Biomimicry

by Janine M Benyus

  Don’t use renewable resources faster than they regenerate themselves.

  At one time, our economy was primarily based on renewable materials—wood, natural fibers, plant-derived chemicals, and so on. One of our greatest missteps was to replace this economy with one based on nonrenewables such as oil, gas, coal, metals, and minerals. The law of sustainability says you should use nonrenewables at the same rate at which you are developing substitutes. But we are obviously using metals and minerals and fossil fuels faster than we are developing substitutes. If we are to leave any resources for our grand-children, we should be recycling nonrenewables now, even if it means finding a way to “mine” landfills, where metals and minerals are often found in higher concentrations than they are in ore deposits!

  The leak that will be toughest to seal is that of dissipative losses, those tiny bits of nonrenewables that are lost to the land, air, or water with each use. (For instance, your brake pads shower the road surface with material each time you stop.) Chemicals are especially prone to be dissipative; if they are not embodied in plastics, synthetic rubber, or synthetic fiber, they are likely to be in the use-and-lose category that includes coatings, pigments, pesticides, herbicides, germicides, preservatives, flocculants, antifreezes, explosives, propellants, fire retardants, reagents, detergents, fertilizers, fuels, and lubricants. Sealing up these slow leaks, and concentrating on recovery, may save virgin sources for generations to come.

  Perhaps the best remedy of all is to find renewable substitutes for these nonrenewables. Recent talk about biopolymers, plastics from plants, and fuel from corn is evidence of a shift from rare and precious resources to ones that can conceivably be grown with the sun’s help.

  Not that a return to a renewable economy would be a total panacea. As Daniel Chiras warns, improperly managed timber cutting, farming, fishing, and ranching can result in severe erosion and marked decreases in the productive capacity of land and sea. The smart alternative is to take from the land only what will allow more to grow back. In forestry this is known as sustained yield, and the idea is to harvest only what has grown that year, so you are basically living on interest, not depleting the capital, of growing stock. The capacity for growing more is what must be protected. Unfortunately, the current rules of our marketplace give lumber companies incentives to liquidate their assets (cut down all their trees) when wood prices stagnate. Cutting into the growing stock of the forest is like damaging the goose with the golden eggs, diminishing the capacity of the system to provide year after year.

  A sustainable society, therefore, depends not just on shifting to renewable resources but on carefully managing all of the Earth’s regenerative gifts. This will require not only a taboo against exploiting ecological capital but also a reining in of the forces that drive this exploitation: runaway population and consumption. In short, it will require a simpler and more graceful life.

  8. Remain in Balance with the Biosphere.

  When we talk about a prairie or a redwood forest, we’re talking about subcycles churning within a much larger cycle. The grandparent of all cycling occurs at the level of biosphere.

  The biosphere (the layer of air, land, and water that supports life) is a closed system, meaning that no materials (except for rogue meteorites) are imported or exported. The stocks of the major biochemical building blocks such as carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus stay pretty much the same, even though they are actively traded among organisms. Whatever is removed from the resource reservoirs, through the process of photosynthesizing, respiring, growing, mineralizing, and decaying, is replaced in equal amounts. Through the revolving door of organisms, the stocks circulate but they don’t run down.

  Gases in the atmosphere are also held in a delicate but dynamic balance. In photosynthesis, plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. Respiring animals take this same oxygen and return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Neither of these gases is removed or returned in excess; for example, oxygen remains at a crucial 21 percent level in the atmosphere (which is a comfort to us every time we strike a match). A similar stabilizing effect is seen in the nitrogen, sulfur, and water cycles.

  Through this give-and-take, life maintains the conditions needed for life. If these biological processes were to cease, writes environmental economist Robert U. Ayres, “The grand nutrient, cycles would wind down, as the many chemical reactions proceeded toward chemical equilibrium.” In short, the great juggling act of life would end.

  Remaining in Balance with the Biosphere: The Lessons Learned

  As living beings, we contribute our share of exhaled gases and organic matter to the Earth. Unfortunately, our byproducts go far beyond these bodily offerings. As Ayres reports, “In the middle of the last century about 280 of every million molecules in the atmosphere were carbon dioxide [CO2] molecules (280 parts per million by volume). Today that value has risen by 25 percent, to about 355 parts per million by volume. The current rate of increase is about 0.4 percent per year.”

  Where does it all go? The 7,100 million metric tons of carbon per year that we inject into the air by fossil fuel burning and deforestation is only about 12 percent of the net primary productivity—the 60,000 million metric tons of carbon that land plants produce in their bodies each year. But while the carbon that plants produce is eventually reused by living things, our injection of CO2 is not balanced by natural processes. Because it is over and above what would be naturally recycled, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere just keeps growing. The ultimate question that industrial ecologists must ask is: How on Earth will our biosphere respond to this perturbation in the grand nutrient cycle, this buildup without balance?

