermittent drought. In the wake of the recent tornado that wrecked communities across Illinois, let’s start with wind damage – how can we make our homes and infrastructure more resilient to damaging wind speeds? As an architect and biomimic, I believe the answer can be found by looking at how our neighbors, the native organisms that have occupied this land long before we have, solve the same challenge. We can start by asking nature!

How does nature...buffer high speed winds?

Every time there is a large storm event, we see absolute devastation of our human habitats. There are no metrics to measure the wildlife populations before and after strong storm events, such as tornadoes, but it's safe to say that native populations have adapted themselves to survive and thrive through a variety of disturbances. By looking to native organisms and patterns found in nature, we can begin to think of new and innovative ways of surviving high wind speeds in our built infrastructure. Some patterns we find in nature include:

Blog Post: Resilient Communities on the Edge

How can we learn from ecosystems in nature to design more resilient communities? The B-Collaborative founder, Amy Coffman Phillips, wrote an article on this topic for The Resiliency Institute, a local suburban permaculture advocacy group. Read the article and let us know what you think!

Ecotones in Nature (creative commons image credit: wikipedia.org)

"Studies have shown that America has become much more polarized in the last twenty-five years in terms of race, socioeconomic status, and particularly political world views. These divisions have been exacerbated by structural forces, such as fragmented news media, increasing disparity of socio-economic conditions, and indoctrinated societal world-views, to name a few.

Each of these barriers are complex and interrelated, but if you accept we have inadvertently created these structural barriers that serve to disconnect our communities, we should be able to identify and break down these barriers as well. Doing so would foster interconnected, resilient communities that are able to resolve disputes and weather disturbance more effectively than is possible today.

As a biomimic and architect, I look to nature for inspiration to design buildings, communities, and cities that function more like a healthy ecosystem – rich with interconnections, diversity, and mutualisms. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about ecotones. Until last year, I wouldn’t have even known what that term meant, but now I see them and think about the parallels between ecosystem communities and our human communities every day. So what is an ecotone and what could we learn from ecosystems in nature to inspire more diverse, interconnected, and resilient communities?"

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