Biomimicry

by Janine M Benyus

  Tibbs is one of the evangelists of the new movement called industrial ecology, my vote for biomimicry’s most oxymoronic term. Coiners of the phrase hope that one day it won’t be ironic, but will instead be an accurate description of how we conduct what author Paul Hawken calls the “ecology of commerce.”

  Considering its esoteric roots (my first contact with the term industrial ecology was in the Whole Earth Review, next to a testimonial on psychoactive plants), imagine my surprise when I read that AT&T, the fifth-largest company in the world, was sponsoring industrial ecology conferences, giving out industrial ecology fellowships, and creating a whole department in Bell Labs to wrestle with the concept. Then I read that General Motors was signing up, and that President Clinton’s U.S. National Technology Strategy would feature industrial ecology as its guiding principle.

  The mainstreaming of a very radical idea is in the works, and if it works, it promises to change far more than the way we make computer chips or fiber or adhesive. It promises to change the way we make, sell, market, and buy everything. As strange as it seems, industrial ecology will conduct business the way a sun-soaked hickory forest recycles its leaves.

  FROOT LOOPS AND THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE

  When I first saw Bob Laudise, adjunct chemical director at AT&T’s prestigious Bell Laboratories, he was at a podium, waving a box of Froot Loops above his head so that neck craners eighty rows back could get a better look. The room held a thousand or so inventors, scientists, and manufacturers from some of the largest companies in the country—producers of electronics, high-tech materials, and durable goods. After a buildup worthy of Barnum, Laudise dropped down into the aisle and handed a few boxes around. Men and women in conference attire eagerly passed them to one another, lowering glasses down their noses to read the ingredients. They conferred in serious tones and jotted notes in leather portfolios: Re: Froot Loops—find secret ingredient.

  The secret Laudise referred to was a new way to clean electronic circuit boards—those platforms of tiny transistors and other components that control electronic devices. Right now, hazardous toxic solvents are used to clean the boards between manufacturing steps. The AT&T researcher who devised the new cleaner was inspired by the basic tenet of industrial ecology, which says that we should try, wherever possible, to work only with substances that nature would recognize and be able to assimilate. Taking this idea quite literally, the researcher had parked himself in front of a database of FDA-approved substances and identified a slurry of ingredients so benign that kids could slurp them from the bottom of their cereal bowls. Yet when poured on a freshly manufactured circuit board, they washed away the leftover solder and other gunk like a lucky charm.

  The question is, why haven’t we always worked with something nature-compatible? Wouldn’t that have avoided a lot of problems? Amazingly, it took a drastic realignment of our thinking to come around to adopting this simple tenet. One hundred years into the Industrial Revolution, we are only now opening our eyes and realizing that our artificially constructed world is not isolated from the real one. It is enmeshed in a larger natural world that cradles and nourishes us, making all of our activities possible. Fouling this nest, a lesson other organisms learned long ago, can be a deadly business.

  PURSUING FOLLY TO THE LIMIT

  At first it was hard to see that we were fouling our own nest—we kept expanding into fresh new territory and leaving our tired land and waters behind. It was as if we were a small seedling growing rootlet by rootlet into a fragrant pot of soil. All was fine as long as the rootball of our economy, our world within a world, was small in relation to the larger natural setting.

  Unfortunately, we didn’t stay small, and the natural world, of course, didn’t get any bigger. It doesn’t take a Malthusian to tell us that we have grown to fill our container. Each month, 8 million people (the population of New York City) join an Earth that is already groaning. In the United States alone, we generate 12 billion tons of solid waste a year—that’s twenty times the total amount of ash released by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens! Over 200 million tons of airborne wastes are added to the atmosphere each year, joining the 90,000 tons of known nuclear waste, most of which will be poisonous for another 100,000 years.

  Our industrial resource cycles now rival or even exceed the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. As Tibbs reports, “The industrial flows of nitrogen and sulfur are equivalent to or greater than the natural flows, and for metals such as lead, cadmium, zinc, arsenic, mercury, nickel, and vanadium, the industrial flows are as much as twice the natural flows—and in the case of lead, eighteen times greater.”

