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| Title: |
Biomimicry |
| Resource type: |
Principles |
| Topics: |
Business, Statewide/Global
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| Keywords: |
biomimicry, nature, sustainability, clean production |
| Audience: |
All
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| Region: |
Minnesota Statewide, Outside Minnesota
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| Summary: |
Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems. |
| Content: |
What sets sustainability apart from other recent "big ideas," such as asset-based community development, is its rootedness in ecology. Sustainability addresses the fundamental environmental life-support conditions for humanity's survival on earth.
Out of sustainability's focus on the natural world comes not just concern over its degradation, but more importantly a profound appreciation of the "research and development" done by successful (that is, sustainable over millions of years) plants and animals during three and a half billion years. As Gil Friend of the sustainability consulting firm Natural Logic (http://www.natlogic.com; note e-newsletter) writes: 'Nature's ecosystems have experience developing safe, efficient, adaptive, resilient systems. Why reinvent the wheel?'
Building on this appreciation is biomimicry, an old way of life understood by indigenous peoples and a new approach that:
(1) Studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems;
(2) Uses an ecological standard to judge the rightness of our human innovations; and
(3) Views nature as a source of information rather than as a mere source of material.
Janine Benyus, author of the book "Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature," is a speaker and consultant to business and others on remarkable new biomimic industrial products and processes which use chemistry performed in room-temperature water, local raw materials, sunlight, and no toxic chemicals. For example, German scientists found that lotus leaves have mountainous surfaces that keep dirt particles teetering on the peaks rather than adhering. Rainwater balls up and rolls the loose particles away like a snowball removing leaves from a lawn. The exterior building paint Lotusan dries with lotus-like bumps, resulting in a self-cleaning surface kept clean by rainwater. See http://www.stocorp.com/allweb.nsf/lotusanpage for more about Lotusan.
See Janine's web site below for more case studies (or click directly on http://www.biomimicryinstitute.org/case-studies/ ), or pages 26 - 29 of the Winter 2002 issue of Whole Earth magazine - see http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2002_Winter/ai_97116314 for this article.
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| Website: |
http://www.biomimicry.net |
| Suggested by: |
Philipp Muessig
|
| Added: |
02/11/03 |
| Updated: |
01/11/10 |
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