The only times I could remember seeing current in my pond were during the spring chinooks when snow melts in a hurry and brings muddy waters from the surrounding fields. A few times each year, these floods would turn the pond a Mississippi brown.
By then it was coming clear to me. My pond must have originally been spring-fed, but lately the source of fresh water, the maker of current and cold, had been suffocated under layers of topsoil roiling in from the fields. The topsoil was prime for eroding because years of overgrazing had weakened the thick sod. One thing led to another, and the pond silted in, becoming a tepid bowl—perfect for duckweed but not, ironically, for ducks. If I wanted to keep the pond open to breeders and have duckweed only in the cattailed edges again, I would have to find that forgotten spring, free it, and then stop the source of silting.
I went home and gave my neighbors one more thing to talk about as I slowly paddled through the green froth, feeling for the coldest spot. I started to dredge there, and sure enough, great shovelfuls of good topsoil came up. What came up next felt like a miracle.
Released from its burden, a cleansing swell of cold Montana snowmelt geysered to the surface. The once-murky waters rose to fill their banks, and the duckweed I had labored to screen away for two years flowed casually over the dam in sheets. By afternoon, my pond was sparkling, and the wood ducks in the sloughs of the river below me were feasting.
Mine was a classic example of echoing nature, and if I were to offer some sort of path for the larger culture to take toward a biomimetic future, it would have to follow this pattern. Like all echoing, mine was a dialogue with the land, but instead of me speaking and a canyon amphitheater responding, it was the other way around. I listened while the land spoke, and then I tried to mimic what I had heard.
The preparation for this echoing was a quieting on my part, a silencing of my own cleverness long enough to turn to nature for advice. My afternoon vigil at the pond was the listening stage, the absorbing of secrets in a respectful way. My uncovering of the forgotten spring was the echoing, the biomimicking itself. The follow-through to all this was the stewarding required of me, an ongoing thank you for the wisdom I had acquired. It was up to me to revegetate my denuded lands with native plants that would hold the soil so that flood events would not continue to suffocate the spring.
In my adventure with the pond, I realized that biomimicry is just like opening a forgotten spring, rushing new hope to problems that have seemed intractable. The steps to the biomimetic future that I offer below are based on that experience. They are part studentship and part stewardship—studying nature’s wellsprings of good ideas, and then protecting them so that they can continue to flow.
FOUR STEPS TO A BIOMIMETIC FUTURE
Quieting: Immerse ourselves in nature.
A solitary American monk named Thomas Berry writes that in our relationship with nature, we have been autistic for centuries. Wrapped tightly in our own version of knowledge, we have been unreceptive to the wisdom of the natural world. To tune in again, to have the “spontaneous environmental rapport” that characterized our ancestors, will take doing something that is perfectly delightful: reimmersing ourselves in the natural world.
Our first taste of nature usually comes in childhood, but even that must no longer be taken for granted. Sadly, report Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble in their book The Geography of Childhood, it is quite possible for today’s child to grow up without ever having taken a solitary walk beside a stream or spent the hours we used to “doing nothing,” foraging for pine cones, leaves, feathers, and rocks—treasures more precious than store-bought ones. Today it is difficult to tear children away from the virtual world of the mall to introduce them to the real one.
Bringing children back into nature and nature back into childhood is a job for teachers and parents and friends willing to take a child outside for a lark. There need not be an “official” park involved; finding a place where green things grow, even if it’s a crack in the sidewalk, is enough. Once you’re there, there’s no need to “do” anything. What kids really need are large blocks of unstructured time for making mud pies and finding nests, for acting on the fascination with nature that is part of our reptilian mind, and that is thankfully still unsullied in children.
As adults, we need to put down our books about nature and actually get into a rainstorm, be startled by the deer we startle, climb a tree like a chameleon. It’s good for the soul to go where humans do not have a great say about what happens. Between these trips to the “big outside,” we need only open our hearts to the smaller encounters: the smell of old sunlight in a leaf pile, the chrysalis of a butterfly inside our mailbox, the glimpse of that earthworm that helps us grow tomatoes.
This literal immersion in nature prepares us for the figurative immersion. This is where we take our reasoned minds and stuff them back into our bodies, realizing that there is no membrane separating us from the natural world.
For a long time we thought we were better than the living world, and now some of us tend to think that we are worse, that everything we touch turns to soot. But neither perspective is healthy. We have to remember how it feels to have equal standing in the world, to be “between the mountain and the ant…part and parcel of creation,” as the Iroquois traditionalist Oren Lyons says.
We may be newcomers here, but we are not aliens. The old-time Montanans have taught me that when dealing with new residents, the important question is not “When did you get here?” but “How long are you planning to stay?” If we are planning to stay forever, we need to look to the life that has preceded us for tips on how to be better neighbors.
Listening: Interview the flora and fauna of our own planet.
I say “interview” because it is not enough to simply name the species on Earth (though this in itself is a monumental task, and nowhere near complete). We must also get to know these species as best we can and discover their talents and survival tips, their role in the great web of things.
