Nature has been designing things better and for a lot longer than people have. We seem to have a tendency to waste energy and resources in our design. We also tend to create byproducts in our production processes that can – and usually do – have all sorts of negative impacts, not only for ourselves but for our small, lovely blue-green home as well. And perhaps beyond.
© 1987 North America Syndicate
I wrote awhile back about Nature, Poison and “Eco-Nomics” saying “Yesterday I was thinking about all the many ways that we humans have conjured to subvert nature. More than that, it sometimes feels as if we truly want to kill nature, to poison it with our effluents. This is self-destruction, pure and simple, because we are in nature and of nature and without it, we will be nothing.”
I’ve been dreaming about sustainability for a long time. It’s nature’s way, after all, to reuse and recycle. For instance, I devised a system I called “Urban Gold” for capitalizing on New York City’s super-abundant municipal solid waste. In this post from September, I wrote about “biophilic design” and Ian McHarg, the author of Design with Nature. McHarg’s prayer was that we act as agents to restore some balance to the earth, for each of us to be a “benign planetary enzyme.”
Design with nature. That sure seems to me to be the ticket. There’s an awful lot for us to learn if we start paying more and better attention. Many engineers, scientists, architects and designers are doing precisely that. Biomimicry: Scientists raid Mother Nature’s cupboard was the story last month from the FT. In Japan, looking at the kingfisher has led to radically more efficient bullet trains. Ceramic floor tiles that have been compressed as some stones have, in super-heated water, keep rooms cool in the summer and warm in the winter – and reduce energy use by 25%. A close inspection of dragonflies’ wings has led to prototype wind turbine blades that “…keep on spinning even when winds drop to near-undetectable levels.” This is the music of the spheres.
One innovative young engineer has created the Windbelt that uses an “aerodynamic phenomenon known as aeroelastic flutter (‘flutter’)” to create power. Nature uses simple solutions and most engineers know the best approach is often KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. If WorldChanging embraces this technology, that should be good enough for anybody. I like to quote Alex Steffen, the guiding hand at WorldChanging. He wrote last year, regarding geoengineering: “Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems.” And, in a book I reviewed, Climate Change: Picturing the Science, one of the authors says: “If our goal is to produce a sustainable society, then to a certain extent, we will eventually need to mimic (and possibly enhance) natural systems.” Party on.
I want to also note a project that “The Guardian” detailed here last summer: an “artificial leaf” initiative that “…involves working out exactly how leaves use sunlight to make useful molecules.” This would then, hopefully, lead to a way “…to build artificial systems that can do the same to generate clean fuels such as hydrogen and methanol.” There is some telltale all-too-human hubris lurking in the lead researcher, though, who says: “If the leaf can do it, we can do it but even better.”
No matter, though, because the impulse here to study and mimic nature is an excellent one and will only lead us down the path to more sustainability, quicker, cheaper and with methods and modes abundantly applicable across the globe.
