Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature

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Summary: Learning from the Genius of Nature
Review: Before even reviewing the book, it seems as though I must explain its raison de'etre; for some negative reviews disclaim the very import of looking to nature as a model for life. For starters, nature runs on sunlight and creates no waste. To me, this alone is reason enough to mimic nature, since our profligate energy use has caused a global eco-crisis. Not only does the combustion of fossil fuels pollute the air breathe (leading to some 3 million deaths from air pollution annually according to the WHO), but it also floods the atmosphere with CO2, leading culprit in the greenhouse effect. Moreover, being that the supply of crude oil is finite, the very foundation of our economy will one day run dry. Nature, on the other hand, runs on the unlimited bounty of sunlight. Unlimited clean energy is just one example of the genius of nature which author Benyus points out in this book.

Nature does many other wonderful things we would do well to learn from. Arctic fish and frogs freeze solid and then spring to life, having protected their organs from ice damage. Black bears hibernate all winter without poisoning themselves on their urea, while their polar cousins stay active with a coat of transparent hollow hairs covering their skins like the panes of a greenhouse. Chameleons and cuttlefish hide without moving, changing the pattern of their skin to instantly blend with their surroundings. Bees, turtles, and birds navigate without maps, while whales and penguins dive without scuba gear. How do they do it? How do dragonflies outmaneuver our best helicopters? How do hummingbirds cross the Gulf of Mexico on less than one tenth of an ounce of fuel? How do ants carry the equivalent of hundreds of pounds in a dead heat through the jungle? How do muscles attach to rock in a wet environment? The answers to these questions may seem like trivia to non-expert, but "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 mattes of scale, the differences dissolve."

Like every other creature, humans cause a lot of commotion in the biosphere: creating, moving, and consuming. But our species is the only one that creates more waste than nature can safely and efficiently recycle. Ours is only one that ignores ecological limits, exceeds the carrying capacity of the land, and consumes more energy than nature can provide. The ideology that allowed us to expand beyond our limits was that the world -- never-ending in its bounty -- was put here exclusively for our use. But after the topsoil blows away, the oceans go lifeless, the oil wells go dry, and the air and water we depend on are utterly fouled, what will we do? Will we be able to survive? Unlike the impact of a car, is crisis is cumulative. The mounting effects of this ideology are rising temperatures, decreasing grain yields, rising cancer rates, falling fish harvests, dwindling forests, worsening air pollution, and rising oil and water prices. A most resilient creature, I believe we (or some of us) will survive this ecololgical "bottle-neck" squeeze, to use Harvard scientist E.O. Wilson's phrase. But the questions this book seeks to answer is, can we flourish?

As mentioned by other reviewers, some parts were overly technical. However, much of it is written with the layperson in mind. Moreover, the book is rich in philosophy, like that of Wes Jackson, Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, and writers Thomas and Wendell Berry (unrelated). And the main point of the book is simple enough for a child to understand. 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? And is it beautiful? In order to right our wasteful and dangerously dysfunctional relationship with nature, these ten questions should serve as guiding principles for design and human interaction.

Although some of the science is now dated (e.g., hydrogen fuel cells are now a reality), this book will remain pregnant with philosophical and practical insights for years to come. It is far, far ahead of the times. My only criticism is that, much of the scientific history and intrastructure this book depends on actually helped create the eco-predicament we currently find ourselves in. The labratories she visits (not to mention the cars she uses to visit them) are not exactly eco-friendly. In other words, the author supposes more technology and "progres" will eventually help us out of this predicament.

This book is a landmark - and one hell of a good read. Dssential for anyone interested business, philosophy, ecology, science or engineering. And when combined with other books, like Lester Brown's ECO-ECONOMY, David Korten's WHEN CORPORATIONS RULE THE WORLD, Paul Hawkins' NATURAL CAPITALSIM, Hildur Jackson and Karen Svensson's ECOVILLAGE LIVING, and perhaps something on eco-education, it would fit well into my dream eco-philosophy course. Unfortunately, I'm not a teacher and very few universities have funding for such programs anyway.

Rating:
Summary: nonsensical environmental manifesto
Review: Biomimicry is an awesome book about how we as humans should mimic nature. In this book the author ( Jannine M. Benyus ) shows the reader how to go about doing everyday things using nature. Jannine answers the questions how will we feed ourselves ?, how will we harness energy ?, how will we make things ?, how will we heal ourselves ?, how will we store what we learn ?, how will we conduct business ?, and where will we go from here?

