The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Biomimicry: Applying Nature's Wisdom to Human Problems with Janine Benyus

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

(Conversation recorded on June 25th, 2024)   Although artificial intelligence tends to dominate conversations about solving our most daunting global challenges, we may actually find some of the most potent ideas hiding in plain sight in the natural world around us. In this episode, Nate is joined by Janine Benyus, who has spent decades advocating for biomimicry – a design principle that seeks to emulate nature's models, systems, and elements to solve complex human problems in ways that are sustainable and holistic. What would our social and technological innovations look like if we started from the foundational requirement that they create conditions conducive to life? In what ways has biomimicry been inspiring projects for the last few decades, revolutionizing everything from energy production to food storage? How can we take biomimicry to a deeper level, changing the way we design and build to be attuned with local habitats and 'return the favor' to nature – helping foster cleaner and more resilient ecosystems?    About Janine Benyus: Janine Benyus is a biologist, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, in which she popularized an emerging discipline that emulates nature's designs and processes to create a healthier, more sustainable planet.  In 1998, Janine co-founded Biomimicry 3.8, the world's leading nature-inspired innovation and training firm, bringing nature's sustainable designs to 250+ clients including General Electric, Google, Herman Miller, Levi's, and Microsoft.  In 2006, Janine co-founded The Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit that empowers people to create nature-inspired solutions for a healthy planet. The Biomimicry Institute runs annual Design Challenges, a Global Network of tens of thousands of educators and entrepreneurs, and AskNature.org, the award-winning bio-inspiration site for inventors.   Support Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on Youtube   

When you ask what it is that life wants, life wants the continuity of life. The criteria for success is that your genetic material survives infinitely. And that means that you're in a conundrum because all you can do to ensure that life will continue is to take care of the place that's going to take care of your offspring, 10,000 generations from now. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagan's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. It is my belief that a post-growth future will require us to rethink the foundational principles. we use to design everything, or at least most things, from technology to our policies, to our institutions. As such, I'm very pleased to welcome today's guest Janine Benyus to the program. Janine has played a key role in the popularization of biomimicry, which calls upon the wisdom of the natural world to inform and inspire our innovation.

Janine is a biologist, an author, an innovation consultant, and a self-proclaimed nature nerd. I suppose I could self-proclaim that about myself. In 1997, she published the book Biomimicry, Innovation Inspired by Nature, kicking off decades of her work in the field. The next year, she co-founded the world's first bio-inspired consultancy called Biomimicry 3.8, which works with companies such as, General Electric, Google, Herman Miller, Levi's, and Microsoft. She also co-founded the Biomimicry Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to making biology, a natural part of our design process. This episode was full of tangible stories of humans learning to do things in a way that is more aligned with biophysical realities,

something that gives me quite a bit of hope for the possibilities still available to humanity. You know, I'd also like to remind listeners that this is not a monetized podcast. So one of the biggest ways you can support us is by following and subscribing on whatever platform you use to watch this or listen to this show. Additionally, if you'd like to donate to our organization, please use the link in the description. All donations are tax deductible and go directly to our operating costs. We appreciate you learning alongside me on this platform. And with that, please welcome, my friend, the biomimicry scholar, Janine Benyis. Janine Benyis, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Nate. It's good to be here. You are two states over. One state over. We have South Dakota between us or North Dakota. That's right. That's right. I headed west.

I used to live in St. Paul for a while. Oh, you did? My partner or not. Yeah, we did. And we moved here, we moved to Montana from St. Paul. Yeah. Yeah. You were telling me off camera that you live in the area where the television show Yellowstone was filmed. And oh, my gosh, so stunning from watching the show. Yeah, it's beauty every day that you wake up. It's such solace. It's incredibly beautiful. and it's we're in a valley surrounded by the largest contiguous wilderness in the lower 48. So in every direction you can just drive and literally get into deep time wilderness very quickly. Can you walk to wilderness from where you live?

I have to ride my bike, but yeah, pretty much. Yeah, if I lived there, I would have hidden wildlife camp somewhere just to see what would happen during the night. I mean, you never know. There's so many species that live there. That's right. And they cross the valley. You know, it's this, you know, we're living in their migratory pathway. We woke up, my partner and I, this spring, now, granted, we live on eight acres, which is not much for around here, but with two ponds.

So a lot of wildlife comes. But we woke up to 125 elk migrating through the property. And I can't tell you what that's like. It was early morning. There was frost on every, you know, it was one of those whore frost mornings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was frost on every grass blade. So where they went on our property, they came through like a river. They move like a river. They go over fences like a, they're giant. So the fence is nothing to them, you know. And they just sort of pour over it, pour into your property. They went like a river. And, and then they, they. they kind of hung out a while, but their breath is going, you know, and there's 125 of them. I can picture that and I can feel it. It's beautiful. I want to get to you and your work, but do you also see grizzlies periodically? You know, we've got grizzlies now in the Bitterroots. We're on the edge of the Selway Bitterroot National Forest, and we do have them. But no, we don't, I haven't. I haven't

seen them. There was a young grizzly in my town, you know, down by the river. But I haven't seen them. I was in Glacier a few years ago, and all I wanted to do was see a grizzly because I'd never seen one. And I was there for six days. And after five days, I hadn't seen one. And I was just getting kind of obsessed. And then we rounded a corner. And there was one like 20 yards away from. And he stood up. And I never want to see another grizzly ever. I was so petrified. Be careful what you wish for. How far away were you? How far away? Like 20 yards. It was eating berries and it stood up and looked at us.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's why we sing show tunes when we're hiking in glacier. You just got to always make noise. Yeah. But what they represent is you not being at the top of the food chain, which is a new thing for us, Western industrial culture, right? Isn't that interesting? And wildness.

Yeah. Because we've taken it for granted. and that primal fear that our ancestors felt that there is someone, something higher than us on the food chain, we've lost that, haven't we? No, that's right. That's right. And what it does is it just gets you into an incredibly sharp focus in animal sense, right?

And it only takes a couple of days now for me in the back country to get into that animal sense where I'm aware that I'm being watched, you know, and I'm, you know, it's their place and I'm looking for exits. I'm looking for ways to move around so as not to disturb them. And it's it's the way we used to, you know, we used to walk with such exquisite attention on all the fine, small details and all the larger patterns and the cycles. We used to, you know, and I can still get to that place. And that's one of the gifts of living here. Yeah.

Well, I'm jealous. I always want to get to Montana and I'm too busy. So I have, as you might imagine, given the topic that you were an expert on, lots of questions for you. Let me start with this. Here's a quote from the opening of your TED Talk on biomimicry that I think still stands as a great introduction to the concept. If I could reveal anything that is hidden from us, at least in modern cultures, it would be to reveal something that we've forgotten, that we used to know as well as we knew our own names. We live in a competent universe on a brilliant planet surrounded by genius.

