Introduction

Masao Yokota, president of the Boston Research Center (BRC), welcomed over 160 attendees to the lecture and praised Janine Benyus for something she shares with Rachel Carson, “a rare combination of literary talent and scientific knowledge.” With reference to BRC founder Daisaku Ikeda’s “lifelong dialogue with Nature,” Yokota spoke of the importance of bringing the wisdom of Nature to our daily life, and with it an awareness of our spirituality.

He also spoke of the important Buddhist concept of interrelatedness (oneness) with others and with Nature and told a story that illustrated this idea and symbolized the work of Rachel Carson at the same time: Once upon a time, there was a beautiful forest but the forest suddenly caught fire. The flames spread rapidly as animals fled and trees turned to ash. In the midst of the chaos, one small bird did not want to see the forest destroyed by the evil fire. In a desperate attempt to save her world, she went down to the river and dove into the rapids and brought up few tiny drops of water, which she carried above the flames and dropped into the fire. Her actions seemed useless at the time, but she never stopped. Finally, the Buddhist gods were moved by her ceaseless efforts and shed tears of compassion. Those tears put the fire out.

“Tonight, as we gather for this important lecture, I feel that Rachel Carson was like this bird whose determination helped to preserve our precious environment by inspiring the compassion of others,” Yokota said.

Virginia Straus then shared her reflections on the life and work of Rachel Carson (1907-1964), whose gift for appealing to emotions while writing about science made her one of the most influential voices of the twentieth century. “She’s been called the fountainhead of the environmental movement,” Straus said.

Following her somewhat solitary childhood on a farm in Western Pennsylvania, Carson watched as rural towns like hers were transformed into wastelands by chemicals and pollutants emanating from the ever-expanding iron and steel capital of Pittsburgh. It was in this atmosphere that she, as a teenager, first became suspicious of claims that better chemistry meant progress. After studies at Pennsylvania Women’s College, Carson moved on to the Woods Hole Biological Laboratory, where her love of the sea blossomed into a fascination with marine biology.

Her father died when she was only 28. This event derailed her plans for an academic career as she became the primary breadwinner for her family. Throughout her career, from this point forward, Carson supported her mother, sister, niece, and nephew by working tirelessly at her own writing and her job, eventually becoming Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was with her prize-winning book, The Sea Around Us, published in 1952, that she became widely known. This book was followed by The Edge of the Sea (1956). In 1962, she published Silent Spring, which warned Americans about the dangers of pesticides and awakened American society to our collective responsibility for other forms of life. After a prolonged controversy set off by the publication of Silent Spring, Congressional hearings were held, resulting in a ban on DDT. Grassroots involvement in the wake of this controversy eventually led to the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency.

As she reflected on what it was about Rachel Carson that made her so brave and influential, Straus articulated three sources of her extraordinary moral courage:

• Her relationships with family and friends who encouraged and supported her;
• Her lifelong love of the natural world;
• The inspiration and comfort she drew from music.

Straus then invited selected members of the audience to read passages from Carson’s writing that demonstrate these sources of inspiration. These passages are quoted below:

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.  It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.  If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last through life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

From Help Your Child to Wonder, a magazine article she later turned into a book that was published posthumously as The Sense of Wonder .

“I longed so for you last night to share my thoughts and feelings… I took Jeffie (her cat) into the study and played the Beethoven violin concerto—one of my favorites...  And suddenly the tensions of four years were broken and I got down and put my arms around Jeffie and let the tears come.  With his little warm, rough tongue he told me that he understood.  I think I let you see last summer what my deeper feelings are about this when I said I could never again listen happily to a thrush song if I had not done all I could. And last night the thought of all the birds and other creatures and all the loveliness that is in nature came to me with such a surge of deep happiness, that now I had done what I could—I had been able to complete it—now it had its own life!”

From a letter to her very close friend Dorothy Freeman when she realized that all of her arduous effort to research and write Silent Spring while she was dying of cancer had produced a book with the power to convince people.

