Biomimicry

by Janine M Benyus

  We can go one of two ways, Laudise told the crowd. We can either crash to a subsistence population level, with all the horrors of a second Dark Ages, or we can find a way to provide a quality life for a stable population (assuming we can achieve that) without over-stressing nature’s filters. In short, if we play our cards right, we could pull off a “soft landing.” More nods. Count industry in.

  Suddenly, the green path has become the most intelligent and maybe even the most profitable way out of the mess for the corporation tuned to survival. Al Gore dangles the bait in his book Earth in the Balance: “The global market for environmental goods and services is approximately $300 billion and is expected to grow to $400 to 500 billion by the beginning of the next century. If one includes recent estimates for investments in energy infrastructure in developing countries, this figure grows to more than $1 trillion by the end of the decade.” Sure it’s self-interest—companies want to get ahead of the green wave so they can surf it, not be crushed by it. And they sure as heck want to get to shore before their competitors do. The feeling seems to be, if the environment gets cleaned up along the way, that’s great too.

  To me it doesn’t really matter why industry wants to change its colors. The important point, though it’s not always public knowledge, is that many companies do want to change. Even as they are pressuring Congress to relax environmental regulations, they are meeting to find out how to make Earth-friendly products in Earth-friendly ways.

  This means an enormous segment of the public—stockholders, workers, managers, consumers—are out shopping for ideas that will work: a new way to think, a new paradigm that will guide our hand as we dismantle the economy we have so feverishly erected and replace it with something that will sustain. As Einstein said, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” People like Laudise and Tibbs pack the house because they have a simple, compelling idea that hails from a group of people that industry traditionally hasn’t consulted.

  You won’t find their books in the airport business bookstalls. They don’t come from Harvard Business School or California think tanks or Japanese productivity institutes. The consultants of the nineties come blinking into the artificial lights of corporate conference rooms fresh from butterfly counts, gorilla watches, and bird bandings. As they put on their first carousel of slides—coral reefs, redwood forests, prairies, and steppes—even E. F. Hutton is listening. This is what’s so amazing to me. In the most unlikely and promising cross-fertilization of our times, the Birkenstocks are teaching the suits.

  SURVIVING IN PLACE: EMULATING NATURE’S ECONOMICS

  William Cooper wonders what an old fish squeezer like him is doing on the Journal of Urban Ecology’s masthead, or the National Academy of Science’s panel to investigate the building of six hundred supersonic transport planes. A fish biologist by training, Cooper has cultivated a multi-octave range of specialties, thriving in the tidal pool between disciplines that is home to good biomimics.

  In addition to teaching zoology at Michigan State University, Cooper is an adjunct professor in marine sciences in Virginia, and civil, environmental, and mineral engineering in Michigan and Minnesota. He’s chaired a department and seven advisory boards and is now on the editorial board of four journals. In fact, from the looks of his vita, you’d be hard-pressed to find a global change, waste management, or environmental risk board that Cooper has not served on. In his spare time, he works for the Brookings Institution, giving about thirty-five seminars a year to policy makers who are about to sail or sink important legislation.

  Despite this heavyweight influence, Cooper is a surprisingly self-effacing, plain talker with a grounded sense of the absurd. I laughed a lot when I talked with him, and I imagine his students enjoy the boomerang rides he calls lectures.

  A decade before it was fashionable, Cooper tells me, he wandered out of the Zoology Department at the University of Michigan and began to teach a class in ecological systems to engineers. When Braden Allenby heard about that, he invited Cooper to a 1992 Woods Hole meeting to talk about a newly birthed concept called industrial ecology. “I was the only biologist in the room,” Cooper recalls.

  What he told Allenby and the other business thinkers was good news. The natural world is full of models for a more sustainable economic system—prairies, coral reefs, oak-hickory forests, old-growth redwood and Douglas-fir forests, and more. These mature ecosystems do everything we want to do. They self-organize into a diverse and integrated community of organisms with a common purpose—to maintain their presence in one place, make the most of what is available, and endure over the long haul.

  But he also told them some bad news. We are nothing like the equilibrium organisms we want to emulate. Right now, we are occupying a niche that is also found in the natural world—that of opportunists, concentrating on growth and throughput (how fast raw materials can be turned into products) without giving much thought to efficiency. We’re acting as if we’re only passing through, taking advantage of the plenty and then moving on.

  Opportunists are the weeds in a farmer’s newly turned field, the bacteria in a Tupperware of leftovers, or the mice in a catless barn. These communities, called Type I systems, spring up to take advantage of abundant resources. They typically use resources as quickly as they can, turning them into adult bodies and then into numerous, small offspring—thousands of insect eggs, for instance. The idea behind this rapid growth strategy is to grow your population, maximize throughput of materials, and then head for the next horn of plenty, with no time for recycling or efficiency. Sound familiar?