  Industrial ecologists say the only answer is an industrial ecosystem that can dovetail with the biosphere without harm. A few minds are talking about this large-scale integration, but at this point, the talk is still talk. Ayers writes that unlike the Earth’s system, which is characterized by closed cycles, the industrial system as a whole is an open one in which “nutrients” are transformed into “wastes” but are not yet significantly recycled. Like any linear system (such as the flour beetles in a bin), this one is inherently unstable and unsustainable. Without blinking, he writes, “It must either stabilize or collapse to a thermal equilibrium state in which all flows, that is, all physical or biological processes, cease.”

  Ayres cheers up somewhat when he reminds us that the Earth was not always a closed system. It took billions of years to evolve all the weblike mechanisms (organisms) that sew up the cycles. Before they were in place, the world faced lots of loose ends: organic molecule shortages (as protocells forming in the ocean used up all their building blocks), carbon dioxide buildups (before blue-green algae were around to breathe CO2), and near oxygen poisoning (before aerobic bacteria were around to breathe O2). So life has stood at the brink before, Ayres tells us. What will evolve to pull us back this time?

  The solution that would save the day, he says, would be very difficult for us to predict. For that matter, so would “the last straw.” The problem is that the biosphere and our industrial worldwide ecosystem are both complex systems, meaning that small changes can amplify to become very large changes. The most popular example of this “sensitivity to initial conditions” is the complexity of weather; theoretically, a butterfly flapping its wings in Central Park could trigger a series of disturbances leading to a typhoon in Taiwan. This nonlinearity makes it tough to gauge the seriousness of our current insults, or to predict the outcomes of our intervention.

  All we can do is watch for warning signs. To that end, we are now monitoring the Earth more closely than ever before, hoping to discern patterns in how we affect the biosphere and how it responds. One of the largest new efforts is NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth begun in 1991. (The mission was instigated by astronaut Sally Ride, who noticed that we spend millions to monitor other planets, but very little to track changes here at home.) In the mission’s first phase, a number of new remote-sensing satellites are tracking, for exam
ple, circulation patterns of the world’s oceans, weather disturbances caused by El Niño, fluctuating sea levels, shifting boundaries between temporate and boreal forest types, and the effects of CFCs on the ozone hole. Phase II begins in 1998, with the launch of the first Earth Observing Spacecraft, which, together with the satellites, will beam back more information every hour than currently exists in all the Earth sciences combined. If we use this information correctly, it could just be the self-regulator we’ve been searching for.

  9. Run on Information.

  Mature communities, like innovative and productive companies, have rich communication channels that carry feedback to all members, influencing their march toward sustainability. Excess and waste are held in check by mechanisms that reward efficient behavior and punish foolish genes. Any organism that is surrounded by and dependent on so many other links must develop unambiguous ways to signal its intentions and interact with its neighbors. Wolves, for example, must perfect ritualized gestures that clearly state things like “Let’s mate” or “You win, I’m moving away peacefully.” As biologists say, successful body designs and behaviors must be high in information content.

  What makes a mature community run is not one universal message being broadcast from above, but numerous, even redundant, messages coming from the grass roots, dispersed throughout the community structure. A rich feedback system allows changes in one component of the community to reverberate through the whole, allowing for adaptation when the environment changes. The raison d’être of mature communities, remember, is to maintain their identity throughout environmental storms and travails, so they can remain, and evolve, in place. This is what sustainability seekers are also beginning to want for our communities.

  Running on Information: The Lessons Learned

  System breakdown occurs when we as a species ignore the negative feedback coming from the natural world—the reproductive abnormalities, the drastic weather changes, the extinctions—and ratchet up our growth gears anyway. We take more than the world can replace and release more than it can handle. This damn-the-evidence kind of excess is called “overshoot.”

  To avoid overshooting, all the firms in an economy have to be keyed into each other and aware of their interactions with the environment, the way organisms are. What we need to establish are feedback links among and within businesses, as well as feedback from the environment to business.

  The recent proliferation of materials exchange brokerages such as the North East Industrial Waste Exchange in Syracuse, New York, and BARTER (Business Allied to Recycle Through Exchange and Reuse) in Minnesota is a good sign. These companies publish up-to-the-minute catalogs of who needs what and who has what, matching companies looking to get rid of wastes with those who could use those wastes. This recycling yenta service signals the beginning of information postings within and between industries that will facilitate the thorough use of materials. Such a feedback system could keep materials cycling through the economy instead of landing in a dump or incinerator.

  Feedback within a firm can also help improve environmental report cards. Back in the fifties, breakthroughs in cybernetic feedback made automation possible. The heater in your home is a chip off that block—its information relay is a thermostat that senses the temperature in your house and turns the heater on or off so you don’t have to. Industrial ecologists would like to see the same sorts of self-policing mechanisms built into machines to help industry avoid environmental transgressions. These mechanisms might constantly monitor emissions, for instance, calibrating the machines to be as clean as possible.

  Feedback mechanisms need not be only mechanical, however. Profits falling or rising in response to a company’s environmental record can also be a damping or driving mechanism. Governments can help push profits the right way by taxing firms for environmental transgressions and rewarding them for advances.

