The metaphor for changing is powerful. But when it comes to the future and how we want to change, we can find many models in the natural world.
“What about the lowly cockroach or the lowly earwig?” says Jessica Ware, an associate curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History, rolling her eyes. (Or Imbler’s gum-leaf skeletonizer.) By some estimates, around 60 percent of all animals go through what scientists call holometabolism—a fancy word for reforming your entire body like butterflies do. Ladybugs, beetles, bees, lacewings, and flies all wrap themselves up and go through an incredible transformation. “You know, there’s a lot of really cool insects out there, but they get no press, they get no greeting cards. It’s all butterflies, butterflies, butterflies,” Ware says.
Stories of collaboration and transformation are common in the natural world. These stories are ones we can all likely learn from.
For example, some sea slugs eat algae, and then extract the chloroplasts and make it into their own photosynthesis. Others sea slugs, which eat poisonous sponges, store the poison in their body to protect themselves. Spade sees this as a connection to Spade’s belief that groups could benefit from each other’s different attributes and skill sets. “We could all get skilled up, and we could gain the most interesting skills that various people in the group have brought.” For Dean, it’s a reminder that “we are each a very small part of something very big.”
For Liz Neeley, a science communicator and founder of the firm Liminal, it’s a giant, dorky-looking fish that offers a metaphor for change. She points to the mola mola—also known as the giant ocean sunfish. And giant is no overstatement—by the time they’re adults, these fish can weigh over 4,000 pounds. They are not born this large. When they’re born, they’re 3 millimeters long—about half the length of a grain of rice. The mola mola’s total body weight increases by 60 million over the course of their lives. That changes everything. “Your ability to perceive your environment, the things you find frightening, even how much effort it takes to move through water,” says Neeley. “At that size, water is heavy, it’s thick, it’s gloppy. You’re kind of swimming through syrup.”
That car-sized giant fish can now be seen swimming across the sea with an inkling of how it felt to be small and vulnerable as it fought against all the water. “I don’t know exactly what size I am as a fish,” says Neeley. “But I hope I can continue to build a practice of revisiting those core assumptions I have about myself in the world and what’s a threat to me and how I move through it.”
This is all because my podcast fundamentally, Flash forwardIt was all about transformation. Is it possible to make a difference in the future? How do we get to the tomorrows we want and not the ones we don’t? A key piece to that answer has to do the way that insects turn into goo. To get the future we desire, must we completely dissolve our bodies and world? Is it necessary to completely destroy the world and build new ones? Are we able to change slowly and incrementally?