  “The Industrial Revolution was the equivalent of throwing a handful of flour beetles into a fresh bin of clean, sifted flour,” Allenby told me. We suddenly had unlimited resources, and like any opportunistic system, we went hog wild, with one important difference. Unlike flour beetles, who can eat and be merry and then move on to another bin of flour, we are in a finite container called Earth. To get a grim foreshadowing of our predicament, put a screen atop the flour bin so the beetles can’t get out to find their next cornucopia.

  The screened-in beetles will eat and reproduce, filling the bin with beetle bodies. Because their system is so simple, there is no decay segment of society, no janitorial species to clean up the corpses and convert them back into food. That means that once the flour gets turned into flour-beetle bodies, those nutrients are locked away from the increasingly hungry population. It’s like our economy turning the last of our raw materials into products, with no mechanism for recycling those products.

  Living space quickly becomes scarce as well. As the population reaches the peak of its classic sigmoid curve, the madding crowd begins to get in one another’s way. Antennas are locking, beetles are munching on the offspring of other beetles, and copulating beetles are being interrupted by a third and a fourth before they can mate. Within days, survival rates teeter, births stall, and the population comes crashing to a “hard landing.”

  “It’s not that these linear, Type I systems are categorically bad,” says Bill Cooper. “That’s a human judgment.” If it weren’t for Type I systems, the Earth’s scars wouldn’t heal. Annuals come in when soils have been disturbed—after fire, windfall, plowing, or plague. They carpet the ground, gobbling newly exposed nutrients and fertilizing the soil with their wastes, setting the stage for the grand conga dance called succession: Flower field turns to shrub field turns to forest. Though their moment in the sun is short, Type I pioneers can always find a new patch of disturbance somewhere, even in little gaps that are created after a tree falls. This slightly offbeat pulsing of decay and repair in many patches is what helps the community retain its stability.

  But the strategy of ragweed, fireweed, and crabgrass doesn’t work everywhere. It’s only appropriate at the start-up stage of succession, when plenty of sunlight and soil nutrients are still available. Once the scene begins to crowd, and the pie of sun and water and nutrients is divided among more takers,
the Type II strategy wins out.

  The Type II system consists of perennial berry bushes and woody seedlings that move into the field. They are there for the longer haul. Unlike Type I species, they won’t spend their energy on making millions of seeds. Instead, they’ll make a few seeds and funnel the rest of the energy into hardy roots and sturdy stems that will see them through winter. In the springtime, their prudence will pay off—they’ll rebound from their roots and reach quickly for the sun, outpacing and eclipsing the Type I annuals.

  At the very end of the conga line are those species that take this patience strategy to the extreme, showing even more loyalty to place. Type III species (the ones that will inherit the site and remain dominant until the next big disturbance) do more with less. They are designed to stay on the land in a state of relative equilibrium, taking out no more than they put in.

  Masters of efficiency, Type III species don’t have to go looking for sunlight. Their seedlings can tolerate their parents’ shade, so wave after wave of the same species can grow up here. Biologists call these species K-selected. They have larger and fewer offspring, which have longer and more complex lives. They live in elaborate synergy with the species around them, and put their energy into optimizing these relationships. Together, the mesh of life juggles materials endlessly. Virtually no wastes leach away, and the only energy imported is that of the sun. By the time a mature forest like this closes ranks, pioneer species are long gone, off to their next sunny fortune—a fire scar in a forest, a gap from a wind-torn tree, the crack in your driveway.

  Type I species are the rolling stones of the world, colonizing rather than learning to close the loops. The reason the footloose strategy works for them, says Cooper, is that new opportunities are always opening up. Back before our world was full, when we still had somewhere else to go, the Type I strategy looked like a good way to stay one step ahead of reality. These days, when we’ve gone everywhere there is to go, we have to find a different kind of plenty, not by jumping off to another planet but by closing the loops here on this one.

  BECOMING MORE LIKE A REDWOOD THAN A RAGWEED

  Now that our rootball has grown to fill the world, we realize: We have to learn to be self-renewing right where we are. What we’re talking about is changing our very niche, our profession in the ecosystem. Cooper says it won’t do to just tweak the current system and hope that we’ll evolve, just as a common ragweed or fireweed could not be expected to evolve into a redwood. Instead, we must replace portions of our Type I economy with portions of a Type III economy until the whole thing mirrors the natural world.

  The gurus for this kind of niche-shift will be people who have studied the places we want to go. Systems ecologists like Howard T. Odum have studied the food chains in a prairie or estuary or bottomland and then drawn diagrams of energy flows and fluxes. If you didn’t know better, you would think they were flow diagrams of a manufacturing process, complete with kilocalories per unit of “product” produced. Of all biologists, these folks come closest to speaking the language of process engineers.

  When the flow chart of a developing Type I system is compared with that of a mature Type III system, some stark differences reveal themselves. This comparison table, first reproduced in a paper by Allenby and Cooper, represents decades of work by systems ecologists like Odum. Many of these concepts will appear in the upcoming discussions.