“This is a postscript to our morning at Newagen, something I think I can write better than say.  For me it was one of the loveliest of the summer’s hours, and all the details will remain in my memory. … But most of all I shall remember the Monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force.  We talked a little about their migration, their life history.  Did they return?  We thought not; for most, at least, this was the closing journey of their lives.

But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return.  And rightly—for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural.

For the Monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months.  For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know.  But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.

That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning.  I found a deep happiness in it—so, I hope, may you.”

Also from a letter to Dorothy Freeman, after a trip to Maine when Rachel realized that she would not live to see another springtime.

Straus closed by saying, “As you can tell from these passages, Nature was Rachel’s first and last teacher. I feel sure that, wherever she is, she would be delighted to see all of you here tonight, honoring her courage to protect the wonders of nature and learning its many lessons from Janine Benyus.”

Susan McGee Bailey, executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women introduced the speaker. While Bailey suggested that many in the audience might feel they already know Janine Benyus from her PBS special, The Nature of Things, “Janine Benyus has become a new discovery for me… and what a wonderful one,” Bailey said. She also recalled how her own mother had insisted she read Rachel Carson’s books. She observed that Benyus’ most recent book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, made her miss her mother “more sharply than I have in a while.” Bailey recalled how her mother had taught her to identify wild asparagus, how to dig for clams, and how to find wild berries in the woods and fields. “She would have loved your book,” she said to Benyus.

Referring to the speaker as “the founder of this movement of Biomimicry,” Bailey introduced her education at Rutgers University and her experience working for governmental agencies, writing, and conducting seminars in hopes of teaching people “ways to learn from, instead of taking from, Nature.” Bailey explained the purpose of the Biomimicry Guild, which was co-founded by Janine Benyus in 1998, “to help innovators create products, processes, and policies that can help create conditions that foster and enhance life.” (Go to www.biomimicry.org for further information.) Finally, she mentioned the course Benyus is developing for engineers entitled “Biology Taught Functionally” and the public database of biological literature Benyus is currently working on, which will be organized by design function and open to all. “These projects are intended to create a flow structure, so that Nature’s ideas can infiltrate and move more freely as human beings look at designing systems that are sustainable and life-enhancing,” she said.

Quoting from Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Bailey posed one of the key questions facing those who advocate biomimicry: “Who’s to say we won’t simply steal Nature’s thunder and use it in our ongoing campaign against life?” To emphasize the threat implied in the question, Bailey referred to airplanes inspired by birds in flight, “dropping deliveries of death.” Or the energy of the atom “used all too often as a threat, rather than as hope.”  But as Benyus says in her book, “Perhaps in the end it will be a change of heart that will bring us to a biomimetic future, a humbling that allows us to be attentive to Nature’s lessons.”

Lecture Summary

Janine Benyus began by saying that she was “honored to be mentioned in the same breath” with her mentor, Rachel Carson. “She taught me a certain kind of bravery, to be brave enough to put poetry into science writing,” she said. “She knew, and I know, that the truly passionate forms of art and science are conjoined twins, two minds sharing a heart.” She further explained that she shares a “sense of loss” with Rachel Carson, and with many people, over the many ways in which our environment has been damaged.

Benyus recalled her experience of traveling to the state of Acre in Brazil to visit the Ashaninka Tribe. On this trip, she presented the chief of the tribe with a box engraved with the bald eagle and told him that this bird was our symbolic, beloved bird that had almost become extinct. In response to this gift, the chief’s face was “creased with the disappointment of watching a favored child commit her first transgression.”

“How could you do that?” he asked.

Benyus replied simply, “We lost our way.”

For Benyus, biomimicry is “one of many ways of finding our way home.” But in order to do this, “We need the ideas of the winged, the furred, the four-legged, and the single-celled.” Furthermore, she stated that “In order to be open to their ideas, it takes a change of heart and stance.”

