BIOMIMICRY

Ethical Legal and Social Issues

 

Ethical

Any technology inspired by nature can be used for good or bad. For example,  the airplane was inspired by bird flight. Eleven years after the plane was invented, we were using it bomb people. Our ideology, the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe has to change if we are to treat the living Earth with respect. Right now we tell ourselves that the Earth was put here for our use. We are not immune to the laws of natural selection, and if we overshoot the carrying capacity of the Earth we will pay the consequences. Practicing ethical biomimicry will require a change of thought. We will have to climb down from our pedestal and begin to see ourselves as simply a species among species, as one vote in a parliament of 30 million. When we accept this fact, we start to realize that what is good for the living Earth is good for us as well. If we agree to follow this ethical path, the question becomes, how do we judge the "rightness" of our innovations? How do we make sure that they are life-promoting? I think biomimicry can help. The best way to scrutinize our innovations is to compare them to what has come before. Does this strategy or design have a precedence in nature? Has something like it been time-tested long enough to wear a seal of approval? If we use what nature has done as a filter, we stop ourselves from, for instance, transferring genes from one class of organism to another. We wouldn't put mammalian growth genes into a potato plant, for instance. Biomimicry says: if it can't be found in nature, there is probably a good reason for its absence. It may have been tried, and long ago edited out of the population. Natural selection is wisdom in action.(1)

Social

If you examine a Coral Reef, it could help design more sustainable communities and better ways of working. For example, in an ecosystem, when an animal dies, it provides food for other smaller animals. These animals make sure that the dead animal doesn't end up as waste. They break it down and use it as a source of energy, what we typically call rotting. This may seem gross, but it means that all the chemicals go back into the Earth and support more life. Nothing is wasted in these systems, a theme that we could take and apply in our ecosystems, like cities. Right now we are taking material from the natural world and we are downcycling it, a tree that is used as a piece of paper once and then thrown away. One way to combat this is to recycle and not destroy resources.(2)

Legal

Biomimicry can be witnessed on every square inch of the planet in every moment of time. it comprise the mechanics of how organisms act on Earth. For example, nature maintains resiliency in the face of constant change. It does this by fostering diversity, creating decentralized and distributed infrastructure and building in redundancy to ensure consistency and dependability. Nature also leverages the interdependence between its biological systems and physical infrastructure. It succeeds by fostering cooperative relationships and using simple, common building blocks and abundant resources in the most efficient and effective manner. Nature’s manufacturing processes use simple designs and benign products. And feedback allows nature to monitor organisms and respond to inconsistent behaviors. By understanding and applying these principles to design challenges, engineers, product designers, architects, planners and business strategists have been able to develop solutions that are both innovative and sustainable in the context of Earth’s operating conditions. Rather than learn about nature, these specialists are learning from nature and applying what is learned to real-world applications.(3)