Janine Benyus

Last Updated March 23, 2023

Original Air Date March 23, 2023 (onbeng.org)

There is a quiet, redemptive story of our time in this conversation — a radical way of approaching the gravest of our problems by attending to how original vitality functions. Biomimicry takes the natural world as mentor and teacher — for, as Janine Benyus puts it, “we are surrounded by geniuses.” Nature solves problems and performs what appear to us as miracles in every second, all around: running on sunlight, fitting form to function, recycling everything, relentlessly “creating conditions conducive to life.” Janine launched this way of seeing and imagining as a field with her 1997 book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Today she teaches and consults with all kinds of projects and organizations, including major corporations, as you’ll hear.

Welcome to this unfolding parallel universe in our midst, which might just shift the way you see almost everything about our possible futures.

This conversation was part of The Great Northern Festival, a celebration of Minnesota’s signature cold, creative winters.

Image by Lilian Vo, © All Rights Reserved.

Guest

Janine Benyus is the author of several books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She is the co-founder of the non-profit Biomimicry Institute and Biomimicry 3.8, a consulting and training company. Image by: Jayme Halbritter.

Transcript

Transcription by Alletta Cooper

Krista Tippett:A few years ago, the term “biomimicry” started turning up as I moved around the world. I’ll meet someone in a field that has nothing linear to do with the natural world — but someone creative and inquisitive and also usually markedly kind — who is remaking, revitalizing their world in some corner. Biomimicry is not a science per se, though it works with science. It’s a design discipline that takes the natural world as mentor and teacher, inviting the intelligence and wisdom of biology and ecology around tables where previously only engineering and construction and material sciences sat. Biomimicry inquires into the mechanisms by which nature solves problems — and by the way, performs what appear to us as miracles in every second all around: running on sunlight, fitting form to function, recycling everything, relentlessly creating “conditions conducive to life.” As Janine Benyus puts it, “we are surrounded by geniuses.” She launched this way of seeing and imagining as a field with her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Today she teaches and consults with all kinds of projects and organizations, including major corporations, as you’ll hear.

There is a quiet, redemptive story of our time in this conversation — a radical way of approaching the gravest of our problems by attending to how original vitality functions. I for one am grateful to have been let in on this unfolding parallel universe in our midst, and it is shifting the way I see almost everything about our possible futures.

[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]

I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

Janine Benyus is co-founder of the non-profit, Biomimicry Institute, and of Biomimicry 3.8, a B Corp consultancy. This conversation was part of The Great Northern Festival and held at Mia, the Minneapolis Institute of Art. We were welcomed by The Great Northern’s Executive and Artistic Director, Kate Nordstrum.

[applause]

Tippett:Hello. Thank you so much, Kate. It’s really wonderful. We’ve had the most incredible experiences with Great Northern. And I’m so excited to be here with Janine Benyus.

I also want to say I realized as I walked in that I was supposed to prepare a formal introduction of Janine, which I failed to do. But what you’re going to get instead is a deep dive into who she is and what she does and brings into our world. And so we can just go straight into it. And if I have left out some really important thing that you want everybody to know, you throw it into the conversation.

Janine Benyus:I doubt you’ll do that.

Tippett:So you have made your home in Montana, but you grew up in New Jersey. You ended up studying forestry, you wanted to become a natural history writer, and your road to and beyond Biomimicry wound through investigations of ecosystems and the secret language of animals and wildlife habitats and being a zoo lover. And I’m really curious about how you might be able to trace the roots of these curiosities and this passion in your earliest life, in the life of your childhood.

Benyus:That is so present to me every day, actually. It was New Jersey and it was the suburbs and my parents, they knew they had this wild child. [audience laughs] And so bless them for always putting me at the wild edge of wherever that suburb was heading next. And we moved several times. They kept moving me out. The suburbs would come and roll over us and we’d move out. My dad was then commuting so far into the city. And I look back and I think I know now what they did. But I always had a ravine behind me. And then there was a meadow called Sir Morton Rom Field. Those places I knew so well. Because, you know, that was church. I’d wriggle out of my mom’s arms in the morning, she’d hand me a lunch bag and I’d be gone until she rang and rang and rang the bell.