  It’s not just the magnitude of the numbers that frightens—it’s the rate at which they are accelerating. Consider that it took from the beginning of human history to the year 1900 to build a world economy that produced $600 billion in output. Today, the world economy grows by this amount every two years.

  So, if we were once a tiny seedling in a fragrant pot of soil, we are now horribly rootbound, pushing dangerously close to the edges of nature’s tolerance. How is it that we did not see this coming?

  Braden Allenby has wondered this himself, and in the introduction of his Environmental Sciences doctoral thesis, he describes quite beautifully how we crafted and mounted our own blinders. He spends the rest of the thesis showing us how to take them off, and how to change course with an approach that has roots in ecology. I went to visit Allenby at his Bell Labs office, where, as research vice president of technology and environment, he is paid to spin ideas like globes in his hands, looking at them every which way.

  Allenby is dark-haired, bright, and intense; he speaks in a swift current, drawing patterns in the air, and sweeping you along like a storyteller. For millions of years, he tells me, there were simply not many, of us, and our impact was limited. There were taboos against truly invasive practices. (As Carolyn Merchant notes in her book The Death of Nature, nature was seen as a living entity, a mother, and it was deemed unthinkable to cut mother’s hair [deforestation] or penetrate mother’s bowels [mining].) In the seventeenth century, says Allenby, mores began to change. The Scientific Revolution made reverence for the Earth obsolete, while the Church condemned it as druidic superstition. Once nature was demoted to a dead and soulless assembly of atoms, it became socially acceptable to exert our “God-given” dominion over her. The path was cleared for worldwide exploitation.

  Still, insists Allenby, when biceps and back muscles ran the shovels, our rate of destruction more closely matched nature’s rate of renewal. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution put us on the winning side of a very large lever that we began vaulting past nature. Gears, hydraulics, fossil fuels, and the internal combustion engine allowed us to tap deeper, faster, and farther into the Earth. We began to extract resources as quickly as we could, transforming them into products, waste, and, of course, more people. The farther removed we became from nature in our attitudes, lifestyles, and spirituality, the more dependent we became on the products of this transformation. We became addicted to the spoils of our “rational mastery.”

  Still, physical limits seemed far away. We were in a colonizing mood, confident that vaster territory and richer riches lay just over the hill. With virgin materials nearly free for the taking, there was no point to recycling or reusing what we had extracted, nor was there any reward. In fact, the fledgling science of economics measured the well-being of a nation by its “throughput”: how many resources it could transform each year, and how fast. In the nation-against-nation scrimmage, it was he who digs up the most toys wins.

  At the other end, the waste end, we also believed the Earth to be limitless, always ready to digest and dilute our waste. We could toss as much garbage as we wanted into the surf, and it would never float back to shore.

  “Economies are like ecosystems,” says Allenby. “Both systems take in energy and materials and transform them into products. The problem is that our economy performs a linear transformation, whereas nature’s is
cyclic.” We’re like the juggler who takes a set of bowling pins, tosses them in the air once, then throws them out, reaching for a new set. Life, on the other hand, juggles one set of pins and cycles them continually. A leaf falls to the forest floor only to be recycled in the bodies of microbes and returned to the soil water, where it is reabsorbed by the tree to make new leaves. Nothing is wasted, and the whole show runs on ambient solar energy.

  Industrial ecology asks the simple question, what if this closed-loop, sun-driven biology were to become our modus operandi? What if our economy were to deliberately look and function like the natural world in which it is embedded? Wouldn’t we be more likely to be accepted and sustained by the natural world over time? This, in a nutshell, is the dream of industrial ecology.

  The idea itself is not new; similar thoughts have been percolating in the environmental literature since the sixties. What is new is that some of the staunchest proponents of this philosophy are swiveling in executive chairs at the world’s largest companies. Bob Laudise explains how industry managers began to green around the edges during the 1990s, and how conscious emulation of natural systems became the hottest business shibboleth since Total Quality Management.