As she spoke, she projected colorful images on a large screen, beginning with images of landscapes, including Montana, where she lives, and Maho Bay, St. John’s, U.S. Virgin Islands, where she had just conducted a workshop with architects. She referred to such natural environments as places where “miracle materials are being made” and “homes are being built” by the design talents and construction strategies of Nature. “These places are existence proof; it is possible for carbon-based life forms like us to live in a way that enhances, rather than depletes, place.”

The next image was labeled “We Are Nature!” and showed a collage of species, including undersea life and the silhouette of a human coming out of a cave. Against this backdrop, Benyus explained that, “The most important definition of success is to be well adapted to life on Earth over the long haul.” As the audience absorbed the full meaning of this definition, she added, “We are a young species trying to figure out how to live gracefully, find a way to be a community member, find a way to be well adapted.” To illustrate how young we are, Benyus offered this vision: “If the age of the Earth was a calendar year starting January 1, and it’s now a breath before midnight on December 31, we just got here 15 minutes ago. All of recorded history has blinked by in the last 60 seconds.  But the first life forms, the blue-green bacteria, got here in March of that year!”

In the struggle to become well adapted, Benyus reassured those present that “We are not alone. Thank goodness!” Her next slide included images of a Namibian beetle, a fly, a snail, kelp, and other organisms she referred to as “the survivors.” Each had developed through the process of natural selection to become highly efficient and beautifully adapted to its environment.

“We are surrounded by genius,” she said. “[In the quest for adaptability], there are clues everywhere in the 30 million species willing to gift us with their best ideas. These beautiful organisms are the embodied wisdom of living well in place.”

She spoke of the history of how we watch and listen to the organisms pulsating through the natural world based on our own needs and interests. “From our fear, we know much about our predators. From our vulnerability, we know much about pathogens. From our hunger, we know everything about our prey species. From our need to predict that we will always have food at hand, we know everything about domesticated species. From our curiosity, we know a lot about a dozen or so laboratory organisms, like E. coli, white rats, or rhesus monkeys. From our hubris, we now know about the intimate, genomic details of certain organisms. There are biologists who study the genetics of an organism like the wild mustard, and yet cannot identify that plant in the wild.”

Biomimicry shifts the focus of such knowledge from “learning about” to “learning from.” “This means preparing ourselves to absorb lessons that we could not have imagined are out there,” she said.

Returning to the organisms projected on the screen, she spoke of the Namibian beetle, which lives without groundwater. However, the beetle uses the tiny bumps on its wing scales to trap moisture from fog. These bumps are water-loving on the tips and water-shedding, or hydrophobic, on their sides. This adaptation allows this beetle to collect balls of condensed water and, with the help of gravity, direct water from its tilted wing scales into its mouth as needed. This natural hydration system, based on the beetle’s bumpy texture, is now being imitated and recreated in sheets to assist agriculture in arid regions. It has also been put on the sides of tents in desert refugee camps as a means of harvesting water. “It collects water four times better than our best fog-catching nets,” Benyus said.

This example illustrates how entering into “a deep conversation with the organism” leads to the opportunity to “borrow the recipe, the idea, the design, the strategy.”

A snail was among the images on the screen. Highlighting the snail, Benyus described the way in which snails travel on slime trails. “Slime is the most amazing material!” she exclaimed. “It absorbs 1,500 times its weight in water and the snail makes it as he goes along.” Possible applications of this include lubricants for motors that use much less energy than current standards.

Benyus then turned her attention to fire resistant plants. Because fire retardants are toxic and everything in commercial buildings, from walls to carpets, is coated with fire retardant chemicals, she believes there are important lessons to be discovered from these plants. Another plant “secret” is stomata, the tiny pores of leaves that open and close, grow and shrink, in response to relative humidity. “That means that the plant doesn’t lose too much water vapor when it’s dry,” she explained. The lessons learned from this particular plant structure point to possibilities for innovative building skins that actually control moisture and, therefore, minimize risks of mold growth.

