Janine M. Benyus (born 1958 in New Jersey) is an American natural sciences writer, innovation consultant, and author.
For the 99 percent of the time we've been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.
Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that's already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn.
If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship to nature--even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe--has to change.
After decades of faithful study, ecologists have begun to fathom hidden likenesses among many interwoven systems. . . . a canon of nature's laws, strategies, and principles. . . 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.
Biological knowledge is doubling every five years.
For a long time we have thought we were better than the living world, and now some of us tend to think we are worse, that everything we touch turns to soot. But neither perspective is healthy. We have to remember how it feels to have equal standing in the world, to be "between the mountain and the ant. . . part and parcel of creations," as the Iroquois traditionalist Oren Lyons says.
There are three types of biomimicry - one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem's level, like building a nature-inspired city.
The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future.
Nature works with five polymers. Only five polymers. In the natural world, life builds from the bottom up, and it builds in resilience and multiple uses.
Everyone is trying to jump on the biomimic bandwagon. But a cork floor is not biomimicry. Neither is using bacteria to clean water.
For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.
What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked, 'How would nature solve this?'
A solitary American monk named Thomas Berry writes that in our relationship to nature, we have been autistic for centuries. Wrapped tightly in our own version of knowledge, we have been unreceptive to the wisdom of the natural world. To tune in again, to have the "spontaneous environmental rapport" that characterized our ancestors, will take doing something that is perfectly delightful: reimmersing ourselves in the natural world.
Life solves its problems with well-adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry and smart material and energy use.
Biologically inspired materials could revolutionize materials science. People looking at spider silk and abalone shells are looking for new ways to make materials better, cheaper, and with less toxic byproducts.
Jay Harman is the quintessential biomimic, a principled inventor who sees solutions everywhere he looks in the natural world. And he looks deeply, with the soul of a student. He moves with grace from a world of waving sea kelp to the world of sustainable design, bringing nature's wisdom into the board rooms of global companies, to the design tables of the engineers and designers who make our world. This is more than a business book, more than a memoir, more than a new way to solve global challenges. It's a book about a new way to think.
The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.
The answers to our questions are everywhere; we just need to change the lens with which we see the world.
Conserving habitats is a wellspring for the next industrial revolution.
Water is at the center of every chemical reaction, and therefore should be the earths most precious gift.