Ecosphere Intelligence

What is Ecosphere Intelligence?

Ecosphere intelligence is an awareness and capacity to respond to the realities of a city’s climate and eco-region environment. Just as honey bees adapt themselves to different geographies, Integral Cities in different locations must adapt different solutions to the same infrastructure problems.

Each city location provides a different combination of matter, energy and information in its resources. This has meant that over time, humans have discovered and developed, different technological solutions for city infrastructure that are appropriate for each distinctive environment.

An Integral City lives sustainably not just from resources taken from the environment, but because appropriate resources are intentionally returned to the environment. Thus a self-supporting seasonal feedback loop operates.

So What?

Our internal environments need to connect to our external environments in very specific ways… so that both individual and collective human life can optimize diversity and resilience in the system. Both diversity and resilience are what we need most in the face of any stress or disaster. What’s more, diversity is a major contributor to innovation, and the driver of new combinations and invention for sustainable eco-systems.
The beginnings of sharing this intelligence are now emerging through a convergence of positive and negative factors related to the resources we consume as measured in a carbon footprint.

This ecological footprint is the first stage of developing true natural capital-based vital signs monitors. Eco-footprints provide a wake-up call for cities who measure their resource consumption and equivalent land displacements to realize the extent to which they borrow natural capital from both surrounding and distant geo-bio regions, which depletes their natural capital account unless they develop a strategy to return it (or even improve it).