Biomimicry tries to learn from and take design advice from this genius. So with that quote, could you go a bit more into detail on what biomimicry actually is and where the inspiration for you in this work began. Yeah, it's this, it's innovation inspired by nature, innovation of all kinds. And it's based on this idea that, or this fact that life has been on Earth for 3.8 billion years. We've been here as Homo sapiens sapiens, 2 to 300,000. So the R&D of 3.8 billion. billion years of living well in place, living in a way that actually enhanced this planet,

to me, that's the instruction manual for how to be an earthling, right? And to biomimics everywhere now. It's a field that has emerged really in the last 25 or 30 years. It's popped up before in history. You know, Leonardo da Vinci was a biomimic, learned from the natural world, Bucky Fuller. But it has really become a design and innovation discipline now, much to my glee. It's, it literally, and we've, we've had a company, biomimicry 3.8 for 26 years, and we've been working with inventors, the inventors of our world, designers. of our world innovators, whether they're innovating, whether they're creating, you know, a better wind turbine or they're creating a better policy or a team or governance structure.

All right. So it runs the gamut. And what we do is we basically ask what in the natural world has already solved what you're trying to solve. We look to those organisms, those ecosystems, and we bring those models force. And then we try to emulate them to create a more sustainable human economy. You mentioned the word biomimic as a noun. I'd never heard that before.

So that's a person who practices biomimicry? Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's a person who basically starts their design or decision-making process with that question. What in the natural world would do what I'm trying to do? What would nature do here? Because the proper adaptive answer has to do with where you are.

What would nature do and what would nature do here? Yeah. So are snakes and bumblebees and ducks biomimics? There's a guy named Lee Dugatkin who writes about mimicry in the natural world and imitation in the natural world and how imitation is a part. of evolution. So, you know, organisms that are imitating other organisms, I think we're just beginning to realize that, yes, indeed, they probably do that. They certainly, culturally, you know, parent organisms will look at younger organisms, right, to mimic what their, or

parent organisms will try to teach younger organisms. And there's a lot of mimicry in that as well. But yeah, are they biomimics? I don't know. That's an interesting, that's an interesting question. I think what I would say is that organisms use whatever good ideas are available to them. Right? Adaptation has, we're learning, is a very, very large and plastic capacity. right, that organisms have. Even the smallest organisms now we're realizing have cognition. You know, they're certainly sensing their environments. They're trying things. They're learning from things. They don't do that again, right? If they see one of their compatrients doing something, do they go over and try that as well? If it looks good, probably. Yes. Yeah. And it's interesting to me that as humans, in Western industrial culture, biomimicry is relatively new, possibly because we thought we had it figured out. And that imitation of the lower kingdoms,

we even have names like that for other organisms, was beneath us. And I think now, as we're seeing the, you know, the unintended consequences of our actions, we're starting to quiet human cleverness enough to say maybe, maybe an organism can teach me something. So were our ancestors pre-agriculture 10,000 years ago and beyond, were they biomimics or closer to that than we are? I think so. We have evidence for sure that, you know, indigenous folks, I mean, you know, where you are, right, take a look at snowshoes and then take a look at the snowshoe hair. You know, snowshoe hair floats on top of the snow because it has these large snowshoe shaped back feet and front feet. And so, yeah, I think we did, we did mimic what we could. Yeah, I'm going to skip way ahead here because I'm really curious. How much of being a biomimic or using biomimicry with humans has to do with technology and would biomimics back in ancestral times, you know, just invent snowshoes or simple things?

And now we're inventing artificial intelligence and other things to help us mimic nature. Yeah, so let me ask you that. Artificial intelligence, how does that relate to biomimicry? Are they antagonistic, synergistic, unrelated? AI is based on the original neural networks, which were based on how your neurons wire together to learn and to remember and to, you know, lay down those pathways for learning. And that is, so yes, absolutely, the original AI came from how the brain works. Now, neuromorphic, there's neuromorphic AI that is even more closely related to, as we learn more and more about brain science. So just like, in my opinion, AI is going to have a deleterious effect on the environment. It's going to make certain things better, lots of things better, more efficient. But from a macro sense, it's like a wider straw. sucking out more carbon emissions and depleting natural ecosystems can bio it, because it's downstream

of a cultural goal of GDP and stuff and status. So can biomimicry be the same way? Can it be really helpful at a microscale? But if it ends up making better tools to access more stuff under an umbrella of GDP and more, can it have a negative impact? You know, we looked at this early on and realized that, of course, it can. You know, some of the, you know, defense agencies studied penguins and to create torpedoes. So you can, technology, you know, it's a tool of your ideology.

It's a tool of your goal, right? So what we did early on was say, well, there's shallow. biomimicry and deep biomimicry. So shallow biomimicry might be that you're mimicking just the form of something, right? It's the snowshoes. But you're making them in toxic chemistry, with toxic chemistry, with high heats, with high pressures, with toxins, you're making them for single use or for, you know, for limited use, you are making them in an economy that tears down life rather than enhances it, right? So there's a deeper, there's a deeper biomimicry. And what we realized was that we had to look at what we call life's principles as a way to make sure that you weren't just

going halfway with biomimicry and then, and then, doing it, you know, with, say, toxic chemistry. So life's principles are these 27 principles that a lot of organisms, most organisms have in common. So there's things like this. So life does all of its chemistry with a limited subset of the periodic table. So everything you see in the natural world, literally when you look at the periodic table, it's a few of these of these substances in very elegant reactions with very, very low heats, low energy fluxes. So that particular life-friendly chemistry with a subset of the periodic table is one of life's principles. So when we're talking to inventors, we're saying, you know, another life's

principle is locally attuned and responsive. And part of that is that local materials are preference. You know, you're shopping locally for local materials. So when you start to talk to an inventor, you can say, okay, we're going to make this, this thing, but how are we going to make it? What materials are we going to use? Then we turn to life's principles, which is a much longer list of these, it's sort of nature's eco checklist. Again, when you're talking about how to be an earthling, it's not just, you know, that you are mimicking, you know, you're making a new rudder for a barge that is mimicking the flow structures of dolphins or tuna or, right? And that's a great thing because it's the kind of technology that reduces energy use, right?

So life has a lot of those. So biomimicry, I think, can help us go towards the goal of getting more biomimicry. bioregional with our material use, with using things that are common and abundant rather than rare and that you have to mine. Life really doesn't do that. Doing chemistry without high heats, right? And then the circular economy, which we all would love to have so that we're not continually going after virgin raw material, but that we're doing circular economy. Life has perfected that by using a limited, a parsimonious material palette, a parsimonious element palette, and energy fluxes that can be done in or near your body, because that's how life makes things. We've been mimicking

volcanoes, and we've been mimicking fire, right, and using fire. But that's such a very, very different kind of, that's like a parallel universe of a way to be on the planet. We've ran into this high density energy, right? And we began to use it. Life really doesn't do that. So if you think about whether it would make it worse, of course it could, but I think if you don't go far enough. And that's why for 26 years we've been developing the methodology of biomimicry to actually look at the micro level as well as the macro level of it. So we've got, you know, you think about an invention like GreenPod Labs won our Rea Hope Prize at the Biomimicry Institute a couple of years ago. and it's something that we couldn't have invented before we understood the chemistry. But what it is is a man from India who actually has gone back to India to create his company and he's doing very well.