Another chemical problem she identified is the build-up of “biofilms” of microbes on wet surfaces, like the inside of the heating and cooling systems in this building. We flush these systems with bromine, which is unsafe because it reacts with naturally occurring compounds,” she said.  William McCoy, a biomimic, asked the essential question: “What organism is surrounded with microbes and yet is unfazed by them and has no biofilm of bacteria on its surface?” The answer was green kelp.

“What kind of chemical are YOU using?” she asked, as if in conversation with the enlarged image of green kelp on the screen.” The answer is bromine. “Indeed,” Benyus said, “the kelp is using a bromine, same as us, except that it uses a non-reactive form that doesn’t hook up with other compounds. And now we’ve borrowed the kelp’s recipe and are making our own stabilized bromine.” This kelp-inspired product is now being sold to architects and engineers.

One of the key distinctions about biomimicry that Benyus underscored throughout her presentation is that none of the solutions supported by biomimicry involve harvesting the organism. Instead, biomimicry leaves the organism alone and simply learns from its ideas. “It’s about learning from the locals,” she said.

“What those organisms do, in total, is create conditions conducive to life,” she stated. “It’s not just little tricks and adaptations that they do. Together as a community, they’re doing amazing things like filtering water, filtering air, building soil, creating a cocktail of gasses that we, and all life, need to breathe.” Thus, she zeroed in on “the only question we need to ask” as we go about solving problems and improving our adaptation: Does it create conditions conducive to life on Earth?

“That’s the design challenge for the twenty-first century.”

In addition to process, she spoke of the importance of mimicking on a community level to ensure that the whole system works together. For example, making a product “with the greenest chemistry available” then sending it across the country in a truck “spewing diesel fumes” misses the “ecosystem level” that must be part of the Biomimicry solution to sustainability. “There are a whole lot of people who are trying to mimic life’s lessons at this larger, whole-system level.  They’re trying to create an economy that functions more like a living forest than like a machine.” This growing field, she explained, is called “Industrial Ecology.”

Benyus then turned to the topic of surprises. For example, humans create color with pigments, many of which are toxic, which explains why water coming out of some textile mills is harsh and dangerous to the environment. “How does life create color?” she asked, then explained that color is created in two ways: with chemical pigments and with what’s called “structural color.” Referring to the brilliance of peacock feathers and butterfly wings that are, essentially, brown, Benyus noted that, “Some of the most brilliant colors in Nature are created through transparent structures, such as the scales of butterflies.” As the light comes in, the layers “play with light.” It is the refraction of light back to the human eye that creates the colors we see. The implications for fabric manufacturers are far-reaching.

Another example of how Nature “flips” our paradigm was revealed in response to the question, How does Nature clean surfaces? “Life doesn’t use detergents,” Benyus said. “Life uses structure.” She elaborated by describing the human paradigm: in order to make something clean, we make it smooth. But in Nature, waxy bumps on surfaces—such as those on the Lotus leaf—allow dirt to loosely perch on a surface and be carried away by rolling balls of rainwater.  Using the free motion energy in rain, the surface of the leaf “cleans itself.” Paint manufacturers are now looking at how to build textural characteristics of the lotus leaf into paint that dries with bumps so that buildings can be cleaned with rain water. “This is called the ‘lotus effect,’” Benyus explained.

Similar examples presented provocative ideas for channeling airflow without noise and friction, or making materials adhere to one another without glue, or designing materials that are stronger than anything we can manufacture with high heat. The solutions to these and a host of other design challenges are waiting to be discovered in Nature’s structural blueprints. “The mother-of-pearl inside the abalone snail is twice as tough as hi-tech ceramics,” she said. “It’s tough because it has soft protein layers between the mineral layers and a crack-resistant brick-wall architecture. The soft mortar allows it to slide when it’s compressed.”

In the context of her remarks on structure, she pointed out that “Nature makes things to shape through a self-assembly process. What if you could pour a carpet into the room?” By going from a liquid to a solid, as happens throughout Nature, more options would be available to “create patterned surfaces that would shed dirt or create color.”

