Biomimicry

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= "Learning from 3.8 billion years of Nature's R&D and decoding that wisdom into functional strategies for co-living on Earth".

URL = http://biomimicry.net/

Graph outlining the place of biomimicry in ecological consciousness: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1125/1*C1R01PJae6yA5bQpKtBrEQ.png


Description

From the Wikipedia:

Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is an ancient concept recently returning to scientific thought that examines nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements— and emulates or takes inspiration from them to solve human problems sustainably. Scientific and engineering literature often uses the term Biomimetics for the process of understanding and applying biological principles to human designs. This includes biomaterials, biomechanics, biological systems composed of individuals of one species (e.g., schools, herds and swarms), or multispecies ensembles." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimicry)


Examples


Status

Interview with Daniel Christian Wahl

From Zygote Quarterly, Issue 17, 2016:

* What are your impressions of the current state of biomimicry/bio-inspired design?

More and more people are beginning to understand that humanity has lost a vital connection with the natural world – a connection that until recently informed and sustained our species. The scientific and industrial revolution brought us fantastic, almost miraculous, technological progress, but also a mindset where progress meant substituting the old with the new, and humanity and culture came to be thought of as being separate from nature. More than once we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, and declared vital wisdom as “primitive” in the rush for technological “progress”. We should have paid more attention to the guiding wisdom of place-based cultures co-evolved in intimate reciprocity with the bio-cultural uniqueness of their bioregions.

Many biomimics are indirectly perpetuating the entirely mind-made divide between humanity and nature by the way we use language to describe what we do. The boom in design and technology inspired by nature is – for the most part – still undertaken within a mindset that is based on learning from nature. It is time to recognize that we are nature and have to re-indigenize to fit our human cultures into the life-sustaining ecosystems functions of the places and regions we inhabit.

We have to learn to design as nature. The first step in this process is to accept that as biological beings we are participants in and expressions of natural processes. Culture does not have to necessarily be divorced from or in competition with the rest of nature. All action or inactions are interventions in the socio-ecological systems we participate in. This participatory worldview is both relatively new in science (second order science) and very ancient, as most indigenous cultures share a participatory awareness of nature as the ground of our being. I believe that learning from traditional indigenous wisdom — or what has also been called Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) — is also an important aspect of biomimicry practice." (https://medium.com/@designforsustainability/interview-on-bio-inspired-design-with-daniel-christian-wahl-zygote-quarterly-issue-17-2016-c24f0ff5f88b)

More Information

Recommended books

By Daniel Christian Wahl:

  • Giles Hutchins’ The Nature of Business,
  • Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua’s Regenerative Enterprise,
  • Jay Harman’s The Shark’s Paintbrush,
  • Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons — A Patterning of Hope
  • Transformative Innovation by Graham Leicester.

See Also