Biomimicry

by Janine M Benyus

  “We needn’t ask industry for altruism,” he replied, “and that’s good, because it’s not in their nature.” If we structure things properly, Allenby believes, profit can be used both as cattle prod and carrot for the cultural and technological evolution we are seeking.

  “A company that is profit-oriented has all kinds of handles and buttons—you know how to push and pull it—how to induce the kind of behavior you want.” Market-based carrots and sticks wielded by governments, for instance, are one way to herd or nudge the system toward sustainability. Another is take-back laws and community right-to-know legislation. These regulations act as “boundary conditions.” They place industry in a new operating environment, a new habitat, where environmental care is suddenly the most natural and competitive way to behave.

  Cooper explains boundary conditions in biological terms. “If you put a species in an Illinois cornfield, it’s going to act differently than if you put it in a beech-maple forest habitat. The conditions are different, the biological checks and balances are different, and natural selection will reward different behaviors in the survivors.”

  In the same way, if we were to plunk our economy into a set of conditions (incentives, disincentives, laws) that more accurately reflected real consequences and limits, it too would react and adapt. Right now, we’ve been smoothing the playing field artificially. We haven’t been including costs to the Earth or to future generations in our accounting. Even worse, we’ve been subsidized negative activities. Fossil fuels have been subsidized worldwide to the tune of $220 billion annually. Artificially low prices give us a false notion of abundance and blind us to the true danger of depending on nonrenewables. What if we were to remove the rose-colored glasses and let the economy actually see the world in black and white? What if we were to resume play on a field that had all the ankle-twisting potholes of environmental limits?

  Allenby thinks realistic boundary conditions would bring out sustainable behaviors in the economy, just as boundary conditions associated with a mature forest—a finite amount of water, sunlight, and nutrients—bring out stability-inducing characteristics in its members. In effect, it would give Adam Smith’s invisible hand of capitalism a green thumb.

  Allenby believes in the power of boundary conditions because he knows how futile it is to micromanage specific elements of the system. “We learned in the command-and-control era of the seventies that the system is just too complex for us to know where to intervene effectively.” Instead, he thinks government should draw the lines—the minimums and maximums that society will allow—and invite industry to color within the lines in whatever way it sees fit.

  In Allenby’s model, laws that mandate a certain kind of compliance technology would be struck from the books, giving companies the freedom to explore and come up with even better solutions. Antiquated subsidies that reward excessive deforestation and mining would also have to be removed. In their place, Allenby suggests “very broad, nonprescriptive policy tools that push the industrial system in the desired direction, without trying to define the endpoint, either organizationally or technologically.” Instead of a detailed map, he says, “we should draw an arrow and dare companies to get there before their competitors.” Now, that’s in their nature.

  Boundary conditions are a great start, but if the system oscillating inside those boundaries is to land softly anytime soon, it has to have all its internal signals blinking clear and true. In our economy, that means having products’ prices truly reflect costs to the Earth and to future generations.

  Green accounting would have strong and immediate effects. “Think what would happen to agriculture if the price of water floated up toward its real social and environmental cost,” says Allenby. “You’d pay a king’s ransom to grow a thirsty plant like cotton in the San Joaquin Valley! Instead, farmers would most likely switch to crops that were better suited to the region.” And what if industries were forced to cover the full environmental costs of their activities up front instead of leaving the bill for the public to pay? It would no longer be a question of whether environmental transgressions were really serious—they would be expensive, and therefore enough of a thorn to warrant pulling. On the other hand, environmentally benign technologies would be coveted, because in this new schema of pricing, green manufacturing would actually be cheaper.

  Government, in its role as tax collector, might play a natural role in rewiring our economic steering wheel to its drive train. Paul Hawken thinks we’ve had it backward. Instead of taxing good things like income, Hawken would like to see government tax bad things like pollution or excessive use of energy or virgin materials. Taxing fuels based on their carbon content, for instance (more carbon is more damaging), would encourage use of low-polluting fuels like natural gas in every stage of a product’s life cycle. The price on nonrenewable raw materials would be raised to more realistic levels, discouraging waste and giving incentives for recycling. The positive flip side would be to give tax credits to companies that are producing renewable resources in a sustainable manner.

  Government can also reward early adopters through its own purchasing practices. The Clinton administration swung a huge green club when it required the federal government to give preference to green, recycled, energy-efficient products in its procurements. When a customer the size of Uncle Sam goes green, the makers of computers, office supplies, vehicles, and more suddenly rush to come out with a qualifying product line.

  Another governmental program that has shown faith in the invisible hand is the scheme, introduced in the 1990 Clean Air Act, to create markets in tradable “right to pollute” credits. Here’s how it works: The government issues a limited number of pollution credits to companies—saying, that’s as much as you can emit. Companies that figure out how to cut emissions no longer need their credits, and can sell them at a Chicago Board of Trade auction (the first one was held in 1993), collecting payment from companies that haven’t been as innovative. Suddenly, bad environmental practices are no longer just costly; now they force you to (ouch) line the pockets of your competitor.

