I started to feel like this chapter was long and drawn out and found my attention span waivering. The section on how will we make things again had some interesting ideas again had some fascinating concepts, like talking about how mussels adhere to rocks underwater and how spider silk is stronger than steel yet made without intense heat, pressure, or nasty chemicals.
However, I once again started to feel bogged down by the overload of biology that went with the concepts. How will we heal ourselves was awesome. My favorite chapter of this book. It talked about finding natural medicines by watching how animals heal themselves; what they eat when they have a parasite infection for example.
There is even a section on a certain type of monkey that seems to be able to choose the gender of their offspring by eating alkaline or acidic food during mating season. Amazing stuff. The section on storing our ideas basically focused on using a carbon based system instead of a silicon based system to "compute" ideas This was where I started to feel like I was in a time warp, as she talked about the biological computers and suggested that early version may be available in the next 5 years or so The last section on conducting business was again a bit outdated.
A lot of the concepts that were talked about clearly haven't worked, as here we are 13 years later, and we are still destroying our environment at a sprinter's clip. The book mentions the buying and selling of pollution permits which had just gone into effect when the book was piblished as the ah-ha moment that was going to change industry, and now, looking back, we know that is not the case.
Anyways, despite this book being a bit outdated, and despite a few sections of way-too-drawn-out-biology for my liking, I still really enjoyed this book. Benyus writes eloquently and presents many ideas to learn from. Ecosystems are completely efficient role models and after reading this, I am certainly questioning how we got so far off the right path, and what it will take for our development to get back on the correct path and to follow the designs of nature.
I found this book to be an extremely inspiring read written by what you can only describe as a truly passionate creature equipped with wonder and wander. Biomimicry is an incredible concept and the book is filled with anecdotes and observations about the resemblance between modern civilisation and the natural ecosystem that birthed it.
It asks us kindly to push away our prejudice and our superiority complexes and make room to be still, observe nature intently and analytically and learn from it, truly learn from it, internalise those lessons and create a world that not only fits within its laws but is also completely inspired by it, shoving our human ingenuity to the side and carefully repeating by example with humbleness and gratitude. We were given delicate instructions, it just seems that our precious pride has prevented us from even taking a look at the guide.
Walking in the forest again, we can find solutions to the most pressing of our issues, revealing that the right path was suggested all along, we just chose to look the other way. The solar revolution has started once again and this time, it is going no where.
Efficient catalysts that mimic the separation process done casually by plants are being invented to support paint that can generate electricity, we would literally be able to paint our rooftops and streets with paint that could generate electricity by interaction Need to read more about this device called PENTAD which changes charge distribution and might be used for future computing to help electrons switch at the speed of light - HOW COOL.
By taking a page form how our own bodies work, we can retrofit existing membranes in industrial complexes to produce hydrogen or any source of energy that pleases us with lightning speed and fewer cost.
They all made it to the mix of magical natural compounds that will revolutionise our good old standard reliable materials. They even know which plants to use and which ones to avoid, apparently with time, we lost our own naturally endowed abilities to tell plants apart through our elongated pampering in our modern world.
The propagation of knowledge also seems to be more natural, there is no in-house doctor in the animal kingdom, creatures are self sufficient, they learn, like we learn, by mimicry. Animals are much more in tune with their bodily functions, they seem to crave what their bodies actually need, even dirt is on the menu for some species.
They actually want to observe evolution the way our carbon wired brains are capable of through silicon. There is a notion that building computers made out of biological molecules may be our safest way to understand the brain, if ever. This intersection between computing and the human machine holds within it the secrets to our future, forget the metaverse, there is something far greater in the knowledge this can reveal.
A little beautiful concept called the industrial ecology and the shape shifter of a truly circular economy with a land filled with industrial clusters symbiosing like a good old multicellular colony with hard working single cell creatures that seem to know how to connect productively forming us into the humans we are today, or claim to be.
So overall, insightful, interesting, cramped with insights and new innovations and communicated with such infectious energy and enthusiasm, by one of those few realistic optimists left in the world, who truly believes in a better world that is most importantly attainable for the simple reason that the ground rules have been set, all we have to do is just study them and learn how to execute.
