Learning from Nature

In early February, while attending Milan’s MADEexpo 2009, I found myself sitting in the audience during a presentation on applying the concepts of biomimicry to the built environment.

Dr Denise DeLuca, LEED AP and representative of The Biomimicry Institute (TBI), was speaking passionately about using lessons from nature to enhance our personal and professional lives.

At first, I’ll admit, I was skeptical. Reading the title of her presentation, Biomimicry: innovation inspired by nature, I expected to be confronted by a daisy-chain donning hippie encouraging me to use vegetable oil in my Jeep’s straight-6.

But, from the moment she read that first quote from Janine Benyus, TBI founder and president, I was fascinated. It went like this: “The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.”

Let me pause. For those unfamiliar with the organisation, biomimicry is: “The practice of developing sustainable technologies inspired by ideas from nature.”

I understand how it sounds and I can imagine the images it evokes in the heads of my readers—a bunch of really intelligent, really eccentric scientists gathered round a table trying to devise better, more intimate ways of hugging trees or speaking to flowers.

If that’s how you’re thinking, hold on. Let me at least offer some concrete examples of just how important this science is to the built environment. The Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe features an HVAC system modeled on the self-cooling mounds of Macrotermes michaelseni, termites that maintain the temperature inside their nest to within one degree while ambient temperatures fluctuate between 3ºC and 42ºC.

Advertisement

FEATURED COMMENT I heard Janine Benyus speak last night on Biomimicry at Syracuse University. That lecture gave me hope that we will be   1 Comments Read more comments »

Another example is how engineers and scientists have studied humpback whales to learn to create efficient wind power. Using science much too complex to describe here, scientists have studied the tubercules on the humpback’s fins to achieve an 8% increase in lift, a 32% reduction in drag and a 40% increase in angle of attack—all of which is being used by a company called WhalePower to design more efficient wind turbines.

TBI analyses trees and bones to optimise safety and gas milage in automobiles; it uses the Golden Ratio to create ultra-efficient fans and water mixers; it studies how chimpanzees cope with illness to devise new medications; it studies prairies to learn to grow food sustainably and the forest canopy to develop green roofing systems.      

All of these are examples of how biomimicry has helped in the advancement of human civilisation.

Biomimicry is, at once, incredibly simple and incredibly complex. It’s about slowing down, getting over ourselves and our status as ‘dominant species’ and looking to nature for answers. Longtime biomimicry advocate William McDonough designed a building that mimics every function of a tree except reproduction.

If more of us paid attention to the basic precepts of biomimicry in our projects, we’d move well past green buildings and into the realm of living, breathing ones. I hope I’m around to experience them when it happens.             

---