Biomimicry. It’s not even a word yet, and it’s hot on the lips of every architect who is With It. Biomimicry.net defines it as “learning from and then emulating natural forms, processes, and ecosystems to create more sustainable designs.” It’s simultaneously brilliant, and stupidly obvious.
(My resources specialization being sustainable community design) I approach it from the perspective of an architect, which means design of functional systems, whether for shelter or food or what-have-you. The natural world is the epitome of efficiency and zero-waste systems, and obviously this is the only place where one can learn how to live in harmony with the rest of the natural world.
But is that what biomimickers do? Well, unfortunately being inspired by nature doesn’t mean that we’ve given up our anthropocentrism (strong anthropocentrism, that is; see “Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism” by Bryan G. Norton). We don’t want to learn what the natural world needs us to do; we don’t want to learn what pursuits we have to give up, or what luxuries cost too much. Humans are expert exploiters, and what we like to learn from nature is how to do what we want to do, just better. Cheaper. Quicker. Easier.
David Suzuki (and Faisal Moola):
One of my favourites [of the ideas posted on asknature.org] is simple: “Leaves on a forest floor create aesthetically seamless surfaces by exhibiting organized chaos.” This led one of our board members, Ray Anderson, the founder and chair of the world’s largest carpet tile manufacturer, Interface Inc., to create recyclable carpeting that can be replaced one square at a time without concern for matching the patterns because no two tiles are alike. He says it is the most popular brand.
The question biomimickers ask is, “What would nature do here?”
What they don’t ask is, “Would nature do this?” nor, “Do we want do be like the rest of nature in this?” nor, “How does nature use this?”
A friend of mine framed this most poignantly: A green prison is still a prison.
Which is to say, making a thing more environmentally-friendly cannot precede the challenging of the justification for that thing. If we want to live in harmony with the rest of the natural world, we need to examine the things we do and use in a fundamental way and justify their existence and practice in light of their environmental and human context before we attempt to make them “environmentally-friendly”.
We need to be aware of two separate issues when we try to emulate nature: Whether the approach and the end goal of our project are compatible with existing natural systems (ex: “Ecosystem-inspired cooperative strategies in business” don’t make a business any less exploitative of the environment), and whether the practices of the natural world are worth imitating (ex: Many habits of animals lack the social responsibility that we as self-aware beings must practice), and finally, Whether we are using a technology in an appropriate way.
Let’s see how these can be applied to the aforementioned carpet example.
Would nature create a carpet? Being recycled, it uses less new materials than one of virgin materials. But it still uses some resources, and it uses plenty of energy (recycling is typically very energy-intensive), and its existence in this world has all sorts of health risks. Carpets are usually made fire-retardant with very toxic chemicals (I learned this first hand when I basement I lived in flooded, and then the landlord dried the carpets with a fan, releasing these chemicals into the air and giving everyone in the house head- and stomachaches), as well as trapping dust particles from the air, that contain other toxins. Carpet squares are mass-produced by machines, and lack any human involvement in their production, let alone human creativity. I wouldn’t expect that they contain any raw materials (unless they are wool, but the carpets we’re talking about are not), and certainly nothing the human eye and touch would recognize and understand. I don’t think nature would be very impressed by a square of petroleum-fibre manufactured by robots and dyed in a computer-generated pattern. This question needs to be asked before we can even start to ask what makes the best carpet.
Do we want to be like nature in its “organized chaos” of a forest floor? Well yeah, aesthetically it’s beautiful. But a forest floor is more than aesthetic. And this is a fundamental flaw in a lot of “biomimicry” (let’s coin a new term: “biofakery”), that it imitates the superficial characteristics of a natural system without asking why. This is a really big deal! A carpet floor is anything but aesthetic. It is a system of decomposition, which also happens to insulate, and ultimately disappears and feeds another element of that system. A recycled carpet has nothing to do with this. The fact that a forest floor cushions our feet is totally irrelevant; if it has any relationship to the animals that walk upon it, it is only to condition them to lack the hardy feet and hooves that animals on harsher land (ex: mountain goats) develop. And as for aesthetically, the beautiful random pattern of the forest floor is a) beautiful only because humans perceive it as so, and b) random because it is an element of an ecosystem with a diversity that no human system could ever, ever possibly hope to imitate.
It’s hardly worth even asking the final question by this point, but what the hell: How would nature use a forest floor? Well, that was pretty decently answered above: as a site of decomposition, habitat for decomposers, and nourishment for plants. Probably other things too: one step in the filtration of rainwater, habitat for other life-forms, insulation to protect roots in winter, supplies for nest-making, who knows?! The fact is that the aesthetics of a forest floor miss the point of its “technology”, and the application of it in carpeting is a total failure at biomimicry.
So what is a good example of biomimicry? You’ll just have to stay tooned … indefinitely … because I’d love to write about it but I’m making no promises … OK, alright, fine, here’s one off the top of my head: www.beingsomewhere.net
PS. David Suzuki just got lost serious points in my books.
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