Biomimicry

by Janine M Benyus

  Jackson says residents here and in similar communities are “the new pioneers, homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century—a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us.”

  CROSSING INTO THE EDDY

  Matfield Green, Sunshine Farm, and other right-living projects around the world are attempts to create counterpoints to the extractive economy, to “keep the good and artful examples before us.” I think of them as eddies in a turbulent whitewater river.

  An eddy is a pocket of calm water that forms as water passes around a rock, leaves the downstream current, and curls back upstream to form a magic haven in the rock’s shadow. It’s a place a kayaker can duck into when she needs to rest, take stock, or rescue less maneuverable boats from calamity.

  Getting your boat into an eddy is hard work. You must cross the line of tension, the rip between the downstream torrent and the curling upstream flow. It takes some momentum and a vigorous, well-placed paddle brace to pivot across the eddy line and into the sanity of smoother water. In the same way, our transition to sustainability must be a deliberate choice to leave the linear surge of an extractive economy and enter a circulating, renewable one.

  Wes Jackson thinks it appropriate that agriculture be the first eddy we enter. He has often called agriculture the Fall, the beginning of our estrangement from nature. “It is fitting then that the healing of culture begin with agriculture,” he says. Natural Systems Agriculture is as different from conventional agriculture as the airplane was from the train. It’s an evolutionary leap in innovation.

  The difference with what we are doing, says Piper of The Land’s work, is that no one can immediately cash in on it. After all, when seed companies or chemical companies see a cropping system that needs no seeds or chemicals, they’re more likely to fight it than join it. The only logical champions of this revolution are consumers who care about how their food is grown, small independent farmers, and a government that represents them. The transition will start slowly, predicts Jackson—if we’re lucky, scattered examples of a circulating renewable economy will appear right alongside the extractive one, and people will suddenly see that they have a choice.

  Already people are supporting agriculture that attempts to wean itself from fossil fuels, at least where pesticides and excessive tilling are concerned. The popularity of certified organic foods, food-in-season restaurants, and community supported agriculture (CSA) are a few examples of eddies that are forming in the river. Through CSAs, city dwellers subscribe with a local organic farmer at the beginning of the season, then pick up a bag brimming with fresh produce each week of the summer. The farmer gets the money up front, and the buyer shares in the risk, agreeing to eat whatever crops do well and do without those that fail. In this way, consumers learn to eat with the cycles of the local landscape and have the satisfaction of knowing their food is grown nearby and in conscientious ways.

  According to Russell Ubby, director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, 523 farms in North America are now doing business via this pre-pay share method. Wisconsin has the most, he says, followed by New York and California. The largest of the farms supplies more than two hundred families yearly.

  That more people are beginning to care about this aspect of our lives does not surprise me. The idea that food is more than a commodity is deep within us, which makes the thought of a square tomato seem outrageous, or at least distasteful to most of us. We know that the scale of farming should be smaller and more personal—that the land would be better served by stewardship than by massive tractors sporting six TVs. The novelist Joseph Conrad said that there are only a few things that are really important for us to know and that all of us know them. We want our farmers to be breaking off an ear of corn to taste a kernel right before harvest. We instinctively want them to heft the soil, to smell it and know what’s wrong or right about it. And I think that instinct comes from our biological urge to survive. It’s that visceral common sense that causes a part of you to rejoice when you see crocuses returning and to be revolted when you hear about tons of U.S. topsoil washing into the Gulf of Mexico.

  Food is something we have it in our genes to care about, and we have been severed from that caring for too long. If we could once again regard the act of growing food as a sacred, biological act that connects us to all living creatures, perhaps we would clamor for a system of farming that builds communities, maintains balanced pest populations, keeps soil out of rivers, and doesn’t traffic in chemicals that are alien to our tissues. Perhaps we’d seek out examples of practical reverence, like those of Wes Jackson and Bill Mollison and Masanobu Fukuoka.

  On the surface, these men seem to be tilting at windmills, bucking a strong sea of “how it’s always been,” and railing at habits acquired ten thousand years ago. In reality, they are the conservatives, secure in the knowledge that their ecomodel is older than agriculture, and that it will be here long after oil-driven agriculture is a memory. This is not really a new fangled thing we are inventing here, insists Jackson. It is just a matter of discovering what is already there and mirroring it.

  All in all, I think nature-based agriculture will be nourishing in the best sense of the word—an honest and honorable way to take our place in the food web that connects all life. We have lived too long by hubris, imposing disruptive patterns on the land, squaring the circle. If we as a country, or as a global net of communities, are truly committed to sustainability in all things, agriculture must be first on our agenda, the first meal of the new day. A change this grand will take the cooperative will of all of us, and it will be based on the one characteristic we all share—a primal need to eat. When we begin to insist on nature-based farming (or, as Jackson says, when trendy people in restaurants start whispering, “Do you believe so-and-so is still eating annuals?”), then we’ll have planted a giant paddle brace against the rapids of environmental disaster. We’ll have crossed into the eddy, showing the world, and ourselves, that it can be done.

  CHAPTER 3

  HOW WILL WE HARNESS ENERGY?

