Biomimicry…looks for the best practices of the 30 million species out there that have been figuring out chemistry, engineering, and physics – trying to live on this planet without destroying the place that sustains them. …We’re trying to live on this planet without destroying the things that sustain us. So let’s share best practices from the overlooked, undervalued, underappreciated geniuses that surround us. When you realize that organisms are the embodied wisdom of living well in place, you begin to see nature in a whole new light.
And all it takes is building a structure to get the ideas from biology flowing into human design. Is that hopeful? Yeah, definitely. But don’t forget that you can also use biomimetics to create a more dangerous weapons system. Or you could borrow the recipe from a spider to make a fiber as strong as spider silk. But you’d lose the holistic value of biomimicry if you turn around and make that fiber in a sweatshop and then put it on a truck spewing diesel fumes. Unless you biomimic everything – the product, the process, and the whole economy – you’re not quite there. That’s why I look at it as a three-part pursuit. You mimic the form for design, you mimic the process for manufacturing and chemistry, and you mimic the ecosystem within which companies operate – creating industrial food webs so that the waste of one company is the raw material of the next. If you were to apply nature’s principles at each one of those levels, then you really might get something that approximated how well these systems work in nature. That’s a big endeavor, and it takes more than just technological know-how from the natural world. It takes humility, will, and wisdom.
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