What he did is he's a plant chemist. And he read that food waste is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. both in the agricultural, you know, supply chain and then, of course, in the methane of the food waste. And he knows that in India, which is the second largest fruit and vegetable producer in the world, that only 40% of the vegetables get to town because they get put onto unrefrigerated trains. So the question is, could we refrigerate the train or what would nature do? So, organisms are always trying to not rot, right, and to keep themselves from spoiling. They're very, very good at that. So what he realized was that there was a plant chemistry that plants are able to release a compound into the air and that that compound keeps them from, keeps microbes from spoiling. And so he created a sachet of these compounds. He mimicked these compounds. And what they do is they actually, these compounds actually turn on the fruit and vegetables' own ability to resist microbes. They, what happens is the vegetables, like an avocado, say, will, it's alive for a while when it's on the train, right? It's alive still. People don't know that. And so it's able to respond to this.

This chemical, as if another plant is telling it microbes are around. It responds to this chemical. It beefs up its defenses against the microbes. And those fruits and vegetables make it to market without spoiling. But he didn't just make the chemical. He made the chemical with green chemistry processes. He put it in a sachet that was biodegradable. He basically built his whole business around.

making sure the farmers would get the lion's share of that new recouped money. Right. So in many ways, in form, process and ecosystem level, he followed nature's principles. And so, yes, can it be used for, yes, of course it can. But there is an alternative, too. I'm thinking ahead of this concept, and it seems to me that we really have two challenges. And you mentioned that you can apply biomimicry to things like governance and social and organizational systems, which I'd like your opinion on. What would nature do when a billion members of Homo sapiens sapiens found millions of years of stored,

energy surplus a couple centuries ago. I think nature is doing that right now to tell you the truth. Right. Which is, you know, we are a biological organism and we are looking to all of our technologies are natural. All of them are natural. The only question is, are they well adapted or maladaptive? Now, there have been organisms that have overshot their habitat.

They've overshot their limits. And there are organisms that have used toxic materials to their detriment, right? There are organisms. 99.9% of all species that have been on the planet are extinct. So there have been failures. And failures are fossils. And what surrounds us right now are the ones. are the ones who have made it,

which I think is also a really powerful argument for looking to the natural world for form process and ecosystem models. So where I was going with that is it seems like there's two challenges. There's kind of, let's just call it the micro for ease of vocabulary. All the different processes like the Indian gentleman you mentioned is making a better way to store food so that it doesn't spoil and there's less

waste and less emissions and better well-being and basic needs for the population. So that's a micro invention that uses biomimicry. But then there's the macro. If you have millions of those micro that add up while we still are riding high on the carbon pulse and, you know, central bank printing presses and such. The whole thing ends up being more consumption and more of a burden on the natural world.

So the second problem is the macro problem, which is an issue of scale. And so I think you can't just say, oh, we don't want to invent anything else because it's going to grow the whole system and we're going to go further into overshoot. I don't agree with that. So we need to be doing lots of examples like the Indian person you mentioned.

But simultaneously, we have to have some sort of governance structure or a cap or something. So what can biomimicry tell us about social organization, governance structures, et cetera? One of the things I worry about is that when we get renewable energy, we'll just have a bigger straw. I know. It's happening right now. Yeah. So the question is, what are we going to do with all that energy? Yeah. What are we going to do with it? And, you know, I, changing what it is we desire is really important. And that, that's something that, you know, this uniquely human, as you've, as you've really, painted that theory of us having this goal of endless growth that is divorced from the biofysical realities of our planet, right? The first thing that biomimicry would do in terms of governance or a new kind of policy would change what it is we desire, right? What it is that's important to us. So I'm not trying to simplify this because this is a very, very big concept. But

when you ask what it is that life wants, life wants the continuity of life. And I'm not sure we want that deep down. It's not in our current value systems as a culture. It's not in our current value. So if you have that, and if organisms are saying the criteria for success is that, you know, and what is fit to place is that you, not that your offspring survives, but that your genetic material survives 10,000, 20,000, infinitely continuity of life, right? And that means that you're in a conundrum because all you can do to ensure that life will continue is to take care of the place that's going to take care of your offspring, 10,000 generations from now. So life creates conditions conducive to life. Not in this, not just in this generation, obviously in this generation, but in future generations, conditions. conditions conducive to life. And what that means is that natural selection as a, you know, people think a natural selection, they think of it as extincting things that don't work.

It's called selection. It selects very, very, the criteria has to change. So what we desire have to change. And then the criteria. So natural selection's criteria is, does it create conditions conducive to life or not. And that's what I mean about well adapted or maladaptive. So all of our technologies are natural. Do we have a vetting system that says, are they good for life on earth over the long haul? Then they're well adapted. So these are, you know, these are not easy answers to change that as a policy. So if we had a cultural value system, uh, in service of life, and then we had some filters. Is this criteria that life begets life for this technology checkmark?

And all the way down, then having these biomimicry informed technologies like the fruits and vegetables that didn't decay, then that becomes holistic and productive. Yeah. But if it's under a global. energy-hungry, mindless, market-based superorganism, then we, I mean, you know, that's our challenge, right? We have to work on both. That's exactly right. Because, you know, these technologies, you know, whether it's a wind turbine that has humpback whale scalloped edges and so it can rotate in very low wind speeds. You know, there are some amazing technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And they design that based on humpback whale learnings? Yeah. So humpback whales are, you know, gigantic, right? But they do this, but they do this movement when they do bubble feeding, this cooperative bubble feeding in which they have to spiral around in the water blowing a curtain of bubbles as they ascend. And then they all go, that traps the krill. And then they all go back under and they have their mouths open. And, you know, you see that. bubble feeding. What allows them to be that acrobatic in the water is that they've got these

scalloped edges on the leading edge of their flippers. When you put that on an airplane wing, on a wind turbine wing, it cuts drag by 32 percent, which is amazing. So yes, all of these technologies I'll tell you about are they sip energy and they save material use. That's what they do. So they're that, those kind. I'm just learning about biomimicry. And I just have, just in these few minutes that we've been talking, I have a fantasy that 50, 100, 500 years from now,

the humans are all ecologists and using technology like the type you describe, mimicking nature. So that if you look at a human community or house or settlement or infrastructure, it all mimics nature that we kind of had to burn through the carbon pulse, the first half, to recognize our path. And that changed our values, which changed our education. And we started to learn from the tens of the millions of years of learning already preceding us on the planet. May it be so.

