Using natural processes as the model for agriculture and business.
Biomimicry: Learning from Nature - Part 2
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This two-part series is based on the acclaimed book, 'Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature', by Janine Benyus.
Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.
In the second program we visit biologists Herbert Waite at USC-Santa Barbara, and chemist Robin Garrell at UCLA, whose studies of mussels' adhesive capabilities reveal exciting models and possibilities for industry and medicine.
Mountain climber and materials scientist Peter Rieke's study of molluscs at Pacific NW Labs is leading to revolutionary designs for bone implants; while chemist Geoffrey Coats' work at Cornell mimicks the activities of a leaf to make a biodegradable plastic out of the most abundant waste product on our planet, carbon dioxide.
Materials scientist Jeffrey Brinker at Sandia Labs in New Mexico, is learning to make a faster microprocessor chip by mimicking one of the slowest moving creatures on the ocean's floor, the abalone.
As Janine Benyus says in her conclusion, 'For a long time we thought we were better than nature. And now a lot of us think that we're worse than nature, and that everything we touch turns to soot. But we are nature. We want to be a part of and not apart from this genius that surrounds us, and biomimicry gives us a chance to do that.'
The other title in the series is:
Biomicry - Part One - Using natural processes as the model for agriculture and business.
'BIOMIMICRY is a profound way for a viewer to invest 90 minutes. They convincingly show the importance (and also the challenge) of changing our world view to be one that focuses on a dialogue with, and adopting the ways of, nature rather than one of domination and control.' Professor Robert M. Goodman, PhD, Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
'Introduces a concept worthy of wide exploration in a world dazzled by the industrial artifacts around us...Over the millions of years, nature's life forms through natural selection have had to live with the constraints of the entropy law on a solar budget.' Wes Jackson, The Land Institute
'Viewers of BIOMIMICRY: LEARNING FROM NATURE will be captivated by an insider's view of exciting current research, dazzled by the infinite possibilities open for exploration, and inspired by the implications that biomimicry has for a healthier world.' Alexis Karolides, AIA, Principal, Rocky Mountain Institute
Citation
Main credits
Benyus, Janine M. (screenwriter)
Benyus, Janine M. (interviewee)
Lang, Paul (film director)
Lang, Paul (film producer)
Lang, Paul (screenwriter)
Springbett, David (film producer)
Suzuki, David T. (presenter)
Other credits
Original music, Andy McNeill, Anne Bourne; photography, Derek Kennedy; edited by Alan Gibb, Paul Lang.
Distributor subjects
Biodiversity; Biology; Business Practices; Chemistry; Design; Ecology; Economics; Environmental Ethics; Global Issues; Life Science; Local Economies; Pollution; Recycling; Science, Technology, SocietyKeywords
NATURE OF THINGS: BIOMIMICRY - LEARNING FROM NATURE, PART 2
INTRO=DAVID SUZUKI: Over 3.8 billion years life on Earth has evolved to create a home for millions of creatures, including us. The beauty and inventiveness of plants, animals and microbes is breathtaking. Their way of life makes the planet more lush, more livable for their offspring and ours. Life has done everything we dream of doing, without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet, or mortgaging its future. Could these companions provide the answers that have so far eluded us? Could they show us how to fit in on Earth?
GUEST=JANINE BENYUS, Author and Specialist in the Field of Biomimicry; HERBERT WAITE, Professor/Biologist, University of California at Santa Barbara; ROBIN GARRELL, Professor/Chemist, University of California at Los Angeles; PETER RIEKE, Materials Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; JEFF BRINKER, Sandia National Laboratory, University of New Mexico; BONNIE BOSMA, Dan Morse Group, University of California at Santa Barbara; JAMES WEAVER, Dan Morse Group, University of California at Santa Barbara; RAY C. ANDERSON, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Interface; WES JACKSON, President, The Land Institute
TEXT=DAVID SUZUKI: The way we think about nature affects the way we treat her. If all we see are resources, then everything is at our disposal. But when we see organisms and ecosystems as mentors, we become students and our relationship changes from hubris to humility. And that's the basis of biomimicry, an approach to innovation inspired by nature that Janine Benyus writes about in her book. What are the biomimics learning?
JANE BENYUS: Lots of things. They're learning to farm like a prairie, harness energy like a leaf, find cures like a chimp, create colour like a peacock, stick like a gecko, compute like a cell, even run a business like a redwood forest.
SUZUKI: How do we get started?
