by Janine Benyus

Plenary DVD

The Earth is ringing—it is ringing off the hook. I feel like we’re in a dream and we’re moving through molasses to answer it. We’re heading for an evolutionary knothole. If we are to get through that knothole—and if we are to bloom on the other side as a keystone species and not an ecological dominant—the way we live our lives needs to make it possible for other species to live their lives. The first thing we have to do is to quiet human cleverness. Life survives through an accurate reading of its context. It takes a deep, deep listening.

Biomimicry is listening to and learning from the locals and there is much to learn. There is not one solution that fits all. There are just really smart ways to find solutions and biomimicry is one of those ways. Life-friendly chemistry is extremely important. The biggest step we need to take is to mimic the brilliance of nature on a systems level.

Nature’s recipe book: from nontoxic glue to biodegradable plastic

There are a hundred carcinogens in the water outside of Silicon Valley. The high tech industry, and especially the making of computer chips, is incredibly toxic. But the diatom might show this industry how to clean up its act.

The diatom is an interesting creature that is made of silica. It’s glass. It’s a skeleton of a microorganism of the billions found in the ocean. These glassy structures are made in seawater without toxins, without high pressure, and of course without carcinogens.

Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara are learning to mimic the way these glasses are formed. That could and should revolutionize the way our computer chips are made. Another exciting example of biomimicry deals with buildings constructed with plywood and particleboard. If we want to move away from using old growth timber and use parts of wood that are joined together into strong shapes, unfortunately, here’s a dirty little secret: the glue that we use contains formaldehyde—urea formaldehyde, and it’s very toxic.

The blue mussel, however, glues itself under water—its glue actually cures under water. We’ve been trying for 35 years to mimic that recipe, not to harvest this critter and use its glue, but to literally take a page out of its recipe book. Finally, a scientist at Oregon State University figured out how to mimic mussel glue inexpensively. Columbia Forest Products is testing it right now and it’s going to be very big in terms of getting some of the toxicity out of buildings.

Life shops at home. There is an abundance of raw materials that we don’t see. We have to borrow the lenses of more evolved species to see it. I come from Montana, a hard rock mining state, and we talk about the Earth’s tears—the bitter ones—that we still live with 50 years later in the Clark Fork River and other rivers. Hard rock mining tears up mountains to get metals, although there are more than enough metal particles on top of the Earth right now, more than enough to mine our landfills, or to mine our waters that are full of heavy metals.

How do we do that? There are bacterial microbes that have amazing molecules and can scavenge metals out of water. We could mimic bacteria—again not using the bacteria by harvesting, grinding up, domesticating, or putting a new farm fence around them, but by asking them how they do it. A company in San Francisco called MR3 is making filters that are immersed in water, and they’re coated with a mimic that we’ve learned from these microbes. There’s a filter for mercury, and a filter for iron, and a filter for different kinds of metals. You can pull that filter out and recover large amounts of metal. It’s a new kind of mining.

Biological chemist Geoffrey Coates rocked my world many years ago when he found a way to use CO2 as a feedstock for plastics. Plants take CO2 and they use that carbon to make wood, to make sugars, starches and polymers. Coates said why don’t we use CO2 to make biodegradable plastics? We’ve got a lot of it. Only our species would think of it as a poison. Many other species would say, yum, CO2! He’s found a catalyst and he’s making polycarbonates. He’s making biodegradable plastics out of CO2. That’s a big deal and he started a new company called Novomer. It’s not fast enough yet, but we get what we pay for in terms of research. We should be supporting things like this.

Here’s another example. If we want to have a hydrogen economy, what makes fuel cells so expensive is the fact that the membrane that produces the hydrogen chemistry is coated with platinum, which is very expensive and takes us back to mining. Blue-green algae produce hydrogen chemistry all the time. Looking at those blue-greens, mimicking the molecule—it’s called a hydrogenase enzyme—and coating that on a membrane could make fuel cells very inexpensive.

This extremely important work is taking place at the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom. Currently we’re looking at getting hydrogen from fossil fuels. Water is an abundant raw material. Getting hydrogen out of water—that’s what plants do. They split water to get oxygen that we breathe, and to get these hydrogen ions as well. There’s a molecule in every green frond and blade and cell around us that knows how to do this. Again, it takes a deep, deep conversation to understand how these organisms have done that and then to try and mimic it.

Planes, trains and automobiles: design lessons from nature

Life surfs for free. The bumps on the fins of the humpback whale are not random. They are tubercles that have evolved over millions of years. Frank Fish, A biomechanicist at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, realized those bumps probably help the whale reduce drag in the water. He mimicked the bumps on a model airplane wing and achieved a thirty-two percent fuel savings in an industry where one to two percent is percussive.

Another example is the bullet train in Japan. When it went through a tunnel it caused a pressure wave in front of it, and as it exited the tunnel it made a sonic boom. People live near the tunnel entrances and exits in Japan, so it wasn’t going over well. The boss asked an engineer to make a quieter bullet train. The engineer happened to be a master birder. He went that night to the equivalent of an Audubon Society meeting and he started to think, what goes from one density of medium to another density of medium? He thought about the kingfisher that dives from air into water and he thought about that beak. He asked himself, does it scale? He redesigned the front end of the train to mimic the shape of the kingfisher's beak. It dramatically reduced the noise and it saved 15 percent in electricity costs for the train.

A diesel car shaped like a boxfish is a concept car from DaimlerChrysler and it’s getting 70 miles per gallon, which is pretty good for diesel. The engineers didn’t think a boxfish looks aerodynamic, but it lives in a coral reef and water is flowing past it all the time and it has to keep its position. So it has a certain kind of aerodynamic grace. Plus, its boxy shape resembles our transports.

The engineers kept saying, “No, no, no. The ideal aerodynamic shape is the teardrop. Case closed.” But one engineer persisted and designed a model based on the boxfish. It came within a very small fraction of the ideal aerodynamic shape. Then they went further and looked at the boxfish’s bony plates and its incredible skeletal structure. They built the plates of the car like that of a boxfish, and they reduced the weight of the car 40 percent. So now they’re believers.

Closing the loop: a bio-based economy

The goal is to get our society into a closed loop. We have lots to learn. It is important right now not just to recover the inorganic materials like metals, but that we move into a bio-based economy in which we are using more things like bio-plastics that come from corn starch, where the corn plant does our work for us.

There are many people in biology and ecology studying highly evolved organisms. Many designers and engineers now want to create materials and processes that are better adapted for the long haul here on Earth, but they don’t know anything about biology.

We need to come up with some grand challenges in sustainability, and then we need to have some deep conversations with other organisms and ask them the way home. If the path of biomimicry is quieting human cleverness, then listening deeply, and then echoing what we hear, that is only half the way home. The last step is giving thanks to these organisms. I invite everyone to help institute a program by which the companies, organizations and individuals who are learning from the natural world donate a percentage of the royalties from every product and process to preserving the habitat of the organism that inspired the innovation.

This article was excerpted from a talk at the 2005 Bioneers Conference. Janine Benyus is an educator and life sciences writer who gave a field a name in her groundbreaking book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She proposes we model our civilization on nature’s solutions, the time-tested practical wisdom of four billion years of evolution.

For more on Janine Benyus and biomimicry, visit the Bioneers Store and www.biomimicry.net.