Pushing the Limits Interview with Janine Benyus

“I think of us as just another species. Every other species…develop(s) a set of adaptations that…work over the long haul—they actually enhance conditions or create conditions that are conducive for life…Natural selection judges whether or not (what we create) is well adapted or not. We are in a unique opportunity to stand in for natural selection and to make some of those judgments ourselves before we go extinct.”

Montana-based biologist and author Janine Benyus pioneered a new way of solving our world’s problems: Biomimicry, or as she explains it, “innovation inspired by nature.” She puts forward the simple idea that we look to the natural world to find the solutions for many of our problems. Like how we can use a leaf’s technology to some day fuel a hydrogen economy, or how we could use models based on neurons to revolutionize computers.

JG:
Is capitalism in its current form sustainable over the long-term? 

JB:
No, I do not think capitalism in its current form is mature enough to look with a clear eye at the opportunities and the limits of the earth. Capitalism has focused on the opportunities, but has not been as truthful with itself at looking at the limits. Until it matures to the point that it truly incorporates into its economic models the true limits of what the earth offers us and will tolerate from us in terms of behaviour, its growth will be a depletion of our natural capital.

JG:
What does a sustainable economy look like?

JB:
I am a biologist, so I would have to go back to a biological model. I think it would look a lot like the self-sustaining mature ecosystems that we see in the natural world. Ecologists define a successionary model with three types of systems, from Type 1 to Type 3. The Type 1 system emerges from a disturbed environment, such as a turned-up farmer’s field or a wind gap in a forest. In this system, all resources are available and it is colonizing time. Species use an opportunistic strategy in which they take as many raw materials as they can and put them into products and waste and move on to their next set of raw materials. It is a linear process. In this Type 1 system, little energy is used for putting down roots, recycling loops or feedback loops. Or, for that matter, symbiotic relationships with other organisms or cooperative relationships. Because the intent is to move on. In the natural world this is a strategy that works well, but it is not the dominant strategy. It is a strategy for healing scars on the landscape and it prepares the landscape for the next kind of species. Type 2 and Type 3 are the mature systems that we should be emulating. These are systems like the large mature forest or the established prairie. Their biggest characteristic is that they are not going anywhere. They take what is given, the opportunities, and they acknowledges their limits. They start to recycle the nutrients over and over again.

I am describing what a sustainable system would look like. All the niches are filled. There is full employment. There are many diverse sorts of jobs and the jobs centre around using every single crumb of nutrients in that system. The interactions among organisms are complex. There are a lot more symbiotic and cooperative relationships than you see in a Type 1 system. The emphasis is on quality instead of quantity.

It is not a leaky system. The system itself creates more and more opportunities for life and that means that more and more niches are created. The fleas have fleas have fleas, as someone once said. Also, the system itself actually enhances the place rather than depletes it.

JG:
Have we been undercutting our resources and our ability to move on to a Type 2 system?

JB:
Well, that is it. Type 1 species actually wind up creating the conditions conducive to the next stage but, for us, there is something new in the equation. We have over-harvested to the point that we have eaten our seed corn in a lot of ecosystems. Type 1 systems don’t stay in place long enough to do that. They move on quickly. We have used a Type 1 strategy for too long and we have tipped over to the point where we are not enhancing the place, we are actually depleting it.

Herman Daly [professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park] helped me understand that, at one time, a Type 1 strategy made a lot of sense for us. We were a species small in number in a large and empty world. It was an opportunistic world. At that point, the colonizing behaviour made sense. Now we have a large population in a small, full world and Type 1 behaviour no longer makes sense. When you have a full world what makes sense is a Type 3 strategy. Type 1 behaviour has become harmful or maladapted because it has gone on too long and there are too many of us.

JG:
How does Biomimicry fit into creating a sustainable society?

JB:
To create a sustainable society we have to be sure that we have the products, the processes and the policies in the pipeline. Biomimicry is an innovation tool that helps us to pragmatically borrow blue prints, recipes and community strategies from the natural world that have proven themselves over three billion years. It helps designers and engineers, architects and policy makers, and people who are redesigning our world. It helps us to leapfrog. There are designs that use minimal amounts of materials to create amazing strength, like a spider’s silk or the inside of an abalone shell. All of these miracle materials are found in the natural world. This is where you mimic process, form and ecosystem.