I guess they expect reviewers to be more decisive. Bees, turtles, and birds navigate without maps, while whales and penguins dive without scuba gear. How do they do it? How do dragonflies outmaneuver our best helicopters? How do hummingbirds cross the Gulf of Mexico on less than one tenth of an ounce of fuel?
How do ants carry the equivalent of hundreds of pounds in a dead heat through the jungle? These individual achievements pale, however, when we consider the intricate interliving that characterizes whole systems, communities like tidal marshes or saguaro forests. In ensemble, living things maintain a dynamic stability, like dancers in an arabesque, continually juggling resources without waste.
After decades of faithful study, ecologists have begun to fathom hidden likenesses among many interwoven systems. Nature uses only the energy it needs.
Nature fits form to function. Nature recycles everything. Nature rewards cooperation. Nature banks on diversity. Nature demands local expertise. Nature curbs excesses from within. Nature taps the power of limits. Other Earthlings take their limits more seriously, knowing they must function within a tight range of life- friendly temperatures, harvest within the carrying capacity of the land, and maintain an energy balance that cannot be borrowed against.
Within these lines, life unfurls her colors with virtuosity, using limits as a source of power, a focusing mechanism. Because nature spins her spell in such a small space, her creations read like a poem that says only what it means. Studying these poems day in and day out, biomimics develop a high degree of awe, bordering on reverence.
Now that they see what nature is truly capable of, nature-inspired innovations seem like a hand up out of the abyss. What will make the Biomimicry Revolution any different from the Industrial Revolution? This is not an idle worry.
The last really famous biomimetic invention was the airplane the Wright brothers watched vultures to learn the nuances of drag and lift. We flew like a bird for the first time in , and by , we were dropping bombs from the sky.
As author Bill McKibben has pointed out, our tools are always deployed in the service of some philosophy or ideology. If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship to nature—even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe—has to change.
The ideology that allowed us to expand beyond our limits was that the world was put here exclusively for our use. Mark Twain was amused by this notion. In his marvelous Letters to the Earth, he says that claiming we are superior to the rest of creation is like saying that the Eiffel Tower was built so that the scrap of paint at the top would have somewhere to sit. Where I live in the mountains of western Montana, a huge controversy is brewing about whether grizzly bears should be reintroduced to the wilderness area that sprawls outside our door.
Although we are different, and we have had a run of spectacular luck, we are not necessarily the best survivors over the long haul, nor are we immune to natural selection. It is time to walk in the forest again. Once we see nature as a mentor, our relationship with the living world changes. At this point in history, as we contemplate the very real possibility of losing a quarter of all species in the next thirty years, biomimicry becomes more than just a new way of looking at nature.
It becomes a race and a rescue. But at heart this is a hopeful book. This time, we come not to learn about nature so that we might circumvent or control her, but to learn from nature, so that we might fit in, at last and for good, on the Earth from which we sprang.
We have a million questions. How should we grow our food? How should we make our materials? How should we power ourselves, heal ourselves, store what we learn? How should we conduct business in a way that honors the Earth? As we discover what nature already knows, we will remember how it feels to roar like a jaguar—to be a part of, not apart from, the genius that surrounds us. Let the living lessons begin. Neat rows of wheat marched up to the doors of the Kingdom Hall, veered around the Quonset hut and its covey of pickups, then folded back together and marched on for miles.
Inside, we had hardly touched the Jell-O salad when news of the approaching weather snaked its way up and down the long banquet hall. Heads turned toward the southern doors and long-legged men began stepping over the benches that lined the tables. Through the doorframe, we could see a sky the color of carbon, a sky that would come off on your hands if you touched it. I made my way out to the parking lot where men in their church clothes leaned against trucks dusted the same flat color as the soil.
In silence they watched the weather come. A few lit cigarettes and winced as the clouds roiled, like smoke barreling before a runaway fire. The others were already crushing butts and climbing into their Dodges and Chevys, peeling out to join the caravan. Wordlessly, the kids at my table collected silverware while their moms stacked plates and whisked tablecloths away.
