Other rules maintain a sustainable harvest. Seine nets are sewn purposely wide to let smaller whitefish through. Beaver traps are designed to catch only large animals, and only two per beaver house are taken. These conservation ethics are based partly on ecological knowledge, says Nelson, and partly on the Koyukons’ belief that the Earth is aware. As one elder told Nelson, “The country knows. If you do wrong things to it, the whole country knows. It feels what’s happening to it. I guess everything is connected together somehow, under the ground.” Our science is also showing us, in a different way perhaps, that the connected country knows. The Gaia hypothesis shows us how life regulates its own cycles and creates the conditions needed for life. In this view, every part of the living world provides for us, and our strumming on one part of the web reverberates through the whole.
To care for this knowing country is the ultimate act of gratitude, and it will be the sign of our maturity as a species. In her book of essays, Dwellings, Chickasaw author Linda Hogan writes, “Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery of what we are.”
A SPECIES SHAPED TO ECHO
After meeting so many elegant beings produced by evolution, we ask at last what is noteworthy about us as a species. How do we contribute to the continuation of life? By virtue of asking the question, we partly answer it.
We whom Thomas Berry calls “the universe become conscious of itself” are self-reflective, and therefore uniquely positioned to seek nature’s counsel, to learn, to echo, and to give thanks for the wisdom we acquire.
These self-reflective brains are evolution’s latest attempt to find a way to handle and profit from information. At first, single cells floated in the broth, with information strung on the bonds between molecules. Next, a genetic code was devised to handle more complex information. As the gene pool evolved, organisms developed keener and keener senses to collect a stream of signals from the natural world. Finally, our brains became a powerful accomplice to those senses, allowing us not only to take in information (though scopes and satellites now) but to make it into Story—to see connections, patterns, and consequences and, finally, to envision a different future. This ability to mentally scout the river of time gives us an option: Run the rapids the way we always have, or pull into an eddy and learn a better way.
We’re in luck here as well because learning is the second thing that we as a species are good at. Both as individuals strengthening our neuronal nets and as a society, accumulating an organic memory through science, art, and culture, we build on what we’ve learned. And, we have the capacity to seek this knowledge selectively, choosing who or what will teach us. If we choose to heed the lessons of the natural world, we become biomimics.
Which brings us to our third evolutionary gift. Like a landform that is perfectly curved to boomerang a voice, we as a species are well shaped to mimic what we see and hear. Children learn language and gender roles and acceptable behavior by mimicking adults, and as mimes they prove to be uncanny. The first artists were also practicing mimics, re-presenting the natural world in painting, song, and dance. The art of survival itself has probably always hinged on an ability to imitate the traits of the best and brightest in any habitat in which we found ourselves. Ice ages ago, hunters doused themselves in musk to smell like their prey, and today, native Alaskans still stalk seals by stretching flat on the ice like their polar bear mentors.
We are not the only species to have prospered through imitation; biomimicry has a long and colorful tradition in the living world. There are behavioral mimics like the cowbird chick, coloration mimics like the viceroy butterfly that resembles the poisonous monarch, and shape and texture mimics like the walkingstick, an insect that looks like a twig. Biomimicry helps animals and plants blend into their surroundings, or, in the case of the viceroy and monarch, to take on the traits of a species that is better adapted to its environment. By mimicking nature’s best and brightest, we, too, have a chance to blend in and become more like what we admire.
In pursuing this path, we do more than ensure our own survival. In a world as interconnected as ours, protection of self and protection of the planet are indistinguishable, which is why the deep ecologists say, “The world is my body.” If we act on our ability to mimic life’s genius, we have a chance to protect both world and body. If we succeed, evolution will not have produced this giant brain in vain.
We are already off to amazingly good start, with so many instances of biomimicking cropping up that I couldn’t include them all in this book: the proliferation of “green” communities built on ecological principles, the several hundred towns that have decided to use natural marshes to clean their wastewater, the restoration of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the Everglades by mimicking natural flood cycles, the restoration of prairies and forests by mimicking wildfire and natural culling, and even a new political party, based on the precept of using nature’s laws to inform our own. In many fields, a conscious emulation is occurring, drawing on the considerable, and still growing, knowledge of the natural world.
In exploring life’s know-how, we are reaching back to some very old roots, satisfying an “urge to affiliate with life” that is embossed on our genes. E. O. Wilson says that it’s only natural for us to be enthralled by the workings of the natural world. For the 99 percent of the time we’ve been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine. “To explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development…our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents,” writes Wilson. He and others hope that this Biophilia, this love of life, will ultimately convince us to pull over and learn a better way.
