The Paris Agreement adopted at COP21 last year placed unprecedented importance on climate adaptation and resilience. Five emerging trends have been identified from learning how countries, cities, researchers and others are putting adaptation priorities into practice.
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Whether it’s setting up a distributed network or devising the best way to share resources, businesses are learning that the natural world has a lot of these things figured out. An LGBTQ activist, a green-business consultant, and a nun walk into a redwood forest… New take on an old joke, right? But it really happened. These three were just a few of a diverse set of participants who took part in the first-ever training linking social innovation and biomimicry. The practice of looking to emulate nature for innovation and sustainable solutions (a.k.a. biomimicry) has been on the rise for decades. Since the 1997 publication of Janine Benyus’s seminal book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, the methodology has especially taken root in the fields of design, architecture, and engineering. There are hundreds of biomimetic examples–like the bullet train that borrows the aerodynamic form of a kingfisher’s beak; or non-toxic adhesives inspired by blue mussels. Now biomimicry is taking root in social innovation and could no doubt be adaptable in organizational behavior more generally. It’s not just about nature’s “design.” The living world also has much to teach us about adaptation, resilience, cooperation, and networked systems that thrive functioning together. What if your company could distribute […]
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What if building codes actually required new projects to enhance a certain number of ecosystem services — such as sequestering carbon, building topsoil, enhancing pollination, increasing biodiversity or purifying water and air? Is it possible that a city could be functionally indistinguishable from the wild landscape around it? And what if companies ultimately built factories that truly enhanced ecosystem services? These were the big questions that biologist and biomimicry expert Janine Benyus posed during her keynote presentation at the recent International Living Future Institute’s 2015 unConference in Seattle.
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Ray Anderson often asked a rhetorical question: does business exist to make a profit, or does business make a profit to exist? With this line of questioning, Ray called upon us to understand that while making a profit is the lifeblood of a company’s survival, it shouldn’t be the only reason for a company to exist.
With his talent for translating lofty vision into everyday reality, Ray would ask: what you would rather get out of bed to do each day: make carpet, or make history?
Making history by making carpet is a unifying sentiment for the people of Interface. How, exactly, are we making history? By proving the business model for sustainability, while taking on Ray’s challenge to eliminate our negative environmental footprint.
Ray believed there must be a better way for business to thrive on our planet, without the assumed ecological and social impacts that our current industrial take-make-waste system creates. With such ambitious goals, where do we look for inspiration in redesigning a system as pervasive and complex as business?
Continue reading... →The conscious emulation of life’s genius is a survival strategy for the human race, a path to a sustainable future. The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.
Continue reading... →Janine Benyus is the president of the Biomimicry Institute. She also teaches interpretive writing, lectures at the University of Montana, and works towards restoring and protecting wild lands. In all of her work her basic thesis is that human beings should consciously emulate nature’s genius in their designs. Below she introduces the concept of Biomimicry for a general readership in the hopes that each reader will develop the principles of Biomimicry in their own life.
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