  Another feedback mechanism that would concentrate industry’s mind is consumer demand for greener products. The countries in the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Australia are currently negotiating an enforceable and credible green labeling scheme. Once a green seal of approval on a product becomes truly coveted, companies will go all out to make their products “greener than thine.”

  Finally, say the industrial ecologists, we need a response system that will allow firms to get warning signals from the environment and immediately clean up their practices without waiting for laws or profit to do the job. The government-industry covenants in The Netherlands are a good example of negotiations that are adaptive in nature. The Dutch decided that they wanted to reach their clean environment goal within a generation. They felt that the practice of legislating change involved too much guesswork and often didn’t go far enough. With covenants, the firm tries out an environmentally friendly policy, and scientific monitoring shows whether it’s working. If the environment is still suffering, there’s no need to wait for new legislation to toughen policy—government and industry simply negotiate a speedy change in the covenant.

  10. Shop Locally.

  Because animals can’t import products from Hong Kong, they shop locally and become local experts in their own backyards. Mountain lions coevolve with mountain goats, for instance, developing a “search image” for their prey and the perfect complement of physique and teeth needed to harvest and digest them. The goats, for their part, are equally adept on home turf, where they have evolved clever defenses to an enemy they know. Staying close to home is a coup then—it conserves energy and makes for the best use of an organism’s abilities.

  For that reason, say Allenby and Cooper, “Biological communities are, by and large, localized or relatively closely connected in time and space. Thus, for example, the nutrients in a rotting log are carried into the soil by rainwater, using energy from sunlight captured as the water initially evaporated. The energy flux is low, the distances proximate.” In other words, with the exception of some high-flying migrant species, nature doesn’t commute to work.

  Shopping Locally: The Lessons Learned

  Shopping locally is one lesson that we seem to be ignoring completely. The drive is now on for a global, borderless economy where a single product is assembled in a dozen different countries, and foods, even those that could be grown next door, are trucked, flown, and shipped from foreign soils (the average piece of food on your table was transported fourteen hundred miles). There are at least three problems with this approach. First, this way of life assumes that a transportation system, with its inherent energy greed, will always be available to us. It may not be. Second, having the whole globe in your backyard encourages regional populations to grow beyond what the land would allow if there were no imports. And third, when you separate producers from consumers, the consumers lose a visceral sense of where their resources come from, and what it costs environmentally to provide them. Deforestation in Third World countries is out of sight and mind, present only in books about the rain forest displayed on teak coffee tables.

  If we were to take a page from nature’s book, we would try to adapt our appetites to where we live, getting our resources from as close by as possible. Shopping locally requires a local knowledge that indigenous people possess but that many of us have lost. (A typical bioregional quiz asks: Do you know what watershed you are living in or what kind of vegetation your backyard used to support? Do you know what you would be eating if you were dependent on local larders?)

  The good news is that local self-reliance movements are popping up like mushrooms. People are educating themselves about their natural addresses and trying to become, as environmental author Kirkpatrick Sales says, “dwellers in the land.” Marketing co-ops are encouraging shoppers to buy locally produced foods, wood products, artwork, and literature as a way to sustain local economies. If this bioregionalism movement achieves its full promise, economic borders will be redrawn in real terms, being more closely related to watersheds, soil types, and climate regimes than to the political boundaries we currently honor.

/>   The idea of an economy that suits the land and takes advantage of its local attributes would bring us closer to mirroring organisms that have evolved to be local experts. Instead of “becoming one patch,” says William Cooper, we would assume the more stable patterning of an ecosystem—a mosaic of unique patches, each pulsing to its own rhythm, in sync with its own place.

  Despite the commonsense rightness of the ideas in our list, leaping from Type I to Type III systems is at this point still a sport for “early adopters” or companies that can afford to experiment with new paths. How do we win over the critical mass of companies that will be needed for a full-web industrial ecosystem?

  One way is to simply wait to hit the wall. As Cooper says, “Once we start to reach the Earth’s real carrying capacity, today’s market-driven ideas of maximizing flow-through will become institutional fossils real quick. We’ll have to dump them for another way of doing business.” Moving from a Type I to a Type III strategy, he says, will require wholesale substitutions, not slow developmental change. What will the changeover look like?

  “It’s called anarchy,” Cooper says, half wisecracking, half serious.

  Brad Allenby has a little more faith. If we can absorb the lessons found in nature, he thinks we can actually self-correct before we find ourselves, along with many other species, dangling over the brink. When I ask him what mechanism we can use to nudge our gigantic many-armed octopus of an economy toward sustainability, he smiles. Like many phenomena and patterns in nature, Allenby’s approach is self-referential.

  “We use the economy itself.”

  GETTING THERE: SOME NICHE-SHIFTING TOOLS

  Boundary Conditions

  The industrial ecologists I talked to admit that we will always need some command-and-control laws like the kind that banned lead in gasoline or phased out CFCs. But that’s not the whole answer. I wondered briefly if Allenby thought corporate America would simply volunteer to go from brown to green.