Biomimicry (from the Greek bios meaning life and mimesis meaning imitation) is the search for innovation inspired by nature. Through out the book Jannine takes the reader into various labs with different specialists and even into her own backyard. She talks with the specialists about how chimps medicate themselves by finding a certain plant, how bivalves called Mytilus edulis can make a polymer that sticks better than any of our adhesives, how spider silk is waterproof and five times stronger than steel, etc. These facts she digs up are amazing. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the human future, in learning how to use nature to build better pharmaceutical drugs, or to anyone who has an interest in nature.

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Summary: Evocative and Charming
Review: I immensely enjoyed this book. Maybe it was because it seems to have accomplished what it set out to do. I do not believe the goal was to convert us all into diehard Biomimics; no, instead it merely opens our eyes to those wonders of the world which might normally go unseen. The strength of a spider's delicate weave, the incredible energy collecting mechanisms of a leaf, the 'better than Kevlar' resistance of abalone shell. I was only vaguely aware of these properties prior to reading this book. Now I know enough to carry a good conversation, yet thankfully not enough to draw schematics. As in nature, the key is balance, and Janine Benyus accomplishes this brilliantly with her book.
I'm always relieved when the author eases us out of and into the science with a bit of an anecdote. Don't get me wrong, this book is very educational, but I couldn't help but be charmed by the charismatic flair that characterizes her writing. She seems a person who never fails to marvel at the beauty found just around the corner. From this, she shares with us not only her fascination of the world, but of the extraordinary people who study it. I judge a book by the way it is able to shape and inform my approach to life. 'Biomimicry' has moved me in such a way that it is hard not to simply stop, take a breath, look around, and laugh whole heartedly at the sheer briliance of it.

Rating:
Summary: disappointed
Review: I ordered this book with great expectations based upon the excellent reviews that it had obtained. Personally I could not finish the book. I had wished for something that would speak of the philosophy of biomimicry. Instead I found a rapidfire, dotcom style, gee whiz book that runs without much depth (though much wide eyed wonder) and seems to spend an excessive amount of time on the personalities behind the science. When you read a thoughtful book on a new subject by an author who has a commnad over it, you can feel it after a few pages. This book, to me, did not deliver that feeling.

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Summary: Nature Chrome in Tool and Law
Review: In Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, the sophisticated *almost* pro-growth angle of Benyus shows the great potential profitability of copying some of nature's time-tested, nonpolluting, room-temperature manufacturing and computing technologies. The colors of Benyus, a splendid Stevensville, Montana writer with an eclectic grasp of quick-moving science, contain far more shades of green than chrome. Rhetorically at least, the ultimate attraction of technologies such as three-plus-billion-year-old photosynthesis that scientists are now trying to "biomimic" is that the techniques nature has evolved are more sophisticated and efficient, less disruptive and destructive than the Promethean pyrotechnics that have made humanity the new kid on the evolutionary block. Like someone who has made a fortune trading fast-growing speculative stocks but must now provide for her retirement by switching to safer, lower yielding bonds, ecologic suggests that the fossil fuel economies that have gotten us thus far will soon be bankrupt and that, if we don't switch to safer modes of sustenance, we will take a major hit, perhaps even extinction. Benyus is dead on: There *is* an artful science embedded in living nature that makes the realm of regular celestial motions, once believed to be perfect and divine, look robotically stupid by comparison. But science, whose great early advances came in uncovering the relatively predictable activities of inanimate objects, has lately found success in examining more complex and chaotic structures the shiniest example of which, of course, is life. Social critic Walter Benjamin pointed out that sometimes the extreme case rather than the average is exemplary. Likewise, theoretical biologist Robert Rosen suggests that biology may be the more generally instructive science of which physics is a local application And inventive Benyus shows once and for all the utter technological superiority of would-be "lower" life forms--the underwater superglue made by mussels, spider dragline silk which ounce-for-ounce is five times stronger than steel and five-times more shatterproof than bulletproof Kevlar, medicinal herb-collecting bears and chimps. Imagine an undiscovered planet in our solar system consisting of intensely advanced life forms that had perfected waste management, parallel shape-based molecular computing, and nanotechnological materials processing billions of years ago. Such a planet exists. It is our own. Benyus had the genius to recognize nature's own genius and make scientists' attempts to copy it the theme of a popular book. Brava. Amusingly, however, when she talks about "the living, breathing examples of sustainability" held up by biomimics as natural models we humans should now emulate, she uses a technological metaphor: at this crucial juncture in our evolution as a species, natural technology is "lighting the runway home." This can be read as an unconscious nod to the petroleum-based collossus involved at many levels in the printing and distribution of the book, and the standing irony that any truly powerful program to subvert the present "unsustainable" ecological impact of humans is likely to employ the very technology (such as petroleum-fed global transportation) it criticizes.

