NARRATION

As human beings, we have a challenge on our hands. We need to think about how we can design an existence on this planet that’s not only sustainable, but regenerative. Meaning, it gives back to the Earth. And while this might seem like a big task, as this week’s guest points out, we have so many teachers to turn to, in how to do that. 

Author and biologist Janine Benyus popularized the term biomimicry after writing the book on it in 1997. It’s an invitation to turn to other organisms for design inspiration that’s both functional and elegant. Think bullet trains that take cues from kingfishers, and water-harvesting devices inspired by beetle shells.

Janine Benyus

We honed our senses for beauty, for good design, by watching other organisms. You watch an eagle land or soar, and you’re like, That’s good design. That’s where we learn good design.

NARRATION

My name is Willow Defebaugh, and this is The Nature Of. Each week, we’ll look to the natural world for insights into how to navigate the experience of being human. This week, we’re exploring the nature of biomimicry. 

Let’s listen as Janine shares how we can apply this concept beyond design in the traditional sense to every choice we make. 

Willow

Janine, you once said that if there was one secret you wish you could reveal, it’s that we are surrounded by genius. As a starting place, I’m wondering if you can expand on that, as it relates to biomimicry. And also just define biomimicry for anyone who might be hearing about it for the first time.

Janine

Sure. Sure. Well, the definition of biomimicry and what I’m about to say about genius, they’re very similar. This recognition that we are—as many indigenous peoples talk about it—we are the younger sibling of a very ancient lineage of organisms that have been here for 3.8 billion years on this planet. And we’ve been here for 200, maybe 250,000 as Homo sapiens sapiens. So, these organisms have learned to do everything we want to do, which is to live in right relation with this planet. They’ve figured out a way to live here, not just sustaining themselves, but actually thriving. And the real magic that they do is that, they’re constantly enhancing this place, making of this place an Eden.

This planet, 4.5 billion years ago was a pretty tough place and not hospitable to life. And life actually sweetened this place, learned how to live here in a way that makes it better. So, what biomimicry says is, well, if there is an entire system of, we don’t know, 30 million species, more, that have learned to work together, doing chemistries, making materials, building their homes, provisioning their young, in ways that make a place better, are regenerative, then we’re really lucky because we’re surrounded by genius and we’re surrounded by the answers. So, there’s so much we can learn from these organisms.

Biomimicry is a practice of allowing yourself to be inspired by the rest of the natural world. Each time you go to make a new design, each time you go to make a decision, you say to yourself, here’s the practice. You say to yourself, What has already solved what it is I’m trying to solve? And how? It’s usually many, many organisms who have done it and they gift us with their genius. They gift us with these solutions that have been co-created with the Earth. They’re Earth-approved, they’re Earth-savvy, they’re Earth-enhancing.

So, biomimics actually do a practice that, it was really surprising to me, but most people that make our world, which are the designers, industrial designers, product designers, chemists, engineers, architects, the people who make our material world, very rarely consult the natural world. They don’t know how life works and how life has solved what it is they’re trying to solve. And so, we get to do that in biomimicry. We get to bring nature’s models and even using nature as measure for what goodness is, everything from nature’s forms to nature’s processes to nature’s system strategies, we get to bring that to their attention and help them emulate that, so that we can live here in the same way, gracefully.

Willow

I am so happy that you ended on that word, gracefully, because I’ve heard you say that life has really—It has learned how to get good at life, how to create the conditions for life, and how to thrive. But you’ve also said that it does so gracefully. And I love that because, when you really study the natural world, so much of the design, it’s so elegant. And I’m wondering if you can just share some of your favorite examples of biomimicry in practice.

Janine

Oh my goodness. Oh, there are so many. I love the fact that, very often, when you find an answer in the natural world, it’s a paradigm flip. So, I’ll focus on those paradigm flips. So for instance, when we build wind turbines, horizontal wind turbines they call them, which have the long blades, we spread them out on the landscape as far as possible, apart from one another, because we are worried about turbulence and we want to get them away from each other’s turbulence. Now, if you go to a trout stream and you stand on a bridge and you look down, you’ll notice this amazing thing where there’ll be a school of trout that will be rushing, almost at warp speed, upstream.