  Once a critical mass of companies begins to clean up their environmental messes, we could see change beget change, as in a positive feedback or snowballing effect. The companies that cut their emissions, for instance may suddenly become “reformed smokers,” advocating stronger laws that would force other companies to scramble to keep up. Responding to pressure from above, within, and below, the swirling mass of our economy may begin to realign into a Type III community bent on optimizing rather than maximizing.

  One of the ways we could speed this transition is to make sure all our signals are blinking unambiguously that “being green is good for business.” Job one is to change the way we measure our economic well-being. Right now, we genuflect to the GNP, which is not a measure of health so much as it is a measure of exchange. It tracks flow-through of materials, and it rings positive when we are using up resources as fast as we can. Even negatives, like pollution, cancer, and other ills, are seen as positives so long as we keep cranking out products to deal with the cleanup or the cure. In this system, the Exxon Valdez goes aground, and the GNP jumps (true story).

  There is, thank goodness, a movement to find a new way of monitoring economic welfare, and it’s called Green (like everything else in this movement) GNP. As a first step, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Statistics is inventing a way to put a dollar value on environmental assets, a new column on its output and investment ledgers. Other countries are also experimenting with report cards that might take into account a wide range of social, economic, environmental, and health-related factors, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, the general health of the population, literacy, crime, accumulated wealth, income distribution, air quality, water quality, and recreational opportunities.

  Meanwhile, at the level of individual firms, Allenby thinks environmental costs that were once buried in overhead must become a part of every department’s debit and asset sheet. People a
t the drawing board, for instance, will have to know what their design choices will cost in terms of the environment. An engineer who orders a cadmium-coated fastener will have to consider more than just price and function; after factoring in the environmental headaches of working with a hazardous compound, he or she may decide that a noncoated fastener, even if it’s more expensive, may be worth the cost.

  If only we had known more about environmental costs sixty years ago when chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were invented. Environmental advocate Hazel Henderson estimates that the true societal cost of one CFC aerosol can—factoring in its contribution to the destruction of the ozone layer, cancer rates, and so on—would be about $12,000. That might have given its designers pause.

  Making Envy Green

  When you think about it, designing may be the most powerful fulcrum from which we can move the economy and the culture toward a more sustainable place. Designers are the people who give a product not only its functionality but also its personality. From art-deco lamps to the tail fins on Cadillacs to Euro-style Bang and Olufsen stereos, designers have been trained to capture the dreams and aspirations of society—what we are or hope to be.

  Also embodied in their designs is the record of our relationship with the Earth. For the most part, the disposable and energy-hungry products that litter our homes loudly trumpet our disregard for other living things. What if designers could help us alleviate some of this psychic guilt?

  Christopher Ryan, professor of design and environmental studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, thinks that designs that are deeply green—in manufacturing, use, and “afterlife”—will give people the option of enjoying life without destroying it, getting the service they want without the bloodbath of consequences. Once a few choice designs show people this guilt-free alternative, says Ryan, passivity is no longer acceptable. Just as safety considerations are now an expected part of any design, people will want to know why greenness can’t be incorporated into all products.

  Designers, together with marketing experts, can help make green de rigueur by first making it look more fun. Ryan feels designers lost their chance in the seventies, when environmental friendliness was packaged to be about as exciting as wearing a hairshirt on a summer’s day. Today Ryan thinks we have a new chance to make envy green—to make environmentally friendly products so fashionable that everyone will want a green product. In this way, the design of sustainable products may actually precede the sustainability revolution and help bring it into being.

  Design for the Environment

  Successful design also has to pass another test beyond consumer appeal. It has to enhance the company’s bottom line on the manufacturing side as well. That’s why Allenby and Graedel are working on Design for the Environment tools to help engineers and operating managers build environmental friendliness into every step of the production process, as well as into the product itself. The first is a matrix-based approach that allows a manager to assign a green score to a potential product or process. The completed matrix is a spreadsheet full of ovals, some filled in and some empty, like the ovals of a Consumer Reports score card. The darkest ovals tell process and product engineers where the greatest areas of environmental concern are, and, subsequently, where the greatest green strides can be made. It brings the impact on the environment into the equation, giving engineers a green set of sieves through which to filter their ideas.

  Graedel has also invented a version of Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) that allows engineers to pit two products against each other, using actual numbers instead of just ovals showing relative levels of concern. His LCA would calculate, for instance, the kilowatts of energy used at each and every stage of a product’s development, from scooping the oil from the ground to the cost of reincarnating it after its use. This cradle-to-cradle accounting is great for comparing two products, such as cloth diapers vs. disposable ones (it’s still a toss-up). The advantage of Graedel’s analysis is that it can be done in a couple of days rather than a couple of years, which is how long most LCAs now take. The only problem with the new tool may be the stampede of industries that want to try it.