You may mimic the design, say, of an insect’s exoskeleton in order to make a breathable building skin, but if you make that with eat-beat-and-treat processes [referring to the way we have used high temperature, pressure, and chemicals to produce product] you are back to the old paradigm.

JG:
Is it possible to have economic growth without decreasing consumption?

JB:
I would use the word development rather than growth. In my lexicon, growth means in size or number. Development means increasing complexity and information content, and increased design. That is actually what systems do, they tend to complexify over time. The story of life has been a story of development rather than growth. It is possible to fulfill needs and even an increasing diversity of needs without using more stuff. That is what life does. It complexifies in a world of finite resources.

What you can do with both energy and materials is substitute design and information for more stuff. When you do that you allow yourself to work smarter. To do more functions with less.

Life adds information to matter. It takes a chunk of material or building blocks and it arranges those building blocks into a particular shape. Take a bone: you could build that bone to be a solid column of concrete. But life does not choose that route. Life chooses to build that bone as a porous structure. You don’t need much of the mineral if you have a porous structure. You have scaffolding that takes shape and handles stress by the way it is shaped.

The next trick that nature does is to multifunction. A leaf is not just a solar harvester. It is also the plant’s breathing apparatus. It produces the chemicals that help to protect the plant from herbivores. It is a pump. We could put up solar panels on our roofs and try to maximize the efficiency of that one product. As we move towards an economy that uses less stuff we will find ways to have those panels incorporated into a building skin in a way that will breathe in oxygen, exchange gasses, gather water, gather sunlight, and keep themselves clean the way leaves do. They will perhaps pump water throughout the building. So you will move towards multifunctional design to replace using more stuff.

JG:
How do we get the population at large to buy into a new economy that is more sustainable? 

JB:
A cultural meme can spread quickly. We should never expect 100 per cent buy-in. But we can get enough buy-in to reach a tipping point. According to Malcolm Gladwell, that could be 10 per cent. Slavery was an accepted norm across much of the world. In a very short period, with what I would call a collective nod, much of the world said that slavery was something that we as a culture, we as a species, did not want to do anymore. Of course, it still happens in different parts of the world. But it was, for the most part, almost an overnight switch.

To have a coherent policy you have to have some cultural worldview changes from which everything else emerges. And I don’t think culturally we have adopted a particular worldview that will naturally give rise to a coherent set of sustainability policies and practices.

You don’t look for buy-in on a sustainable society; you look for buy-in on some core belief statements. A sustainable society emerges from those.

We are beginning to link many of our environmental problems to human health. That is one of the ways that you can get buy-in. Everyone agrees that we want to be healthy. Now the next step is to move beyond just human health, and to look at it as the health of all living tissues.

Designers have a key role to play in helping us choose what will give rise to a more sustainable society. Designers can make things appealing to us and, at this point, designers are using their talents to make things that are bad for us, appealing to us. So designers are making very sleek and beautiful objects that are poisonous or that use enormous amounts of gasoline for instance. So to re-couple the talent of people who are making beautiful things, to make the beautiful things also be things that are good for us, that is on a tactical level how we gravitate towards that which is good for us. I think designers can make those things beautiful.

JG:
Are we outside of nature or part of it?

JB:
I think of us as just another species. Every other species goes through what we are going through; thrashing around to develop a set of adaptations that work, and work over the long haul—they actually enhance conditions or create conditions that are conducive for life. As a species we are still thrashing around right now. Every single new technology that we come up with today and every new policy we come up with are artifacts. Natural selection judges whether or not that artifact is well adapted or not. We are in a unique opportunity to stand in for natural selection and to make some of those judgments ourselves before we go extinct.

How do we choose? Biomimicry helps us to choose what is well-adapted by looking at what has worked in the natural world over long eons of evolutionary time. If it is something that is completely not seen in the natural world, like transgenic engineering, then maybe we should be cautious about it. To choose the rightness of our innovations and strategies it helps to look at the natural world and ask: Is there something like this that has been carried on generation after generation and proven itself? Then we know we are on the right track.

Jordy Gold is a sustainability expert and columnist for Corporate Knights. You will find his work online at www.jordygold.com