BENYUS: Well, first we have to realize that we are nature. But we're a young species, and we have a lot to learn about how to fit in here. So I guess quieting human cleverness is step one. Then it's time to get out with the organism, and begin to really watch with the eyes and the heart of an apprentice.
HERBERT WAITE: When I was a three-year-old and my family was vacationing in a small Italian coastal town near Venice, I was wandering the beach and I noticed some mussel shells. I picked them up and they had byssal threads stuck to the outside. I didn't actually get around to that as a research topic until 20 years afterwards. When I started my research, I was more the romanticist, and that was probably pretty important because I needed to attach to this organism and I needed to discover its peculiarities, its vagaries, just the way that it lived. The mussel is one of those critters that attaches itself opportunistically to all kinds of wet surfaces in its habitat. And this has always been recognized as a very difficult technical feat to accomplish.
SUZUKI: Adhesives that we make don't stick to wet surfaces. Just try putting a Band-aid on your finger when it's wet, or gluing boards together in the rain. Industry would love to make an adhesive as fine as the mussel's.
WAITE: We were asked to think about our problems in terms of their application to real problems in the world. And it was about at that time that I started attending conferences on the science of adhesion in manufacturing. And I became aware of a very strange thing, that all of the ideals that industry was striving for in adhesives already existed in nature. And so it was just a matter of... of finding the connection and the relevance of those natural solutions to the industrial problems that existed.
SUZUKI: After cleaning them, Herb puts his mussels in flow tanks with freshly-pumped ocean water to study how they make their threads and glue. It was while exploring the chemical make-up of threads that he came across a special adhesive protein that no one had ever seen. His discovery ignited the imagination of another scientist who was following his research.
ROBIN GARRELL: Well, we've been very fascinated with the idea that mussels, when they create little threads that allow them to stick to rocks, build in many properties. These threads are adhesive. They stick to just about anything. They stick to rocks, to metal, even to plastic. And the surfaces that the mussel sticks to are covered with bacterial and algal slime and... and soil particles and all kinds of things. Nevertheless, we can't pull these organisms off a rock with our bare hands. So they're adhesive, these threads hang together so they're cohesive, and they're also waterproof. So a few years ago Herbert Waite discovered at least one of the components of these fibres was a protein called MEFP-1. So we were interested in learning how this protein and its structure then give rise to the mechanical properties that we can measure and see. One of our discoveries, by my student, Brian Baker, was that in fact mussel adhesive protein seems to have a certain kind of helix.
SUZUKI: The protein's helix is stretched out like a Slinky, with sticky sites that hang down and bond with whatever surface the protein encounters. Robin Garrell's team hopes to make a mimic of this unique shape, producing a glue with the ability to bond to any surface, including the surface of a human cell. Tissue engineers would use such a glue to anchor cells so they can grow into sheets, creating real skin for burn victims, for instance. Next, they'd like to grow organs, like livers, hearts, lungs. The idea is to build a 3-D scaffold that cells can grow on to create the organ. Its surface has to be cell-friendly, a great job for Robin Garrell's mussel glue mimic.
GARRELL: A liver has veins and arteries, as well as patocytes(?), which are liver cells. So what we'd like to be able to do in the laboratory is to create an architecture that allows two or more different kinds of cells to grow and thrive just as they would in a real animals. And so to do that, what we have to be able to do is to be able to arrange for different cells to be in different places. What is done in living animals is they have certain kinds of receptors and molecules on the surface... think of these as locks and keys or gloves and hands... that fit together, through which the cells signal each other and bond to one another. And they're very specific. What's different about mussel adhesive protein is it's a very non-specific. Everything sticks to it. Lots of different kinds of cells are perfectly happy sticking to it and growing and proliferating.
SUZUKI: The scientists on her team jury-rigged an inkjet printer to hold mussel glue instead of ink. Dots of glue are printed on sheets, providing landing sites for cells. A solution of liver cells is poured over the sheets, and as predicted, they settle on the dots and begin to grow.
GARRELL: Mussel adhesive protein and I have come to know each other very well. I think of it in some ways like... like a child. It has some unpredictable behaviour, some inscrutable behaviour. But perhaps, like a parent, I have this abiding hope that... that I will be able to understand it and we will come to terms with each other, and that I... I'll learn from it and hope that we can take away some of its really remarkable properties and collections of properties that are unique in the biological and in the material world.
BENYUS: What Herb Waite thought he was investigating was the mussel glue, the adhesive. But then he found all these incredible properties in the byssal thread. And the way he did that was by asking the mussel, 'What's the byssal thread doing for you?' And what he found was that it was doing a lot more than he thought it was.
