Notice any similarities? The air-piercing “nose cone” design on Japan’s bullet train was bio-modeled on the beak of a Kingfisher, making it faster, quieter and more efficient
Notice any similarities? The air-piercing “nose cone” design on Japan’s bullet train was bio-modeled on the beak of a Kingfisher, making it faster, quieter and more efficient
When Time magazine named Janine Benyus one of its “45 Heroes of the Environment” in October, it signaled that biomimicry had finally made it into the mainstream consciousness.
Biomimicry refers to the practice of looking to nature for ideas about how to create new designs. Benyus, a natural history writer who has now become the public face of the field, coined the term in her groundbreaking 1997 book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Benyus’s insights launched a revolution in how innovators think about design problems. Instead of starting from scratch or trying to create “better living through chemistry,” they looked to plants and animals to see how they were built, in the hopes of finding ideas that could be applied to new products. Today, the gecko’s powerful ability to cling to vertical surfaces is inspiring new types of adhesion. Exploring photosynthesis in leaves has led to the creation of transparent photocells that can absorb solar rays passing through a window. And a Japanese train picked up speed and reduced energy consumption after modifying the shape of its nose from the tip of a bullet to that of a kingfisher’s beak.
Last year, the Montana-based Biomimicry Institute, where Benyus is president of the board, took one more step to make biomimicry a standard design practice. It created a two-year, masters-level certificate program to train designers, engineers, biologists, businessmen and others to become “practicing biomimics.” Says Benyus, “Hopefully, at the end, they’ll walk out together and have an idea for a new product, or even a new company.”
What is a “practicing biomimic?” What will that person’s job look like in the real world?
A biomimic is somebody who wants to invent a new product or a new process or a new organizational strategy. In order to do this, one of the steps they take is to ask: How would nature do this? And, how would nature not do this? They find some design principles or blueprints or a recipe in nature. What they then design tends to be informed by nature’s advice, the advice of an organism or an eco-system, because nature has already done what it is they are trying to do.
Who do you expect to apply for the certificate program? Designers? Biologists? People with MBAs?
All of the above. We have two workshops right now. One is for people in the design disciplines: designers, engineers, architects, chemists — people who make our world. We teach them the methodology of how you turn to nature for a model and then emulate what you find.
The other type we train is the “biologist at the design table.” As members of the Biomimicry Guild, we go in as biologists, and we sit with designers and engineers who are inventing something. Say they’re inventing a way to take salt out of water, a water desalination device. They want it to be simple, and they want it to not use much energy. Maybe they want it to be something like a bag that you could dip into salt water and pull out fresh water. So what we would say is: Let’s look at membranes in the natural world. Let’s look at kidneys. Let’s look at mangrove roots that are separating salt out of water. Let’s look at the nasal glands of seabirds. Let’s see if we can learn anything from those membranes. That’s what a biologist at the design table does. He tries to inspire an inventor by explaining how nature does what it is they are trying to do.
Biomimicry seems intuitive. But the fact that it’s considered a new idea suggests we haven’t historically turned to nature for solutions. Did we lose that impulse somewhere along the way?
Biomimicry resonates with people because it’s a sort of remembering of something we did naturally when we were hunters and gatherers, which is about 99 percent of the time we’ve been on earth.
Fossil fuels put us on the end of a very long lever, and we figured out “better living through industrial chemistry.” We really pulled away from the natural world. I think we’re circling back, perhaps because we’ve been faced with some unintended consequences of our technologies. The technological trance has been broken. We’ve said: “All right, this time, when we invent our way out of the situation we’re in, perhaps we should go to some models that we can trust, things that are not just cool technologies but well-adapted technologies, technologies that are well adapted to life on earth over the long haul.”
Who’s “getting it” these days?
We count among our clients General Electric, General Mills, Boeing, Herman Miller, Kraft, Nike, HOK (the largest architecture firm in the world) and Proctor & Gamble. What unites our clients is that they’re very interested in innovation. As far as industry sectors, the built world was the very first and continues to be our largest audience. It’s a great place to work because the built world is responsible for about 40 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions and 76 percent of our electricity use. If you get the built world right — you get a lot right.
What keeps you up at night?
What keeps me up at night is reading about the biological implications of our change in climate. So many species are beginning to move from south to north to escape drying and heating up, and to move from lower elevations to higher elevations. They’re moving at a rapid rate. They are also breeding earlier and budding and flowering earlier. What keeps me up at night is the idea that there’s going to be a flower blooming someday farther north, whose pollinator has not yet moved its range north. Those kinds of ecological disruptions are going to make rising sea levels look like a walk in the park.
What keeps you focused and motivated and hopeful?
I am hopeful because we live in a competent biosphere that has been working on exactly the same problems we’ve been working on — how to live here sustainably over the long haul — for 3.8 billion years. What gives me hope is that in a natural area, even in a park, even in grass in a crack of a sidewalk, there is a system that has answers. All the things that we are looking to do are being done — albeit in a very different way from the way we [humans] have been approaching it. But that existence is proof that it can be done — and it’s what allows me to keep getting up every morning.
Do you think that biomimicry will become more widely accepted?
We’re about to see many, many products that you use every day be biomimetic. Mercedes Benz has a concept car that gets 70 miles to the gallon. It’s shaped like a coral reef fish called the boxfish. You can buy a kind of paint that is self-cleaning in the same exact way that leaves are self-cleaning. When you have these bio-inspired products around you that you can actually see, people will realize that we should at the very least ask, “How would nature do this?”
How could each of us be more biomimetic in our own personal lives?
Get what you need locally. Nature shops locally. Most organisms use the most abundant thing in their surroundings as their raw materials, their food and their nutrients. It saves them incredible amounts of energy. If we were to remake our economy so that we could procure what we need locally — I believe that’s the biggest way we could cut our carbon emissions.
What reading is on your bedside table?
I just got Mae-Wan Ho’s Genetic Engineering: Dream or Nightmare? It’s a cautionary tale about transgenic engineering. If there’s one thing nature would not do, it’s moving the genes from one class of animals to another. If you look in the natural world and you don’t see a lot of moving of genes — for example, the anti-freezing genes of a fish moving into a strawberry — you have to ask yourself: “Over 3.8 billion years, why is it that we don’t see that?” To me, there is some impermeable membrane there. There is some stop sign there.
As the go-to person on biomimicry and innovative thinking, what advice would you give to those of us who are looking for new solutions to old problems?
Follow your hunch in the beginning. If something interests you, satisfy your curiosity. I started to collect material just to satisfy a curiosity. And then, there was a time in which I was writing the book [about biomimicry] when I really thought I was making it up. There was sort of a crisis of confidence. I wondered: Is this pattern really there? During those moments, there’s a certain amount of “Just go with it.” Believe it. Have faith in the pattern that you’ve recognized.
Plus, it’s an enormous responsibility to broach a topic and to have an awful lot of smart people listening. You’re never completely ready, and you always think you don’t have the personal capacity to fulfill the job that the universe invites you into. If you’re honest with yourself, everyone always feels a certain amount of “I’m not the right person for this.” But guess what, you have been asked. At that point, you literally serve the work.
What questions should our readers be asking themselves?
“What’s worth doing?” We’re at a point in deep evolutionary time in which all of our towns, all of our energies, all of our passions should be turned toward a worthy challenge. Whether you’re coming out of school and trying to decide what to do or whether you’re working and trying to decide what kinds of jobs you want to take on, or what you want to do in your personal development, ask yourself: “At this point in deep time, evolutionarily, as a species, what is worth doing?”