Framing Sustainability Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Biomimicry

Biomimicry, expounded by Janine Benyus in a book of the same name, is "the conscious emulation of life's genius" to solve human problems in design, industry, and elsewhere. Biomimicry also spawned a consultancy and nonprofit organization, both based in Montana. The Biomimicry Guild helps companies apply biomimicry's principles, while the Biomimicry Institute aspires to educate a broad audience and spread those principles. Biomimicry's core assumption is that four billion years of natural selection and evolution have yielded sophisticated, sustainable, diverse, and efficient answers to problems such as energy use and sustainable population growth. Humans now have the technology to understand many of nature's solutions and to apply similar ideas in our societies from the level of materials, such as mimicking spider silk or deriving pharmaceuticals from plants, to the level of ecosystems and the biosphere, such as improving our agriculture by learning from prairies and forests or reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by shifting toward solar energy.

Janine Benyus talks about biomimicry at the 2005 TED conference.

Biomimicry does not, however, merely exploit nature's design secrets in conventional industry, whether to make Velcro or genetically engineered corn. Instead, biomimicry requires us to assume a sustainable place within nature by recognizing ourselves as inextricably part of it. Biomimicry focuses "not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it". This emphasis leads to three precepts: nature is a model for sustainable designs and processes, nature is the measure for successful solutions, and nature is our mentor. It also lends urgency to protecting ecosystems and cataloging their species and interdependencies so that we may continue to be inspired, aided, and instructed by nature's ingenuity. In these respects, biomimicry most resembles industrial ecology and nature's services but clearly shares traits with other frameworks and concepts.

Nature's ingenuity, meanwhile, displays recurrent "laws, strategies, and principles":

Nature

• runs on sunlight.
• uses only the energy it needs.
• fits form to function.
• recycles everything.
• rewards cooperation.
• banks on diversity.
• demands local expertise.
• curbs excesses from within.
• taps the power of limits.

Benyus was frustrated that her academic training in forestry, in contrast, focused on analyzing discrete pieces, which initially prevented her and others from seeing principles that emerge from analyzing entire systems. Similarly, solutions to problems of waste and energy need to operate with the big picture in mind. Benyus explicitly allied biomimicry with industrial ecology and elucidated ten principles of an economy that mimicked nature.

1. Use waste as a resource. Whether at the scale of integrated business parks or the global economy, "all waste is food, and everybody winds up reincarnated inside somebody else. The only thing the community imports in any appreciable amount is energy in the form of sunlight, and the only thing it exports is the by-product of its energy use, heat".Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 255.
2. Diversify and cooperate to fully use the habitat. Symbiosis and specialization within niches assure nothing is wasted and provide benefits to other species or parts of the ecosystem just as it does to other companies or parts of industry when businesses collaborate to facilitate efficiency, remanufacturing, and other changes.
3. Gather and use energy efficiently. Use fossil fuels more efficiently and invest them in producing what truly matters in the long run while shifting to solar and other renewable resources.
4. Optimize rather than maximize. Focus on quality over quantity.
5. Use materials sparingly. Dematerialize products and reduce packaging; reconceptualize business as providing services instead of selling goods.
6. Don't foul the nests. Reduce toxins and decentralize production of goods and energy.
7. Don't draw down resources. Shift to renewable feedstocks but use them at a low enough rate that they can regenerate. Invest in ecological capital.
8. Remain in balance with the biosphere. Limit emissions of greenhouse gases, chlorofluorocarbons, and other pollutants that severely disrupt natural cycles.
9. Run on information. Create feedback loops to improve processes and reward environmental behavior.
10. Shop locally. Using local resources constrains regional populations to sizes that can be supported, reduces transportation needs, and lets people see the impact of their consumption on the environment and suppliers.

While biomimicry's concepts can be used at different scales, they have already been directly applied to improve many conventional products. Butterflies alone have provided much help. For example, Lotusan paint uses lessons from the surface structure of butterfly wings to shed dirt and stay cleaner, obviating the need for detergents, while Qualcomm examined how butterfly wings scatter light to develop its low-energy and highly reflective Mirasol display for mobile phones and other electronics. These and other products have been cataloged by the Biomimicry Institute at AskNature.org.