Day 2: October 18th

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Today was a very exciting fun-filled day. We started off the morning by hearing from Janine Benyus, Dune Lankard, David Orr, Bill McKibben and Greg Watson on various issues including biomimicry, climate change and sustainable solutions. We then got the amazing opportunities to conduct serveral interviews of speakers and participants at the conference.

Interviews:

Morning Plenaries:

Nature's 100 Best: Top Biomimicry Solutions to Environmental Crises

Janine Benyus

            Janine Benyus has inspired Bioneers for years as she has been thrust into the forefront of the progressive field of Biomimicry.  Biomimicry is described as using nature’s knowledge to help us create a one to one relationship with our products and the Earth. Her message is one of sustainability and appreciation: “Quieting our human cleverness, recovering sense of awe & wonder, humbling our selves, thanking the genius of nature”.  Ms.Benyus’ session was devoted to describing the abundance in nature rather than the deprivation of it.  She spoke of her home state of Montana, where she sometimes walks up a hill only to encounter a flood of migrating ladybugs, later on as she walks back down the hill she sees hordes of bears off in the distance, waiting for the opportune moment to strike at their prey.  She wanted to talk about the fact that there still is hope for man-kind but that we need to act quickly, and we need to act with the planet in mind.  According to Janine, “Nature has already solved many of our problems more beautifully than we could ever imagine;” what she proposes is that by using biomimetic process found in nature, we will be able to create a more direct connection with our planet.  Some people found this plan far-fetched and unreasonable, but Janine and many others still have hope. “What we have found is that there are 2100 examples [of biomimicry] that can easily be used in our factories and our businesses,” nature's solutions are all around, it is now up to us to see them.

            During her talk, Janine delivered specific examples of how we can immediately change some of our tactics in production.  For one, there are a few independent clothing companies that are harnessing the ability that peacocks have to look colorful without the harmful pigments involved.  By reflecting light in certain ways, peacocks are able to create beautiful blues and greens without having to have pigment in their feathers.  These pioneer companies are using this technology to create shirts and hats and socks and any clothing that you can imagine with sustainable methods of coloring.  Janine has a vision for another form of clean energy that has even less problems than ones considered thus far.  Electric eels are able to produce their own energy in their bodies without any oil, or wind power.  If we are able to figure out what sort of mechanics the eel uses to create this, we might “one day live in a world where you can reach out and power your laptop with your hand.”  Of course many of these solutions are not at the ready right now, but with enough energy and research, we can achieve these things that nature already has. 

            The answer to most of our problems today can be answered simply by rethinking the solution.  “You can’t use the same thinking that you used to get into the problem as you do to get out of it,” unfortunately this is true, the old “heat, beat and treat” method that we have lived by for over a hundred years will not be able to get us out of the mess we have created.  We need an entirely different approach to solving problems and that approach is biomimicry. 

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Janine Benyus

Natalie: So first off, just for perspective, what exactly is it that you do?

Janine: What do I do? I try as best I can to increase peoples respect for the natural world. That's the number one. Seriously, that's mission number one for us at our company. I think of myself as a natural history writer. That is how I began and I wrote 5 books in natural history I wrote about plant and animal adaptations. And then I wrote Biomimicry. I basically chronicled the people who were actually looking at those plant and animal adaptations and trying to mimic them. And then an interesting thing happened. The phones started to ring. And there I am sitting there about to write another book, my seventh book. Okay, you know, I'm there doing my research for my book and the phone rings and it's companies. And they say, "could you tell us how life works, you know we're making a membrane to take salt out of water, could you tell us how the nasal glands of seabirds work, and how does nature take salt out of water? How do all the fish in the sea live on freshwater. They have to get salt out of that water, right? All those filters. Penguins are really good desalinators. Your kidneys are great desalinators too. So anyway, I started to come by myself and realized that this is a whole new career, it's called biologists at the design table. BADT. B-A-D-T. We have batmobiles... But there was only one of me. There was a young woman, named Dayna Baumeister, who was taking a PhD at the University of Montana, and she called me up, she had read the book, and she said she shook for three days. She said, "I was so excited, this is what I want to do." I said, "What do you mean this is what you want to do," because I had gotten called by a couple of big companies, so anyway, I said come on down here lets work this out. And this was ten years ago and we started this company called the Biomimicry Guild. And we have ten of us; consulting biologists who work with designers, engineers, and architects, anybody who is making something, inventing something, and we present them with natural models that inspire them to design differently.

Natalie: So would you say that's the goal of the biomimicry institute, to inspire people to design differently in accordance with nature?