How is that happening? They can go from a standstill to warp speed. And scientists studied this movement and realized that the closer they were together, and the way they swim—they sort of curl their bodies. As they’re swimming, their tails create what’s called a vortex, which is a spiral in the water; and the spiral’s in a particular direction, and it’s going upstream. And so, they throw a spiral, the fish right behind them, and next to them curls its body into that spiral and gets flung upstream. And of course, it’s doing it for the next one, it’s doing it for the next one.

So, a guy named John Dabiri, he said, “Well, why don’t, instead of taking wind towers and moving them as far apart as possible, why don’t we use vertical towers,” which are kind of like a helix, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those vertical ones, “and put them as close as possible?” And he did, he did this out in California. And he put them close together or at particular spaces where, as one turned, it would create a vortex, which would send the next one turning even before the wind hit it. And he was getting five times the wind power of a wind farm that would’ve taken up so much more land.

We are familiar with pigments, like flowers have pigments. But the most brilliant colors in the natural world, the butterflies and the hummingbird gorgets and insects—metallic-looking insects—that’s not pigment. What they do is, they create structure out of the same common material that their wings are made out of, say the morpho butterfly, it’s chitin. Their whole body is made out of… That’s another trick, right? The whole body is made out of the same material, so that when you go to recycle it, it’s great food, but it’s chitin. It’s a chitin composite. And as they’re doing their wings, the last few layers are structured. It’s structured in such a way to play with light, so that when light comes in, it refracts and it bounces back in a way that amplifies the color blue.

A few millimeters over, that same material is laid up in a new way to project the color yellow to your eyes, or black, the deepest blacks. And what we do, when we use pigments, that’s why textiles are one of the most unsustainable industries, and a lot of it is because of dye. All the black colors that we all love, all the designers love to wear, those are the worst. And so, our rivers are just full of these dyes.

And now people are starting to do that. They’re starting to create structures that reflect and refract light in such a way to create the color blue or create the color black to your eye. And you can just tune what you want, whether it’s a fiber or something that you can apply as a paint, which is a pigmentless paint that dries in a certain way, to create that color. And it’s four times brighter than pigmented color and it doesn’t fade. Pigments are chemicals that are really hard to, they’re expensive to make for the organism, energetically and materially expensive, so a lot of them choose not to.

Willow

They found a more efficient way to do it.

Janine

Exactly. And a more beautiful way, speaking of beauty, yeah.

Willow

And there’s something so clarifying when you speak about biomimicry and some of these examples, which is, that it is simply about aligning with how life works. I love the way that you phrased that. And our challenge is, for our species almost, is where have we fallen out of alignment with how life works? And it feels like it’s such a win-win, right? Because okay, the example you just shared of, it’s more efficient and there’s less waste and it’s even more beautiful.

I’d love to place this conversation also in context, in time. So, you first wrote your book, the book, on biomimicry in 1997. I’m curious, how has your understanding of or approach to biomimicry adapted and evolved over the years, particularly as climate change has unfolded? 

Janine

Hmmm—

Willow

Small question, you know, just—

Janine

Yeah. Biomimicry has, a lot of people in the media are very fascinated by the product side of biomimicry, the cool, no-pigment-paints and things like that. And that’s a small scale. And what’s smaller yet than that is, the biomimetic ways of manufacturing, ways of working with materials. So, that’s small-scale biomimicry. We work on that all the time, as we’re working with product designers. But now we’re starting to also work at a larger-systems-level with some of our larger artifacts. And it’s like, what does biomimicry have to say about city planning? What does biomimicry have to say about a building and its site? The way we’re practicing it now, and I think it’s some of our most impactful work right now, is in, we have a learning cohort of companies, universities, cities, that are saying to themselves, what if we took, as our standard, nature as measure? What if we said that our building and its site should perform or function like the wildland next door?

