Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature — Educational Resources

December 19, 2019

by Lisa DiCaprio, Conservation Chair, Sierra Club NYC Group

 

Biomimicry — innovation inspired by nature — combines two Greek words: bio from bios (life) and mimicry from mimesis (imitation).

 

Pioneered by Janine Benyus, a biologist who coined the term, biomimicry seeks insights from 3.8 billion years of evolution in nature. As she explains in Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997), “The biomimics are discovering what works in the natural world, and more important, what lasts. After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. The more our world looks and functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to be accepted on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.” [1]  

As Benyus emphasizes, research by ecologists allows us to “divine a canon of nature’s laws, strategies, and principles,” which can be summarized as:

Nature runs on sunlight

Nature uses only the energy it needs

Nature fits form to function

Nature recycles everything

Nature rewards cooperation

Nature banks on diversity

Nature demands local expertise

Nature curbs excesses from within

Nature taps the power of limits [2]  

Since the publication of Biomimicry, Janine Benyus has led several consulting and educational initiatives to promote innovation inspired by nature. In 1998, she and Dr. Dana Baumeister co-founded the Biomimicry Guild, the “world’s first bio-inspired consultancy.” Benyus and Bryony Schwan co-founded the Biomimicry Institute in 2006. As of 2014, the Biomimicry Institute is the non-profit entity that includes the Biomimicry Education Network, the AskNature “database of biological intelligence organized by design and engineering functions,” Design Challenges, and the Global Biomimicry Network. Biomimicry 3.8, the for-profit organization co-founded by Janine Benyus, encompasses the Biomimicry Guild and “delivers consulting, professional training, and thought leadership through our Speakers Bureau.” [3]  Currently, Benyus is also a member of the Board of Directors for Project Drawdown, which comprises 100 existing solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reverse global warming. [4] 

Today, practitioners of biomimicry throughout the world are designing products, packaging, transportation, energy, buildings, construction materials, factories, organizations, financial investment strategies, regenerative urbanism and new economic models, such as the circular economy. [5]   

 

PRODUCT DESIGN

Biomimicry allows us to understand how we can

  • gather energy like a leaf

  • filter salt from water without fossil fuels like mangroves

  • join two surfaces like a clam

  • create cement from CO2 and water by replicating how coral reefs form with seawater and CO2

  • design sustainable foams and plastics

  • repel bacteria by imitating how the design of a shark’s skin protects it from bacteria

  • allow wind turbine blades to turn with low wind speeds by looking at how the flippers of a humpback whale function to reduce drag

  • sequester carbon in products

  • improve the efficiency of a Japanese bullet train by streamlining the design of its nose to imitate the wedge-shaped beak and head of a Kingfisher bird that catches fish by diving into water with minimal splashing

As Benyus explains in “A conversation with Janine Benyus,” there are three levels of biomimicry: 

The first level of biomimicry is the mimicking of natural form. For instance, you may mimic the hooks and barbules in an owl’s feather to create a fabric that opens anywhere along its surface. Or you can imitate the frayed edges that grant the owl its silent flight. Copying feather design is just the beginning, because it may or may not yield something sustainable.

Deeper biomimicry adds a second level, which is the mimicking of natural process, or how it is made. The owl feather self-assembles at body temperature without toxins or high pressures, by way of nature’s chemistry. The unfurling field of green chemistry attempts to mimic these benign recipes.

At the third level is the mimicking of natural ecosystems. The owl feather is gracefully nested — it’s part of an owl that is part of a forest that is part of a biome that is part of a sustaining biosphere. In the same way, our owl-inspired fabric must be part of a larger economy that works to restore rather than deplete the earth and its people. If you make a bioinspired fabric using green chemistry, but you have workers weaving it in a sweatshop, loading it onto pollution-spewing trucks, and shipping it long distances, you’ve missed the point.