That storm turned into one of the hardest hails to hit southwestern Minnesota in a decade. What I realized then, viscerally, I knew already. Farmers are responsible for protecting their crops from things they cannot control. You see a system that runs on sun and rain, year after year, with no one to cultivate the soil or plant the seeds. It drinks in no excess inputs and excretes no damaging wastes. What if we were to remake agriculture using crops that had that same kind of self-sufficiency, that ability to live amiably with their fieldmates, stay in sync with their surroundings, build soil beneath them, and handle pests with aplomb?
What would agriculture look like? Well, that depends on where you live. Wes Jackson thinks it would look like a prairie. Jack Ewel thinks it would look like a tropical forest. Russell Smith, were he alive today, would vote for a New England hardwood forest. The common theme is that the agriculture in an area would take its cue from the vegetation that grew there before settlement.
Using human foods planted in the patterns of natural plant communities, agriculture would imitate as closely as possible the structure and function of a mature natural ecosystem.
Threading our needle with the roots of such a stable system, we would sew up one of the deepest wounds on the planet—the gash made by till agriculture. As I drive, a crew cut of wheat fields surrounds the car in all directions, as far as the eye can see.
From the air it must look cut from a tool and die machine—straight rows of alternating green and brown, edged with an angularity foreign to living things. The soil beneath the stalks is plainly visible, all hint of weediness rounded up by chemical sprays.
Nothing extraneous is allowed to grow here; everything has been stripped down to its least diverse form. Whatever is left of the biotic community is harnessed and tuned to the production of one star: the cash crop.
Plumes of diesel smoke and soil billow behind their rigs, like live volcanoes spewing. The soil plumes bring me back to a conversation I had at the Ravalli County Fair with a stoop-backed rancher who had farmed in Kansas during the Dust Bowl. He described windrows of soil so high that the cows used them like ramps to walk over the fences and out. Only then can I find the trail home. We saved a seed, planted it, and rejoiced when it grew up, spilling its harvest right into our hands.
We celebrated our release from the gamble of hunting and gathering, and brought bumper crops of grain and babies into the world. The more babies we produced, the more land we had to put under production to feed our brood. In our quest for ever-increasing production, we removed their inborn defenses.
We isolated them from mixed species groupings, narrowed their genetic diversity, and gutted the health of their soil. Of these three, say historians of agriculture, eviscerating soil was our greatest misstep.
Topsoil is essentially nonrenewable. Once eroded or poisoned, it can take thousands of years to rejuvenate itself. Rather than opt for a self-sufficient, perennial plant community that would batten down this black gold, we opted for the rip-roaring growth of annuals, which requires us to disturb the soil each year.
Each time we plow, we simplify the soil, taking away some of its capacity to grow crops. We break apart its intricate architecture and wreak havoc with the dream team of microfauna and microflora that glues it together into colloids, or clumps, of soil and organic matter. This clumping is vital; it leaves air channels like veins throughout the soil, giving water a way to sink down deep. Soils that are plowed too fine or packed too hard lose their colloids, and with them the art of retaining water.
Parched air sucks the ground dry, and when the winds blow, talcum-powder topsoil coats the hoods of cars in town. Instead it glances off and runs in sheets, rills, and rivulets, murky and bloodstained, to the sea. The blood is soil, the living plasma of the Earth, sloughed off at a rate of five to one hundred tons per acre per year—a massive heist. Some Palouse Prairie wheat fields in Washington, on the shameful side of that equation, have the potential to lose one inch of topsoil every 1.
In Iowa, up to six bushels of soil are washed out to sea for every bushel of corn produced. Behind the rest stop on Highway 7, I trespass a ways into a Kansas wheat field and bring up a handful of the bladed, pulverized, chemically amended soil. Such is what we have lost. The grand larceny of harvest removes even more organic matter from these fields. Even in places where the stubble is plowed back in before planting, the nutrients are often wasted, pried away by hard rains before any plants are even visible.
Exotic plants instead of indigenous ones, annuals instead of perennials, monocultures instead of polycultures. This disruption of a natural pattern, says Wes Jackson, is the definition of hubris. Rather than looking to the land and its native peoples for instructions what grows here naturally and why?