SUZUKI: For mussels to survive in the turbulent waters of the intertidal zone, they need to attack to surfaces quickly. The mussel foot supplies the solution. It's a little thread factory. It's got a hollow groove running down the middle, with a series of jets facing into the groove. The jets secrete various proteins which solidify into a thread. The whole process takes just a few minutes. It's like the injection molding that we use to make bottles and polyethylene ice chests, with one major difference.
WAITE: The injection molding and industry involves a lot of toxic materials: solvents, gases, polymers. What the mussels... what mussels do is entirely green at ambient temperature and under very normal conditions.
SUZUKI: Byssal threads provide several crucial needs for the mussel. They anchor them where rising and falling tides can deliver food, distribute sex cells called gametes, and wash away wastes. They also serve as a communication network for the gregarious mussels. When a predator approaches, they'll tug their threads to send a warning across the colony. Some mussels use threads to deal with the danger more directly.
WAITE: Mussels often will altruistically use their byssal threads to immobilize predatory drilling welts. So the mussels know these predators quite well and they will... almost looks intentionally... attach byssal threads to these welts so after killing nearby mussels they can't do any more damage. It certainly is suicidal behaviour. They probably don't think about the consequences; they just want to help the... the unit.
SUZUKI: In the calmer and danger-free waters of his tanks, the mussels produce byssus threads that are easier to study than those in the wild. Herb and his students examine the mussel thread's strength, toughness and stretchiness using standard engineering tests. They've found some very refined properties that far exceed our industrial capabilities.
WAITE: The most sophisticated aspect of byssal threads is that they are not monolithic filaments, that is filaments or fibres that have the same chemical and mechanical properties from one end to the other. They are made in a few minutes, but the finished fibre has properties resembling nylon at one end and flexible rubber at the other. And the transition between those two mechanical and molecular extremes is gradual, very gradual, at the molecular level. I think gradients are the rule in nature, rather than the exception.
SUZUKI: We don't currently use gradients in our manufacturing, but we sure could. Consider our steel-belted tires. The abrupt boundary between layers of rubber and steel is unstable at high speeds, an accident waiting to happen. For a solution, Herb Waite says we should look to the seamless gradients in mussel threads.
WAITE: This is a manufacturing process that we'd love to know more about. If we could make a car tire that had a stiff, solid component like steel that turned into rubber in a seamless gradient-like fashion, this would be the most excellent material in terms of its performance because that stress at the interface of the rubber and the steel would never be realized. It would be so dissipated by the presence of the gradient that the integrity of the material would be much more robust. All of the rather superficial attachment that was based on naivet‚ has deepened into a more profound respect for how things are done. And even now I have to say, even though my insights are more profound than they used to be, I still think they're superficial compared to what they could be.
BENYUS: Herb Waite's study of the mussel over the last 35 years has profound implications for manufacturing and medicine. But the mussel is only one of the Earth's ten to 30 million species. Imagine if we began to interview them all.
(BREAK)
SUZUKI: Life in the ocean is dangerous. If you can't move fast, the best defence against a predator might be a protective cover, like a fracture-resistant shell. And the abalone's got one, twice as tough as any ceramic we know how to make. But how does it do it?
PETER RIEKE: We asked ourselves very early on why a plate, when you drop it on the floor, breaks, and why a mollusk shell doesn't. And sometimes it's just a matter of breaking the plate on the floor, but sometimes it's a matter of the jet engine coming apart in mid-flight. So there are critical reasons why you want to make ceramics a lot like biological analogs... the mollusk shell, the tooth, the bone in your arms. They're fracture-resistant. And so we asked ourselves what is it about those materials that makes them fracture-resistant, and how are they made that we can utilize in a real sense, in an industrial sense.
SUZUKI: How to make ceramics hasn't changed much since the Phoenicians. In that time we had figured out how to make many other materials that have brought exciting new possibilities to our lives. We've had a bronze and silver age, gold, steel and silicon. Yet all these materials share a common manufacturing process. It's what material scientists call heat, beat and treat. We take a bulk material and shape it into what we want, using high temperatures, high pressures, or toxic chemical baths. Can you imagine an organism making its shell in this way?