And I, you know, I'm not a polyetta. I know exactly what it would take to, you know, how big a change. It's a paradigm. It's a worldview change. It's not a change at the level of technology alone. It really is that, you know, where Donella Meadows says the, you know, the major points of leverage, right? The biggest one is that worldview shift, which is why I started with change what it is you desire. Change, you know, and endless growth is a, is a fair, it's a fairy tale. I mean, the purpose of the this podcast is to educate and inspire more humans to play a role and change the initial conditions of the future and basically change what we desire. So in that sense, we're changing hearts and minds one human at a time, hopefully. But does biomimicry suggest that this could happen at different scales, or are we just trying to change one organism at a time on what they desire and value.

No, I think it can happen on many scales. I think it is happening on many scales. I mean, interestingly, even in the 26 years, I've been working on this. I have seen that are, you know, I work with a lot of, I work with a lot of corporates, governments, all kinds of scales of invention. And it used to be that Newtonian machine era metaphors were what we used. Militaristic metaphors, machine metaphors, right? Endless growth.

Just feed it more coal, right? Just keep going. The metaphors are changing. The language is changing. The idea of realizing that people are living systems, your employees are living systems, that your company is a complex adaptive system, those are no longer strange concepts to people. The ideas. And so that's where I look for inflection points, right?

I look for how people are changing, right? And for how we might turn. And so I'm seeing that when we go in to a company to create, a new product, and then we get asked to come to the board, we're the biologists at the design table. That's our, that's our role. But inevitably, we get asked to then go, be biologist at the boardroom to talk about management questions. How does life create mutualistic partnerships? And how do I do that in my company? What are the, what's the etiquette around that? That, that didn't happened 26 years ago. So I do think that the top, and that's the top down, where we're in the

boardroom you suddenly are saying, let's be, let's have our whole company behave more like a living system. Oh, really? You're ready to do that? Okay. And then the bottom up is, well, let's make sure we change our chemistry then and the material use and how we're making these things. But they, it's both. Is the first step, um, with some of these corporate clients you have and boardrooms, You know, we live in an era of human supremacy arguments, you know, the Anthropocene, and is the first step humility? Like, okay, we're kind of mucking things up. Maybe we should pause and look to nature. So is the first step in some of your meetings, like a little bit of humility and then learning and asking questions?

Yeah. The places where we get brought up into the management level, these are places where the people there have been asking themselves some hard questions. And they're starting to get some humility. I mean, you know, because of the work you've done, that we're reaching peak everything. And they know that too. They know that too. And they know that there's no good business. There's no business on a dead planet, as they say, right?

So they're beginning to realize that this whole system that we created from the way we do our economy to the way we ship our goods, all of it, the way we grow and the whole thing, the way we grow food and forestry and all of it is now unsustainable. So they do, I think they do understand that we need a paradigm shift. And for those who have really been paying attention, they realize that there's one sustainable framework on this planet and that it's right outside your door. And so what they realize, though, is that our educational system has educated us, you know, in two different streams. And they never learned, really, about how the biological. world works or how the ecological world works, right? And so they do, they're like, tell me, what would nature do here? So there's biology classes and increasingly ecology classes, especially in college. Are there biomimicry classes? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. I mean,

we teach a, we teach a two-year master's course, an 18-month course at Arizona State University at the biomimicry center. We teach a certified biomimicry professional class. But there are classes now. There are tens of thousands of classes. Architects have told me many times that, yeah, that you can't go to architecture school without learning biomimicry. There are some fields that are very, and chemistry, biochemistry now, biomimetic chemistry is, you know, if we're going to learn how to, for instance, There are some of these large paradigms. We have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now. But carbon dioxide is an ingredient in every recipe in the natural world that every green plant you see is carbon dioxide.

Right. Its carbon comes from carbon dioxide, right? So plants, coral reefs, they're made out of dissolved carbon dioxide, all the shells. in the ocean are dissolved carbon dioxide. So carbon dioxide chemistry, and there's about six pathways. That's the thing about the natural world. I mean, we really haven't looked. There are about six biosynthetic pathways where you take CO2 and turn it into stuff, what life does. And we're now starting to look at that. That should be required reading for humanity, those sorts of things. So does biomimicry have any pathways to suggest to sequester

carbon out of the air in large scales, like, I don't know, biochar or things like that? Well, yeah, those are some pathways. I'm talking about, yeah, there's ways to take carbon dioxide, mostly where it's concentrated now. It's easiest for us to get. But life takes carbon dioxide from the air, right? Every plant that you see is taking it from the air with sunlight as an energy source and turning it into sugar, starches, cellulose, right? So these biosynthetic pathways are being studied now. And you can take that in school. You can start to take biomimicry, chemical biomimicry. There's, you know, things on a system level, the one that I really love right now that I'm writing about in my new book is taking, you know, for the circular economy, there's

this, there's this field called industrial ecology where you put companies together in a food web. So you can co-locate them or you can just have them mapped in a city, in a municipality. So in other words, the raw material of one that you look around and you say, whose byproduct could I use as my raw material locally. So whose waste product could I use? Or whose waste heat could I use to put into my greenhouses? Or if I co-located a bunch of companies and they were all feeding on each other like a food web, so those are called industrial ecologies. And there are many of hundreds of them around the world. But the people who have been studying food webs, there's this new network analysis where we're able to look at a network at a food web or a mutualism web in the natural world and go,

okay, here are all the players, here are how they're connected, and we can draw their map. We can map their network and how connected they are and where they are and who's there and who's the decomposer and when we take those food webs, and this is true biomimicry, you take those food webs and you look at the industrial ecologies we currently have and you analyze them both. they don't work like food webs. But if they did, they'd be so much more efficient. They'd have so much more of what's called cyclicity. They'd use so much more of the raw material. It wouldn't leave your town. You know, you'd be able to use it more. So now people who study food webs in the natural world are advising the owners of these industrial ecologies, which kinds of players they should put in, what kind of new links, who they're missing. Most of the time, they're missing decomposers. They're missing the ones that take things apart so that they can be put into other kinds of processes. So in the broader context of my work and the carbon pulse and the great simplification,

could we speculate that those watersheds and bioregions that have ahead of time some sort of industrially ecology, biomimicry, let's look at the local inputs and the local sink capacity and merge and share and trade and interrelate that those regions will be better off in an energy and growth-constrained future? I think so. I think so. Yeah. I think that's, I mean, if I was a municipality now, I would have a, I'd have a department

that looked at flow. material flow and energy flow in my city and say, okay, what do we have here that we're currently shipping out of here, either to landfill or to the atmosphere or to the water column? And how do we turn those pipes back around and actually design for value-ad economies in our town? Yeah. And I think, you know, my sense, Nate, is that one of the things that's going to be a lot of the things that's to happen in climate change is that it's going to be too dangerous to travel. I think that ships are going to start, it's going to be too dangerous. I think that the, I think that the, I think we're starting to see people get thrown around in airplanes. And I think that there's a lot of energy in the

system. That's what it is, right? Like with greenhouse gases being trapped and all this heat, That means more energies in the system. And I think shipping is going to get, I think shipping is going to get disruptive, shall we say. So conceptually, there are these universities that crank out graduates in biomimicry. So couldn't we have one or several of those in every watershed around the land and start doing the things you just talked about? I mean, this seems like a simple and grandiose yet really smart idea. Yeah. I mean, if I could, if I had a magic wand.

