Convo: Bill Browning on Biophilic Design
In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Bill Browning, Founding Partner of Terrapin Bright Green, a sustainability consulting firm that helps governments, corporations, and complex real estate projects meet sustainability goals that lead to the improved health and wellbeing of employees and ecosystems, as well as the enhanced performance of their products and systems.
Bill is one of the green building and real estate industry’s foremost thinkers and strategists, and an advocate for sustainable design solutions at all levels of business, government, and civil society. His expertise has been sought out by organizations as diverse as Fortune 500 companies, leading universities, non-profit organizations, the U.S. military, and foreign governments.
He and Ted worked together at Rocky Mountain Institute, where he founded Green Development Services, an entrepreneurial, non-profit “Think and Do Tank.” He later went on to co-found Terrapin Bright Green, created out of the Partners’ shared sense of urgency to transition to a sustainable development model that could only be achieved by working with developers, communities, and companies around the world. Their mission has become an imperative to not only create a sustainable world but one that is aligned with natural processes and supports human health and wellbeing at all levels.
He defines biophilic design and shares case studies that demonstrate the effects that harmonizing the built environment and natural world have on cognitive growth, health and wellbeing, and profitability and productivity within the business sector. Terrapin’s work is reflective of both the culture of the community and the environmental features of a given ecosystem.