Dr. John Andy Phillips is the Deputy Director of Conservation and Research at the Zoological Society of San Diego. Since 1981, Dr. Phillips has been working with the Zoological Society and CRES (Conservation and Research for Endangered Species). With CRES, he supervises conservations programs in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. It is Dr. Phillips' job to establish scientific and conservation goals.
We'd met Dr. John Andy Phillips twice before, and the moment we walked into the High Tech High conference room we could tell that this meeting was to be no less exciting than before. Our first impression of him was made by a very lively presentation about biomimicry which included him showing off a deer's foot and a horned-animal skull. Our second was at the San Diego Zoo where he took our class on a very interesting tour to show us how animals that we would expect to be very different are actually very similar, and how animals adapt in different ways.
Q: So first off, who are you and what do you do?
A: I'm Andy Phillips. I'm the deputy director at the zoo for conservation and science.
Q. What first got you interested in animals and conservation?
A. What first got me interested. Well ever since I was a little boy so for 50 years I've always had dogs and I love dogs and I thought originally I wanted to go to veterinary school but I ended up going to Davis where the vet school is but I got my Ph.D. in physiology instead of veterinary college and so just I've always loved animals.
Q. Each manipulation [of an animal’s environment at the zoo] is well thought out and done for a specific purpose?
A. Specific purpose and also it can't be if there is another way of doing it, in other words, if you can use an animal model like a rat or something like that at a university and you are not replicating something that's being done with an animal model we have to take that into account too. So it has to be very specific, it has to be targeted research and for us it has to be what we call mission oriented which means the zoo is a conservation organization so whatever research you are doing has to have some immediate impact on conservation.
Q. All right. So I guess moving on, what is the role of a biologist in biomimicry product development?
A. First of all, most product development organizations like big companies don't have biologists on staff so they are not familiar with the biology of the animals that may be applicable to solving a particular problem. So let me give you an example. Let's say you wanted to develop something that was going to take the place of napkins or Kleenex or something like that because once you use Kleenex, most of the time you just throw it out. So one of the big things about biomimicry is how to make a product that we consider a waste product to become something neutral back into the environment, fertilizer. So maybe you are going to develop a type of tissue that when it decomposes in the landfill actually becomes part of the soil. So there are ways of being able to do that. So a lot of the biomimicry products now I think have to go toward solving problems of waste management, cleaning up water, all of those things that are human pollutants that we put into the environment that don't degrade.
Q. Do you feel that that is the main goal of biomimicry to produce sustainability?
A. I think it is now. I think in the past there are many ways of doing biomimicry, you know, some of them are sustainable and some of them are not. [The new goal is to] make sure that all of the nutrients and everything else are recycled into the environment or sooner or later you are just going to run out. So our goal is to try to show how green you can be with recycling and developing products that can be recycled.
Q. So that new definition, does that exclude things that aren't sustainable for biomimicry?
A. No. there is two definitions we talked about before. In the old term 30 years ago biomimicry was about how certain animals mimic other animals so they don't get eaten. So many years ago biomimicry meant animals that were mimicking other animals.
Now, the term has come full circle because product biomimicry means how do you take a functional element of an animal and make it work for you? So the question is since nature solved all these problems, filtration, stickiness, non stickiness, all of those things have been solved with water as the base element how can you take that and mimic that so you have water as the base element of all these products so it's recyclable.
Q. How does the zoo use biomimicry in either its public relations or in its animal habitats?
A. [In animal habitats] I'm not so sure it's biomimicry it's just trying to mimic nature to the point where the spatial elements are what the animal needs. So when you look at an animal, they don't know unless they eat something, they don't know if something is rubber I mean a fake tree or a real tree. Let's say it's a monkey swinging through the branches. It doesn't know the difference between a real tree and fake tree. But what you want to do is provide them with the structural element that they need; they need three dimensionality to do what they normally do in the world. And if you look at reproduction doesn't matter if it's in the human or if it's in an animal, reproduction is a very, very stressful event, especially for the female. So if the female is not in good physiological shape, chances are she is not going to reproduce. The trick is that you want to provide them [natural habitat] so that the animal thrives. Not just surviving in captivity it's thriving in captivity and one of the benchmarks for that is how many babies do they have over their lifetime because if the female is stressed she is not going to have kids. That's just the way the body works.