Entering into this sort of intimacy with life on Earth is not a job for scientists alone. It calls for a renewed popular interest in natural history, like the flourishing of nature-buffism that characterized the 1800s. In those days, amateur naturalists contributed mightily to the literature, and nature study with hand lens and plant press was a common form of family recreation. I see some hint of this in people’s increasing desire to get to know their own region better, to develop an internal pride of place. Naturalists tell me that people are showing up at mushroom walks and owl-calling nights and master-gardening lectures in droves, finally curious about the true nature of their homeplace.
At the same time, the pool of people who can teach these courses is thinning out. In one of the most frightening essays I’ve read in a long time (“Forgetting”), Rutgers University’s David Ehrenfeld talks about how many basic courses such as Classification of Higher Plants, Marine Invertebrates, Ornithology (birds), Mammology, Cryptogams (ferns and mosses), and Entomology (insects) are going untaught at highly respected universities. They are no longer offered because there is no one on the staff qualified to teach them. Retired faculty sometimes volunteer in a pinch, but few graduate students are following in their footsteps. For many students, systematics is not a glamorous enough career track, nor well enough funded. Ehrenfeld asks administrators to realign their priorities, to make sure that before they break ground for one more “world class molecular biology lab,” they figure out how the fundamental knowledge of our natural world will be passed on.
Harvard’s E. O. Wilson has the same concerns, especially as he contemplates the great exploration that still lies ahead. In an April 1989 Bioscience article, he writes, “Systematics [deep knowledge of particular groups of organisms] in the broad sense is the future of biology. The responsible expert is the steward of a chosen taxonomic group…. He or she knows best which organisms exist and where, which are most endangered, which offer new kinds of problems to be solved, and which are most likely to benefit humankind. No on
e but the systematist can reveal the particular and extraordinary value of alcyonacean corals, chytrid fungi, anthribid weevils, sclerogibbid wasps, melostomes, ricinuleids, elephant fish, and so on down the long and enchanted roster.”
With at least 30 million possible names on that roster, we could use a peacetime army of people trained in basic identification and observation skills. As long as we’re enlisting, I would love to see a Biological Peace Corps that would give adults of all ages a chance to volunteer for two years in this very important work.
Our interview with life will allow us to become “innovation matchmakers,” matching nature’s designs and processes to the needs of technologists and engineers who design the shape, feel, and flow of our products, materials, and systems. We are at a turning point right now in which much of this century’s infrastructure is in need of replacement, including outmoded highways, energy and communication networks, water treatment facilities, factories—even economic models. This time when we collect proposals for public works and policies, we want to make sure that nature’s blueprints are at the top of the stack.
Echoing: Encourage biologists and engineers to collaborate, using nature as model and measure.
The only way to ensure that nature’s designs will be considered is to put biologists and engineers on the same working teams. Unfortunately, many engineers I know say they’re not interested in the life sciences, just as many of my biologist friends profess boredom at all things mechanical. I find that odd, because as the biomimics in this book taught me, life manufactures, computes, does chemistry, builds structures, designs systems, and engineers, to within a fine tolerance, the tools needed to fly, burrow, build dams, heat or cool their homes, and so on. The difference between what life needs to do and what we need to do is another one of those boundaries that doesn’t exist. Beyond matters of scale, the differences dissolve.
The trick is to show this hidden likeness to engineers and biologists before they put on their blinders. It takes educating in the estuary—the place where two or more disciplines flow together to make a fertile ideabed. Throughout their degree work and even in their continuing education, biologists and technologists should take courses in one another’s fields. At think tanks, task forces, joint forums, conferences, and professional societies, they should get to know one another on a personal basis, rubbing minds and getting a little creative friction going. Sparks fly from these mixed unions in a way that just doesn’t happen within bureaucracies of like-minded people.
To encourage interaction on an ongoing basis, universities would be wise to create interdisciplinary departments for the express purpose of making the metaphors flow the right way, from biology to engineering.
Until that happens, there are many ways we can make biological knowledge available to innovators wherever they are. Using the Internet, for instance, systematists could maintain a giant database of information about known taxonomic groups—their biochemical makeup, their ability to survive in certain conditions, their flight speed, and so on. Engineers could work with the biologists to help design the categories of information in the database to make sure that searches would be useful to them. This way, an engineer charged with designing a new desalination device, for instance, could easily review the strategies of mangroves and other plants that filter seawater with their roots.
Finally, when the biologist/engineer collaboration has yielded a new device or process or system, we should use what we are learning about nature’s survival principles to screen for viability—meaning, quite literally, to judge whether or not our new solutions promote life.
For too long, we have judged our innovations by whether they are good for us, which has increasingly come to mean whether they are profitable. Now that we realize, as my Jamaican friend says, that “All of We is One,” we have to put what is good for life first, and trust that it will also be good for us. The new questions should be “Will it fit in?,” “Will it last?,” and “Is there a precedent for this in nature?” If so, the answers to the following questions will be yes:
Does it run on sunlight?
Does it use only the energy it needs?
Does it fit form to function?
Does it recycle everything?
