"We must draw our standards from the natural world. We must honor with prudent humility its limits and the mysteries that lie beyond them, and admit that there is something in the order of being that clearly exceeds all our capabilities."
Vaclav Havel
Janine Benyus is a biologist, writer, and innovation consultant. After writing books about wildlife and their behavior (Beastly behaviors: a zoo lovers companion, 1992 etc.), popularized in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997) biomimicry as a new scientific discipline that imitates natural patterns and creates sustainable solutions – e.g. solar cells inspired by leaves. Her book Biomimicry has attracted widespread attention among design and architecture professionals and entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists. In 1998, Benyus co-founded Biomimicry 3.8, the first biotechnology-inspired consulting firm, and then in 2006, the Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit organization that promotes global sustainability through design challenges and resources such as AskNature, a comprehensive database of biomimicry. Janine Benyus has reached millions of people through her TED talks, documentaries, and articles in media such as TIME, Forbes and The New York Times. She has received several awards, including the Gothenburg Prize for Sustainable Development (2013), the UN Environment Programme Champion of the Earth for Science and Technology (2009), the Rachel Carson Environmental Ethics Award (2009) and the RSA Bicentenary Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Regenerative Design (2022). Janine Benyus believes that learning from nature inspires us to protect it and that biomimicry represents a new way of looking at and appreciating the natural world, opening up a new era of civilization based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from it. This text is part of Chapter 1 of the author's aforementioned book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (HarperCollins Publishers, New York 1997, pp. 1-7.) Translated by Jiří Zemánek.
It is not usual for the pages of a magazine to The New Yorker A man with a bare chest, jaguar teeth, and owl feathers has emerged, but these are no ordinary times. As I was writing this book, Moi, a Huaorani Indian leader whose name means “dream,” traveled to Washington to defend his Amazonian homeland from oil drilling. He roared like a jaguar during the hearings, teaching a roomful of bored employees where real power comes from and what home really means.
Meanwhile, in the heartland of America, two books about Native people became bestsellers, much to the surprise of their publishers. Both were about urban Westerners whose lives were forever changed by the wise teachings of pre-industrial societies.
What's going on here? I think so. Industrial man, who has reached the limit of what nature can tolerate, sees his shadow on the wall, along with the shadows of rhinos, condors, manatees, ground squirrels, and other species that he drags down with him. Shaken by this insight, he, we, hunger for guidance on how to live on Earth sensibly and sustainably.
The good news is that this wisdom is widespread not only among indigenous peoples, but also among species that have lived on Earth much longer than humans. If the age of the Earth were measured in calendar years and today were the breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we would have appeared just fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded human history would have flashed by in the last sixty seconds. Fortunately for us, our planetary companions—that fantastic network of plants, animals, and microbes—have been patiently perfecting their creations since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria arose.
During that time, life has learned to fly, to circle the globe, to live in the depths of the ocean and on the highest mountain peaks, to produce miraculous materials, to glow at night, to harness solar energy, and to build self-reflective brains. Together, organisms have managed to transform rocks and seas into a welcoming home for life, with a constant temperature and smoothly running life cycles. In short, living organisms have done everything we want them to do, without consuming fossil fuels, without polluting the planet, or burdening their future. What better models could there be?
Inventions as responses to nature
In these pages, you will meet men and women who explore nature's masterpieces—photosynthesis, self-organization, natural selection, self-sustaining ecosystems, eyes and ears, skin and shells, talking neurons, natural medicines, and more—and then copy these designs and manufacturing processes to solve our own problems. I call this endeavor biomimicry—the conscious imitation of the genius of life. Innovation inspired by nature.
In a society accustomed to controlling or “improving” nature, this respectful imitation of nature is a radically new approach, a revolution in fact. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Revolution opens up biomimicry an era based not on what we can get from nature to extract, but on what we can learn from it to teach.
As you will see, “doing it the natural way” has the potential to change how we grow food, how we produce materials, how we use energy, how we heal ourselves, how we store information, and how we do business.
In a biomimetic world, we would manufacture as animals and plants do – using the sun and simple compounds to create completely biodegradable fibers, ceramics, plastics, and chemicals. Our farms would be self-fertilizing and pest-resistant, like the prairies. When searching for new medicines or crops, we would consult with animals and insects that have used plants for millions of years to stay healthy and for their nutrition. Computing would also take cues from nature, with software that would "develop" solutions and hardware that would use the lock-and-key paradigm to compute by touch.
