About: Nik is a science communicator, ecological designer, and innovator of place-based rewilding and regenerative culture. He uses cognitive and behavioral lenses to transmute cultural and institutional distorted beliefs and maladapted behaviors into biophilic infrastructure, nature based solutions and reciprocity based economies.

Website: ​www.ritualbiology.org

Bio: The son of an East German social psychologist mother and Lithuanian architect/mountaineer father, Nik grew up free range in Seattle, Washington. Weekdays were strictly for schoolwork, but weekends and summers were reserved for climbing the North Cascades, mushrooming old growth forests or exploring remote beaches.

Climbing continued into the college years and merged with filmmaking, and photography at Colorado College. At the nexus of the Sonoran desert, Rocky Mountains and the high plains of the west, backcountry adventure was endless and constant.  He gravitated towards the environmental science department where he focused on fire ecology, and the fine art program where he fabricated a bicycle towed “house-bike” and lived in it for six months as an extended performance/commentary on simple living in urban environments. He finished with a degree in Ecological Design, a self-designed major inspired by the writings and works of John Todd,  Stuart Cowan, Sim Van der Ryn and a Permaculture Design Course with BIll Mollison.

Post graduation he found and worked with the most radical eco-designers he could find, Pliny Fisk at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, TX, Paolo Soleri at Arcosanti near Flagstaff, Arizona and closed loop nutrient cycling agronomist Francisco Arroyo in Mexico City. He was also exposed to production organic farming at Jubilee Farm on the Snoqualamie River and worked and taught at the Bullock brothers Permaculture Education Center on the Salish Sea.

While studying Wes Jackson’s Land Institute in Kansas he met Aysha Massell and Jacques Abelman and together they formed an Art Collective. Over the course of a couple of years they were commissioned to build a couple of sculptural natural buildings that explored bioregional vernaculars and eventually a large time based land installation at Plan B in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that harvested stormwater run-off from a road into a field of clay/compost “nuclear” seedbombs that  dissolved into a native food forest.

A job with an Ecological Restoration Company called EarthCorps landed him back in his hometown of Seattle which solidified his love of native plants and amplified his curiosity about management of invasive species.In this period he also collaborated with the UW’s college of the Built Environment’s Public Interest Design program.

A permaculture design/build company in Santa Fe called Living Structures hired him to project manage large earthworks and erosion control structures after the Cerro Grande wildfire threatened to release radionuclide laden ash from Los Alamos national Laboratory into the rio grande river.

Under the leadership of Claudia Sheinbaum Mexico City launched the first urban organic food certification program by and for Mexicans called Sello Verde. By that point Nik had experienced building several wastewater treatment wetlands with 20/20 engineering, Tom Watson’s “Watson Wick”, and Paco Arroyo’s “organoponics” and wastewater contaminated irrigation water had become the single greatest barrier to a clean urban agriculture and he was hired to help a team of agro-ecologists prototype wetland based solutions to wastewater bioremediation. By this time he became proficient in spanish and began to work as a translator for bioremediation science articles and for international organic certifiers.

The urban farming scene in Oakland, California captured his attention and he became certified as a Permaculture Teacher and worked on several nascent urban permaculture efforts including CitySlicker Farms, the Ecology Center’s eco-house and Green Fairie Farm. Merritt College’s landscape horticulture program had recently offered a permaculture class and Nik spent 5 years helping develop and teach one of the nations first two year associates degrees in Permaculture and Regenerative Design.

Through attending conferences like the Society for Ecological Restoration and Bioneers, Nik was exposed to TEK, traditional ecological knowledge,  Dennis Martinez and Malcolm Margolin and became active in campaigns to defend threatened groves of Oaks, California’s traditional “breadbasket”.

In this period Nik and a group of colleagues helped permit, design and install one of the states first wastewater wetlands at the Ecohouse. Subsequently they were inspired to start a Design-Build Cooperative specializing in earthworks and water systems called the DIG COOP.

After leaving Merritt, Nik was invited to teach and develop his curriculum at the oldest art school in the west, the San Francisco Art Institute. Here he added classes like Predator Economics and Urban Ecology to his repertoire. Simultaneously he was curating informal  naturalist events and met a group of bay area naturalists that created a non-profit called the California Center for Natural History. CCNH helped organize place-based bio-blitzes that use the Inaturalist platform to contribute to biodiversity research. Nik specialized in leading outings that conducted naturalist interpretation of various management techniques on working lands.

Around this same period Nik teamed up with a group of sustainability educators from the Sustainable Living Roadshow and co-founded PLACE, an acronym for people linking art, community and ecology. Place bootstrapped a not for profit cooperative that converted a parking lot and abandoned warehouse into a tiny house village, urban food forest, maker space and community center.

Through the films of John D Liu, Nik became aware of the movement to restore large scale degraded ecosystems. After meeting John at the Regeneration Festival in Spain, Nik was invited to co-organize the
California chapter of the Large-scale Ecosystem restoration Camps council, which culminated in the creation of a network of ecosystem restoration camps across California. With the widespread collapse of California’s kelp forests Nik took a particular interest in marine restoration. Through his work of designing closed loop water and sanitation systems for the Blue Frontiers Floating Cities efforts, Nik worked with Greg Delaune on a design for a method to reverse marine dead zones using floating wetlands and became a finalist for the Schmidt Marine Challenge. Greg and Nik went on to co-found the Deep Blue Institute focused on developing and promoting regenerative marine Infrastructure.

​Today Nik tinkers, ferments, researches and writes relentlessly in his garden laboratory in Bolinas, California. He does freelance design and consulting and sits on the board of the Watershed Alliance of Marin and the Dietrich Institute for Applied Insect Ecology.

contact: [email protected]