BENYUS: An organism can't afford to manufacture a material in or near its own body using heat, beat and treat processing. It's got to be life-friendly. It can't heat it up to high temps like we do, or put it under incredible pressure, or bathe it with toxic chemicals. So they found another way. And that way is chemistry in water, first of all, at room temp, and they use self-assembly. Nature's building blocks are three-dimensional molecules floating in water. They have a shape. They have nooks and crannies and bumps, and they fit together like lock and key. Their surfaces have positive and negative charges that either attract or repel each other. Parts of the molecule are drawn to water, while other parts flee from water. Charge, shape, water response... these three forces allow molecules in water to find one another and jigsaw together without added energy. They self-assemble. The abalone needs a hard shell. And the minerals in sea water could provide the raw materials. But how do you get calcium and carbonate to jigsaw together into a hard shell? The abalone lays out a layer of protein, a substrate with positive and negative charges. The minerals are attracted to those charges, and they begin to grow into a crystal that has a particular shape... very, very strong. The final product winds up looking like a brick wall, with bricks of mineral separated by layers of squishy protein... very tough, and very beautiful.
SUZUKI: A new material age is dawning, thanks to the abalone's lessons in self-assembly. Scientists are now using beach sand and organic polymers to make products to replace many of the hard surfaces in your home, and more. Can you imagine making a faster computer chip by consulting one of the slowest-moving creatures on the ocean's floor?
JEFF BRINKER: We... we can make materials that have this hard-soft, laminated construction by a deceptively simple technique, essentially just putting a substrate into a liquid, and we have some amount of solvent, water and alcohol, and then we have this... this surfactant molecule that has... The magic about a surfactant molecule is it's a two-sided molecule. One side of it likes water, one side of it likes oil. So it's somewhat of a schizophrenic molecule, so if you put it into water or into oil it will organize and reorganize themselves. And as they're doing that, they're just moving around all of these monomers. And finally they end up in this very precise, layered construction. Making these materials as thin films is very important because technology now is usually based on thin films of materials that are stacked up and tattered in various ways. And almost all devices that we use today... high-tech devices... are built on solid substrates as... essentially as films. What is used as lithography... this is a way of using light to pattern structures. But there are limitations in how small a structure one can make. A tenth of a micrometer is getting down to about the limits of what... what one can do. Here we're designing things on a scale that's a thousand times smaller than that. The significance of what we do is our ability to make materials by... essentially by design, molecule by molecule, without any external intervention, so no fancy equipment is necessary. We just use molecules that are essentially pre-programmed to organize in a specific way. So this allows us to essentially stand back, to some extent, and let the structure organize itself. Self-assembly is quite... we were amazed at how robust it is. We can take many, many materials and put them all together in this homogeneous solution and allow them to organize, and they organize... you know, multiple materials will organize in very specific ways. It's amazing. It's a... and it's also beautiful. If you've seen... if you see some of the patterns of the materials that we make, they're fantastic. I think there's a certain aesthetic appeal to making structures that are beautiful, and I think nature of course has many, many beautiful... really beautiful structures on all length scales. But I think the ability to make things that are both functional and aesthetically pleasing is really... yeah, a lot of fun.
SUZUKI: We've seen that, while organisms evolve novel solutions, they don't publish them. Instead, we rely on biomimics who spend years looking over their mentors' shoulders and who see them casually accomplish what we still dream of doing.
BONNIE BOSMA: We look at the... the strength of the abalone shell because that's much greater than anything that we can do in a non-biological way. This is the head area, and then you're seeing... this is the foot of the abalone. And as the abalone moves, he actually secretes a mucous membrane and travels on that.
SUZUKI: To better understand how it builds its shell, scientists witness how the abalone coats a thin glass implant.
BOSMA: We're putting the implants between the shell and... this is the mantle tissue. And so we actually have to take that back and then put our implants in between the mantle and the shell tissue. We want the animal to relax, to be able to hold onto that implant. So we make sure the mantle tissue is covering that, and that the animal's feeling relaxed before we actually put it back into the... the tank for it to grow.
SUZUKI: The implants are removed periodically to see how the pearl-making process occurs. First, a layer called a green sheet self-assembles as the abalone releases proteins from its body. And then, as minerals begin to land and crystallize, we see more mother of pearl. The electron microscope, like a new sense organ for humans, allows researchers to peer into the protein mortar between the mineral plates to see some extraordinary properties.
JAMES WEAVER: One of the unique molecules that we discovered that's actually found between the crystal layers of the shell actually acts like a modular adhesive, almost like a molecular shock absorber. And it actually has a series of sacrificial ponds that basically can... when a stress is applied to them they can release, they can unfold, and then when the stress is... is removed, these molecules can fold back together. So this forms an almost naturally self-healing adhesive that holds the crystalline tablets together.