So I got to know, especially this old field, this old New England kind of field that grows back — very diverse and a lot of organisms living there. And I knew where they all lived. I spent enough time out there by myself. I knew who was going to have babies, where the rabbits were going to have babies. And they’ve been down low for a while. And here’s where a cocoon is going to become a butterfly. It was Wind in the Willows to me. Every day I’d rush out there to find out how everybody was doing in the neighborhood, seriously.

And then one day I started to see the signs. I saw these little metal wire posts with flags on them and cigarette butts and footprints. And I was reading Sherlock Holmes, so I made plaster of paris out of the footprints. [audience laughter] And I gathered up the cigarette butts and my mother thought I was smoking because I had them in a thing. And what it was, was phase two of my subdivision. So this comes directly watching for a summer a bulldozer take off everything, including the topsoil, replace it with turf.

Tippett:Did you watch that more than once, it sounds like?

Benyus:That’s the one that I really, really remember. I think my parents knew that it was coming and they would move us, but that one I lived through. And I said to myself, “If the guys in the trucks knew the neighborhood as well as I did and knew the community members as well as I did, they would find a different way of doing this.”

Tippett:And your community members were the other creatures alongside the human creatures?

Benyus:Yeah, right. So I thought I’d write about it.

Tippett:How would you begin to define what biomimicry is?

Benyus:I will give you the writerly definition that’s tucked into the book, which is, “the conscious emulation of life’s genius.” And it’s also — it’s an innovation practice where the people who make our world, the designers and the engineers and the architects and the construction workers, when they go to solve a problem, they say, “What in the natural world has already solved this problem?” And then they try to emulate that organism or that ecosystem and hopefully come up with something that helps us live here more gracefully.

Tippett:This is from the Biomimicry book, which was published in, was it 1998?

Benyus:’97.

Tippett:’97? Okay. “So far we’ve lived by the grace of green plants and we owe both our lives and our lifestyles to them.” And a few sentences later, you write, “For my money, the discovery of fire, as ballyhooed as it was, was vastly overrated.” [laughter] So take us into your way of seeing those things.

Benyus:Well, the way we power ourselves now is with fire. We burn up ancient photosynthesis — oil and coal. Fossil fuels are these organisms that did get their life from the sun. All life, except for some sulfur vent critters at the bottom of the ocean, all life comes from the light of the sun. And somehow we had all of these examples around us of how to power ourselves with the sun, but instead, somebody dug up ancient photosynthesis and we started to light it on fire. What it’s been for us is like putting all your furniture into your house, closing every window and door, and lighting it. And that photosynthesis was the first paper — artificial photosynthesis was the first paper I collected because I thought, “Surely people do solar cells by looking at leaves.” And they don’t.

Tippett:Well, you say the first paper you collected.

Benyus:First paper I collected for the book, yeah.

Tippett:Oh, that you collected from the book.

Benyus:That I collected for the book. Because I said, “Is there anybody in the natural world trying to emulate these geniuses?” And I knew that fire was very powerful. But it was also very violent compared to this silent powerhouse that is the photosynthetic reaction center. This little wishbone-shaped molecule that grabs light photons, two photons femtoseconds apart and takes our out-breath — carbon dioxide, and water, and some minerals — and makes sugars and starches, and then gives us back oxygen. So for a biologist, there’s nothing more poetic really than photosynthesis. It’s just so beautiful in its symbiotic exchange: you give me carbon dioxide and I’ll breathe out some oxygen for you.

Tippett:I was thinking also about when I spoke with Robin Wall Kimmerer, and she talks about how she has “photosynthesis envy.” So this is just her variation on what you’re saying to us. And again, what we’re talking about is so obvious, so given, and so miraculous. So she said, “I have photosynthesis envy. The ability to take these non-living elements of the world, air and light and water, and turn them into food that can then be shared with the whole rest of the world, to turn them into medicine that is medicine for people and for trees and for soil. And we cannot even approach the kind of creativity that they have.”

Benyus:No, it’s true. I love her, too.

Tippett:That’s what you’ve been…

Benyus:I love her.

Tippett:…bringing into the light.

Benyus:The thing is, that as I was researching more and more — the next group of papers — I was reading about materials and how we make materials by heating them up to high temperatures, high pressures. “Heat, beat, and treat,” is what it’s called. If you are a material scientist, and you were at a conference, you were about to present a new polymer, I would say to you in the hallway, “What’s the heat, beat, and treat on it?” Because that’s the formula.