  BUSINESS CAN BE A JUNGLE: THE PROMISE OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY

  LCA-inventor Tom Graedel is a soft-spoken man whose eyes are lit with a keen intelligence tempered to a patient, steady flame. He makes an unlikely maverick. “I’m actually a little afraid,” admitted Graedel when I asked him about the tsunami of interest that had built around his life-cycle analysis tools. “Now that our textbook is out [the first of its kind in industrial ecology], we’re going to be deluged.” Checking back with him a few years later, I find he is indeed busy. Virtually every industrial field wants to know more about how it can design in greenness at the beginning to avoid corporate mistakes and win the badge of corporate environmentalism. Within AT&T, Graedel is making the rounds, visiting one department after another with his shortcut LCA tool.

  Despite the demands, Graedel is happy to be on the ground floor of industrial ecology. His background is in atmospheric science, specifically atmospheric chemistry and climate change. Widely recognized as an expert, Graedel was consulting scientist in the project to recondition the Statue of Liberty after years of corrosion in New York City’s air. He told me that when he stood at the feet of the statue for the unveiling ceremony, he thought that he was experiencing the absolute peak of his career. Now he thinks differently. “When I look back, I think helping industrial ecology get off the ground will be by far the most important thing I’ve ever done. Industrial ecology has the potential to remake industry and, in our tonier thoughts, to remake society as well.”

  As I listen, I’m reminded of Laudise’s comment to his peers that “industrial ecology has the capacity to change not only the way we make things but the way the world works.” And later, to me alone, “Industrial ecology has a great deal to offer and I would love to see people appreciate and understand it at a poetic level if nothing else.” Neither of these men strikes me as a dewy-eyed idealist. What they see I am beginning to see also—that our economy is fertile ground for making the inside-out changes that need to occur if we are going to mesh gears with the Earth and manage a soft landing.

  Though it seems worlds away from ecology, industry might just be the perfect place to start pulling our rip cord. As Christopher Ryan writes in an Internet post titled Green Goods, “As we manipulate the materials we extract from our environment, through our industrious efforts, we engage in our most fundamental relationship with nature, that of its reconstruction. Every material thing we create, everything we produce, reflects our relationship to the physical and biological world.” Right now that relationship is estranged and characterized by abuse. Remaking it into something that will sustain both the human race and the Earth’s integrity is the great hope and the true mission of industrial ecology.

  Our desire is greening. What we choose next can either satisfy our urge to do right by the Earth or plunge us deeper into denial. The biomimics, by holding up living, breathing examples of sustainability and daring us to emulate them, have become beacon-bearers at a crucial juncture, lighting the runway home.

  CHAPTER 8

  WHERE WILL WE GO FROM HERE?

  MAY WONDERS NEVER CEASE: TOWARD A BIOMIMETIC FUTURE

  Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future. This spiritual craving cannot be satisfied by the colonization of space…. The true frontier for humanity is life on Earth, its exploration and the transport of knowledge about it into science, art and practical affairs.

  —E. O. WILSON, author of Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic

  To sit with the eagles and their flutelike songs, listening to the longer flute of wind sweep through the lush grasslands, is to begin to know the natural laws that exist apart from our own written ones.

  —LINDA HOGAN, author of Dwellings

  As I put the finishing touches on this book, two households of geese fuss in the pond right outside my window. They are restless lately w
ith what biologists call Zugunruhe, which means “travel urge.”

  Eleven goslings were raised this year, which is eleven more than last year or the year before. When I bought the property, everyone told me that the pond was a legendary nursery for waterfowl—cinnamon teal, blue-winged teal, mergansers, coots, and Canada geese. Two years ago, as you’ll remember from Chapter 3, the once sparkling water was eclipsed by a solid sheet of duckweed, a tiny floating plant that forms colonies and manages to shade out everything below it.

  It seems that duckweed in profusion is too much of a good thing, and birds that would normally relish it wouldn’t even land on it. For two years, pair after pair wheeled over the pond at nesting time but opted to go elsewhere. I tried to remedy things by screening off the duckweed with a series of handmade contraptions, but like the Sorcerer’s apprentice, I managed only to create more duckweed.

  The county extension agents recommended that I treat with chemicals, but I had seen too many turtles periscope up, leaves like sequins on their sleepy lids, to even consider it. When I asked the agents for a more natural way to rejuvenate the pond, they were stumped.

  Finally this summer, after one heaping wheelbarrow too many, I simply stopped. I stopped trying to engineer schemes in my own mind and I just sat down on the banks. I indulged in a fantasy of how I would like the pond to be—clear, loud with the squabbles of nesting birds, a healthy balance of vegetation and open water.

  It was then that I became a biomimic instead of just writing about them. I realized that it wasn’t a fantasy I was referencing, but an actual place, a pond that I had once biked to up near the National Forest. I peeled off my swamp boots and got on my bike.

  I spent the afternoon on the lush banks of that balanced pond, trying to absorb its secrets. I noticed the way grasses and willows crowded at the edges, and, when I dipped my hand in, I found it sharply colder than my pond. My final clue came when a cottonwood leaf cruised lazily into view—and out again. Current!