  ECOLOGICAL SUCCESSION

  Ecosystem Attributes

  Developing Stages (Type I)

  Mature Stages (Type III)

  Food chain

  Linear

  Weblike

  Species diversity

  Low

  High

  Body size

  Small

  Large

  Life cycles

  Short, simple

  Long, complex

  Growth strategy (how to multiply)

  Emphasis on rapid growth (r-selection)

  Emphasis on feedback control (K-selection)

  Production (body mass and offspring)

  Quantity

  Quality

  Internal symbiosis (cooperative relationships)

  Undeveloped

  Developed

  Nutrient conservation (closed-loop cycling)

  Poor

  Good

  Pattern diversity (vertical canopy layers and horizontal patchiness)

  Simple

  Complex

  Biochemical diversity (such as plant-herbivore “arms races”)

  Low

  High

  Niche specializations (jobs in the ecosystem)

  Broad

  Narrow

  Mineral cycles

  Open

  Closed

  Nutrient exchange rate between organisms and environment

  Fast

  Slow

  Role of detritus (dead organic matter) in nutrient regeneration

  Unimportant

  Important

  Inorganic nutrients (minerals such as iron)

  Extrabiotic

  Intrabiotic

  Total organic matter (nutrients tied up in biomass)

  Small

  Large

  Stability (resistance to external perturbation)

  Poor

  Good

  Entropy (energy lost)

  High

  Low

  Information (feedback loops)

  Low

  High

  Adapted from Braden R. Allenby and William E. Cooper, “Understanding Industrial Ecology from a Biological Systems Perspective,” Total Quality Environmental Management, Spring 1994, pp. 343–354.

  You can read this chart as a list of challenges or lessons—column two is where we are now, the ragweed stage, and column three is the redwood stage, the blueprint for our future survival. Though the two appear to be worlds apart, industrial ecologists are quick to note that the ragweed economy and the redwood ecosystem are both complex systems, and as such, they have much in common.

  Complex systems—such as a wildfire, a storm pattern, or a waterfall—are not “run” by anyone in particular, but are instead controlled by countless individual interactions that occur inside the system. Every day, for instance, customers in hundreds of countries make decisions to buy or not to buy, and those decisions in turn affect the price of beans and stocks. In the same way, countless interactions in a natural system—eating or being eaten, for instance—weave together to define the community. Just as the invisible hand of the marketplace determines whether a company lives or dies, so natural selection works from within to shape the nature of life.

  Over billions of years, natural selection has come up with winning strategies adopted by all complex, mature ecosystems. The strategies in the following list are tried-and-true approaches to the mystery of surviving in place. Think of them as the ten commandments of the redwood clan. Organisms in a mature ecosystem:

  Use waste as a resource

  Diversify and cooperate to fully use the habitat

  Gather and use energy efficiently

  Optimize rather than maximize

  Use materials sparingly

  Don’t foul their nests

  Don’t draw down resources

  Remain in balance with the biosphere

  Run on information

  Shop locally

  If we agree there’s merit to trying to emulate these approaches, it’s easy to see that our economy, since it is also a complex system, has more than a snowball’s chance of actually being able to operate and survive this way. This hope is what motivates industrial ecologists to get up every morning and work to shift our niche.

  Living the Lessons

  Though they know it won’t happen all at once, the Allenbys and Tibbses of the world want to move us toward a future in which industry runs on sunlight (or a similar renewable nonpolluting source), doesn’t “overdraw” natural resources or foul its own nest, sees nothing as waste, is cooperative and diversified, and does more with less t
hrough ingenious, high-quality, information-rich design of products and processes. In short, they envision an industry that is more like a closed-loop redwood forest than my front lawn.

  As you will see in the comparisons that follow, our culture is taking some first tentative steps down this “path of no regrets.” Right-thinking companies, shaped by their own form of natural selection, are already experimenting with the approaches you will find here, trying to mimic the successes of redwood communities. If any company or national economy is successful in applying all ten lessons, it could master a trick that’s as old as the first bacteria: life creating conditions conducive to life.

  1. Use Waste as a Resource.

  One of the key lessons from systems ecology is that as a system puts on more biomass (total living weight), it needs more recycling loops to keep it from collapsing. A forest is more complex than a weed field—shrubs and trees and vines and mosses and lichen and squirrels and porcupines and bark beetles extend upward and outward, filling every nook and cranny with life. If all that biomass kept withdrawing nutrients from the environment with no way of recouping from within, it would quickly suck its surroundings dry.

  Instead, the mature community becomes more and more self-contained. Rather than exchanging nutrients and minerals with the outside environment at a high rate, it circulates what it needs within its pool of sprouting, dying, and decaying organic matter. The reason the cycle works so smoothly is that there are no holes in the organizational chart—a diverse assembly of producers, consumers, and decomposers have evolved to play their parts in closing the loops so resources won’t be lost. All waste is food, and everybody winds up reincarnated inside somebody else. The only thing the community imports in any appreciable amount is energy in the form of sunlight, and the only thing it exports is the byproduct of its energy use, heat.