Asking nature for advice

Have you heard of biomimicry? It is both age-old and quite new. Biomimicry is the copying of natural processes and elements and using human imagination to put them to work in the form of sustainable technology.

This all becomes a lot clearer if we look at an example of this fascinating science. One of the most famous is found in Harare, Zimbabwe. The Eastgate Centre, a shopping center and office block built in 1996, is ventilated and cooled entirely naturally, using as a model the mounds built by termites. During the day heat is absorbed by the Centre’s materials. The temperature inside increases very little. At night, warm internal air is vented through the many chimneys, while cool air flows in through cavities in the floor. This passive cooling uses only 10% of the energy needed by a similar building with conventional cooling. The environment benefits also, of course, as fuel is not used for air conditioning and CO2 is not produced.

A number of aspects of this science are inspiring. Rather than ignoring nature or bashing it with technology, the two are working together. Nature is taking the lead, showing us how to do something that we then adapt to human needs. We don’t copy nature slavishly; we differ from the plants and animals whose techniques we adapt. Biomimicry is a partnership of the best that nature and technology have to offer. This has been summed up concisely by Janine M. Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, who said in an interview “I’d say that Biomimicry is asking nature for advice.”

What a dynamic paradigm! How applicable to other aspects of nature and technology! Let’s ask nature for advice in a few other areas, farming for example. From the beginning of agriculture up to the industrial revolution, farmers looked to the natural world to figure out how to grow their crops. By the beginning of the 19^th century, mechanization and fertilizer had increased yields and made farming easier. But then farmers began to forget that in nature everything depends on everything else. They began to favor monocultures with desirable traits like higher yields, for example, leading to the Irish potato famine and other disasters. Technology went to their heads, and into the long perfectly straight ploughed rows of crops in the American central plains in the 30s. These unimpeded lanes for wind-blown dust, lack of rain for several years and failure to apply dryland farming techniques combined to create the dust bowl of the 30s.

Another aspect of asking nature for farming advice? We humans want the sweetest fruit, the most tender corn, the most prolific berry bushes. One finds these things in nature sometimes, but it is hit or miss. Ask nature how it does it, however, and we find out some truths about plant genetics. Cross different plants with different desirable traits and at least some of the offspring will exhibit the desirable traits of both parents. We can control this natural process using a technology called selective breeding, which has produced, most notably, sweet corn from corn used for animal feed.

And now we must ask nature what it thinks of GMOs. While some species of bacteria are able to transfer DNA to other bacterial species, and mutation takes place frequently in natural organisms, the invasive manipulation characterized by genetic engineering is unknown in nature. In creating GMOs, technology is taking over. My feeling is that much of the resistance to GMOs among the general populace is a gut reaction (pardon the pun) to just this interference. Consideration of the dangers to health, the expense and other negative aspects comes later. The invasive character of the creation of GMOs goes further than the one-sided attempt at maximum yield that led to the potato famine and the failure to apply farming techniques that work with nature that marked the dust bowl disaster.

It took a while for nature to strike back in these situations, and then the results were devastating. Nature’s advice had been ignored. Are we heading in a similar direction with GMOs? If so, we will be contending with the fact that much of the world’s produce is already contaminated with GMO containing material, and the devastation will be widespread. Perhaps only then will we remember what Barry Commoner said in his book “The Closing Circle”: Nature knows best.