Nature would certainly provide models. Imagine solar cells modeled after leaves, steel fibers woven from spiders, unbreakable ceramics modeled after mother-of-pearl, cancer treatments inspired by chimpanzees, perennial crops inspired by tall grasses, computers that signal like cells, and a closed-loop economy that learns from redwoods, coral reefs, and oak forests.
Biomimicry discovers what works in nature and, more importantly, what lasts. After 3.8 billion years of research and development, its failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. The more our world looks and functions like this natural world, the more likely we are to be accepted into this home that is ours, but not only ours.
This is, of course, nothing new to the Huorani Indians. Virtually all indigenous cultures that have survived without destroying their "nests" have recognized that nature knows best and have humbly sought the advice of bears, wolves, ravens, and redwoods. They can only wonder why we don't do the same. A few years ago, I began to wonder too. After three hundred years of Western science, is there anyone in our tradition who can see what the Huorani see?
How did I discover biomimicry?
I have a degree in forestry, with courses in botany, soil, water, wildlife, pathology, and tree growth. I focused primarily on tree growth. As I recall, cooperative relationships, self-regulating feedback loops, and dense interconnectedness were not something we needed to know for the exam. We studied each piece of forest separately in a reductionist fashion, rarely considering that a spruce-fir forest might be more than the sum of its parts or that there might be wisdom in the whole. There were no soil-listening laboratories that mimicked the ways in which natural communities grow and thrive. We practiced a human-centered approach to management, assuming that nature’s way of managing had nothing to teach us.
It was only when I began writing books about the habitats of wild animals and plants and their behavior that I began to understand where the real lessons lay: the exquisite ways in which organisms are adapted to their place and to each other. This harmony was a constant source of pleasure for me, as well as a lesson in learning. As I saw how animals fit seamlessly into their homes, I began to understand how far we managers had become from our homes. Although we face the same physical challenges as all living things—the struggle for food, water, space, and shelter in a limited environment—we have tried to meet them only with our human ingenuity. The lessons contained in the natural world, the strategies that have been shaped and refined over billions of years, have remained scientific curiosities, separate from our lives.
But what if I went back to school today? Couldn't I find some scientists and researchers there who would consciously look to organisms and ecosystems for inspiration on how to live on Earth easily and ingeniously? Couldn't I collaborate with inventors or engineers who delve into biology texts for new ideas? Isn't there anyone these days who considers organisms and natural systems to be the best teachers?
Fortunately, I have discovered not one, but many biomimics. They are fascinating people who work at the boundaries of their fields, in fertile areas between different intellectual habitats. Where ecology meets agriculture, medicine, materials science, energy, computing, and business, they are learning that there is more to discover than to invent. They know that nature, inventive by necessity, has already solved the problems that we humans are trying to solve. Our job is to take these time-tested ideas and replicate them in our own lives.
When I discovered these biomimics, I was excited, but I was surprised that there was no formal movement in biomimicry, no think tanks, no university degrees. It was strange, because whenever I mentioned what I was working on to people, they responded with general enthusiasm, a kind of relief to hear about an idea that made so much sense. Biomimicry has the makings of a successful meme, that is, an idea that will spread like an adaptive gene in our culture. Part of writing this book was my desire for that meme to spread and for it to become the context for our explorations in the new millennium.
Everywhere I go these days, I see signs of nature-based innovation. People trust the unfathomable wisdom of nature’s solutions, from Velcro (based on seed hooks) to holistic medicine. And yet, I wonder, why now? Why hasn’t our culture always rushed to imitate what obviously works? Why do we become nature’s protectors so late in life?
The storm before the calm
While it seems perfectly reasonable to emulate our biological ancestors, we humans have gone in exactly the opposite direction, driven by a desire to gain our independence. Our journey began ten thousand years ago with the agricultural revolution, when we broke free from the trappings of hunting and gathering and learned to make our own provisions. It was then accelerated by the scientific revolution, when we learned, in the words of Francis Bacon, to “torture nature to extract her secrets.” And finally, as the engines of the industrial revolution sped up, machines replaced muscles and we learned to shake the world.
