Ayres Knowledge Center Learning From Nature | Page 5

professionals, we focus on the primary objective of making
highways safe, and we tend not to think of highway design
of the place, but we should. And the challenge here isn’t
about the vegetation on the shoulder of the road or
stormwater control for a highway. I’m talking about the
means and materials. If every road looks like every road
everywhere else, we probably aren’t doing a good enough
job of designing of the place. Enough said. On to rule
number two.
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2: EXPECT A HIGH ROI
Generally speaking, the more Nature has invested in an
object or system, the more value it expects to get from
its investment in terms of how long it lasts or how it
supports the other parts of a system. To put it another
way, Nature doesn’t typically invest a lot of energy into an
object or place unless it expects that investment to result
in high returns. This is true for individual structures, like
a mountain or tree, or systems like a prairie or forests.
Nature builds objects and systems to withstand change. 9
Here’s the funny part about this, though. Change is the
investment. This doesn’t make sense, I know. Let me
explain.
As we discussed earlier, Nature wants objects and systems
to resist change. 10 The more Nature invests in an object
or system the longer it expects that something to resist
change. Think of a mountain. Nature put a whole lot
of energy into raising the mountain and invested a lot
of mineral resources into the rocks and stones of that
mountain. That mountain is a mineral bank. After building
the bank, Nature then meters out the minerals through
erosive techniques over a period of time. The mountain, as
a whole, is durable to most forms of violent impacts over
the long turn. Even when a mountain is hit by tornadoes,
hurricanes, or even subsequent volcanoes, most of the
mineral bank remains intact. It might break into pieces,
but it is rarely vaporized into its constituent parts. The
investment to create the mountain was a huge change
This may sound like it contradicts the first rule Preservation of Essence. Remember I likened the rules of nature to a game. Well, the
best games have competing interests. The value and excitement comes in the competition of interests. In this case the first two rules
have at the surface competing interests but the outcome is much more exciting.
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In nature, change is any deviation in an object’s or system’s normal and desired state of affairs; such as wear, pressure, damage. The
ability to resist change defines an object’s or system’s durability.
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