Wheat, for instance, was leveraged to help us win the First World War. The European continent was overoccupied with fighting, and in many places, crops were neither planted nor harvested. To fill that void, we boarded battalions of newly motorized tractors and plowed our home soil right up to the Rockies, uprooting massive amounts of virgin prairie in what would later be called the Great Plow-up.
It was considered backbreaking but heroic work, at least by white settlers. Having broken the prairie, we were ripe for the s disaster of deep drought and relentless winds called the Dust Bowl. It got so bad our topsoil started showing up on the decks of ships a hundred miles off the Atlantic coast. One day in , as officials in Washington, D. A frightened Congress coughed, teared, and eventually created the Soil Conservation Service SCS , an agency that would cajole and even pay farmers to conserve their soil.
SCS agents were evangelical, and farmers were ready to repent, and together they were successful in getting our most erodible lands replanted to perennial, soil-holding grasses. We now had acres of new canvas on which to paint the next face of industrialized farming: the Green Revolution. In what was heralded as the answer to world starvation, breeders unveiled new hybrid strains of crops that promised phenomenal yields.
So farmers around the world abandoned the time-honored and ecologically prudent tradition of seed saving and added a new expense to their ledgers: purchasing hybrid seeds. The homogenization of fields spread rapidly.
Varieties of crops that had once been used because they did well on a south-facing slope or were able to prosper in the Banana Belt or the Little Arctic regions of a state were forgotten. In places like India, where there were once thirty thousand land- tailored varieties of rice, their replacement by one super variety swept away botanical knowledge and centuries of breeding in one fell swoop.
Too late, farmers realized that touted yields were only promised, not guaranteed. In your part of the world, the fine print read, you may have to do a little goosing to get advertised yields—more water, more thorough tilling, more pest protection, more artificial fertilizer. But once the farmer next door had taken the bait and started to grow high-yielding varieties, you had to as well, so as not to be left behind. Together, like a slow pour over a large falls, we switched to a system of farming that mimicked industry, not nature.
Chasing economies of scale, experts advised farmers to get big or get out. To hold the debt at bay, and to qualify for government subsidies, you have to farm volume. We quickly went from growing food to sustain ourselves to growing so much food it became a surplus—an export item and a political tool. The farm became just another factory producing another product that would keep the United States in the global catbird seat.
They propped up flagging soil fertility with artificial nitrogen fertilizer produced with natural gas. Weed competition was quelled with herbicides, another petroleum product, while oil-based chemicals were used as a prophylactic against pest outbreaks which by now were extreme, thanks to acres of identical plants with identical vulnerabilities. Suddenly, for the first time in ten thousand years of agriculture, farmers were beholden to the protection ring of petroleum and chemical companies, and were said to be growing their crops not so much in soil as in oil.
Once on that treadmill, the feedback loops began. Weeds and pests are wily by nature, and even if you spray them one year, not all of them will die. Those that manage to hack an immunity explode the next year, requiring even heavier doses of biocides.
Since , pesticide use has risen 3, percent, but overall crop loss to pests has not gone down. In fact, despite our pounding the United States with 2. In the meantime, more than five hundred pests have developed resistance to our most powerful chemicals.
On top of that bad news, the last thing we want to hear is that our soils are also becoming less productive. Our answer has been to rocket-boost fertility with 20 million tons of anhydrous ammonium fertilizer a year—as many as pounds per person in this country alone. Recently, the protection racket has jumped to a whole new level of menace.
Because the plant has been specially bred to grow unscathed by that brand of herbicide and none other, the company is assured future sales. Evidently, this latest move has been in the offing for quite some time. This is the kind of news that should worry all of us. At last count, leaching pesticide residues made agriculture the number-one polluting industry in this country.
At stake is groundwater, which supplies half the U. Farm families already know about contamination. Recent studies have shown that people living in rural parts of Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois are likely to have pesticide residues in their wells, and to have higher than normal risks of developing leukemia, lymphoma, and other cancers. Nitrate levels from fertilizer in the drinking water of many farm communities also exceed federal standards, which may be why miscarriage rates in farm families are unusually high.