Does it reward cooperation?
Does it bank on diversity?
Does it utilize local expertise?
Does it curb excess from within?
Does it tap the power of limits?
Is it beautiful?
Assuming our bio-inspired innovation passes those tests, our next design decision will have to do with scale. Since scale is one of the main things that separates our technologies from nature’s, it’s important to consider what is appropriate, that is, what is receptive to and acceptive of our habitat. Wendell Berry’s test of scale is simple but valuable. In his book of essays titled Home Economics, he writes: “The difference [between improper and proper scale] is suggested by the difference between amplified and unamplified music in the countryside, or the difference between the sound of a motorboat and the sound of oarlocks. A proper human sound, we may say, is one that allows other sounds to be heard. A properly scaled human economy or technology allows a diversity of other creatures to thrive.” I find this last point compelling because any bio-inspired technology that diminishes diversity diminishes the very inspiration upon which it depends. By letting the diversity of life on Earth erode, we smother the wellspring of good ideas.
Stewarding: Preserve life’s diversity and genius.
The erosion of life in this country alone includes: Ninety-five percent of all virgin forest cut down in the last two hundred years. Nearly all the prairie turned “wrong side up.” Sixty percent of all wetlands drained and filled. And now, according to the new National Biological Survey, half of all native ecosystems degraded to the point of endangerment. It’s no secret that we can level entire habitats as if we were sweeping children’s blocks from a table. But can we refrain from doing that?
Restraint is not a popular notion in a society addicted to “growing” the economy, but it is one of the most powerful practices we can adopt at this point in history. Over the next several decades, we will be doubling our population before we begin to level off at 10 billion by mid-century. If most of us hope to live above the poverty level, our economy will have to somehow mushroom tenfold. This means more pressure on wild lands than ever before. If current rates of deforestation continue, for instance, only 10 percent of the original tropical forest cover will be left by mid-century along with only 50 percent of its biodiversity. The alternative, say biologists, is to plan now to save habitat and get wild species through the knothole of the next several decades.
This calls for a new valuing of what we have left, not in an economic way but in a much deeper way in which we acknowledge that we are ultimately dependent on the existing natural pattern, a pattern that we only partially understand. Science is continually peeling masks away, only to find another mask deeper down, one of the many worn by what Thomas Hardy called the Great Face behind. The closer we come to glimpsing that face, the greater the mystery appears. Our partial knowledge—the fact that we are, as Wes Jackson says, more ignorant than knowledgeable—is the best reason to save wild lands in their unadulterated state.
Native peoples’ response to this abiding mystery was to set aside sacred sites—a valley that would not be hunted, a stream that would not be fished, a grove of trees that would never be cut. These spiritual sites turned out to be lasting conservation legacies. In some parts of the world, they are the only examples of a certain kind of habitat that are left.
But saving fragments of land here and there is not enough. One of the latest revelations from conservation biology shows us that an ecological unraveling occurs as the fabric of the landscape is cut into smaller and smaller pieces. The smaller the “island” of land, the more edges there are to fray, and the more vulnerable species are to human influence, genetic inbreeding, catastrophic disease, and ultimate extinction. One way to alle
viate the isolation is to connect large blocks of wilderness with protected migration corridors. Blocks-and-corridors alternatives such as The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act are, in my opinion, the only land-use plans before us that honor ecological realities.
Important as they are, wild set-aides cannot preserve the lion’s share of biodiversity, which resides in and among us in our settled lands—our urban forests, our suburban greenspaces, our farms and ranches. We cannot escape the fact that we must use nature on these lands; our lives depend on the lives of other species. As the author Wendell Berry says, the question will be how to use it and how much to use. Again, our actions must be guided by a humility that comes from the realization of how little we know. There are four thousand to five thousand species of bacteria in a pinch of ordinary soil—most of them species we don’t yet have a name for, much less an understanding of why we need them. There must be studentship on settled lands, and only then, stewardship or good use.
The idea of good use also applies to how we use the products of those lands. Berry argues, for instance, that shoddy workmanship is a much greater threat to our forests than clear-cutting. Only when we come to value the well-made chair or table that lasts a lifetime will we begin to value and save the source of those things, whole forests instead of trees. When the product of that forest is a durable idea, as it is in biomimicry, the same valuing of source will occur.
Cultures that depend directly on hunting, gathering, and fishing tend to work out codes of behavior that honor both product and source. Richard Nelson, an ethnographer who has lived and hunted with native Alaskans, says there are literally hundreds of rules and rituals that keep hunters in the good graces of the animals they depend on.
Koyukon hunters believe that an animal either gives or withholds itself; success has nothing to do with the hunter’s prowess. In fact, when a hunter returns to the village with a bear, he makes a cryptic comment like “I found something in a hole,” so there is no semblance of boasting over the animal’s demise. He then adheres to a strict ritual when butchering the body, beginning with the slitting of the eyes so that the powerful spirit of the bear will not see if the hunter makes mistakes. It is considered strictly taboo to deviate from this ritual, to kill more than what you need, or to waste any part of an animal.
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