  LIGHT INTO LIFE: GATHERING ENERGY LIKE A LEAF

  “Pond scum” may be a synonym for “primitive,” but the tiny organisms that compose it easily beat the human state of the art when it comes to capturing energy from the sun. Some purple bacteria answering to that unflattering description use light energy with almost 95% efficiency—more than four times that of the best man-made solar cells.

  —University of Southern California news release,

  August 22, 1994

  The energy sector in industrialized societies is probably the single largest economic contributor to global environmental degradation.

  —EPA’s Expert Workshop on Energy and the Environment

  July 21, 1992

  When I first began dreaming about this book, I would sit at the edge of my pond and watch Montana clouds skate upside down across the water’s surface. At night, I’d watch the moon pole-vault up and over. That was before duckweed moved in and stole the big sky show away.

  Duckweed is a floating plant with a single round leaf, as thin as paper and no wider than a pencil eraser. It spends its winter alive at the bottom of my frozen pond, feeding on its own stored starch. One buzzy May day, it pops up as if arriving for an appointment, and then, to put it mildly, it multiplies. In a matter of weeks, it has stretched a living lid of lime-green leaves across every square inch of water surface. By August, when the leaves of cattails and cotton-woods have grown dark and dusty, duckweed is still exuberantly green, so springtime green that people stop their cars to stare. We thought it was wet paint, they tell me.

  En masse, duckweed spreads an impressive solar array—one plant, a mere quarter of an inch across, can multiply through the sheer energy of sunlight to cover an area the size of a football field in a couple of months. But there is not just one; there are millions of them. I screen them off; they grow in behind me, l
ike splinters from the Sorcerer’s broomstick. This spasm of photosynthesis—sunlight transformed into acres of green tissue before my eyes—is more than just my nemesis. It’s a miracle.

  That’s what most folks thought before the late eighteenth century when scientists began experimenting with leaves to learn “from whence their mysterious nourishment came.” This was at a time, remember, when mice were believed to spontaneously arise from piles of rags. Joseph Priestley, an English amateur chemist, mystified the curious when he published the results of his bell jar experiment in 1771. He had sealed a mouse and a candle inside a jar, and the mouse had died, asphyxiated by the “injured air.” Miraculously, when Priestley added a mint plant to the mix, he could add a new mouse, and it would live. Vegetation, he told the world, can somehow repair air.

  But in the devilish way that photosynthesis research seems to work, Priestley was plagued for years by disappointment when he tried to repeat these experiments. Historians think he must have moved his jar to a darkened corner of his lab, not knowing that light played a role in the release of oxygen from the mint leaves. Mouse after mouse kept passing out. It took eight more years before Dutch physician and chemist Jan Ingenhousz did the same experiment near a sunny window and had a lightbulb of revelation blink on.

  The rest is history. We now know that photosynthesis, which means “putting together with light,” is the process by which green plants and certain algae and bacteria take carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight and transform them into oxygen and energy-rich sugars. In the meantime, animals like us take that oxygen and those sugars and transform them back into carbon dioxide, water, and energy. Thanks to the sun, mint and mice and men all thrive.

  We on this bell jar called Earth are lucky to be so close to such a marvelous explosion happening all day, every day, above our heads. The sun’s fusion of hydrogen provides enough light energy to easily supply all our energy needs without burning a drop of oil. If only we had a way to plug in.

  So far, we’ve lived by the grace of green plants, and we owe both our lives and our lifestyles to them. Consider that everything we consume, from a carrot stick to a peppercorn filet, is the product of plants turning sunlight into chemical energy. Our cars, our computers, our Christmas tree lights all feed on photosynthesis as well, because the fossil fuels they use are merely the compressed remains of 600 million years’ worth of plants and animals that grew their bodies with sunlight. All of our petroleum-born plastics, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals also spring from the loins of ancient photosynthesis. In fact, other than rocks and metals, it’s hard to find any raw material we use that was not once alive, owing its ultimate existence to plants.

  Plants gather our solar energy for us and store it as fuel. To release that energy, we burn the plants or plant products, either internally, inside our cells, or externally, with fire.

  For my money, the discovery of fire, as ballyhooed as it was, was vastly overrated. Fire was fine for a while—it kept us warm and cooked our meat. The problem is, we’ve never gone beyond fire—combustion in furnaces or in engines is still the primary egg in our energy-producing basket, and it hasn’t brought us one inch closer to living sustainably. Instead, torching old fuels has led to rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, calving Antarctica icebergs, swelling ocean levels, and the hottest decade on record.

  When we burn oil, gasoline, and coal, we release great quantities of carbon that was locked up and compressed during the Cretaceous Period. The giant ferns and dinosaurs of those days decomposed in oxygen-starved conditions and never had a chance to complete their decay cycle. Now we’re finishing the job with a bonfire, consuming in a year what took one hundred thousand years of organic growth to form. Like a huge bellows, our bonfire breathes in oxygen and exhales an unearthly quantity of CO2, a greenhouse gas.