BOSMA: When we look at the lustran(?) molecule with an SEM microscope, we can actually pull it apart and we see that elastic quality. And so we pull it till it gets to the point where it actually snaps, and then we can push it back together, and we have a certain percentage that actually self-heal. So this is part of where we're finding this... this tremendous strength in the abalone shell.
SUZUKI: What if we could mimic the lustran molecule to create a material that helped bridges heal or buildings repair themselves? To do so, we'd have to create an innovative team, much like the one Peter Rieke gathered to learn about the self-assembly of bones and shells.
RIEKE: One of the first things we did is we held a workshop, and we got together materials scientists and biologists and medical folks... bone growth experts and mollusk shell experts and diatom experts. And we all kind of got together in this room, and it took us a while to kind of learn to interact in a positive sense. They couldn't really understand what... what we were actually really wanting to know about them. They were asking different questions. We're studying the same system and they're asking different questions about it than we are.
SUZUKI: After learning about mineralization in shells and bones, Peter decided to try to mimic the process. He couldn't have known how important this work would become to his own survival.
RIEKE: As you can see, I... I use a wheelchair. I was injured in a rock-climbing accident in 1994, kind of in the middle of our efforts here at the laboratory to study biomineralization. And that came back in a... to me in a very odd way. I broke my back at about this level, and shattered one of the vertebrae completely, and... and hence have to use a wheelchair because it injured the spinal cord there. But in order to fix that, they had to go in and stabilize the backbone, and they used a rather interesting technology here. They used this brace. Basically they screwed holes into a vertebra here and screwed holes into a vertebra here, and then my broken vertebra was the one in between here, and they basically spanned it and bolted the two together... really not much different than you... you know, carpentry. I had to have this removed because it got very, very badly infected. And that's one of the big problems with doing bone surgery and bone implants, is getting the bone to grow around and adhere to the screws that you put into it, as well as preventing infection. And the faster that you can get the healing process and the growth process to occur, the much better off you are to avoid the serious type of infection that I had. So it was... had a really dramatic impact upon my life. But you can see that these... these here, where they drill a hole in the bone and they put these little screws into it here, we've been working on a coating that will make these more compatible with the bone here. And let me show you one of those here. Here's some... some test pieces. Here's one that's uncoated, and you can see it's nice and shiny. And here's one that's... that's... that's coated. And it has kind of a grey appearance to it, and that's a calcium phosphate coating. That calcium phosphate coating is the basic material of bone. That's what the bone cells, the osteoblasts, lay down to make your bone, and they do so in a very organized fashion. But the bone osteoblasts really like to be in the environment of calcium phosphate. They don't like to be in the environment of stainless steel and titanium. It's not a natural environment for them to survive in. And the calcium phosphate makes it much, much more amenable, as long as you get the right kind of calcium phosphate, and in a very thin film. And then the bone osteoblasts will adhere to that and grow onto it much, much more effectively.
BENYUS: I love the fact that we're studying so intensively mussels and abalones. I mean, after all, these are the lower animals. That's what we have... that's the name we give them, the lower animals. Higher primates... these are the invertebrates, the lower animals, you know. And yet... and so that has a really... a really poetic feel to me, for us to be learning so much from these creatures that we previously thought, because they didn't look like us and because they weren't wired like us, that they couldn't possibly have the intelligence that we did. Well, perhaps intelligence is... the best measure of intelligence is how well adapted these organisms are. How long have they been here, compared to us?
RIEKE: In almost any kind of cross-disciplinary endeavour, it's very, very rewarding because you learn things that you don't expect to learn. And that's... that's really kind of the joy of what real science is about. It's creating knowledge where none has really existed before, of making something new and novel, of being creative, not just grinding out data, but being creative about what little bit of data really matters.
BENYUS: We've been making ceramics in the same way for the last 5000 years. Suddenly an underwater engineer teaches us how to make ceramics, membranes and microprocessors without heat and with no fancy equipment. It's revolutionary for us. But for the abalone, it's a technology that goes back 550 million years.
(BREAK)
SUZUKI: After all the amazing things you've seen that we can learn from nature, what impresses you the most?
BENYUS: It's not one individual thing. It's what organisms do together. They create conditions conducive for life.
SUZUKI: What do you mean by that?
BENYUS: By meeting their needs they filter air and water, they build soil, they recycle nutrients. They not only keep themselves alive, but they make life possible for all organisms, including us. And that's what we have to learn to do too.