So then, you say to yourself, Okay, well what does that mean in practice? So, what we do is, we go to the wildland next door, literally we find a place, and we’re building data centers with Microsoft, we’ve got Ford Motor Company, we just did four of their facilities, we’re doing factories for Interface. These are things that are popping up like mushrooms, but they don’t act like mushrooms. So, we’re trying. So anyway, so what we do is, we go and we measure the ecological gifts that are coming from the wildland next door. What would the place be, where we’re going to build or we’re going to retrofit? What would it be if we weren’t here? And each place has an eco type. You can say, okay, this part of it would be a meadow, this part of it would be a forest, this part of it would be a riparian area.

So, then we go and we find the most intact examples of that, not 200 years ago, but today. The best, highest-performing, highest-functioning, healthiest place. And we go in and we say, we have 21 ecosystem services or gifts. What those are, are like, how much water are you storing for us? How much air are you cleaning? How much soil are you building? How much wildlife are you—what’s your wildlife support? How much wildlife support do you have? How much pollinator support do you have? All the things that these ecosystems gift us with—clean air, clean water—all the things they do. We come back to the building site and we sit with the engineers, and they’re going to build a factory and a parking lot. And we say, and if these are gallons per minute of water stored or water cleaned, and we say, you have to clean this much water, clean this much air, support this much wildlife, abate this much noise, transform this much pollution.

And they’re like, Well, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. And you’re going to send all of that beyond your borders, right? It’s going to be goodness beyond borders. It’s going to go downstream, the water’s going to go downstream cleaner, the air’s going to go downwind cleaner. You’re basically going to give these gifts to your surrounding neighborhoods, which by the way, are usually zip codes that have not had something nice happen for a very long time. And so, we have some interesting conversations at the design table, as you can imagine.

Willow

Oh, I bet.

Janine

Like, Why should we do this? It’s not our property that’s going to get improved. Well, your property will, it’s going to be a lush and livable place for your employees. How about that? What’s most important about that and how biomimicry can really have a deep change is that, that changes the paradigm of who we think we are on this planet, and what is our role as a human being. We’ve been sort of, in our young young life, as a young species, we’ve been taking all of these gifts, but not giving back anything of value. So, that’s the paradigm shift. Ecosystems are generous. We talk about regenerative, the word generative, to me, it’s generous. They’re constantly producing this abundance beyond their borders.

Willow

There’s something that you shared that really stuck with me. That this is really, it’s an existential question, right? That’s at the heart of this. Which is, what role do we want to play and who are we going to be as a species? Because you can imagine that every single conversation in every design room, every conference table would ultimately come down to that question of, Well, why? Why should we do this? Why should we care? And that comes down to, Who do we want to be? And I absolutely am going to carry with me, generative—the root of that being generous—because that is such a beautiful reminder.

And I’d love to bring this into the personal for a second, which is: There’s an element to this—you’ve spoken about this before—that learning from nature, seeing nature as a teacher, it requires also a humbling of ourselves, a stillness. And you mentioned the word practice a few times. So, I’m curious, what does it look like in practice for you? How do you practice biomimicry in your just everyday life as a human being, trying to navigate being human?

Janine

I completely do. My partner and I live on eight beautiful, beautiful acres that we were on the healing team with, on the healing team, because when we bought it, it had been very, very heavily overgrazed by horses and abused. And so, it’s taken, we’ve been here 34 years, it took us about 12 years to bring native grasses back and to restore the two ponds that are on the property. And so, there was a lot of me doing biomimicry and Laura doing biomimicry, because there’s nothing more humbling than realizing that you are not going to be the hero that fixes this place. That’s not what happens. All you can do is set the table and be hospitable for the organisms, the real healers that are going to come in.

And so, how do you do that? You’re constantly saying, Wow do I create a place that is welcoming? And then you have to constantly go to welcoming places to see the patterns. We had this, the pond that’s closest to our property on the south side, it’s right outside our door. When we first opened it up, we had all of this thing, a plant called duckweed, smallest flowering plant. And it’s just like these little sequins, and they just spread. They spread like, they double every 24 hours. So it’s like, aaaaah! And so, it was like, what is happening here at this pond? What’s going on at this pond? So, the practice is, you quiet human cleverness by not trying to do it in your head. I mean, I would literally find myself going to the internet to figure out what to do. And I’m like, wait a minute.