  THE GREENING OF INDUSTRY

  W. Edwards Deming (the father of Total Quality Management) taught us to look for and fix the root causes of problems. In the long run, he said, quick fixes leak and need shoring up. TQM adherents like Braden Allenby realized that pollution was not the root cause of our environmental crisis; fantasy was. We had begun telling ourselves a dangerous fairy tale that went something like this: The Earth, put here for our use, is a limitless provider of resources and will clean up our messes for free. We treated raw materials as if they were essentially free—you paid for access to them and you paid to remove them, but you paid nothing for the leaching slag heaps or the fact that you were depleting another generation’s resource stocks. Waste was released to oceans, rivers, land, and air, with no recompense for the Earth’s free services.

  A pricing scheme that ignored environmental costs was a silent perpetuator of this ruse. Because the economy put no price tag on resource drawdowns or on pollution, it gave no incentive to extract sustainably, process cleanly, or optimize use. As a result, Laudise says, “We made dumb materials choices, dumb process choices, and when it came to waste, we blithely elected to emit it and forget it.” For a long time, like adolescents who think they are immortal, we acted as if we had some sort of magic shield against the consequences of our plundering and polluting.

  As for activities that caused pollution, they were all but lionized in the name of “progress.” I have a 1930s rubber stamp that has a downright heroic-looking set of smokestacks belching for all they are worth. The idea was to place this at the top of your letterhead to symbolize your own prosperity. When I told Laudise about the stamp, he showed me some equally glowing “factory cards” that were collected and exchanged like baseball cards. Evidently there was no greater source of pride than to have the “World’s Largest Fertilizer Factory” in your town. Enabled by the economy and blind to the dangers, we climbed to a great height of delusion, and became more determined than ever to keep those smokestacks waving.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, bang! The first warning shots were fired about the health effects of environmental pollutants, with some of the most ringing salvos coming from the pen of Rachel Carson. The environmental movement woke with a start and surged forward to win many legislative victories. It was the beginning of the “command and control” laws, which directed industry to muzzle its smokestacks and cauterize the hemorrhaging at the ends of its pipes. Like all rules exerted from above, however, command-and-control laws were just begging to be circumvented. Companies quickly hired squadrons of lawyers to perfect the art of minimal compliance. By the indulgent eighties, denial was back in style, and corporations routinely lobbied to reverse environmental regulations or, failing that, found ways to wriggle under them. It gave stockholders and consumers one last, short-lived hurrah.

  Instead of fading from fashion, however, federal regulations kept growing in number and severity, doubling between 1970 and 1990. Toward the end of the eighties, the original laws moved into their more stringent phases, loopholes closed, and states and local governments stepped up to the plate with their own antipollution laws. As Laudise showed in one of his viewgraphs, corporations faced a relentlessly climbing slope of regulatory red tape.

  With each step toward compliance, costs ratcheted up as well. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, U.S. industry is spending $70 billion per year treating and disposing of its wastes. Even these economic penalties failed to sober all the partiers, however. What really sent corporate America back to the drawing board in the nineties was the greening of its customers.

  Ecologist Paul Ehrlich says that we are not hardwired genetically to respond to long-term dangers—it takes a saber-toothed tiger roaring at the cave mouth for us to jump out of our skins. These days, the environmental sabertooth licks its chops on our televisions, in our newspapers, in our wells, and on our beaches, and our skin is finally beginning to crawl.

  One particularly memorable cat in the cave mouth came in 1987 when a barge laden with 3,186 tons of commercial garbage left Islip, Long Island, and spent the next six months looking for a place to dump its load. No one wanted it, and the bloated barge kept rising up over the horizon, proving once and for all that the world is not flat—it has no convenient edge over which we can shove all our disposables. The next year, lest we think that was an isolated occurrence, the cargo ship Khian Sea left Philadelphia with 15,000 tons of toxic incinerator ash and roamed for two years before it finally dumped its waste in an “undisclosed” location. The world had never looked so small or overburdened. We followed the barges’ journeys with nauseated fascination, the way we had watched the senseless violence of television wars and on-camera assassinations. Now it was the Earth’s turn.