Whereas in photosynthesis, you have the sun. Super powerful. Light source. And then it just has these electrons lifted and they go one molecule at a time, they hop. And that’s this sort of subtle, non-violent way to make things. There’s this beautiful sort of controlled heat. And when we eat, it’s combustion, but it’s controlled. There’s this elegance because everything had to be done in your soft body. It had to be life-friendly.

Tippett:Weren’t you also the poetry editor at Rutgers when you were a student?

Benyus:[laughs] You did do your research.

Tippett:I did. Well, also, you are poetic. So I want to read — there’s a list from the book of basically fundamental observations behind biomimicry, which also I think is poetic in its clarity and compression and elegance.

“Nature runs on sunlight.
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.”

Benyus:Yeah.

Tippett:Has that list altered at all since you first started writing this down?

Benyus:There are about 26 of them now.

Tippett:Okay.

Benyus:“Life’s Principles.” What we decided when we went on this journey to try to help designers make things, power themselves, and build things the way nature does, we realized that a shallow imitation — if you were going to imitate, for instance, how a spider makes its silk, you might just wind up kind of cheating and taking the genetic material, the genes from a spider and putting them into a goat and milking out the protein. That’s shallow, very shallow biomimicry. So what we realized was that it’s not just the material itself; it’s how it’s made, and it’s how the spider fits into its watershed and into its biome that really, if we want a truly regenerative world, we have to mimic at all those levels. So we came up with an extension of that list called Life’s Principles, which is what all organisms have in common.

Tippett:But to think that you can do that in 27 lines, is that what you said?

Benyus:26.

Tippett:26. And also that “life creates conditions conducive to life.”

Benyus:Yeah.

Tippett:There is Wes Jackson, the agronomist, geneticist, Land Institute, wonderful human being. I think you quoted him saying, given this, what we’re describing, the notion of talking about the natural world as a resource “becomes obscene.”

Benyus:That’s right. Once you see nature as mentor, gratitude tempers greed, and the notion of resources becomes obscene.

Tippett:So you wrote this book, you did not realize I think that you were kind of giving rise to a field, really. But it’s interesting to me that you started tracking this, what you would then call biomimicry and what is now called biomimicry, in 1990. Where you saw it was in the academy, being funded by the military and space agencies and departments of energy, which is so fascinating, isn’t it? Because those are also places of power. They were paying attention to this and keeping it to themselves.

And then it seems that what you realized after you published the book is that the people who were really reading it and taking it in were designers.

Benyus:Yeah.

Tippett:And so it was kind of an evolution that you realized that what you had actually described were design principles. A new kind of design discipline.

Benyus:Yeah. It’s interesting because I look back now and I see that I named the chapters questions. “How will we heal ourselves?” “How will we store what we learn?” “How will we conduct business?” And boldly saying “will”: “How will we?” It was almost like we were so far from everything I was writing about in the natural world. But that hope that’s bared out on that page, that table of contents, is the “will.” “How will we” do this, someday?

And I was writing another book when I started to get calls from the people who make our world, the designers and the architects and the chemists. And they said, “Please bring your biologists to the design table.” And I said, “What biologists?” [laughter] I’m in my pajamas writing my next book. But they did know that. They read that literally: how will we?

Tippett:I almost feel like as you’re talking about that, that you were surprised at yourself, that you’re wondering, where did that come from in you, that conviction.

Benyus:And I started in 1990. And the thing was that I didn’t know how we made our world because I had been educated in one stream, which biologists are and ecologists are. We learn about how life works, the rest of nature works. And then everybody that picked up on biomimicry, they got put into another stream, which was the world. I had never taken a factory tour. I do now. I take factory tours and I see how we make stuff and I see how we do what we do. And we had been educated separately and then biomimicry was like this estuary, like this salt and fresh coming together or this fertile crescent where these two disciplines came together. And I saw it. And it was such a faint signal when I was doing the book. It was just bench scientists doing this.

Tippett:Yeah. Well, it was the last century after all.

[audience laughter]

Benyus:It was way last century, yeah. Our century. The last century. Anyway, so I was surprised.

