Biomimicry

Nature has answers to every issue humanity every faced, facing and will face. It's upto us to understand and realize how precious and delicate biodiversity is. The things we reverse-enginerred using nature as a model:

"Inspiring examples of nature at work abound: the spider creates silk, at room temperature, that gram for gram is five times stronger than steel, without the dirty and energy-intensive smelting process. The mother-of-pearl coating inside an abalone shell is twice as strong as industrial ceramics, which require enormous kilns to manufacture. And sharks and other sea animals glide through water with no boost from gasoline. Among the many products on the market today are self-cleaning windows and exterior paints that are inspired by the leaves of the lotus plant, which remain clean even in muddy river deltas, its natural habitat, without the use of harsh cleansing agents. Fabrics, paints, and cosmetics are all being developed with techniques based on the way color is created on butterfly wings. A new kind of plywood is being manufactured with a material that mimics the proteins that allow blue mussels to maintain their grip on rock, rather than by using a formaldehyde-based adhesive. Bharat Bhushan, director of the Nanoprobe Laboratory for Bio and Nanotechnology & Biomimetics at Ohio State University, estimates that the revenue from the top 100 biomimetic products totaled $1.5 billion between 2005 and 2008."

A catalyst for the movement was the work of Janine Benyus, a Montana nature and science writer who began in the mid-1990s to collect and catalog examples of what she called biomimicry. She came to realize that for the most part the people working in the field didn’t identify themselves as biomimics and were largely working in isolation from one another. She collected their stories in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Soon after, her phone started ringing with companies such as General Electric, Boeing, and Nike calling to find out how biomimicry might work for them. “They were starting to get pressure to green up their policies and processes,” she says. “They started to ask, ‘What if we pulled up another chair to the design table—and it’s a biologist?’?”
Benyus and her partners were soon invited into R&D labs, and through her nonprofit, the Biomimicry Institute, and her for-profit consultancy, the Biomimicry Guild, she connected like-minded individuals from the business, science, engineering, and design communities. Over time the number of bio-inspired ideas mushroomed. Benyus says an examination of the Worldwide Patent Database between 1985 and 2005 shows the number of appearances of the terms “bioinspired,” “biomimicry,” and “biomimetics” jumped 93 percent, compared with a 2.7 percent increase in patents overall. Universities and research institutions in the United States, Mexico, and elsewhere started to open centers focusing on the subject. “We are at that early, explosive-growth phase,” Benyus says."

and more here.

One of my favorite quote:

“The library of life is burning, and we don't even know the titles of the books”.
- Harlem Brundeland speaking at the Trondheim Conference on Biodiversity