In the end what makes us different from other creatures (as far as we know) is our ability to collectively act on our understanding. We can decide as a culture to listen to life, to echo what we hear, to not be a cancer. Having this will and the inventive brain to back it up, we can make the conscious choice to follow nature’s lead in living our lives.
The good news is that we’ll have plenty of help; we are surrounded by geniuses. They are everywhere with us, breathing the same air, drinking the same round river of water, moving on limbs built from the same blood and bone. Learning from them will take only stillness on our part, a quieting of the voices of our own cleverness. Into this quiet will come a cacophony of earthly sounds, a symphony of good sense.
The geese that were born here are honking their good-byes now, rising in a noisy ribbon that quilts the clouds with Vs. Deep in their genes is a map of mountains, sage steppes, grasslands, and riverbeds rolling like signposts along the curvature of the Earth. I follow the flock with my eyes until they are out of sight, clearing a ten-thousand-foot range with strong and liquid wingbeats.
In the silence their passage leaves, I begin to imagine that their farewell song was a kind of prayer, similar to the Mohawk blessing spoken by a midwife at the moment of birth: “Thank you, Earth. You know the way.” Although the scientists and innovators I met might be hesitant to phrase it this way, it could just as easily be their journeying song. Together, we biomimics are setting out on a voyage to learn what nature’s “long and enchanted roster” already knows. It’s the way home, and I’m as eager as the geese to go.
BIO-INSPIRED READINGS
JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG…
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1977.
Birge, Robert R. (ed). Molecular and Biomolecular Electronics: Symposium Sponsored by the Division of Biochemical Technology of the American Chemical Society at the Fourth Chemical Congress of North America. New York, August 25–30, 1991. Washington, D.C.: American Chemical Society, 1994.
Capra, Fri
tjof. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
Center for Resource Management and David Wann. Introduction by Paul Hawken. Deep Design: Pathways to a Livable Future. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996.
Chiras, Daniel D. Lessons from Nature: Learning to Live Sustainably on the Earth. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992.
Etkin, Nina L. (ed). Eating on the Wild Side: The Pharmacologic, Ecologic, and Social Implications of Using Noncultigens. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994.
Graedel, T. E., and B. R. Allenby. Industrial Ecology. New York: Prentice Hall, 1995.
Gratzel, Michael (ed.). Energy Resources Through Photochemistry and Catalysis. New York: Academic Press, 1983.
Gust, Devens, and Thomas Moore. “Mimicking Photosynthesis.” Science, April 7, 1989, pp. 35–41.
Hameroff, Stuart R. Ultimate Computing: Biomolecular Consciousness and Nanotechnology. New York: North-Holland, 1987.
Hawken, Paul. The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Jackson, Wes. Altars of Unhewn Stone: Science and the Earth. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987.
Johns, Timothy. With Bitter Herbs They Shall Eat It: Chemical Ecology and the Origins of Human Diet and Medicine. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990.
Kellert, Stephen R., and Edward O. Wilson. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993.
Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994.
Ogden, Joan M., and Robert H. Williams. Solar Hydrogen: Moving Beyond Fossil Fuels. Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, 1989.
Rothschild, Michael. Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem. New York: Henry Holt, 1990.
Sarikaya, Mehmet, and Ilhan A. Aksay (eds.). Biomimetics: Design and Processing of Materials. New York: American Institute of Physics, 1995.
Soulé, Judith, and Jon K. Piper. Farming in Nature’s Image. San Francisco: Island Press, 1992.
Swan, James A., and Roberta Swan. Bound to the Earth: Creating a Working Partnership of Humanity and Nature. New York: Avon, 1994.
Todd, Nancy. Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1984.
Tributsch, Helmut. How Life Learned to Live: Adaptation in Nature. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982.
Viney, Christopher, Steven T. Case, and J. Herbert Waite. Biomolecular Materials: Materials Research Society Symposium Proceedings, Vol. 292. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Materials Research Society, 1993.
Vogel, Steven. Life’s Devices: The Physical World of Animals and Plants. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Willis, Delta. The Sand Dollar and the Slide Rule: Drawing Blueprints from Nature. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
Yeang, Ken. Designing with Nature: The Ecological Basis for Architectural Design. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995.