Yeah, I'm going to ask you that later. But, yeah, I would be training the people who make our world, those are our clients, the people who make our world. And by that, I also mean the people who make our decisions and make policies because I see those as technologies as well. So the people who make our world do not have access to biological information. Imagine if every engineer in the world, the first class they taught was, the first class they took in school was, how does nature pump? You know, it would be a whale heart, right? They would learn how does nature filter? How does nature move, you know, how does nature move materials through and around an ecosystem?

What is the optimum network to move materials through and around a city? They'd learn, they would learn the biological questions that an engineer has to ask themselves, right? And they'd learn how the natural world did it first. It's a fusion of biology and engineering in a way. That's one of the, yeah, I mean, we've got, we've got bioengineering, we've got those things in which, you know, if I said biotechnology to you, you would think of microbes being genetically engineered to be, you know, that's bio assisted technology. There's a lot of bio assisted technology, including making beer with yeast, right? And what's a difference between bioassisted technology and biomimicry? biomimicry is you actually, you actually mimic the processing yourself. You don't ask, in other words, you know, you don't, so for instance, you could say, let's make plastics by genetically engineering plants to take CO2 and turn them into plastics.

Or you could do biomimicry, which is you learn how to take CO2 and make it into plastic. biodegradable plastic yourself. We've been always going and asking other organisms to do these things for us, to become truly more plant-like, right? So to mimic these organisms, rather than harvesting the producer or breeding and domesticating the producer, which we've done for so long. This is, we become the producer by learning how nature does the, and I'm not saying we're never going to use, you know, sometimes it's an overlap. You know, you're going to have, you're going to have agriculture, for instance, that is bioassisted. But a biomimetic agriculture would be, the van diagram of that would be that you mimic the patterns that the plants are in, the structure

they're in, right, the way they, the way their microbial ecologies are working, right? So you're always You're going to often have these vend diagrams of bioacisted and mimicked. Let me ask you a personal question. Of course, these are all personal questions of a sort. When you go and make presentations to corporate boards in your work at the Biomimicry Institute, you said you've been doing it for over 25 years, what's the distribution of response? Are people increasingly saying, oh, my gosh. this makes so much sense, please tell me more, or does some of them say, this is stupid?

Thanks for your time. Yeah, what's the distribute? Well, it certainly has shifted over the years, that bell curve of adopters have shifted. Thanks civil society. You know, thanks civil society for all the regulations and thanks for all the hoops that we have to jump through now, right, in order to try to make things. safer and, right? Thank you, civil society. And as a result, that bell curve is now like, oh, let me hear about that. That's interesting. I mean, they still want to know whether the way biomimicry is working now is that small companies are starting things and then they're getting

licensed. So, for instance, in the last three years, we get 200 to 300 biomimetic companies a year coming to our Ray a Hope accelerator. Yeah. No, this is not like, yeah, this has come along. There's tens of thousands of people working on this. So from lab to market and now startups. And the last, our last 40 startups, all of them in the last three years, all of them are still in business. They're all, they're all getting, you know, what happens is they get licensed by larger companies, right? So we're trying to fill that pipeline with things that are, You could just call them sustainable technologies, but they happen to be bio-inspired. Let me ask you this. You just mentioned, thanks civil society, because we recognize pollution and we're creating regulations on things that produce toxins or waste. But it seems like on a deeper biomimicry ethic, there's in service of life that life wants to. to sustain life. So are you saying that we're choosing biomimicry because the prices are telling us that we can't do pollution?

Or is it a re-remembering of what the carbon pulse has erased from our memories on how to live more aligned with nature, like the elk flowing through your property? Oh, I like that, Nate. I think of it as remembering like we were dismembered, or remember. literally, you know, remembering. But this carbon pulse erasing, you know, it does feel like that. When you asked about like, what's the response? And, you know, some people are skeptical. Obviously, they're skeptical of anything new. But there is a large, large segment of people who will come up to me after a talk or talk to me in the hallway. about the fact that this was right on the tip of their tongue. Like they know that the answer is to be found in this. Because all of us, all of us, you know, if you ask anyone, you know, what are your deepest, oldest memories very often of happiness?

Very often, it's in the natural world. So it's not like we're divorced from the natural world, right? We just have separated it in our work lives. So it does touch a place in people where they say, this makes so much visceral sense to me. Because I'm a biological organism and it does make sense. And this has we, you know, I've been running a company with violent technologies. I can't bring my baby to the work line, you know, to the manufacturing line, right? I have to wear a hard hat and eye guards and I walk outside and there's she's she's reminding

them that there's tremendous powerful chemistries, incredible materials, incredible physics and ecosystem dynamics going on where you're walking through a forest but you're not wearing a hard hat. How is it that all of those incredible materials are being made and you're not wearing a hard hat or, you know, what's good. People know that. They feel that. And so they're, they are willing to listen. And then I have to start showing them the case studies of the companies, of the agricultural, new agricultural systems, new farming systems, new, new, new ranching systems, new, you know, whatever field they're in, I then have to show them the goods that this is real. And here are the numbers. And you know what? You've been, you've worked with people like this. You know, at a certain point, you have to say, it's this much better than this. But down deep, that's not going to get us here fast enough. It's literally having company after company, municipality after municipality putting what's best for life into their business models. That is their business model.

It becomes their business model. Could you give a couple examples of things that are surprising that have used biomimicry as a design principle? Preservatives, you know, we're just life does preservatives all the time. So there's a company called Biometrica. They study these brine shrimp. Did you ever play with brine shrimp as a kid? They were called sea monkeys. I did.

You know what I'm talking about. You're kind of nerdy. You're totally nerdy. I knew it. Yeah. So you put them in water, right? They're a little, well, those little balls that you put in water and they become brine shrimp and you look at them through the microscope. They call them sea monkeys on the back of the comic book. That's right. And they had like a whole family of them and all. Anyway, that's actually a pretty amazing thing that they do, which is those critters dry up. Androhydrobiosis. It's called or cryptobiosis. They dry up almost entirely, and yet when you add water, they're able to come back, right? And there are organisms that do this, like tardigrades are a really good example of them. And they can last for months and months and months in this dehydrated state. Well, they thought, well, that's preservative, right? What is it? And of course, it's not a toxin, right? It's actually a sugar called trehalose that wraps around like tiny time. capsules around the important bits, the biological bits, the proteins and whatnot. And so there's this company that's taking that same, they're mimicking that same exact process to take vaccines, for instance, and put them, preserve them without refrigeration. So that's really important when 50% of vaccines don't get to, you know, because there's a break in the cold chain in the refrigeration. But then when you start to think about how many things, like their goal is to unplug all the freezers in all the

hospitals and unplug the freezers, like to take away having to freeze things because you're protecting it, like protecting a vaccine. It can sit in your glove compartment, self-stable, right? Those sorts of things or all the plastics that are everywhere right now, Right? Does life know how? Does life know how to make plastic-like materials? Yes, of course, polymers. Life makes polymers all the time. Makes them out of CO2 often, by the way. So we are learning now to take CO2 and to make biodegradable plastics out of that. The other thing we have is a lot of plastics that are now in our environment. Does life know how to break down textile plastics, for instance? Yes, go to the bottom of those giant piles of textiles. And you will find all kinds of fungus and all kinds of organisms that are using it as a food source. Now, that doesn't mean we use the organisms necessarily to break those things down. We look and find their enzymes and we start to learn how to break down the legacy plastics and then how to build up biobase-based materials without farming them.