Q. How has biomimicry improved or changed or developed in the zoo's work over the last 10 years?
A. I'm not so sure it's changed our work. I think it's one of the easiest elements to teach the public though. So when you talk about appreciation for nature, if you say did you know that this product or this type of element is a mimic of something that's in nature, then they can more readily understand why those species in nature are so important because they hold a lot of the secrets to be able to solve a lot of these problems. If you can't get that across to the general public, then the zoo is just like a sideshow type of thing where everybody is looking at different animals and they may be very intrigued by them. But if you don't teach them about the animal and biomimicry is one of the easiest ways to teach about the difference between a species then you get a lot more empathy from the public about what the animals are and why they are important on the planet and what it would be like without them.
Q. What can the general public do to contribute to biomimicry?
A. Well, I think there are two things. First of all, even if a product is not an exact biomimetic product but it's a greener product that means something at least tried to get closer to nature than they did if it's a non green product. So the public has a choice between green products and non green products and I think even though sometimes green products cost a little bit more, if the public knows that they help balance nature a lot better than if you buy the non green product, that's the key to get across. And what you are trying to say is that a green product is more balanced with nature and so you're getting much closer the a biomimetic situation where if you have sustainability if you use something and then it is digested and excreted and then the biproducts are reused by something else then you have a net zero. You haven't actually taken anything from the environments and you are recycling everything and that's I think the ultimate aim of the sustainability in biomimetic products is that that can happen. Nobody is actually there yet. But the goal is to get as close to that as you possibly can.
Q. So it's like becoming the ideal member of the ecosystem?
A. Right. So as an example you know there are sheets like that you put on your bed that are made from bamboo and bamboo is a readily grown harvestable product that's renewability and whether the sheet deteriorates, if you do it right, it just goes basically right back into the soil as nutrients again. So and they are very soft you can't tell them much from a regular sheet so but that's an example of how you can do biomimicry and use it in a product.
Q. So we have seen a lot of these developments kind of over the last few years this green movement. What other kinds of advancements in biomimicry do you see? Do you see like further or more products that are green, more sustainable closer to nature?
A. Well, I think that, you know, there are a number of companies now that realize that the products they make now are only going to get more and more expensive because the materials they have to use are going to become more and more scarce. So the closer they can get to a biomimetic situation the better it's going to be for their bottom line. For most companies how much money they make is the most important thing and the money they make is relative to how much the product costs them to make. So if they come up with better ideas on how to utilize materials and put them into their products and they are greener then in the long run it's beneficial to them too.
Q. So do you think biomimicry can be applied to large scale environmental problems, global warming, climate change?
A. Yeah, I think so. I mean if you look at the key elements of sustainability, I mean there is a few things that are most important. It's fresh water. It's number of green CO2 absorbing plants that you have on the planet. I mean there are actually this is an actual experiment that was done. Corn plants grow so fast that if you take a CO2 meter and you stand in a corn growth of corn out in Iowa, they are sucking up so much CO2 that you your CO2 meter when you hold it at the level of the corn will actually show there is less CO2 there than there is above the corn. So you can actually look at your meter and that's how much CO2 a fast growing plant like corn is absorbing.
Now, there is a Catch 22 to that. And that is corn takes an enormous amount of water. So if you just cut down the rain for rest and you say I'm going to do a tremendous biomimicry experiment and we are going to suck up CO2 like no tomorrow because we are going to plant all of Brazil in corn, that's a great thing CO2 wise but it's probably not sustainable because the corn sucks out the nutrient base out of the ground really fast. It takes a huge amount of water and then what happens after the fact? So all of those trees that you are eliminating and planting corn, grew there because they adapted to that particular environment. So the trick is to say, okay, if we are going to grow a stand of trees in an area that's been leveled, what we want to do is find the most appropriate replacement for that tree because that's the one that can grow in this environment.
Q. So it goes back to that sustainable cycle whatever you waste is reused?
A. Right. Heavy metals are a little bit of a different story; most of the time you don't reuse heavy metals. But you certainly want to get them out of the environment.
Q. Right. And then what do you think is one of the biggest problems facing our country that can be solved or somehow ratified with biomimicry processes?