Nitrates are not the only thing draining from farmland. Money is, too. Today, even though we produce more food, our genetically pauperized, oil- hungry crops cost more to grow.
Moreover, because of the crops and robbers feedback effect, we will continue to need more and more inputs. Already, Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel reckons that society spends ten kilocalories of hydrocarbons to produce one kilocalorie of food.
That means each of us eats the equivalent of thirteen barrels of oil a year. Author Richard Manning cuts through these statistics to ask the important question: When you have a system that is one part farmer and nine parts oil, who do you think will have the ultimate power? Not small farmers, and certainly not the landscape. According to data collected by Iowa State University in , most farm families now rely on off-farm revenues for one half of their income. These megafarms are hardly what Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he saw a nation of yeoman farmers tending their acres, beholden to no one.
Fertilizer, for instance, masks the real problem of soil erosion caused by a till agriculture of annuals. Pesticides mask a second real problem: the inherent brittleness of genetically identical monocultures. Money borrowed to pay for the fossil-fuel inputs masks a third real problem: the fact that industrial agriculture not only destroys the soil and water, it strangles rural communities.
With our help, they are liquidating the ecological capital that took the prairie five thousand years to accumulate. Every day, our soil, our crops, and our people grow a little more vulnerable. What I want to know is, how long can our denial hold? At core these researchers are farmers, and they think there is nothing more sacred than the pact between humans and the land that gives them their food.
It comes from an insistence on decoupling ourselves from nature, from replacing natural systems with totally alien systems, and from waging war on, rather than allying ourselves with, natural processes.
Once wild creatures, our agricultural charges were shaped by an ecological context that bears little resemblance to our farming. Their natural ecosystems ran on sunlight, sponsored their own fertility, fought their own pest battles, and held down, even built, soil. But long ago, plants were removed from the original relationships they had with their ecosystems and pressed into our service. He was amazed that no one planted or tended it, yet the grass came up year after year, drought or no drought, through snow and blistering sun.
There were rattle- snakes coiled right in the middle of it, and burrowing owls standing sentry outside their holes. Another good rain fell while Jackson was working toward his Ph. When Jackson was thirty-seven, on the fast track to tenure after writing a successful text called Man and the Environment, he got uneasy. To the astonishment of his colleagues, he and his wife, Dana, packed up their three kids and returned home to Kansas.
They moved into a partially earth-sheltered house that they had built along the Smoky Hill River, and in , they began a school that focused on sustainable living practices. In Kansas, the wilderness was tallgrass prairie, the natural expression of the underlying layers of soil, the carnival of weather, the licking of fire, and the grazing of elk and bison.
Prairie is what Kansas land wants to be, but for the most part, is no more. With no warning, the bristle of wheat fields yields to a softer ensemble of wild-haired plants, stems akimbo, saturated with color and raucous with flowers and tasseled stalks.
As I watch, wind enters like a dancer onto a crowded floor, parting the crowd, causing a bobbing and dodging of plants in its wake. The whole thing sways crazily for a moment, then settles in a perfect hush, like a band ending a jam by feel.
A sign by the road says that this is The Wauhob, a prairie miraculously spared a sodbusting, probably because it was up gradient, and hard to get plows to. An understanding intern spots me and interrupts his organic gardening chores to give me directions to the office. The Land Institute headquarters is a modern brick house that was once home to an older couple.
Ecologist Jon Piper greets me in the foyer and asks about my drive, all the while migrating toward the door, as eager as I am to get out into the prairie. Piper is in his late thirties, bespectacled and bearded, with a quiet forbearance for visitors like me. He knows that what I experience here, my dip in the prairie sea, will be as important as what we say to one another.
Though never planted by human hands, the prairie is choked with blossoms, grasses gently pouring over, seeds setting, new shoots growing, runners crisscrossing the earth in a web of decay, growth, and new life.
There is no hint of hail damage or drought wilt, no such thing as weeds. Every plant— species in this patch alone—has a role and cooperates with linked arms with the plants nearby.