However, these revolutions were only a preparation for our real escape from Earth's orbit - the petrochemical revolution and the genetic engineering revolution. Now that we can synthesize what we need and rewrite the genetic alphabet to our liking, we have gained what we understand as independence. Chained to our technological juggernaut, we consider ourselves gods who are very far from home indeed.
In reality, however, we have not escaped the gravity of life at all. We are still subject to ecological laws, just like all other life forms. The most inflexible of these laws states that a species cannot occupy a niche that owns all the resources—there must be some sharing. Any species that ignores this law will eventually destroy its own community by promoting its own expansion. Tragically, this has been our path. We began as a small population within a large world, and we have expanded in numbers and territory until the world is literally bursting at the seams. There are too many of us, and our habitats are unsustainable.
But like many before me, I believe that this is just the storm before the calm. The new science of chaos and complexity tells us that a system that is far from stable is a system that is ripe for change. Evolution itself is believed to have proceeded in leaps and bounds, stabilizing for millions of years and then reaching a whole new level of creativity after a crisis.
Reaching our limits, if we choose to admit them, can be an opportunity for us to leap into a new phase of adaptation to our environment, one in which we adapt to the Earth, not the other way around. The changes we make now, however gradual they may seem, can be the core of this new reality. When we emerge from the fog, I hope we can turn this colossus around and instead of fleeing the Earth, we can embark on a journey home, guided by nature to landing, as an orchid guides a bee.
In Vivo Genius
A troubled conscience may be urging us home, but biomimicry says that an equally important driver is the critical mass of new information provided by the natural sciences. Our fragmentary knowledge of biology doubles every five years, growing like a pointillist painting into a new recognizable whole. Equally unprecedented is the intensity of our vision: new telescopes and satellites allow us to observe natural patterns from the intracellular to the interstellar. We can examine a butterfly through the eyes of a mite, we can ride the electron shuttle of photosynthesis, feel the flicker of a neuron in thought, or watch the birth of a star in color. We can see more clearly than ever before how nature creates its wonders.
When we look into nature's eyes this deeply, it takes our breath away and, in a good way, our bubble bursts. We realize that all our inventions have already appeared in nature, in more elegant forms and at a much lower cost to the planet. The smartest architectural struts and beams have already appeared in water lilies and bamboo stalks. Our central heating and air conditioning are outclassed by a termite tower with a constant temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Compared to the multi-frequency transmissions of a bat, our most stealthy radar is hard to hear. And our new "smart materials" are no match for dolphin skin or butterfly proboscis. Even the wheel, which we always thought was a uniquely human creation, has been found in a tiny rotary motor that powers the flagellum of the world's oldest bacteria.
We are also humbled by the hordes of organisms that effortlessly perform feats we can only dream of. Bioluminescent algae spray chemicals to light their body lanterns. Arctic fish and frogs freeze and then come back to life because their organs are protected from damage by the ice. Black bears hibernate all winter without poisoning themselves with their own urea, while their polar cousins remain active, their skin covered in a coat of transparent, hollow hairs that resemble greenhouse glass. Chameleons and cuttlefish hide without moving, changing their skin patterns in an instant to blend in with their surroundings. Bees, turtles, and birds navigate without a map, while whales and penguins dive without scuba gear. How do they do it? How do dragonflies outrun our best helicopters? How do hummingbirds cross the Gulf of Mexico on less than a tenth of an ounce of fuel? How are ants able to carry the equivalent of hundreds of pounds in the deadly heat of the jungle?
But these individual achievements pale in comparison to the complex interplay that characterizes entire ecological systems, communities like tidal marshes and saguaro forests. Within the whole, living organisms maintain dynamic stability like dancers in an arabesque, juggling resources without waste. After decades of diligent study, ecologists have begun to discover hidden similarities among many interconnected systems. From their notebooks, one can read a canon of natural laws, strategies, and principles that resonates in every chapter of this book.
Nature operates on sunlight.
Nature only uses the energy it needs.
Nature adapts form to function.
Nature recycles everything.
Nature rewards cooperation.
Nature relies on diversity.
Nature requires an understanding of place.
Nature curbs excesses from within.
Nature uses the power of limits.