See, this is key. Where are we going to get our carbon? We're going to farm them because soil could be the new oil. right? And you could be you could be extracting from soil instead of extracting oil if you start farming for all your materials. So the key thing is to learn how these organisms break down what we currently have in our industrial world. And then it's called catabolism and anabalism and then build up or transform it into something else. As you know, the world runs on energy materials. So those are the things that we have, we're eating the world and burning the world. And so

those are big problems that we've, and the thing is that other organisms are not burning oil. They're reducing the energy gradient from the sun to the earth. Because nature abhors a gradient, right? They're reducing that energy gradient in very complex, beautiful, and yet at base, pretty simple ways. Like they're based on simple, like I said, simple building blocks in very elegant reactions. So I keep thinking there are two pathways here. One is the downslope of the carbon pulse, which might get extended with artificial intelligence. We don't know yet, but it's, it's a lot of energy. AI takes a ton of energy. It really does. I don't think that's the larger issue. I think that it's going to make all kinds of other processes more efficient,

and therefore it's a larger draw on all energy. I think that, that force dominates the how much AI, you use 10 times more energy using a chat GPT search than Google. It's the Jevins paradox. And I also see the potential of a Jevins paradox were a biomimicry to scale and got all these things more efficient. But I also see between the time now and whenever the great simplification arrives in the global north, the more of these ideas and concepts and technologies that we have. learned and started to implement from biomimicry, the softer the landing is and the more educated

and in service of life future generations have the potential to be. So I don't, I'm not asking you or anyone to solve the whole thing because I don't think that's possible. But we do run into the scale question over and again. So does biomimicry apply to things like supply chains, which are currently optimized for global, hyper-efficient, just-in-time metrics. I'm friends with one of the people that developed just-in-time supply chain 25 years ago, and he, like, carries guilt with him on that. So what do you think about that? How so? Why?

Well, because they were just trying to make profits and to make the technology and things be delivered more efficiently, And then it got taken up by all the companies in the world, the methodology on just in time supply chains. And so it's the same thing as my friend, Aza Raskin, who designed the infinite scroll on the phone. He thought it was a cool thing to save time. And now people spend so much time. So there's the unintended consequence. Yes.

Yeah. What are your thoughts on the relationship between the micro benefit of all the things you just mentioned running into Jevin's paradox and and the rebound effect and yeah I'll stop there I have a follow-up too no I hear you I worry about I do worry about that the bigger straw effect that this becomes you know you improve use use nature's ideas to improve the extractive impulse and you get better at extracting you get better at eating the world and so So it literally chicken and egg, what's going to come first, right? Inventing, you know, as you know, just inventing new things can, you know, hopefully you're inventing things that reduce energy and material use, right?

And not your type two technologies, which just increase, you know, energy and material use. But even you can get into that, you can get into that trap of, well, it's less energy. So let's do more of it. It takes less energy, but let's, yeah, right? Let's have, yeah, Jevin's paradox. This is a social, at the end of the day, it's a social and a cultural shift to reimagining our relationship with limits, with the idea of limits. Because life taps the power of limits that, you know, overshoot is. is not a strategy over the long haul.

So what happens is that all the technologies I see in the natural world are working within a frame of local, endless amounts of energy, lots of energy. That's really not a problem when your basis is mostly photosynthesis, sunlight. But the rest of it, the material use, is very, very local. And that's a policy issue to say, to tamp down our limits. The other thing is, and that we haven't talked about that I think is it really, really important in terms of our worldview shift.

You know, we've talked about what is it we desire. We've talked about what's worth doing with all that energy. right? There's another one that I see in the natural world, the rest of the natural world, I believe we're nature too. We're just young. So for this young species, you know which one we haven't really looked at? We haven't really looked at returning the favor. Yeah. So the way these ecosystems work is that they, and I live on the, on the edge of this wilderness, and I have 27 canyons that are coming, pouring their goodness into the Bitterroot Valley. And they clean the air and then they send it my way. They clean the water and they send it my way. They produce elk.

They send them my way. There's all. this sort of abundance that's created and then given away. There's generosity. I'm going to go ahead and call it generosity. Ecosystems are generous. They're cooling the air. They're handling my pest problems. There's all these things they're doing. Now, now you come to this young species, and we have never been asked to return the favor, to give back. So in other words, and I'm talking Western industrial culture because I think if you've lived in your own watershed for a long, long time, tens of thousands of years, you've learned to give back. But in Western industrial culture, we're like, we're taking, we're taking, and these are my ownership boundaries around my property. And I really don't need to give back at all. I don't need to, I don't need to clean your water. I don't own your water.

It's a anyway, so we've been working on that to everything we work on, we start with a concept and then say, okay, how do we make this real in the natural, in the real world? I suspect that a human being going through a biomimicry class, even if they end up developing a technology that has a Jevin's paradox impact, on growing GDP even by using less carbon or whatever. I suspect that at the same time, they have an inkling. They have a deep recognition of the kinship between humans and nature. And there must be the embers of gratitude

and wanting to do something in service of life. Once you see the different game board, the game board that we're not taught in our modern school, systems. So I'm wondering if, you know, we talked earlier in this conversation about the two parallel projects. One is scaling as much biomimicry technology as possible. And two is changing the governance and the scale and the aspirations.

We need them both. But I'm wondering if the former influences an indirect way, the latter, let me ask you this. Does biomimicry have anything at all to say about this change in what we desire and this gratitude that you mentioned and giving back? Or is that something that happens as we turn from a young species to a middle age, more mature species, this recognition that you and I having this conversation are having? I've seen it happen when you change what it is you expect of yourself. So, okay, I'm going to, I have to tell you what we do with this generous design. So we work now a lot in the built world because we realize that the built world, meaning, you know, all the everything, all the cities and the buildings, the houses you live in, including work. working landscapes like forests and farms, so the built world, the human-influenced world.