  A flux this extreme in a closed system like our biosphere poses the same danger you would face if you burned the furniture inside your house with the windows closed. For the last one hundred years, we’ve been doing just that—burning the heirlooms made from ancient sunlight, ignoring the fact that contemporary sunlight was streaming in every window. Instead of feeding dead plants to our fires all these years, perhaps we should have been studying the living ones, carefully copying their magic.

  AN UMBILICAL CORD TO THE SUN

  Though neither popular nor profitable in the shadow of still-spouting oil rigs, the idea of sun-wrought energy has grown tendrils in great minds for many years. Back in 1912, an Italian chemistry professor named Giacomo Ciamician wrote in Science magazine about a world in which smokestacks would be felled to make way for forests of clean glass tubes, which would mimic the “guarded secret of plants” and photosynthesize the fuel we needed.

  How close have we come to Ciamician’s dream? Eighty years later, we have acres of shimmering solar cells made of silicon, a material never found in the blueprints of green plants. After first testing them in the panels of spaceships, we now use photovoltaics (PVs) to pump water, light homes, run laptops, charge batteries, and supplement the electric grid. PVs can cover a rooftop or make digital numbers dance in the tiniest of calculators, but they won’t do actual chemistry (making storable fuel from light) the way plants do. And although they’re smaller and more affordable than when they first came out, photovoltaics are still nowhere near as compact, efficient, or incredibly cheap as the organic modules assembled by plants. Which brings up another point of envy. Every morning, as our technicians don their white suits and static-free moonboots to assemble high-tech solar cells in toxin-laden factories, the leaves and fronds and blades outside their windows are silently assembling themselves by the trillions.

  After all these years, and despite the deluge of photochemistry papers published every week across the world, the secret of photosynthesis remains guarded. Fragmentary glimpses of the process reveal themselves, but the working model is still riddled with black boxes (unexplained parts of the process) and mystery molecules code-named Q and Z.

  Part of the problem is that the actual harvesting of energized particles of light (photons) is not mechanical in a macroscopic way, a way that we can see with our naked eye. Our strongest electron microscopes can go only so far, showing us where photosynthesis occurs, but not how. The “gears” of photosynthesis are molecular, composed of groups of atoms that fly below the radar of even these fantastic scopes. Consider that in the small duckweed that floats atop my pond, there are fifty thousand chloroplasts (the cell-like organelles where photosynthesis occurs) for every square millimeter of leaf. Each chloroplast contains a complex network of membranes filled with molecular pigments and proteins all arranged in a fantastically precise choreography. At least, that’s what our best guess tells us. For higher plants like duckweed, we’re still waiting for actual pictures. In the meantime, we infer the process, build theories, and hunt for proof.

  Despite our incomplete knowledge, the spirit of Ciamician still soars in a cadre of artificial photosynthesis researchers. These investigators believe we know enough about the guarded secret to begin building a reasonable facsimile, a solar cell of molecular proportions that will turn light energy into electricity, into a storable fuel, or into the spark we need to do chemistry at room temperature and in water.

  Each lab seems to view the guarded secret and the way to mimic it in a slightly different way. Some rally behind the cry of “Charge separation!” Others say, “We need to build an antenna!” Still others shy from using organic building blocks and instead aim to remake nature’s design in inorganic form. Each lab is taking a different tack across that great ocean of promise, like boats of different designs in a great America’s Cup of science.

  In 1990, I was delighted to read that one team in Arizona had pulled ahead. They had actually hitched together an organic molecule modeled on a photosynthetic reaction center, and it had rivaled the quantum yield of photosynthesis! They were rounding the buoy with excited shouts and horn blasts—papers in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. In March of 1994
, I pulled alongside their boat and climbed on.

  If you had to dream of a place to pull down the sun, the Arizona State University campus in Tempe would be the perfect setting. Fresh from a Montana winter and still peeling off my parka, I was intoxicated by the sounds of a southwestern campus: the thunk of tennis balls, the laughter from flower-filled grottoes, the incessant birdsong in the palms. I showed up at the Center for Early Events in Photosynthesis smiling like a cruise passenger who’s just come up-deck for the first time.

  But it was hardly a vacation for J. Devens Gust, Jr., and crew. They had just gotten word that the deadline on their major National Science Foundation grant had been bumped up, and drafts were flying between offices like sideways snow. Despite the pressure, Gust—chemist, professor, and leader of the center—crafted a schedule that would allow me to meet experts from each facet of their work, from the folks who disassemble the real photosynthetic powerhouses to those who assemble the mimics from scratch. As Gust explained, the team held in aggregate what would be too onerous for a single scientist to know, from an understanding of the “quantum uncertainty of electron movements in the near-red spectrum of light” all the way to “how the corn plant in Indiana likes its soil, and why.” Labs on one floor held glowing jars of some of the world’s most ancient bacteria, while in the seismic-steady basement, cutting-edge lasers hummed. On the floors in between, seemingly ordinary organic chemistry labs cooked up molecules that were closer to resembling nature’s solar collectors than anything else ever made.

  My tour at the center was a mental decathlon of sorts, each conversation stretching my understanding of all that is involved in mimicry of this kind. Each team member knew photosynthesis from his or her own scale or discipline or means of measure, but as a whole, they worked as a single organism. And that organism, I got the distinct impression, was in the race of its life.