A. Well, I would say there is two the two big issues when you look at what happened to the species, say, in California is all of the toxins that are in the system, especially the water ways. I mean there are a lot of places in the Sierras when I was doing my Ph.D. research 30 years ago that were absolutely pristine. You could take your glass out there when you were backpacking through, there was nothing in the water. You wouldn't do that now to save your life. So but the trick is how do you in a more natural sense start to clean up those water ways and hopefully people will start coming up with solutions on how to do that because water is a huge problem just because of the amount of volume of what you have to deal with. I mean if you have ever gone up to the central pumping station in Bakersfield that pumps the water into Los Angeles, you don't realize how much water humans use. There are five pipes the diameter of this room that pump 24 hours a day just to send the water to Los Angeles over the hills there. So it's just and then you think about treating something, you know, billions of gallons of water every day if it was polluted.
Q. So why do you think there aren't more federal laws prohibiting all these toxins? Is it lack of education or do you think it's lack of solutions? And if it's the latter, do you think biomimicry could be applied?
A. I think it's just because well, I think it's all of what you just said, okay. I think one of the problems is that we there is the old way of doing things is called heat, beat and treat. You heat something up, you beat it and then you treat it and it becomes an automobile or whatever. But the new kind of rules are that you can't do that forever because then you would have extracted everything out of the ground or used up all the oil or whatever. And I think what we need to do now is, say, okay, if you made something out of something else, once you get rid of it, is it reusable? And so like aluminum car bodies are much better at being recycled than steel car bodies are. And so should all cars be made out of aluminum? And you could take soda cans and make a car out of aluminum. But it's a little more difficult to recycle steel and make car bodies out of it. So it's just this is a balancing act of what you have to do.
Q. So is it maybe like a lack of motivation in people?
A. I think it's a lack of the fact we have done it one way so long that retooling or reconfiguring or rethinking, so that's the biggest thing is rethinking how you are going to do it and I think that having even having students your age being exposed to biomimicry shows you that it can be done if a sustainable way and that that's the best way to do it.
Q. Do you think economics plays into why we weren't changing our philosophies and strategies for products?
A. That's generally the case. It's still easier to go cut down trees, ship them to the U.S. or wherever, than it is to actually think of a sustainable way of doing it. And I think that in most countries that I visit that are in Africa or southeast Asia, it is the balancing act is this. Most of those people are so poor, so poor you can't even imagine it. They are making $60 a month or something like that. So $700 a year. They live off of $700 a year. Some of them only $300 a year. So if somebody on the outside says you know if you go down and cut down those two big trees over there, I'll pay you $300 for those two big trees even though it may be not legal to do it, the person who is going to get the $300, that's a huge incentive for them. They almost have no choice. If they want their child to go to school or whatever. And so I think a lot of the decision making process has to come are the first world countries, the U.S., Europe, and to a certain extent china now so that those types of sustainable situations can be passed down to the countries that don't necessary will you have that type of situation where they can make sustainability issues be at the forefront of their philosophy.
Q. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?
A. Well, I think the trick is that at least in I mean in California we are in a unique situation. California generally leads the trend for everything in the U.S. We are the most liberal, the most trendy state in the U.S. And I think a lot of that is because of the education system here. You know the University of California which is still probably the best public school there is in the world and having going to college and understanding and them being able to disseminate that information to people that are the same age as you is really important. Just hearing it from me is not enough. You have to do it yourself and teach others the possible of it. Not everybody is going to listen. Three quarters of the people that come through the zoo probably don't listen to the messages. But if you affected one quarter that's better than not affecting anybody at all. So that's the rule I go by. You just can't role over and play dead. In all the places I've been in the world, people always say, well, you know, did you do any good? And the question is not that. The question is if you didn't go there and try, how would things be? So you always have to go from the positive side. If I hadn't done it, things would be a lot worse. And so when you are thinking about your futures and stuff like that, you kind of have to take that into account and say well, you know, I'm going to have to do this and that's going to make a positive impact because if I didn't do it or I'm not going to do it it's not going to make any impact at all.
Q. Right. So you almost have to think of what if I was apathetic, everyone else could be apathetic [as well]?
A. Yeah. That's half the problem is that everybody wants really inexpensive goods. And I mean when I was a kid, when I was your age, I remember the first car I got, you know, a car back then cost about $2000 for a new car, okay. But a house back then only cost $10,000. Okay. So it was five times as expensive. But houses now are a lot more than five times as expensive as cars are. So if you buy a $20,000 car, there aren't very many $100,000 houses around. So you can see how the dynamic just of purchasing has changed since when I was a kid 40 years ago.