Piper talks about the plants as if they are neighbors in a community—the nitrogen fixers, the deep-rooted ones that dig for water, the shallow-rooted ones that make the most of a gentle rain, the ones that grow quickly in the spring to shade out weeds, the ones that resist pests or harbor heroes such as beneficial insects.
He also points out the butterflies and bees, the pollinators with wagging tongues, spreading rumors from one plant to another. Beneath this unruly mob lies 70 percent of the living weight of the prairie —a thick weave of roots, rootlets, and runners that captures water and pumps nutrients up from the depths. A single big bluestem will have twenty-five miles of this fibrous plumbing, eight miles of which will die and be reborn each year.
These root remains, together with the leaves shed from above, will fall into the welcoming jaws of a miniature zoo—ants, springtails, centipedes, sowbugs, worms, bacteria, and molds. There are thousands of species in a single teaspoon, all tunneling, eating, and excreting, conditioning the soil crumb by crumb. Through their magic, dissolved nutrients are released to thirsty roots or stored in humus—the tilth that transforms the prairie into a living sponge. The character of this belowground world is an expression of the bedrock, organic matter, rainfall, temperature, light conditions, and most important, the plant and animal community above.
Pluck or plant something new and you change the microecology slightly. Plow, spray, and harvest every year, and you change it plenty. Some of the organisms you lose might be those that sponsor fertility, or help stave off insect and disease attacks, or produce hormones that tell a flower to unfurl or a root to push its snout deeper into the soil. It takes years to tune such an orchestra of microhelpers, but just moments to silence it.
The secret of the prairie is its ability to maintain both above-ground and belowground assemblies in a dynamic steady state. A prairie keeps pest populations in check, rebounds gracefully from disturbance, and resists becoming what it is not—a forest or a weed garden. To illustrate, he heads downslope from The Wauhob to stand in the zone between the prairie and wheat field I saw earlier.
There exists a sweet spot between chaos and order, gas and crystal, wild and tame. Is there a rule of thumb about which categories of plants consistently show up on a prairie roster, and what ratios they are in? Does it matter where they grow in relation to one another? In search of answers, Piper read everything he could about prairie ecology, and then spent seven glorious summers up to his eyebrows in wild pastures.
He and his interns actually took scissors and clipped and bagged all the vegetation in certain plots. They identified each and every plant, separated them out into piles, and then dried and weighed them to find out what grew there. Through wet years and dry years, in rich soil and poor, Piper found that prairies do have a pattern that repeats itself, an order in the seeming chaos. They cover the ground throughout the year, holding the soil against wind and breaking the force of raindrops.
Hard rain hits this canopy of plants and it either runs gently down the stems or it turns into a mist. By contrast, when rain hits row crops, it strikes exposed soil, packs it, then runs off, taking precious topsoil with it. Thirty percent of their roots die and decay each year, adding organic matter to the soil. The remaining two thirds of the roots overwinter, allowing perennials to pop open their umbrella of vegetation first thing in the spring, long before weeds can struggle up from seed.
Not just one nitrogen-fixing legume, but twenty or thirty. Download Feel the Fear. Download Gangsta Granny. Download Give Me Liberty! Ebook PDF. Download Logic Pro X Download M. Lovecraft Ebook PDF. Download Overlord, Vol. Download SAFe 4. Download Spartan Fit! Transform Your Mind. Transform Your Body. Commit to Grit. Tolkien Ebook PDF. Download The Belgariad, Vol. Download Who Moved My Cheese? Mapa webu. Images of bing. Jul 30, Rebecca rated it really liked it.
This felt like the most fuzzy and underdeveloped chapter, lacking in the passion and clarity which Benyus imbued in the others. If we decide to enclose ourselves within concrete nsture, we have only temporarily separated ourselves. Granted, I am overly sensitive in both of these categories, and these attitudes, though Quite an in-depth description of observing and studying nature more closely to solve human problems. Benyus No preview available — Can we use perennials, which are self-fertilizing and self-weeding, instead of annuals as food crops?
It is really interesting but also very scientific, which was never my strongest subject!! I ended up skimming a bit in hopes of just gaining the larger idea. Lists with This Book. Innovation Inspired by Nature, ever since. Return to Book Page.
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