Janine: Absolutely, not only in accordance with nature, the goal is to increase respect for the natural world, that's number one. And then we're hoping that people will design differently. Not only in accord with nature, but actually emulating nature, the goal is that our technologies would be functionally indistinguishable with those in the natural world. They may not look like...on one hand you have the city of San Diego, imagine seeing San Diego from the sky, and all the skyline and the buildings and all, and then imagine seeing a rainforest, Amazon rainforest from the sky. Those two pictures right next to each other. Now, I don't think the city is going to look like the rainforest, but our goal is that the city and all the technologies within it will function like it. Functionally indistinguishable from a natural system. That's what we're attempting to head towards. And then of course we'll just take...see, we are nature, so we'll be a welcome species. In the big picture, that's our goal. That we fit in here, on our home.

Natalie: So do you think the distance that has separated humans from nature, from their roots, has cause for the need of publicizing biomimicry?

Janine: That's a really good question. That's a question that has an answer within it. Because the question is, why haven't we done this before? Why haven't we done this before? And I think the answer is within your question. I think there is this large distance between humans and the rest of the natural world. And there's a lot of reasons for that. It's a longstanding cultural mind body split. You could go all the way back to Descartes; that mind and body split, that there's humans, and then there's the rest of the natural world. It is actually quite a cultural campaign, whether it be philosophy or religious beliefs, to separate us from lower animals. And that campaign worked very very well, and we now honestly do not believe that we're part of nature. At this point, we believe that we're worse than nature, that we don't belong here, and that's really a shame. So, I think, yeah, I think there's been this split, and splitting nature off from us allows us to do a lot of things that we're not proud of. It allows us to treat the natural world with very little respect, right? Because it's not us. It's us and other. So it's really important, in the same way that we culturally, if we even think of other races as other, as not like us, not quite as good as. That's when we start to, that's when our behavior...our belief allows us to do behaviors that we're not proud of, and that's what's happened. It's a very very good question, that separation is what's allowed us to get to this point, it's also made us incredibly lonely, right? So biomimicry is an attempt to remind us that we're not all that different from the rest of the organisms on the planet. That when it comes right down to it we're all just trying to meet our needs, put our kids to bed at night, build our houses, power ourselves, feed ourselves. Really, what's the big difference? When you get down to that level, that's when you can start doing biomimicry. You say okay, if this tree is meeting its needs, how is it doing it differently than how we do it in that building. Once you take away that false separation between us and the natural world, you can see that that tree is moving water 100 feet up; it's gathering solar energy; it's filtering water - we need to do that - it's responding to wind; it has to keep itself safe in storms; Ponderosa, I think that's what it is; its gotta keep itself safe in fires, this is a pretty good one for keeping itself safe in fires. It's gotta do a lot of the same thing that that building has to do. So once you remove that false separation, all of the sudden you can model your technologies on that technology.

Brittney: So the ultimate goal is getting back with nature, when do you see us getting there?

Janine: When? I think we're there already in bits and pieces. A friend of mine is an architect, she does a lot of public speaking, she asks every group of architects that she ever speaks in front of for years: close your eyes and tell me where you're happiest; tell me where you're most comforted; tell me where you feel most creative and feel most at home and like yourself. And no matter what audience she talks to, she'll say to them, "Now who was thinking of some place outside?" They're architects, they're architects, but. So I think we naturally gravitate towards the natural world. I think we have, E.O. Wilson calls it "biophilia." We love our pets, we love, I mean, it's not that people don't love nature, they do! But they separate. "Okay I'm at work now," that's something different. Caring about my kids,  my tenderness, my feelings about the natural world, I'm keeping those at bay now. So, I don't think we don't have to go as far as you think we have to go. Do you know what I mean? I think it's a matter of reconnecting with something that, evolutionarily, 99% of the time we've been on Earth we were right in the middle of it. We were hunters and gatherers. We were this close. We saw no separation. So the separation is relatively recent if you think of evolution. People are homesick for the natural world. You reconnect them with the natural world and what  happens? Their hearts melt. The question is, can we get hundreds of thousands of people who have the responsibility of designing our world, can we get them in touch with the natural world in this way? And that's a start right? And then if our buildings become functionally indistinguishable from nature, could we come to a point at which there's more of a permeable boundary between the two. Between our technologies and nature's technologies.

Brittney: Right now what can everybody be doing to help get back there?

Janine: Go outside. Go outside! It’s called a doorknob. I gave a talk one time, and I made a joke about go outside- www.gooutside.com- that’s where the answers are. And there were like twenty people in line afterwards asking me “what’s that website?” It’s called a doorknob. It’s called open the window and climb out of it. It really is as simple as that. That’s the first step. The first step is to go outside and see with new eyes.