SEARCHABLE TERMS
Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.
abalone shell, 97, 98–112, 142–143
Ableman, Michael, 11
Ableson, Philip H., 176
actin, 134
adhesives, byssus complex as biomodel for, 118–122, 124–129
Adleman, Leonard M., 231–235
Agricultural Revolution, 5
Agricultural Testament, An (Howard), 41
agriculture, 11–58
animal diets as model for bioregional crop choices in, 160
annuals vs. perennials in, 12, 14, 17, 20, 25, 26–30, 46–47
bioregional differences in, 35–36, 40–46
government policies on, 16–17, 46–50
industrialization of, 17–20, 53
insecticide use in, 13, 14, 18–20, 47, 48–49, 179
mature natural ecosystems as models for, 12–13, 21–27, 36–37, 40–41
mixed species in, 14, 23–35
of permaculture, 37–39
soil damage from, 13–19, 25
successional model of, 39–41
sustainable energy for, 47, 50–53
weather conditions and, 11–12
airplanes, development of, 8
Allenby, Braden M., 238, 241–243, 248, 251–253, 254, 257, 258, 264–267, 276–279, 281, 282
Allied Signal, 127–128
Altieri, Miguel, 34
aluminum industry, 95
amino acids, 102, 103, 109, 111
anaesthesia, biological consciousness models and, 220–224
Andow, Dave, 34
anhydrous ammonium fertilizer, 18
animals:
agricultural, 44–45, 47–48, 51–52
cooperative relationships between groups of, 258
dietary discrimination of, 147–172, 178–184
extinctions of, 139–140, 144–145, 146–147, 174
habitat destruction for, 170
toxic defenses used by, 179–181
anisotropy, 133
anting, 167
ants, 7
architecture, botanical models for, 6
Arizona, University of, 100, 219, 220
Arizona State University, 63
Army, U.S., spider silk protein research by, 133, 136–138
Arneson, Charles, 180
art, computer evolution of, 209–210
artificial intelligence, 195
artificial life, 202
AT&T, 238, 239, 268, 283
Atlantic Forest, 170
atmosphere, balance of gases in, 271–273
automobile industry, thin-film technology for use in, 113
Ayres, Robert U., 272–273
baboons, 151, 166
Bacon, Francis, 5
bacteria:
in genetic engineering, 82, 106–108, 208
as light-sensitive digital switches, 213–219
magnetotactic, 114–115
in photosynthesis research, 70–74
bacteriorhodopsin (BR), 213–219, 229
Baum, Eric, 234
bears, medicinal plants used by, 167, 182
grizzly, 8, 167
polar, 6
Beck, Matthew, 169
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 185
Bell Laboratories, 239, 241
Bender, Marty, 52
Berenbaum, May R., 130, 179
Berger, Patricia, 171
Bergman, Morris, 236
Berish, Corey, 40
Berry, Thomas, 287–288, 295
Berry, Wendell, 16, 43, 53, 292, 293–294
BioComputing Group, 188
biodegradability, 126
Biological Components Corporation, 217
biomimicry:
defined, xi, 2
development of acceptance for, 4–6, 287–295
human capacity for, 295–296
mechanical paradigm vs., 236
potential applications for, 2–3, 6–7
Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic (Wilson), 285
Bioscience, 289–290
biosphere, chemical balance in, 271–273
biotechnology, genetic basis of, 107
Birge, Robert R., 216, 217–219
Black & Decker, 257
Body Shop, 257
bones:
for dental implants, 144
structural composition of, 101
Borges, Jorge Luis, 185–186
boundary conditions, 278–279
Bound to the Earth (Swan and Swan), 238
BR (bacteriorhodopsin), 213–219, 229
brain function:
in accommodation to evolutionary changes, 200–201
dietary selection and, 155, 158–159
digital computers vs., 189–202
electroche
mical aspect of, 198–200
at molecular level, 219–229
of neural net parallelism, 196–198, 199
quantum arguments for, 219–228
Brand, Stewart, 238–239
Broom, Jo Ann, 267–268
Brown, Robert, 104
Brownian motion, 104, 206, 212
Bugs in the System (Berenbaum), 130
bundleflower, Illinois, 27–29, 33–35
Burden, Jeremy, 34
Butz, Earl, 17
Byrne, Dick, 151
byssus complex, adhesive technologies based on, 118–122, 124–129
California, University of, at Santa Barbara, 103, 111
Calvert, Paul, 100–101, 116–117, 125
cancer therapies, 146, 165, 172, 181
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