After discussing our group's progress with Dr.Vesna, we came to the conclusion that there will be two main parts to the sustainability chapter. 1) The environment can help us 2) We can help the environment. My piece is the first piece in the first part, which introduces core environmental topics and biomimicry. Other people within part 1 will go more in depth to these topics, so my contribution will provide an overview and background knowledge. I am struggling with getting original images/artworks of biomimicry that are not copywrited. I am hoping to figure this out this week.

After the discussion amongst others in the same chapter for the Honors book, we decided that the Sustainability group will be organized in two main parts, which are each interconnected within a larger web. The two main parts are 1.Climate Change / Environment / Disease and 2. Biomimicry and Covid-19 .

I find that I am either a strong optimist or a strong pessimist, I am rarely a mix of the two, thus I made my lines intersect at the end since I don’t switch between them.  Optimist = light, cloth/feather-like ; Pessimist = dark, overwhelming.

Upon reflecting on my blogs for the past 7 weeks, I have found that my entries often focused on similar ideas. I found that I often create associations relating COVID-19, a scientific problem, and an artistic simplification or interpretation of this topic. The two main themes I found in my entries included:

When watching Spaceship Earth (Wolf 2020), I was fascinated by how the theater affected the path toward creating Biosphere 2. The documentary explained that John Allen and the Synergia Ranch practiced theater exercises on the side of their building projects. Additionally, the Spaceship Earth film demonstrated that the Bionaut’s training included theater and performance exercises.

Some of the topics we have discussed in the class thus far has been Eco Materialism, biomimicry, environmentalism, and how these relate to the COVID 19 pandemic. In Linda Weintraub’s book What's Next? Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art, she defines Eco Materialism as "regain(ing) kinship between the physicality of human bodies with the physicality of the planet" (Weintraub, Introduction).

The Big Against the Small: How Animals Fight Molecular Diseases

Inspired by last week’s lecture, and more specifically bread and yeast, I decided to make pizza this weekend. To my surprise, when I went shopping for the ingredients, there was no bread flour and very little yeast available, even weeks into the quarantine. Curious about the longstanding nature of the COVID-19-driven wheat shortage, I began conducting research to understand the extent of this issue.

Katherine Morrett’s piece entitled “An Introduction to Epigenetics” gave a thorough description of epigenetics and its connection to the real world and art. As explained by Morrett, epigenetic factors can influence our gene expression, and thus our appearance, actions, and physiology. Unlike other heritable DNA-binding factors, epigenetic factors can be influenced by the environment, such as diet and exercise.