Can you start by telling us what biomimicry is and how you first got into this field?

“Be happy to. So, biomimicry—the definition that we use—is the conscious emulation of nature’s genius. And ultimately, that is about turning to the more-than-human, the rest of the world, and asking the question of what does it mean to live here well? What have you learned about sustaining and thriving on a planet for the last 3.85 billion years? And what could we learn from that if we ask those questions and tap into that genius?

We’re a relatively new species on the planet and it wouldn’t hurt for us to ask our elders for how to live here well. And I’ve been doing that for almost 30 years now. I’m actually trained as a biologist and I’ve always been interested in this question of, you know, the brilliance that exists in nature and kind of the clumsiness that humans are often in. What does it look like to take some of that genius and apply it so that we can become that much more elegant in our own processes? So, I’ve been doing that for the last several decades.”

Wow, amazing. And as you mentioned, and as we said before, according to the biomimicry approach, nature is model, measure, and mentor. Can you unpack what that means for designers and businesses today?

“Yeah, I’d be happy to. So, nature as model is probably the more classic way that people think about biomimicry, when they find a form or a shape and we understand what it does in function. So, Velcro—most people are familiar with Velcro. Velcro was inspired by looking at seed burrs, the little hooks on the burrs of the seed caught on the fur of the dog of the inventor, and he said, “Oh, what an interesting attachment mechanism. Can we mimic that form?” And so nature forms a model for us. And many of the other examples that you see today when you see things being called biomimicry are often form or shape-based, and turning to nature as a model.

Nature as mentor and nature as measure allow us to set some aspirational goals. So, nature mentor, of course, is nature as our teacher, right? Like, help us learn not just about a specific adaptation or something interesting a particular organism might teach us, but mentor us of what it means to be a living, thriving species on the planet and help us set those aspirational goals for living here well.

And nature as measure is around the idea of: can we actually use nature as a benchmark for what works, what works well, why does that work well? Those could be quantitative measures, they could be qualitative measures, and it depends. So, for example, we’re doing work on factories. What would it look like if our factory performed the same way as the forest next door? And we can measure that performance in the forest, we can measure that performance in our factory, and so that is a nature as measure. So, it’s really all aspects of what nature might want to offer us.”

Yeah, and that’s exactly what your company, Biomimicry 3.8, does with businesses. It has consulted with major global businesses. So, can you share a few standout examples where biomimicry directly influenced a product or process?

“Sure. I’ll tell the story of working with Interface carpets. Interface is a commercial carpet company, primarily. And they started with some questions—they make carpet tiles and they wanted to understand better ways to make an aesthetic carpet tile. And in a workshop that I led many years ago, we asked the question of how would nature design a floor? What does that look like?

And in walking in the forest, one of the things that fascinated the designers was the recognition that everything looks like it goes together, but yet it’s not identical. It’s not a constant, repetitious pattern across the forest floor. And so they began to embed that idea of connectivity but randomness into the designs of the floor. Originally it started from an aesthetic perspective, but they found that it imparted all sorts of benefits for manufacturing, for waste reduction, for installation, and it imparted a whole bunch of sustainability benefits by not having to have this constant repetitive floor. It also, in turn, was that much more appealing to the designers that were buying the carpet.
They started there and then began to ask other questions around, you know, how does nature adhere and stay attached? And developed a sticky tile called a TacTile that goes in the four corners of the tiles as they come together, rather than the smothering a bunch of toxic glue on the floor which, of course, prevents from ability to recycle and reuse.
Then they got into larger questions around: how can we recycle these tiles? What does it look like to separate the nylon face from the back? Can we reprocess those? And the factory that I mentioned before—we’re also working with them of, okay, not just the product, but how can our whole factory and our whole systems operate in the way that nature does? And so it can start very small at one scale and then extend throughout an entire company.”

Wow, those examples were very interesting. And in general, we know that there is a growing interest in regenerative design. How does biomimicry differ from traditional sustainability approaches and why is it crucial for circularity?

“Yeah, that’s a great question. So, life has been around for 3.85 billion years not because it’s just been “less bad.” The whole perpetuation of life is around creating conditions conducive to life. There’s a circularity in that statement: life creates conditions conducive to life creates conditions conducive to life, right? And that is really what regenerative work is about—is both restoring ecological function that we’ve done a pretty good job as a species degrading over the last 250 years particularly, and more importantly, allowing that ecological function to continue to create conditions conducive to life.
And in the question of circularity, that is honoring that the most value that any resource can have to a system is not when it’s locked up, but when it stays in flow. Nature’s nutrient recycling is a process of making sure that the value of both the energy conversion of that carbon into sugar, and that sugar into cellulose and body parts, stays in flow and it doesn’t get locked up in a landfill where it provides no value. So, regenerative and circularity go hand in hand because the ability for life to continue providing value means that the nutrients and the resources need to stay in flux and continue to provide value.”