Which begs a brutal question. How will we get back to nature? Benyus evokes an ecological "canon" she says can be used as a template for our technology. A natural system should run on sunlight (but do cats?), it should use only the energy it needs (but even our cells store energy), it should fit form to function (do penguins?), it should recycle everything (but no single organism does), it should bank on diversity (but after fire, nuclear explosion and other crises certain organisms grow wildly, priming the area for followers), it should curb excess from within (ok, but excess creates the luxury which leads to new innovation), and it should be beautiful (why not?). This is a noble list. What needs to be clarified, however, is the larger evolutionary perspective. The ecological "canon" of emulatable processes displayed by nonhuman nature cannot be conflated with nature per se. We are about to embark on an oft-travelled ecological adjustment made by many organisms which, finding a formerly unused resource, grow wildly and then are forced to deal with the literal spoils of their victory. The energy from the sun which runs through all life is ultimately a Pandoran excess that cannot be closed up and kept tidy. The global environment, like Rome in its senescence, will always be open to organisms evolving new ways to plunder it. Like other pioneer species except on a larger, global scale, we must now temper our populousness and foment the diversity of biological maturity (leading to sensescence) not because of any intrinsic evil but because of the dangers, mostly to ourselves, caused by our own fabulously innovative growth. Billions of years ago, when cyanobacteria tapped into water as a source of hydrogen, the free oxygen they produced as waste was no evolutionary breath of fresh air. Rather, the reactive gas burnt the tissues of all organisms that had not evolved to tolerate or use it, especially the creators who found themselves in the gas's midst. Our puritanical hyperbole needs a Swift to kick it. "Power," as Nietzsche, who disparaged the use of mechanical over natural metaphors, observed over a century ago, "makes stupid." Our ability to tap into Earth's resources to power our own growth has brought us to something even more annoying than the brink of population or standard-of-living collapse: our own stupidity. Books like Benyus's-which should be required reading at corporations, I would imagine-reminds us that in the long run moderation pays.

Rating:
Summary: Biomimicry
Review: Ms. Benyus's book was for the most part enjoyable to read giving many perspectives of this new emerging science. The book was well written and many of her arguments were compelling. One element was terribly troubling, however, her constant reference to evolution as the source of all things natural. Evolution is the biggest farce of modern science and has been proven invalid in so many ways that to use it as the argument of origins diminishes the value of her work. As I read her book, I kept thinking at each reference to evolution that if she had just left that unsaid or that reference to evolution out, none of the force of her conviction would have been lost. Instead I kept reeling from the evolutionary references. It is too bad that she did not stick to true science.

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Summary: Fascinating Science marred by Silly Thoughts
Review: The Vancouver Sun says Benyus "Writes like an angel." That scared me. But they were right.

Unfortunately, it's not one of those no-nonsense Biblical angels. She writes like one of those daffy, dewey-eyed, diapered, dinky-winged ones instead. Let me clarify.

The science described in this book is interesting. This is where the author is at her best. However, she wanted to seem like a deep thinker, too, and that's where she founders into New-Age-like poofiness, seasoned with ecological alarmism. But you want specifics.

"... [l]ife has learned to fly, circumnavigate the globe, live in the depths of the ocean ... lasso the sun's energy ... in short ... everything we want to do, without guzzling fossil fuel, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future."

Sorry, sis, nature doesn't move hundreds of 120-lb passengers at a time along with their luggage, or make trips to the moon, or produce supercomputers. Our sights, for better or worse, are higher, and so are our needs.

"Virtually all native cultures that have survived without fouling their nests have acknowledged that nature knows best, and have had the humility to ask the bears and wolves and ravens and redwoods for guidance. They can only wonder why we don't do the same."

Perhaps she hasn't heard how native Americans would decimate thousands of buffalo at a time, or burn trees for after-dinner entertainment, or basically slash-and-burn their way through nature. Nature knows best? How silly can you get? Does that include the violent killing of prey, volcanoes, tidal waves, disease? And why should Nature "know" anything?

"We humans regard limits as a universal dare ... other Earthlings take their limits more seriously, knowing they must function within a tight range of life-friendly temperatures, harvest within the carrying capacity of the land, and maintain an energy balance that cannot be borrowed against." More idiocy. Other organisms know nothing of the sort. They merely function as programmed, reacting to situations by instinct, blissfully ignorant of all these issues. Unless she's talking about Disneyworld, which seems to be where her mind is when not describing biological marvels.

