BOOK & GIFT IDEAS

Recommended Reading: Biomimicry by Janine Benyus (Feb. 2002)

Why can you see rainbows in spiderwebs? How does the golden orb weaver spider make a substance that, compared ounce to ounce, is five times stronger than steel?
In her book, Biomimicry, science writer Janine Benyus explores spider silk and other products of nature and finds innovations that could be adapted to address the most urgent of human problems. She describes products from nature that we could adapt and use to grow food, cure disease, harness energy, and make things without doing harm to ourselves or the earth.

Benyus observes that if the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up fifteen minutes ago and all of recorded human history blinked by during the last 60 seconds. By contrast, other species have been here a long time, 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. Collectively, these organisms have, through evolution, learned to do everything we want to do.

Benyus believes that hope for human survival on the planet depends upon exploring nature's work - photosynthesis, self-assembly, natural selection, self-sustaining ecosystems, natural medicines and more - and then copying these designs and manufacturing processes to solve our own problems. She calls this approach biomimicry - the conscious emulation of innovation inspired by nature. Biomimics, says Benyus, are the scientists and inventors who study what works in the natural world and what lasts. After 3.8 billion years, "failures are fossils and what surrounds us is the secret to survival."

Learning from nature was the way humans survived until the Agricultural Revolution, when we broke free from hunting and gathering. Our movement away from nature accelerated with the Scientific Revolution but even that was a minor change compared with the Petrochemical and Genetic Engineering Revolutions. Now, says Benyus, we believe we can synthesize what we need, rearrange the genetic alphabet and be independent of the planet on which we live. The result of our hubris is that we are destroying our ecology to support our expansion but our habits are unsustainable.

Benyus believes we are living in the storm before the calm. A system that is far from stable is ripe for change and change is already occurring. Our knowledge of biology is doubling every five years and new scopes and satellites are allowing us to see nature's patterns from "the intercellular to the interstellar." We are seeing that all our inventions have already appeared in nature in more elegant forms and at a lot less cost to the planet. Lily pads and bamboo stems feature architectural designs we think we invented. Termite towers maintain steady temperatures better than our central heating and air-conditioning systems. Bats transmit better than our radars, and our "smart materials' are inferior to dolphin's skin.

But, Benyus cautions that the hardest change for humans will be to give up the notion that limits exist to be overcome. She wonders if we will "simply steel nature's thunder and use it in the ongoing campaign against life." The last really famous biomimetic invention was the airplane, invented when the Wright brothers learned drag and lift by watching vultures. Benyus notes that we flew for the first time in 1903 and by 1914 were dropping bombs.
It will be a change of heart, Benyus believes, not a change in technology that will bring us to the biomimetic future. Then "we will come not to learn about nature so that we might circumvent or control her, but to learn from nature so that we can fit in, at last and for good, on the Earth from which we sprang."

You see rainbows in spiderwebs because somehow the spider has learned to manufacture a composite - two types of materials in one. Spider silk is made up of small crystallites embedded in a matrix of organic polymer. Learning from the golden orb weaver spider could be our enthrallment and our welcome home.

Books as Gifts (Dec. 2001)

Dave Dempsey's new book Ruin and Recovery: Michigan's Rise as a Conservation Leader chronicles how environmental activists, sports(wo)men and conservationists persevered to save natural resources from destruction. Through stories about early settlers to Michigan's "north country," the growth of Michigan cities in the 20th century, and current battles over land use, Dempsey portrays Michigan's environmental history as cycles of exploitation followed by restoration. Now the big battle in Michigan is over land. Protecting land from sprawl may be a tougher battle than the battle for clean water and air because, unlike water and air, land can be held in private ownership.

Other book suggestions include:

• Cities Without Suburbs by David Rusk
• Inside Game/Outside Game: Winning Strategies for Saving Urban America by David Rusk
• Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability by Myron Orfield
• New Visions for Metropolitan America by Anthony Downs
• The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas Sugrue
• Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit by June Manning Thomas
• Sprawl City edited by Dr. Robert Bullard, Glenn Johnson, and Angel Torres