To mimic a natural system, you must ask how each product fits in — is it necessary, is it beautiful, is it part of a nourishing food web of industries, and can it be transported, sold, and reabsorbed in ways that foster a forest-like economy? [6]   

Biomimicry 3.8 consults on product design with a wide variety of organizations and companies, including Fortune 500 firms and benefit corporations, such as Patagonia, Seventh Generation and Interface, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer.

Interface is incorporating biomimicry in product design and facility operations to fulfill its “Mission Zero promise to eliminate any negative impact the company has on the environment by 2020.” For example, the Interface i2 modular carpet tiles imitate the pattern of “a leaf-strewn forest floor” and can be arranged randomly. This design results in “less installation time, nearly 90% less waste than traditional broadloom carpet, and easy reclamation and recycling.” Similarly, the Interface TacTiles installation system that does not require adhesives is inspired by how the gecko (lizard) “relies on the intermolecular force of more than a million tiny foot hairs to stick to surfaces at any angle.”

 

THE NATURAL AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Biomimcry provides the most innovative approach to urban sustainability. Today, one-half of the world’s population lives in cities, which is projected to increase to two-thirds by 2050. [7] To protect the world’s natural resources, we must not only reduce the ecological footprint of cities [8], but also contribute to biodiversity and the vibrancy of ecosystem services in urban areas.

The UN 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment identified four categories of ecosystem services:

  • provisioning (e.g., food, fibers, and fresh water)

  • regulatory (e.g., the carbon cycle)

  • cultural (non-material benefits)

  • services that provide support for the first three categories, such as photosynthesis, the nutrient cycle and pollination

 

The value of ecosystem services is illustrated in this video: “Big Question: What is Nature Worth?”

Cities can produce ecosystem services like the natural environment. In 2001, the Biomimicry Guild (now Biomimicry 3.8) began to collaborate with HOK, a global design, architectural, engineering and planning firm. They formed an alliance in 2008 to create city master plans inspired by nature. As Dr. Dayna Baumeister observes, “Buildings account for about 50% of total US energy use, and our greatest collective impact will come from applying biomimicry to the planning and design of buildings, communities and cities — at every scale and in every region.” [9]  

The Biomimicry Guild developed the concept of ecological performance standards. Instead of degrading nature with greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, impermeable surfaces and increased temperatures (the urban heat island effect), Benyus states that cities can be “redesigned with nature’s technology” to “function like forests.” In an “Interview with Janine Benyus on How to Design Like Nature,” she explains:

We decided that a biomimetic city should be functionally indistinguishable from the wildland next door. It should produce beneficial services, just like the native ecosystem, because, after all, biomimicry is not about how it looks, it’s about how it functions. We started to look for nearby reference habitats that show us what would be growing here if we weren’t here. We found remnants of prairies or forests or wetlands that were relatively intact. We could measure how they’re performing today, not historically.

What we measured are the things that that matter most to people — they are called ecosystem services. They’re things like purifying water and storing water, retaining soils from erosion, supporting biodiversity and pollinators, managing pests — all these things forests and other natural systems do for us . . . How much carbon is being stored per acre per year? How much water is being stored in a storm? How much air and water are being purified? How many nutrients are cycled? How many degrees of cooling happen? How much soil is created? We use biological literature paired with GIS models to get those quantities on a per acre per year basis. [10]  

Benyus has also worked with Interface to elaborate ecological performance standards for its factory in New South Wales, Australia. This “factory as a forest” project transforms factory operations to replicate the ecosystem services of the surrounding environment. In “Can a carpet factory run like a forest?,” Benyus describes these phases of design:

We start this process by identifying and studying a reference habitat for the project’s location. We need to understand what keeps it healthy, what are its tipping points, or key slow variables, what are the keystone elements of the ecosystem, etc. For example, in Interface’s case, we have identified the reference habitat for the project site as being the beautiful, not to mention endangered, eco-region called the River-Flat Eucalypt Forest on Coastal Floodplains. Once our team understands the critical ecological dynamics at play, we begin linking them to quantifiable ecosystem services and we measure how many beneficial services the reference habitat produces each year per acre. We then apply these per-acre performance goals to the factory, challenging the building, the manufacturing metabolism, and the landscaping to meet or exceed reference habitat metrics . . . [11]  