"Who's to say we won't simply steal nature's thunder and use it in the ongoing campaign against life? ... This is not an idle worry. The last really famous biomimetic invention was the airplane ... by 1914, we were dropping bombs from the sky." The silliness goes on and on, believe me. Doesn't she understand that anything can be used as a weapon? Are we to stop making chairs and tables? Even then, nature-made rocks are handy.

She quotes an organic farmer: "The native peoples ... worshipped the Earth; they were educated by it. They didn't require schools and churches - their whole world was one." Well, maybe that's why they regularly slaughtered and mutilated one another, missy. Did she get all her history from "Dances with Wolves?"

She throws in some latin here and there to reinforce her intellectual image, but it just seems pretentious.

The rest of the book is interesting but somehow spoiled by her nauseating pretensions to philosophizing. Unfortunately she starts out with a rather boring (to me) topic - biomimicry in farming. But it gets better - she goes on to harnessing solar power, making wondrous materials, and so on. She does this quite well, and it's too bad she didn't stick to this.

Also, unfortunately, she has been caught up in the assumption that nature is in a state that is "just right" - related to the "nature knows best" myth - that is the most puzzling belief of environmental alarmists. Why should it be? Supposedly nature is continually evolving - species here today, if unfit, should simply be gone tomorrow, nary a second thought. But she doesn't grasp this, although she says at the beginning, "failures are fossils."

If you can stomach this kind of naive psychobabble, you'll marvel at the ingenuity and complexity of nature ... in this way, this book is a good companion to "Darwin's Black Box."

Rating:
Summary: Good subject but poor content
Review: This book deals with an interesting concept which is 'biomimicry'. In summary, it says that Mother Earth offers many models on which we can base our innovation/creation. But the book is not so easy to read and not so well planned. I skip many parts which in my sense go to deep in details and some parts are a bit repeatitive. The book is quite large but offers only few interesting ideas that are then developed and so detailed to an end which you don't remember the purpose. Some parts don't have a conclusion so you finish the chapter quite frustrated because you have read a big technical part and uoi don't see what was the point the author wanted to demonstrate. If you are interested in technical sciences then you might like it but otherwise, the ideas on biomimicry in this book could be summarize in a more compact book.

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Summary: Inspires us to look to nature for solutions to our problems
Review: Where can we find the best solutions to the many technical, environmental, social and economic problems that beset us?

In this wonderful book Benyus shows us that nature can teach us valuable lessons. "In the 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria, life has learned to fly, circumnavigate the globe, live in the depths of the ocean and atop the highest peaks, craft miracle materials, light up the night, lassoo the sun's energy, and build a self-reflective brain...living things have done everything we want to do, without guzzling fossil fuel, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future. What better models could there be?"

By adopting a little humility and treating nature as a model, a measure, and a mentor, she argues, we can catch up on the lessons nature has had millions of years to learn. Benyus writes like an angel, her prose conjuring vivid images as she takes us with her on a journey to explore what Biomimics are doing in material science, medicine, computing, energy, agriculture, and business. Her journalistic style does not shrink from the intricacies of photosynthesis and relishes the wonders of mussel tethering techniques, but always keeps the wider picture in view.

I found myself wanting to push the fast-forward button - to the time when prarie-style agriculture is widely adopted; materials are made at room-temperature in life-friendly conditions with no toxicity; and our economy is modelled on a rainforest, not a ragweed. Readers of this book could be those who will help get us there faster. Enjoy!

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Summary: Realistic, innovative solutions for a sustainable world
Review: With the eloquence of an angel, Janine Benyus captures and describes the rapidly emerging field of biomimicry. In this beautifully written "seed of hope", Janine reveals how Nature--in her complexity and intricacy--can provide the innovative solutions we as a society desperately seek as we strive for sustainability. Through clear, clever, and enjoyable writing, Janine tackles difficult scientific information and presents it in a manner digestible to even those that fear science! The book is full of wonderful examples ranging from biomimetic materials to agricultural systems to pharmaceuticals to industrial ecology. After reading this book, I can no longer look at the natural world in the same way. With over 3.8 billion years of research and at least 30 million case studies, Nature probably has the answer we are looking for. Every roadblock presented to me is now countered with the following question: "What would Nature do if she had to tackle the same problem?" As a biologist and a business person, I'm finding that the two have more in common that I previously thought. This book is on my number one list for life. I find myself carrying my page worn copy everywhere I go just so I can recommend it to everyone, including strangers! This book gives me hope for our society. If we can learn to look towards Nature as model, measure, and mentor, we might just stand a chance.