Natalie: So it seems you have a lot of hope for biomimicry in terms of societal woes, but what about solving the most pressing environmental issues like climate change and getting clean water? How can biomimicry be applied there?

Janine: Climate change. Gathering energy- photosynthesis is a model for new thin-film solar cells called di-sensitized solar cells. To make those solar cells more efficient they’re using photonic crystals which are mimicked from butterflies. On the top of the solar cell they’re putting a thin film based on the moth eye, because the moth has a completely anti-reflective surface because it doesn’t want any eye shine at night when predators are coming around. So it has little pillars on its eye to drink the light in but not let it our. So you’ve got a solar cell that is based on photosynthesis that has a leaf capped by a moth with a butterfly underneath gathering solar energy. Storing- hydrogen. Leaves split water all the time. That’s a good source of hydrogen. People are mimicking how they split water- the water splitting compound- mimicking that. There’s about 4 or 5 labs crazily moving towards that. I can’t wait for them to get there. Wave energy. Biopower has a kelp-inspired wave-energy harvester. Wind turbines- whale power is mimicking the humpback whale. There’s harvesting the energy, there’s storing the energy in the form of hydrogen, there’s going all the way from sunlight directly into making fuel. That’s what theses guys do, they take sunlight and turn it into sugar starches, cellulose. There’s work in fuel cells. Both sides of the fuel cell are learning. There’s oxygen chemistry going on, and we’re learning from aerobic bacteria about that. There’s a hydrogen anode, where the hydrogen chemistry happens. And we’re learning from xyano bacteria about that- they have a particular hydrogenise enzyme that we’re trying to mimic to get those two parts of the fuel cell working well. And then the fuel cell takes in gas and it take in oxygen- it basically breathes. So the people who are making What are called the bipolar plates and making those plates in the shape of branches that you see in your lungs. Branch structures. So in a fuel cell, you’ve got the most ancient bacteria, the xyano bacteria, you’ve got the aerobic bacteria, which are like our cells, and you’ve got lungs. You name it. That’s on the energy side. On the energy saving side you’ve got all kinds of [innovations] you’ve got energy savings in buildings, for instance. Lots and lots of things. You’ve got even biofuels. There’s a guy named David Tillman that’s done work at the University of Minnesota, and he looked at prairies, and said “Ok, what if we were to take the prairie as a model for a new way of growing biofuels?” and found that a prairie has 238% more BTUs than a monoculture growth of biofuels. And plus you don’t dig up the soil and all those issues you have with monoculture agriculture. Then say you want to use agricultural residues for biofuels- cellulosic biofuels they call it now. So stalks, switch grass, maybe pulp waste, what if you wanted to do that? There’s a problem with it in that chemically it’s very difficult to break down cellulose- a plant’s cell walls has got lignin in it, but there are other organisms that do this very well- termites. So here at UC Berkeley, there’s a guy, Stephen Schootz, Nobel laureate, who says termite guts will save the world. He’s looking at the chemistry- it’s not the termites- it’s actually the bacteria called symbians that live in the gut of the termite. How are they breaking down that cellulose? So anywhere you look really in the climate change equation- and then the big one, how do you get CO2 out of the air? This is serious stuff. We could take CO2 and use it as a feed stock for plastic, for all kinds of chemicals, for building materials and other ways to sequester it without pumping it underground. If we were more like- and we’re getting this way- inventive organisms we’d go “Wow, lots of CO2. Good, now let’s figure out how to use it.” So we are getting to that point. You’ve got gathering solar energy, you’ve got storing it, biofuels, you’ve got CO2 sequestration. It doesn’t help us curb our consumer appetite- biomimicry is not good for everything- we still need ethics and morals and psychologists and hugs, this is just technical stuff. But there’s quite a bit of promise in it.

Chris: Do you have any Biomimetic solutions to address our project on San Diego bay?

Janine: Oh my gosh, yeah! Water quality, right? You’ve got membranes. And then also, I’m starting another company, investing into small technologies, and another thing we’re looking at is metal chelating and metal scavenging. It’s mimicking microbes and how they salvage metals. Microbes are really good at saying “I’ll just take iron or I’ll just take mercury or I’ll just take gold”. They take things for their own metabolism. They have little molecules called cyderaforce and those have been mimicked and they’re going to tether them to thin film and then basically take a belt of thin film through a tank of water, say the bay, picks up all the metals, goes through another tank of water, releases the metals, those get sponged into recoverable amounts of metal. It’s a mining operation in the a box that you sit in the bay. As you can tell, I can go on and on.