Go find an example of a healthy pond and figure out what’s going on there. So, I did live near national forest wilderness, surrounded by wilderness. So, I did. And immediately I realized, this is cold, there’s a flow here. Our pond is warm, there’s no flow. I mean, it sounds simple, but we were rubes, we didn’t know. And what we realized was that, 40 years of silt from the agricultural fields up above had come and smothered four springs that were in the property, in the pond. And when we got in the water, we could find the cold spots, swim over to the cold spots. So, it was a matter of removing those, so that the water would rise, cold water would rise, come up, and then start to flow, and then go over and take that duckweed with it. And we had spent, I mean, so many weekends raking duckweed.

Go to a place. So, the steps are: Quiet human cleverness. Listen. Listen without hunting for the next sound, is what we call it, because you’re not hunting. You’re not hunting for an answer. Go to a place that works and listen, then echo what you hear, echo it, try to emulate it. Again, you’re going to have to go back. It’s a deepening conversation with the organism or the ecosystem, says Wes Jackson. You got to go back a lot. How does this really work? So, echoing.

The fourth step is a really important one, and after 28 years, I find we’re finally starting to hopefully formalize this one in some way, in some meaningful way. But the fourth step is giving thanks. Not new for our Indigenous brothers and sisters, but definitely new for Western industrial culture. Giving thanks.

Willow

The one that really is going to stick with me is, listening without hunting for the next answer. That is—

Janine

The next sound, yeah.

Willow

Next sound. That is powerful.

Janine

We’re so acquisitive, acquiring, as a little young species. I guess there’s another part of this that I don’t get to talk about as much, but it’s super important that you remove the false boundary between yourself and other organisms. And I call this radical empathy. So, when you see a bird, I used to be like, okay, what’s its species? How many young does it have? Blah, blah, blah. Now I’m like, What are you facing today? What’s it like to be you today?

Let me watch you in minus… I’m looking out right now, let me watch you, chickadee, in minus six. How are you staying warm? How are you getting ready for spring? Because I already saw you start to flirt a little bit, you’re starting to mate. How are you mating and staying warm right now? How are you—and then when nest building comes, how are you building your nest? Where are you putting your nest? For what reasons? What are you making it out of?

Those questions, they require that you respect the organism enough, to know that it is meeting its needs. It may not meet its needs in the way we do, because we tend to have taken materials and turned them into something that is unpalatable to the rest of the world. So, it’s different, it looks different. And I’m not saying we’re all going to live in nests, but I’m saying that the qualities of that nest are very important to pay attention to.

Willow

And that goes back to the same question from earlier, which is about who we want to be as a species. Do we want to be a species that is empathetic, that seeks to understand the perils that other organisms are facing, not just each other, but outside of our own species?

Janine

Yeah.

Willow

And I feel like, something we talk a lot about in our work at Atmos is, if we are just treating climate change, then we’re treating the symptom of something. We’re not treating the deeper understanding, which comes down to who we are, and that’s where we need people to be.

Janine

Yeah, we have to dream something bigger for ourselves than a McMansion.

Willow

Please.

Janine

I mean, we really do—like, what is our dream for ourselves?

Willow

Well, I’m happy that you asked that question because one of the things I wanted to ask you is, what is your vision for a biomimetic future? Can you paint a dreamscape scenario of what a world looks like for our cities to have fully integrated nature’s intelligence into the way we live?

Janine

Yeah I think about that all day long.

Willow

Share the dream with us.

