Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease

Sagarin received a Guggenheim Fellowship in order to work on (the book): LEARNING FROM THE OCTOPUS: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease. Sagarin explains how natural organisms have learned to thrive in an unpredictable and risk filled planet without having the power to plan, predict, or try to perfect themselves.

Sagarin goes on to show how adopting just a few principles of natural adaptability has helped Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians work together to improve the health of all their people regardless of what side of the borders they live on, helped a giant company like 3M save hundreds of millions of dollars while vastly reducing its environmental impact, and helped soldiers and marines in Iraq finally overcome the threat of improvised explosive devices.

Sagarin was recently featured in Stanford Law School Magazine, here’s an excerpt:
“Now an assistant research scientist at the University of Arizona, Sagarin has turned his observational focus to questions of national security: How can people adapt to changing conditions using evolutionary principles? His work, which now involves collaboration with military and government officials as well as with fellow scientists, asks what humanity can learn from nature when dealing with complex uncertainties, like natural disasters or terrorism.

“The problems that are faced by natural organisms are exactly the same problems that businesses face, that security experts face, that climate change experts face, which is that the world is full of risk and it’s unpredictable,” says Sagarin, a wiry man with unruly brown hair who speaks in thoughtful bursts. “We have a lot to learn from natural systems because they’ve been adapting to unpredictable challenges for 3.5 billion years.”

Thought-provoking, timely, and wholly unexpected, the results of Sagarin’s research hold the potential to revolutionize the way we approach uncertainty. From government rulers and military leaders to healthcare providers to business consultants, LEARNING FROM THE OCTOPUS offers ground-breaking lessons for how we might best prepare society for any type of risk, no matter when, or where, it appears.

Podcast of the interview Download:
 

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