Reading Masanobu Fukuoka’s “The Natural Way of Farming”, it has occurred to me that biomimicry is not only nothing new, but nothing uncommon. It’s nothing new because, as I think I mentioned, it’s the only way humans have ever ‘invented’ anything good, by watching the natural world and imitating its processes. But this book has brought to my attention that this is not only a habit of our inventors and designers, but of all our food production practices as well. Agriculture especially (as opposed to other methods of food-acquisition) has been a story of our attempts to both gain control over a natural function (i.e. cultivation), and learn about the natural processes by which this function operates, in order to imitate them in our controlled environments so that they are now strictly to our advantage. This is biomimicry. And in typical human fashion, this kind of biomimicry is nothing more than appropriation of the natural world according to our limited understanding.
As finite and fallible beings, humans have an incredibly strong drive to simplify and categorize observations and practices. I don’t know if it stems from our hard-wired disposition towards patterns, or vice versa, but it seems to be the only way we are capable of processing the enormous volumes of information we encounter every minute. We have a limited capacity for absorbing such information — I heard recently of studies that show this capacity has not increased for millennia, despite the enormous cultural and technological changes — and so we resort to simplifications, reducing data to recognizable patterns.
But natural patterns are not so constant as we like to believe, and certainly not so comprehendible. Scientific farming methods, those based on scientific discoveries, succeed when they are used in human-made environments; when we have razed an ecosystem, severed it from the larger processes and exterminated the organisms that gave it life, we created a sterilized and isolated human-made environment, and here, unsurprisingly, only human-devised processes of food production can succeed, if at all. So the question is, then, are these human-made food systems an improvement on the natural ones? We are realizing that they fall short of the natural abilities to multitask, as with the multiple functions of every element of a natural process, failing to both ensure that all inputs (especially the free and infinite energy of the sun) are used efficiently and that other elements can compensate if one fails to perform its functions. Thus artificial systems require alternative energy sources (i.e. petroleum), and are less efficient and more vulnerable. They also fail at symbiosis, instead following the parents’ (humans’) example of virus-living, exploiting natural systems without return, making waste instead of resources for other systems.
But this is still not answering the question the economist would be demanding: Are they an improvement over natural systems in their yield?
Fukuoka says no.
Think of it this way: Plants (and animals) have evolved by the laws of self-preservation and self-propagation. They have developed physiological properties that advance these two goals, and while the larger ecosystem must keep an organism in check to prevent total takeover by this organism (which would be suicide), the organism is always operating at maximum capacity towards these goals. It will always grow as tall, as strong, as fat, as fruitful as it can; to fail to do so is death.
Perhaps humans have forgotten this in our ‘advanced’ social and technological evolution, by which we have achieved the opportunity for laziness to be successful.
Science, and scientific farming, cannot by any means (including genetic modification), increase this maximum capacity. At best they can increase one of the functions of an organism, for example the drought-resistance of a strain of corn, but because its capacity is finite, this must detract from another function, perhaps strength of stalk, or resistance to a pest, or ability to produce some chemical that will be of advantage to another organism. As Fukuoka is adamant to point out, the factors are infinite — and incomprehensible.
What happens instead is that yield is measured in the environment of an agribusiness’ field or worse a laboratory, where, as I’ve explained, the sterilized and isolated environment cripples the functions of an organism, and future yields, as they alter nitrogen levels or irrigation, are compared to this measure and believed to be improvements. The reality is that an organism is most productive in the competitive and challenging natural environment, where its success is the difference between life and death. So-called improvements in scientific agriculture are, in reality, only fractional recoveries of yield as artificial processes inch closer to a better imitation of natural processes.
This brings us to organic farming. It’s a sham. Organic farming is the application of science in agribusiness with the use of natural materials. It allows the shipping of algae thousands of miles to be used as a fertilizer on an inland agribusiness operation, or the keeping of countless chickens in a warehouse as long as they have access to outdoors and their all-grain feed is organically grown, itself in enormous swaths of (hand-weeded) monoculture. Organic farming is only one inch closer to a better imitation of the natural world. I buy it because it is that one inch closer. But it is not a solution.
The solution according to Fukuoka is: Just stop. All of it. Impede natural processes as little as you can. Do as little as you can. Nature takes care of itself, and us. This Fukuoka’s “do-nothing” farming and he has been living off of it for decades.
I ultimately find that the best biomimicry we can practice in food production is simply to observe and take advantage of natural processes rather than imitate them — and I’m left wondering if the same applies to architecture.
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