Janine

All day long. Let’s fly into the city on a completely transparent plane, so you can see down and, completely silent. And probably hydrogen runs it, so water vapors is its output. And you come into the city, you fly over a wilderness area, and we’ve managed to give nature half, to save half for nature. People live in there, but we’re not as intensively converting wildlands anymore. You fly over and there’s, it’s clear air, clear water, birdsong, fragrant soils. You can imagine yourself hiking there. And then you fly into the city of Missoula, Montana, say, and it doesn’t change. It looks different, but it doesn’t change. It’s still fragrant, cool air, clean water, right? It still functions like that wildland. It has begun to function like it. And actually, the wildland is thankful. The watershed is thankful that we’re there. Because of what we produce from all of our humanly energy is abundance. We produce more nutrition for organisms, we produce better habitats both within the city and beyond our borders.

So, we’re living in a way that is truly, truly reciprocal. That’s how I think of it. And that we don’t have the guilt or the loneliness that we have now. That we truly feel—a lot of it, when I dream about this, I dream about how it would feel, to feel at home on this planet. Not as an interloper, not as somebody who’s trying to get off the planet, because we kind of messed this one up, but somebody who is at home. A good citizen of this planet, somebody who gives back as much as we are given, if not more, and that we use our brilliance for that. And I think our products will, like I said, they may not look like the natural world, but they’re going to function like it. So, there is going to be a feeling of being at home, even with our manufactured artifacts, in the same way as I think we honed our senses for beauty, for good design, by watching other organisms.

You watch an eagle land or soar, and you’re like, that’s good design. That’s where we learn good design. And so, we start to have our artifacts replicate that, they take care of both body and soul, they’re not toxic, and we know that. I think we’ll know that when we get to that point. I think that our manufacturing will not be the factories on the edge of town. I think it’ll be small, local manufacturing, because manufacturing will be safe. It won’t be high heats, high pressures, heat, beat, and treat. It’ll be small 3D printing kind of facilities. And there won’t be as many trucks coming in with materials from outside. There’ll be a lot more circular economy happening locally. Everything will be a lot more localized by the way. People will know their place in a way that we have forgotten in Western industrial culture. I look forward to that. I look forward to being, to feeling at home on the planet, instead of feeling like we continue to—don’t you? Wouldn’t you rather just feel like one of the good ones?

Willow

Part of the healing team.

Janine

Part of the healing team.

Willow

I would imagine everyone who is tuned in would love to live in the city that you just described. It was actually so beautiful, it made me cry. I’m curious, for anyone who’s listening to this and wondering—maybe who isn’t a designer. Anyone who’s wondering how they can incorporate biomimicry into their work. Is that something that you’re thinking about? What advice might you have for them?

Janine

Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we’re all designers. You even design your day, you design a party, you design, you design lots of things. It’s anytime that you think with intention.

Willow

Oh, I love that reframe. Thank you.

Janine

We’re all designers. We’re all designers. So, you have many choices. I mean, the big question is, Does what I am about to do, create conditions conducive to life? And it’s up to you to really expand as much as you can that life, to capital L. Other people, people who don’t look like you, people who don’t worship like you, people who you think of as different than you, and then do as Aldo Leopold said, and expand your circle of kinship. Is it good for all life? That’s a big question.

But what I would say is that, as you make purchasing decisions at work, as you make decisions about how to create even a corporate culture or a company culture, your small company culture, is it good for life? Is it good for the life of your employees? Is it good for life? Walk outside the place where you have your office, say, if you do work somewhere, and don’t say to yourself, Well, I only lease this place, it’s not mine, it’s not my responsibility. It’s always your responsibility. That question will keep you occupied as a cowan for a long time, a long time. And then there are lots of ways, lots of help now with how to make choices that are more sustainable. And I would encourage you to go even deeper and try to get as local as you can.

Do it in concentric circles. Make sure that you’re locally creating conditions conducive to life. And if that means buying a local product instead of something from really far away, do that. If you have a backyard, do project positive kind of work. Create ecosystem services in your backyard. If you have a balcony, do it in your flower pots. Taking that agency and saying, what I’m going to do is create a set of positive benefits that come from me, and I’m going to learn how to do that by seeing how life does it.

Willow

Amazing.

Janine

Yeah.