  The images kept on coming. The cows of Chernobyl sickening, rivers in the Ukraine catching on fire, the smothering oil fires of the Persian Gulf, a ship leaking death into Prince William Sound, syringes surging around the ankles of New Jersey swimmers. The soundtrack to all this was the Cassandra choruses of scientists warning of an ozone hole twice the size of Europe, a smoggy Arctic Haze thousands of miles from the nearest city, rafts of amphibians blinking out like warning lights, and strange reproductive deformities afflicting dozens of wildlife species.

  All the while, our population mushroomed, sending industrial fallout to each corner of the Earth. Europe’s trees began to weaken, the deserts marched, the rain forests shrank, and the wetlands dried out, exhaling their petrified cache of carbon in “greenhouse gas” form. Even the weather seemed to have gone mad, as if Gaia were sneezing us out of her system. By now, people had had enough—enough Love Canals, enough Bhopals, enough Cancer Alleys, enough Summers of 1988.

  These days, citizens welcome dirty industries into their backyards about as readily as they’d welcome the Khian Sea to their bathtub. Thanks to Community-Right-to-Know legislation, newspapers carry the records of emissions of neighboring businesses, opening them to community shame. In editorials across the nation, smokestacks are referred to as smoking guns, firing the equivalent of shrapnel into our lungs. People are making a commitment to personally “do something about the environment,” making surprise best-sellers out of books such as 50 Ways to Save the Earth. Consumers are also voting at the cash register, weighing in against dolphin-abusive tuna-netting practices and for organic agriculture. Overnight, it seems, people who litter or refuse to recycle have begun to seem, to say the least, unsavory.

  And it’s not just happening in yuppie America. Here and abroad, surveys have shown that an astounding percentage of people are concerned about the environment and are willing to change their lifestyles. A 1992 George Gallup Health of the Planet Survey showed that between 40 and 80 percent of the respondents from twenty-two countries are already “avoiding the use of pro
ducts that harm the environment.”

  The tide has definitely turned. Soil loss, water poisoning, and air contamination, little more than background static up until now, have suddenly become information. The economy, a beast whose senses are tuned to customers’ changing moods, is beginning to twitch. And a worried industry, concerned about covering its bottom line, is headed in droves to seminars like Laudise’s.

  Laudise speaks loudly and with punch, like a coach talking strategy to his team before going out for the second half. “OK. What we’ve realized is that despite all the happy consequences of industrialization—medical miracles and the common man being able to tune in the Philharmonic and all that—we can’t go on like this. The way we’ve been operating is illogical from a sustainability point of view.”

  Heresy, right? But as I looked around the room, every head was nodding. As he went on, I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t a Sierra Club meeting. It was a corporate strategy session, and Laudise was talking tough love. “There are three reasons for greening up your act: It’s the right thing to do, it’s the competitive thing to do, and you’ll go to jail if you don’t.”

  One way or another, corporate America and consuming America are starting to get the picture. We are realizing that there is nowhere to run, no edge of town where we can pile our wastes out of sight and out of mind. The world is a roundabout, and we are not immune to its laws, its boundary conditions.

  At this point in history, our problem is not a shortage of raw materials (though that will come), it’s that we’ve run smack against the limits of the Earth’s resilience. As Tibbs says, “The natural environment is a brilliantly ingenious and adaptive system, but there are undoubtedly limits to its ability to absorb vastly increased flows of even naturally abundant chemicals and remain the friendly place we call home.” Our manufacturing output is now twice as high as it was in 1970, and many products that did not even exist twenty-five years ago are being manufactured in mass quantities. That’s a lot of barge trips to nowhere.