And what we say now, we work with companies and we say, okay, let's start with your factory. Let's start with the lands you touch, right? The lands you own. I'll start with the ones you own. So your factory is sitting on, you know, if you're Ford, we work with Ford and Microsoft, off to all these big companies. If you're sitting, if you're Ford and you're sitting on 4,200 acres or something, that's, you know, or if you're sitting on 4 acres, you've got a building, you've got a parking lot. You've got like a sad little turf thing happening, you know, that you're pesticiding the heck out of, right? And what we say is, well, you know, you're occupying 4,400, 4,000 acres. We go to the wildland next door and we get the closest, the, the, the, healthiest system we can find. We say, you know, if you weren't here right now, it would be this kind of forest and this kind of prairie and this kind of wetland. We just went over there. We measured them not 200 years ago, but just right now what they're producing in terms of ecological gifts or benefits. They're called ecological ecosystem services. There's 21 of them. And there's

things like cooling the air. They do this much cooling. They store this much water. They sequester this much carbon. They build this much soil. They support this much habitat and their numbers. So what I've seen, we go back to the building site or to the retro site and we say, okay, let's measure that. Let's see how much habitat you're supporting or water you're storing or cleaning or air you're cleaning or noise you're abating. Let's look at the same. And the current, the performance is like this and then the ecological performance right next door is up here. We call it the Emerald Standard. And then we say, okay, well, we're giving you all these numbers, all these metrics, how many gallons per acre,

or how many, you know, parts per million of pollution removal. We give them these numbers, and then we say, hey, smart humans, hey designers, design into that gap. and bring current performance up to the biomimetic performance where you're mimicking the way the forest functions. You're performing like the forest. And inevitably, that's generous. You're doing something generous for, because whatever you do is going to go downstream or downwind. It's a very technical process, but what's at the base of it is a design paradigm shift that I've actually seen entire design teams go, oh my God, well, if we have to do this, then we're going to plant different kinds of trees. If we're going to cool the area, we could put in solar shades, or we can plant some trees,

or maybe we should have vegetated walkways, or we have to cool the area. Because humans are good when you give them a new design challenge and say, the water that's coming onto your site. How do we do that? Well, I don't know. Let's go and look at a marsh or let, you know, and they're really wants, but, but here's the biggest thing. How do you convince them to do generous design? You know, and we're doing that. So it's that two part that you're talking about, very technical bottom up. Here's the, here's the design interventions that'll bring you to that. But the fact that you set a different bar for yourself, You said, I want to be like the wildland next door. I want to be biomimetic. The fact that I've

seen that happen over the last 15 years gives me great hope. Me too. So there's a lot of talk nowadays about regenerative agriculture and regenerative economics. So in your framework, would regenerative agriculture be an umbrella above biomimicry or is biomimicry above and regenerative agriculture is a subset of that, or is that not the way to think about it? Oh, no, it's, yeah, it's, it's an example. It's a, it's a subset of it. It's an example of learning from the natural world, how to, how to grow things in that area. And it can go even farther. I mean, there's this huge field now called nature-based, you know, nature-based solutions. Nature tech and nature-based solutions, right? So we're trying to bring the nature back to those nature-based solutions, right? We're saying, okay, are you in that agriculture? How closely are you mimicking? And a lot of regenerative agriculture does come closer to mimicking it for sure. Like if you were in a tropical area where there was a three-story forest, and you were going to grow coffee, say, you would want to grow shade-grown coffee because you would want to mimic the structure of that forest next door, right? Or if you were in the Midwest, you'd want a perennial polyculture that has perennial plants like a prairie does in a mixture of species.

right? So the, or if you were ranching, for instance, and people are doing that here, you would mimic, it's called rotational grazing, where you're mimicking the way buffalo evolve, grasses in buffalo evolved together. And wolves kept buffalo in small groups, and then they would move together in small groups and eat the grasses to a certain point and then move on. And those grasses evolved to actually do better. when they were grazed. So they would put on, you know, they'd drop some of their roots and put on new roots and another flush of photosynthesis. That's biomimetic ranching. So the closer you get to that ecosystem, the more, you know, it makes sense when you think about it, like how does nature grow things here? What are the structures? It totally makes sense. So, so let me ask you this. I'm sure this is making sense to a lot of our, our viewers. And what if someone is listening to this, watching this in Topeka, Kansas, or Sebastopol, California, or Hartford, Connecticut? And they're like, we need to do this in our own watershed, in our own town. We need to start thinking about how to be in service of life to the regenerative structures that are where we live, because we want to continue life for our descendants and the other species that. I live here and this carbon pulse thing has an expiration date. How would they even start thinking about that and attracting the right people and resources and

frameworks to do this in a local level in the way that you just described? Well, you know, we're always, you know, we do work with corporates, but then we're also saying, how do we make sure that we democratize this? so that the information that we're getting about, for instance, the ecosystem services of the wildlands of that place, we're working to make those available. There's a software called ecological intelligence, and our client Microsoft has worked to make that more available to people on a local level so that you can go and find out what are the ecosystem services of the place that you have, right? And what are those metrics? How would they know what the ecosystem services are where I live by Red Wing, Minnesota? No, they're just, I'm saying that they're helping this tool that we use called ecological intelligence tool. They're helping make that available

through foundations, monies, and things like that. So, yes, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's ecologists that we work with on that, with that software have been trying to democratize that. We also have something called Asknature.org, where you can put in the function that you're trying to design around and up will come biological strategies. So the biomimicry Institute, which is our nonprofit, we're trying to democratize it. So there's also courses that you can take, everything from a one hour to a one week course to start this kind of thinking. And then there are there are resources for teachers. We'll put all those resources in the show notes for people to find.

I'm just wondering, though, in the changing what we desire and the changing of the value system that would optimally be married with biomimicry sorts of observations and ideas and technology, like, couldn't we just start little Oprah book clubs of five to seven people in communities around North America or the world that say we want to do more biomimicry in our town, in our community, in our local ecosystem, and just roll their sleeves up and learn and start to do that. Because that, I think that is going to require different answers in every community, because everywhere is different, the ecologies. Yeah, that's right. But what a powerful thing if such a thing could get started. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I

I mean, when you think about it, we talked about two things. We talked about that industrial ecology kind of thing. And so just starting to dig into the material flows, right, of your town, having a, having a group that does that. The other thing we talked about was how many ecosystem services are you producing in your backyard? A 40% of all U.S. cities are backyards, which is amazing. So there's a lot you can do. I don't understand. I know. Well, we think of, mostly we think of cities as as the concrete part, but 40% of them are the suburbs. You know, 40% are suburbs of with, and there's, there's a lot of natural areas in cities as well, cities and parks. So why is your park still just all turf? Could you come up with the list of ecosystem services? You want to support bird habitat. You want to support, um, herps. You want, you know, you want more carbon sequestration, so not as much cutting and hauling the grass away. You know, you want to do a no-mo Monday, of no-mo May, right? So there's more habitat for, there's all kinds of things you can get into once you have those metrics that you can personally do in your own backyard, or you can do in your balcony, or you can do, or you can help your municipal palities do. I think that's a great idea to get people, literally those two things is a move towards towards a more a more bioregional circular economy,

biomimetic economy, and biomimetic lands that are that are in your area. I'm going to have to have you back because I only, I sent you an outline a couple days ago. I've only gotten to like a fifth of those questions. So this is fascinating. and actually I'm really inspired by this. I didn't, I prepared by watching your TED talk and reading some things, but this has got my mind spinning a little bit. So transitioning to the closing questions that I ask all my guests,

let me use your words. How do the people listening to this show that resonate with what you're saying, what sort of advice do you have for them to be an earthling living at this time of of wonder and peril on our planet. I would say please get back in touch with the biological being that you are. Number one, go outside next time you have a question of how to do something, how to, how to, because we're all designers. We design our lives. We design a lot of things.