Showing a close-up photographic image of spinnerets for silk, she explained that silk is five times stronger ounce for ounce than steel, and self-assembles in a way that textile scientists are trying to mimic. She spoke of the marine brittlestar’s calcite lenses which self-assemble out of seawater and focus light better than any optics we have. AT&T fiber optic scientists have successfully mimicked the sea star’s low-temperature, non-toxic lens making process. And she shared a lesson from the sea cucumber, whose gelatinous body turns “rock hard” at the touch of a predator. The reason for this is that fibers cross-link in its skin. “We’re looking at this for packaging because it could be soft and flexible on a truck, then turn hard and protective if it fell out.” These “gentler technologies” are not new, Benyus explained. We only need to pay attention and learn from them.

Regarding energy, she referred to the possibility of relying on “current sunlight instead of ancient sunlight, which is what fossil fuels are.” At Arizona State University, scientists are studying photosynthesis and exploring ways to extract hydrogen out of water to create a “hydrogen economy.” At Cornell University, a scientist named Geoff Coates is emulating photosynthesis to change the way we make plastics. Most of our plastics are derived from oil, which is a buried source of carbon that we have to dig up. But when plants need carbon to make polymers, says Coates, they use CO2, because it’s so abundant. His work currently focuses on “becoming more plantlike” by making biodegradable plastics from CO2.

“We take what is scarce and we make it the most valuable thing. In the natural world, what’s abundant and easy to procure is what’s golden.”

Returning to the lessons of ecosystems, Benyus discussed some of the challenges facing agriculture. One problem is that the oil-dependent monoculture methods of industrial agriculture invite highly-efficient attacks from pests, whereas polyculture spreads the risk and exposure to infestation, which we cope with through heavy use of oil-based pesticides and herbicides. The excessive use of petroleum-based fuels, pesticides, and fertilizers threatens the entire ecosystem, from topsoil to food production.

“There is a lot of oil involved in industrial agriculture and a lot of soil going into the Gulf of Mexico. For every bushel of Iowa corn, six bushels of soil go into the Mississippi River.” As an alternative, she pointed to Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, whose work focuses on studying the lessons of the prairie where many species coexist in harmony. “Perennialism and diversity save a lot of petroleum—you don’t need to tractor up the soil, and the diversity of species keeps pests guessing rather than multiplying so you can reduce pesticides.” Furthermore, the nitrogen fixers in the mix preclude the need for fertilizers.  Thus, the prairie is a model for agriculture.

Turning to what can be done, she urged that we learn the “elegant recipes” of Nature, where very few elements in the Periodic Table are used to accomplish goals and enhance life. “We’re a designing species, and that implies choice. We are the agents of natural selection for our products and our strategies,” Benyus said. “The more we function like the natural world, the more likely we are to fit in… and that is what we truly, deep down in our cells, yearn for.”

In closing, Benyus said, “There’s nothing like trying to emulate a leaf to make you tremble every time you walk through a forest. We are as ingenious, as fragile, as beautiful as any of these creatures you’ve met tonight. We’re part of it. It’s our home and it’s where we belong.”

Guided Reflection

Sarah Conn, director of the Ecopyschology Institute, then introduced a guided reflection to help people formulate their thoughts and questions on the presentation. She suggested that members of the audience reflect on their “unique part in the whole,” and on experiences that have brought them into a sense of interconnection with Nature, and with other people. Conn suggested that in order to do this, we need to “step back from our usual, habitual ways of interacting with the world” in order to achieve other ways of knowing.

Q&A

Several intriguing questions were raised during the Question/Answer session. Those questions, and excerpts of Janine Benyus’s responses, are summarized below:

Q: Is there a realm of biomimicry that deals with how we can change the way we’re thinking in terms of policies and politics?

JB: Each organism is beautifully adapted to its place and its conditions. Part of our adaptation is this incredible social structure. I look at the creation of policies, laws, and systems of reward and incentive as creating habitat conditions. An ecologist thinks about habitat conditions in terms of things like temperature swings or the number of predators or prey you have available, it’s the opportunities and the limits and the rules. Different habitat conditions bring forth different strategies for survival. Herman Daly has said that as a species, our habitat conditions have changed as we’ve grown in number, but our strategies have not.

