Metamimicry’s Role
Mission: To explore accessible biological solutions for our time’s most pressing environmental pollutants.
Vision: A shift towards a culture of remediation for diverse natural ecosystems and humankind to thrive.
Metamimicry is a newly-formed environmental nonprofit operating out of Olympia, Washington. We work to serve tribes, non-profits, small governments, and businesses in the Puget Sound region. Our aim is to, whenever possible, utilize pre-existing infrastructure to restore the environment’s ability to remediate soil, water, and air. We pursue funding for our partners primarily through grants, allowing us to research, design, and implement solutions at little to no cost to them. We will work to advance grassroots bioremediation methods through a research-centric approach. We also work with Indigenous peoples to further food sovereignty and traditional medicine efforts. Recognizing that these efforts combine to combat pollutants in the environment, inside the body and out on the land. Together we support, enhance, and inspire remediation efforts through the incorporation of research and reporting into grassroots remediation projects, improving the long-term sustainability of this work.
Why Bioremediation?
The Problem:
The problem lies at the intersection of specific conditional factors that create a culture of pollution. These factors include improper planning and an economic-based rather than a value-based approach. Pollution is an acute detriment to well-being: affecting people, ecosystems, and economies. It is accountable for 16% of the global deaths, and 25% within the most polluted regions (Landrigan et al 2017). Pollution also accounts for the loss of 5% gross domestic product (GDP) in developing countries (Reddy and Behera 2006). Pollution complicates existing problems such as food insecurity, biodiversity, and drinking water availability, all of which coalesce to create a system of degeneration.
There are many physical and chemical strategies to address pollution and its subsequent complications. However, these methods are often expensive, produce toxic byproducts, and prove ineffective for low concentrated but highly toxic chemicals (Khan et al 2019). A growing grassroots community of people have come together to develop and deploy bioremediation techniques that create mutualistic relationships in polluted ecosystems. Between microbial remediation, phytoremediation, and mycoremediation th ere are hundreds of effective strategies with the capacity to effectively handle widespread pollution.
Our Solution:
Metamimicry’s purpose is to become an intrinsic element within a new culture of remediation. One of our main goals is to enhance the effectiveness of green infrastructure through research-backed design. We will do this by leveraging underutilized ‘in situ’ and restorative practices through our research in the form of grant-backed projects, designs, and experiments. We will also work to make implementation more accessible, reaching the public through education while keeping our research and designs in the public domain.
Unlike other research-centric environmental groups in the region such as Cascadia Research and Northwest Watershed Institute, Metamimicry’s focus is on measuring the effectiveness of grassroots remediation techniques in order to reconstitute generative ecosystem functions in real world applications. Informed through a social ecology lens, Metamimicry works to bridge efforts of sustainability in the urban environment by designing decentralized, interdependent, and self-renewing systems of remediation. Included in our methodology is a biomimetic approach to design, utilizing strategies that nature has tested over millions of years.