Willow

I love that you said it’s always your responsibility. It made me think so much about one of my partners at Atmos, Theresa, our executive director. She always says, “If you have a role, then you have responsibilities.” And we all play so many roles. We are sisters, daughters, citizens, organisms, parts of ecosystems, and asking ourselves those questions, I think it’s so beautiful.

Janine

“We’re embedded in mutuality,” says Andreas Weber. “We’re embedded in mutuality.” And to remember that, all the critters that are inside of you, what have you done for them today? Right? Because they’re helping you in so many ways. They’re your immune system, they’re part of your brain. All those microbes, you’re feeding them good? Good, got to take care of them. And then, where else are you embedded? Are you taking care of the entire web of relationships that you are a part of, which include the natural world? And it doesn’t matter, if you’re in a city, all the better. I grew up in New Jersey. I mean, you find your wildernesses locally.

Willow

Find your wildernesses. Okay. I have one last question for you. What is the most, or one of the most, profound lessons you have personally learned from the natural world? For your life? Saved the best for last.

Janine

Well, I tell you this, my biggest teacher really is this land. And one of the biggest things that is just still something I work with and go, What does this mean in other parts of my life? How could I apply this in other parts of my life? But when we got here, it was 100% Russian spotted knapweed, which is an invasive, that is allelopathic, meaning it puts poisons out. It’s from Russia. Makes great honey, so beekeepers brought it in, and it creates sort of little biological deserts around itself. I have a lot of respect for the plant. It’s a really… It’s amazing. Tens of thousands of seeds every year, and it lasts about 12 years.

Anyway, it was 100%. And for the first… And it took 12 years. It was a war. It was always about how to get rid of it. And when we focused on how to get rid of it, we only got so far and actually didn’t feel great about it, and we refused to use chemicals, so we’re using goats and stuff like that. Then we realized, oh, what if we add something instead of subtracting something? So, we started to broadcast seed, and I do this because we just walk around with this thing that you carry like a baby’s on your stomach and it has seeds in it.

And every year, we would have different kinds of grasses, a different mix, and we would walk behind the goats and they would kick up the ground and we would broadcast seeds. The seeds just kept adding and adding and adding diversity. And one year, it was amazing, it did flip. It flipped like in a phase change. It was unbelievable. And I mean, it was terrifying because the year it flipped, it flipped to another weed. The entire thing was another weed, an annual weed. But the year after that, all that diversity came in.

And what was happening as we watched was that, all this stuff that we’d added, all the diversity we added, that’s what healed the land. It wasn’t about taking away the thing that we were all focused on in a warlike way. It wasn’t about that. It was about giving the grasses, the forbs, the lagoons, what they needed in order to flourish. And then they took over, because they were natives and they spread and persisted, and the knapweed slowly moved to its small amount that it is out there now, rather than taking a whole thing. So, there’s something about that that I’m still working with, is, when I think that I need to remove something, I mean politically right now, of course, what do I need to add instead? What diversity will flourish here?

Willow

I think that speaks volumes for this particular moment. It’s perfect.

Janine

Exactly.

NARRATION

In thinking about how to apply biomimicry to my everyday life, I was really struck by Janine’s invitation to ask ourselves, before making any decision, will this be conducive to life? What would it look like to ask ourselves that question before every choice we make? So, in lieu of the usual  prompts that I offer at the end of each episode this week, I’m going to invite you to practice asking yourself that question before every decision you make:

Will this be conducive to life, with a capital L?

For additional information on biomimicry and Janine’s work, follow the links in show notes. 

The Nature Of is an Atmos podcast produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Nuzum of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Julia Natt, Eleanor Kagan, and Daniel Hartman. Our sound designer is Kristen Mueller. 

The Executive Producers of The Nature Of are me: Willow Defebaugh, Theresa Perez, Jake Sargent, and Eric Nuzum.

Atmos is a nonprofit media organization focused on the cross pollination of climate and culture. In addition to our podcast, we deliver award-winning journalism and creative storytelling through a biannual print magazine, daily digital features, original newsletters, and more. To support our work or this podcast, see our show notes or visit atmos.earth/biome

I’m your host Willow Defebaugh and this is The Nature Of.