Tippett:Well, so here’s one way you described it that I loved. You said that you wrote it and then you found, as you say, it’s a faint signal, but then you found biomimics, you found “fascinating people working at the edge of their disciplines in the fertile crest between intellectual habitats.” If there’s one thing I’ve heard in these 20 years of talking to people who found ways to shift some part of the world on its axis, it’s all that change happens in the margins. It’s not happening above the radar, in the headlines. And so that makes such sense to me. So who were these people in these fertile crests and what were they doing, what were they making or doing differently?

Benyus:Oh my gosh. Well, they were — the material scientists were studying spiders and studying rhino horns and studying abalone shells. They were seeing how life makes things without kilns, right? And how is that possible? The thing was, when you go to meet with these people, they’re in such a reverential state because it’s hard to be a botanist or be a solar cell manufacturer and try to mimic a leaf. It’s hard work. It was people like Wes Jackson who was saying it’s not just the problem “in” agriculture, it’s the problem “of” agriculture. And it’s these annual plants that we plant the same thing for miles in a monoculture. This was seen as wild-eyed.

He went to the prairie next door, the Konza Prairie in Kansas. And said he literally took scissors and cut the plants. And there’s this wild diversity, hundreds of species — not 12, not two, hundreds. But when he cut them and he looked at them, he started to see a pattern and he pulled, he said, “Okay, there’s legumes. Those are the nitrogen fixers.” Like pea plants. “And then there’s composites like the sunflowers, and then there’s cool season grasses and warm season grasses.” And when he saw that pattern, he went, “Oh my, perhaps we should have those four things.” And our crops fall into those, by the way — maybe we should plant them together in this part of the world. In the tropics, it’s going to look like a three-story forest.

Tippett:You mentioned abalone, which you’ve written a lot about, which is really fascinating also as kind of an example of something that occurs in nature that we would think couldn’t be. Just that example, what that is, and also what people were doing with it.

Benyus:Yeah. Well, the mother of pearl on the inside of an abalone shell, or there’s lots of shellfish who have this, and that mother of pearl, believe it or not, it’s twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics that you have in your engines, in jet engines. It’s super tough. So you think, if it’s this tough against cracks and against any kind of impact that you would give it, then it must be really, really hard, right? What you find is that the puff pastry is mineral, it’s calcium carbonate like chalk, which is not very tough. And then in between the layers of puff pastry, there’s this gooey sort of protein, which is very — again, everything was a paradigm shift as I would find the way we do it.

So what the critter does is it’s this soft-bodied critter, and so it’s got to fill the ceiling, and there’s seawater. And so it releases these proteins into the seawater, and they self-assemble, because of the way they’re shaped and their charges, they self-assemble into a very thin sheet. And there are these positive and negative charges in particular places. And then the minerals from the seawater precipitate out, they land on the landing sites, calcium and carbonate are also charged, and they self-assemble into a rhombohedral crystal, which is one of 14 kinds of crystals, but it’s the strongest one. And then there’s a layer of protein, and then there’s a layer of mineral. So it’s the seawater, what’s already in the seawater gets pulled in and coaxed into form, to self-assemble this amazing material.

Tippett:What have you found designers making as a result of that, being mentored by that?

Benyus:Exactly. Well, that is now being formed into a glass that is extremely, extremely tough. So it’s layer-by-layer glass, transparent. The interesting thing about it is that there’s no fossil fuels being burnt to create this glass. When I say glass to you, you think fire, don’t you? It’s not. And that’s everything in the natural world. Because it’s all made in or around the body, they’ve found a different way.

[music: “On the Hour” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett:You call the scientific method or paradigm that you use with your colleagues the way of “muddy knees and epiphanies.” [laughs] So would you describe…

Benyus:Yeah. That’s our North Star compass. That’s our compass in our company.

Tippett:Okay. Describe that scientific method to us.

Benyus:“Muddy knees and epiphanies.” [laughs] What happens if we’re lucky, and the way we prefer to have it happen is that when we — and we, I’m talking right now about Biomimicry 3.8, it’s a consultancy. It’s an interesting thing to hire us. We immediately want to take you outside. Even if it’s in the suburban area around you. I know how to find stuff in suburbs.

Tippett:Yes, you do.

[audience laughs]

Continue reading Biomimicry, an Operating Manual for Earthlings →