RAY C. ANDERSON: The history of Earth, laid out on a time line a mile long, we would find humankind occupying the last seven-tenths of an inch of this mile. You would find the industrial age occupying the last three-one-thousandths of an inch. The thickness of a human hair in a mile-long time line... we've tripped on a hair at the end of a mile-long walk, if you will.
BENYUS: We know we are very, very close to the Earth's limits, that the Earth's patience is frayed, and the Earth's tolerance is frayed. And we've been desperately looking to one another for help, and nobody really knows.
ANDERSON: To turn it around will require, I believe, first of all a change in mindset. The mindset that today views the Earth as infinite in its ability to supply our wants, infinite in its ability to absorb our waste... we have a lot of flaws in the mindset that underlies this system. And until we can get the change in mindset we can never truly intervene in the system and change it for the better, and it's the system that has to change.
SUZUKI: In 29 years Ray Anderson has built Interface into the largest commercial carpet manufacturer in the world. His goal is to make his company environmentally restorative, and he is looking to nature as a model.
ANDERSON: Biomimicry, looking to nature for inspiration, is a way of thinking differently about that system and every aspect of that system: the products, the processes, the entire system.
BENYUS: It's not just what would nature do here; it's also what wouldn't nature do here. And one of the things that nature would not do here, I think, is to take a spider gene and do what they're doing now in putting it into a goat and having the goat milk out the spider silk. To me, first of all, nature doesn't take genes from one class of animals and put them into another class of animals, insect to mammal. It just doesn't happen. But the deeper point is that, to me, it's not emulation. It's still domestication. It's a 10,000-year-old technology, domestication, with a twist... with a very frightening twist. But it's still domestication. We're asking the goat and we're asking the spider to do our work for us.
WES JACKSON: You know, Descartes said the more he sought to inform himself the more he realized how ignorant he was. But rather than regard that as a... I think Wendels(?) put it this way... as an apt description of the human condition and the very proper result of a good education, Descartes thought our ignorance correctible. And so we've got this knowledge-is-adequate world view. And I think just a little bit of examination shows you we're billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable and always will be. And so I've been calling... saying we ought to go with our long suit and have an ignorance-based world view, which would force us to remember things, hope for second chances, keep the scale small, a whole... there's a tremendous derivative of all of that. I've been wanting to put on an international conference on ignorance, an ignorance-based world view. I think I'm the perfect one to organize that.
BENYUS: I don't think this is new. I think we knew how to ask nature, we knew how to consult nature, and in a very short period of time in the western industrial world we've moved away from that. Better living through petrochemicals, and now through genetic engineering. We forget that the organisms that we're surrounded by are solving the very same design challenges that we're trying to solve.
ANDERSON: In a forest there is no waste. One organism's waste becomes another organism's food and sustenance. Nature runs on sunlight. Nature recycles everything. Nature rewards cooperation. I'm quite convinced that the... nature's the real thing, and every... all of this system that we've designed and have built over the last 290 years in the industrial age is a contrivance. It's really an artifice. Nature's the real thing. And when we can pattern what we're doing to look more like nature, we will have the system that can live in harmony with nature.
SUZUKI: Ray Anderson believes his actions will create a trend among investors and other industries who will recognize the value of sustainability and biomimicry.
ANDERSON: Other industries, totally removed from ours, will see this example and will want to emulate this example. And then not only will whole industries shift, but the whole system will shift. And that's my purpose in life, to hold up the example that starts that process of shifting the whole system towards sustainability.
WAITE: We're consummate imitators, as much as we'd like to think of ourselves as purely inventive. And nature is the ultimate font for that inspiration. I feel that nature is at the cutting edge of a lot of technologies. That's my own personal feeling. And I think they have spent so many hundreds of millions of years developing these necessary tools to survive that we could profit from knowing more about them.
BENYUS: I think we're homesick. For a long time we thought we were better than nature. And now a lot of us think that we're worse than nature, and that everything we touch turns to soot. But we are nature. We want to be a part of and not apart from this genius that surrounds us, and biomimicry gives us a chance to do that. By asking other organisms how they've been such good neighbours for so long, we get a chance to learn to fit in, to belong to this Earth from which we sprang. We get a chance to come home.
Distributor: Bullfrog Films
Length: 44 minutes
Date: 2003
Genre: Expository
Language: English
Grade: 7-12, College, Adult
Color/BW:
Closed Captioning: Available
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