We were a small population in a very large world and so we acted very much like a Type I system. That’s a pioneering system, like annual plants in a newly plowed field. They hardly put down any roots because they’re not going to stay long—in a few years, their seeds will blow to the next opening.  Their strategy is to spread out, get everything they can, and put energy into seeds. What comes in next would be the berry bushes. They put down roots and begin to build a more stable community; they build closer networks with one another. That’s Type II. Then, finally, the Type III system is the mature forest that finally comes after the berry bushes. That system isn’t going anywhere. It’s going to stay on that site until the next big fire or hurricane—hundreds of years in some cases.  When you’re staying for awhile, you have different strategies. Herman Daly says we are now a large population in a limited world so need to start acting more like a mature forest that isn’t going anywhere.  In the forest economy, very few material resources come in, and no waste goes out. 

There’s an incredible transfer of energy and information, however. There are deep roots, symbiotic relationships, much more mutualism, much more cooperation, tighter feedback loops, because there’s nowhere else to go.  The species that are in that place are hooking up in ways that keep on making the most of the limited pool of resources.

How can we encourage cooperative strategies? If we truly believed there was nowhere else to go, perhaps we’d start acting like Type III organisms and we’d put in place the laws and policies—habitat conditions—that would bring forth that behavior.

Q: What does biomimicry offer in our world of food?

JB: The agriculture example of mimicking prairie is exciting. You have to ask, “What would be growing here, naturally, if we weren’t here?” Ask the land what it will support and what it will help you do, as Wendell Berry says. If we were in the tropics, where multi-canopied forests are the norm, we should ask, “How can I emulate the structure of this jungle?”  In the Midwest, the prairie was the natural model.” Wherever you are in the world, I think the simple question of how Nature grows abundantly here is the question to ask.

Q: How do you expect plants manipulated by humans, which have been domesticated to function in this idealized natural society, to produce enough to feed all of us?

JB: The really hard thing for many scientists to conceive of is how we can perennialize our annual crop plants. The work of Wes Jackson at the Land Institute has to do with making edible perennials. For years we believed there was a trade off, that plants only had so much energy and if they put energy into roots and became perennial, they wouldn’t have enough energy left to make enough seeds for us [to eat.] That became mythical fact in plant biology until Wes Jackson’s daughter, Laura Jackson, did the work that showed there is no trade off.  There’s energy for roots AND large seeds.  They’ve now perennialized wheat, rye, and sorghum.

As far as polyculture goes, that’s the idea of planting crops in mixtures. They’ve found that you don’t need hundreds of species to get the companion-planting benefits of a prairie.  You can have as few as eight different species in the field that will be harvested at different times of the year, with different kinds of machinery. They’re finding that in a polyculture, these plants are actually over-yielding because they’re not in head-to-head competition with each other.  And of course, there’s less pressure from pests because it’s not a single-species, “all you can eat” restaurant.

Q: Can the perspective of man’s dominion over Nature, as it is expressed in sacred texts, be compatible with the idea of learning from Nature?

JB: There is a faith-based group called “Caring for Creation” that has a very different reading of the Book of Genesis (Bible). They see it as completely compatible with their reading of the Bible to be better stewards of the land. To me, stewardship without “studentship” is yet another example of hubris.

Q: John Todd has been doing a lot of work with ecosystems that purify water. Can you comment on his work?

JB: John Todd makes wastewater treatment facilities that model the marsh, so there are these beautiful tanks full of plants and animals and microbes that purify water and you wind up with a garden setting. They’re really quite amazing. He basically puts ecologies of creatures together and he lets them work things out in the optimal way for water purification. He’s in a deepening conversation with Nature; it’s iterative. If something doesn’t work, he goes back to the marsh. It’s a lifelong endeavor.

Book Signing

Janine Benyus then signed copies of her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, and took time to dialogue with individual members of the audience.