This nature-inspired, regenerative approach is not simply an option, but an imperative, especially given the conclusion of the May 2019 UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services that our human activities, such as urbanism and agriculture, have “severely altered” three-quarters of the land on the planet. We are now threatening the extinction of one million plant and animal species and accelerating the degradation of ecosystem services throughout the world. [12]  

On May 22, the International Day for Biodiversity, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres released a statement in which he emphasized, “We need healthy ecosystems to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and to address climate change: they can provide 27% of the mitigation needed to limit global temperature.” [13] 

As Janine Benyus concludes in Biomimicry, “In a world as interconnected as ours, protection of self and protection of the planet are indistinguishable.” [14]  

 

NOTES

1. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (William Morrow, 1997), p. 3

2. Biomimicry, p. 7.

3. For the history of these organizations, see this Biomimicry Institute website.

4. See my article, “The Drawdown Project to Reverse Global Warming,” in the Spring 2019 Sierra Atlantic.

5. Currently, the global economy is based on a linear model of production, consumption and waste. A circular economy imitates the circularity of nature in which all that dies and decomposes becomes the basis for new life. See the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website. I am writing an article on the circular economy for a future issue of the Sierra Atlantic.

6. Biomimicry 3.8, “A conversation with Janine Benyus.”

7. See, “Two-thirds of world population will live in cities by 2050, says UN,” The Guardian, May 16, 2018.

8. The Global Footprint Network glossary defines an Ecological Footprint as: “A measure of how much area of biologically productive land and water an individual, population or activity requires to produce all the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste it generates, using prevailing technology and resource management practices. The Ecological Footprint is usually measured in global hectares. Because trade is global, an individual or country’s Ecological Footprint includes land or sea from all over the world. Without further specification, Ecological Footprint generally refers to the Ecological Footprint of consumption . . .” (Note: a hectare is 2.47 acres). For more information, see my article, “Ecological Footprints and One Planet Living — Educational Resources,” in the Fall/Winter 2018 Sierra Atlantic.

9.   “HOK and Biomimicry Guild Form Alliance,” Building Design, September 15, 2008.

10.  Jared Green, “Interview with Janine Benyus on How to Design Like Nature,” American Society of Landscape Architects, The Dirt, November 4, 2015.

11.  Bart King, “Can a carpet factory run like a forest?” GreenBiz, June 12, 2015.

12.  Brad Plumer, “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace,” New York Times, May 6, 2019. See also the Convention on Biological Diversity.

13.  UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “Healthy Ecosystems are 37% of the Climate Solution.” 

14.  Biommicry, p. 296.


KEY RESOURCES

Videos

Websites

Books

  • Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (William Morrow, 1997).

  • Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature Is Inspiring Innovation (White Cloud Press, 2013).

  • Dora Lee (author), Margot Thompson (illustrator), Biomimicry: Inventions Inspired by Nature. (Kids Can Press Limited, 2011).

  • Veronika Kapsali, Biomimicry for Designers (Thames and Hudson, 2016).

  • Michael Pawlyn, Biomimicry in Architecture (RIBA Publishing, 2016).

  • Fausto Tazzi, Biomimicry in Organizations: Business management inspired by nature: How to be inspired from nature (CreateSpace Publishing, 2017).

  • Katherine Collins, The Nature of Investing: Resilient Investment Strategies Through Biomimicry (Taylor and Francis, 2014).

  • Dayna Baumeister, PhD (author), Rose Tocke (contributor), Jessica Smith (illustrator), Biomimicry Resource Handbook: A Seed Bank of Best Practices (CreateSpace Publishing, 2014).

Articles

 

 


 

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