It's not just obviously pillows and couches, right? It's deep design. We, we, and we have decisions we have to make. Go outside. Even if it's, you know, a tomato plant, go outside. Find another living being or another ecosystem. Ask questions. Three questions. Three or four. What would nature do here? And look for an example. What would nature do here? What wouldn't nature do here? why and why not? Those are, those are the questions that will get you deeper into being in touch with. The organisms of your place, start looking at them differently. Start looking at them as beings that have figured out how to live in your place. And not just as scenery or recreational stages. but rather as mentors. And I mean that quite, quite literally, mentors. And, you know, if you're going to use AI, use it this way. Go to perplexity and begin to ask questions.

We are in the process of creating chat nature, where you're going to be able to go to ask nature and actually interact in a chat way. But at this point, try to learn what you can. about the natural world. That's what I would say. In your place. Would a common answer, if you asked nature, of course different in different locales, but would a common answer reverberate back, slow down and consume less stuff? I think that's what you'd find. When you go outside, what you're going to find is that there aren't ships pulling up to harbor full of stuff?

You're going to find that the common, what's golden is common, common and abundant, easy to procure locally. And it doesn't, you're going to figure out that there's an incredible juggling of those materials over and over again in that place. and that, lo and behold, that place gets better over time rather than degrading. There are lessons that, and I hope I've made this clear, is that the lessons are at that higher level of life's principles, lessons, and then you can figure out and not just figure out who's doing work that is closest to this and start to buy. to buy those products, buy those services, right, start to move towards, you know, and we're doing this, I think, in the most beautiful way in the local food movement. I think it's the first

indicator of us turning, right? Everything that you, that you love about local food, think about what if everything was really like that? What if things were locally manufactured in safe ways using the materials that are here in my place, right? Now you're always going to have coffee. There's going to be things you're going to import. But for the most part, can we think about becoming closer and closer to that Emerald Standard? Right. And the first step really is to understand more about how the natural world works.

Beautiful. I think that advice applies to all age groups, but do you have any specific advice, especially for young humans, who want to be good earthlings during their stay on this planet, but they're only 20 years old, and they see all the climate, carbon pulse, all the things. Oh, yeah.

All the things. Yeah. Well, you know, I'd go back to that quote, from the beginning of the show, remember that you live on a competent planet and that you're part of it, that our species is young, but that we are really, really good at mimicking. Well, that's one of the things we're really, really good at. And begin to think about us as a species, as much as you can. can, you know, that megatrib, right, that larger species thinking. Right now you're seeing so

much division as we, you know, the other thing I would say is remember that we are part of these grand cycles, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, the water cycle. And we've been monkey wrenching those cycles. And you are part of the generation that's going to start to put us back as beneficial participants, using our brilliance, your brilliance, to be beneficial participants in those grand cycles rather than monkey wrenching them. And it's going to take you continually trying to find an antidote to your despair. And for me, the competence in the natural world, the rest of the natural world has always been a source of solace for me, hope for me, challenge for me, because they're so confident out there. So if you feel despair, remember the antidote to it is to find a system that works and make that you're standing.

standard and live your whole life trying to get closer to that standard. That's what I would say. I love that. What do you care most about in the world, Janine? I think that's obvious. Probably. Life, life, life, this sweet, sweet planet. I was put here. You know, I work for Gaia. I love this planet. I mean, that's why I write, that's why I write about life. You know, that's why I became who I am. That's what matters most to me that on this watch.

I'm, you know, I'm not sure how much solving I can do, but it's really important to me that I spend as much time as I can pointing out the obvious brilliance of the rest of the natural world because respect is what's going to get us out of here. It's not a technological thing. It's going to be respect for the rest of the natural world, I think. And a little bit of humility and some love. Yeah? Yeah. And some love.

Yeah. So if you had a magic wand you mentioned earlier, what is one thing that you would do if you had no personal recourse to yourself to improve and change human and planetary futures? I would find a way through education. and I mean lifelong education. It doesn't have to be, we work in education, but a K through 12 kind of education, but I would find a way to help people and enable people to fall in love with their places. And to, I would have everybody take that course, that one course of how life works. so that they could compare, before they ever design anything, they could compare how the rest of life works with how we work, with our industrial culture. I mean our industrial culture.

So I would reconnect people with the natural world, and I would increase their respect through a course like that. Everyone would take that course. That would be, there would be a certain, there would be a literacy requirement that we used to get, when we lived in our watersheds for long periods of time and our elders would tell us how our place worked. I think I would find a way to recreate that and to create that kind of curiosity that would allow that to naturally start to happen again. Excellent. This has been a real eye-opening conversation. for me. A lot of times at the end of my podcast, I'm kind of in a worse mood than when I started. Today is the opposite. I'm in a much better mood because of your wisdom and grace and care on these

things. You said you were writing another book. If you were to come back on the podcast in the future to take a deeper dive in something that we didn't discuss today, what might that be? And maybe what is your book and when is it going to come out? Well, the book is about nature's universals. So it's, I laugh because it's the biggest thing I've ever done. Because there's the disconnect between, you know, I see the disconnect that not a lot of people know about how our world works. I'm looking at the things that organisms have in common with all the diversity of all the species. and I'm looking at it through a lens of certain areas that I think are important.

One of the chapters, for instance, is how does nature grow, right size, and optimize. So that's one chapter. A chapter is, how does nature heal from trauma? And a chapter is, how does nature continually regenerate or research? circulate, reincarnate materials over and over and over again, which is the basis of the circular economy. One is, how does nature shape community? Because there is a shape to community. There are network shapes to community. Anyway, there's these seven areas, and I look at scales from the molecular all the way to the biospheric to see if there are patterns that we can learn.

When will that book be out? Well, I'm hoping two years, two to three years. Oh, yeah. And I've been collecting for it for a long, long time in addition to creating the three organizations. But it's, yeah, it's going to be, it's a biology book that hopefully will help people quickly reconnect to the natural world in a practical way. Well, I look forward to reading it. And I look forward to continuing this conversation with you. We have a lot to talk about, I suspect.

And I love your energy and enthusiasm on trying to reconnect people with the natural world. Janine Benyus, thank you for your time today and for your 26 years of work on behalf of life. Thank you, Nate. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite. podcast platform. You can also visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes

from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett,

Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.