Biomimicry and teaching business the 'secrets of life'

Radical Industrialists

Biomimicry and teaching business the 'secrets of life'












This isn't just a theoretical conversation; regenerative design is practiced today. There is a growing movement in the world of green building design that offers an inspirational vision of a thriving, living future heralded by regenerative design. Inspired by biomimicry, the Living Building Challenge calls for transformative change. After all, if collective efforts of reducing our impacts are not enough to ensure a healthy planet for our children's children, then we must aspire to actually improve the ecological fabric of our planet.

Looking beyond the green building movement, what would our world look like if our products and processes created conditions conducive to life? Imagine inhibiting bacterial growth on surfaces through structure (not chemistry) and without creating antibiotic resistance. Sharklet Technologies' designs do just that. Or imagine converting ambient carbon dioxide gas into cement, much the way coral does, shifting a carbon source to a carbon sink. Calera is emulating coral and flipping the carbon equation on its head.

While products and processes are making great strides, ultimately, we must redesign commerce itself to be regenerative, so that the system-level impacts of industry improve the ecology of our planet. Do we know what this would look like or where to begin?

Factories where the only energy input is direct sunlight and the only effluents are clean water (a la photosynthesis)? Incredibly, we have a great start to understanding life's regenerative strategies, thanks to Dr. Dayna Baumeister and Janine Benyus, co-founders of Biomimicry 3.8.

Dayna and Janine have distilled the deep principles that allow life to create conditions conducive for more life. These "Life's Principles" [PDF] offer design lessons for how nature has solved countless challenges -- providing an invaluable guide for how we may solve our own challenges -- and a critically important starting point for understanding how to approach this ideal of regenerative commerce.

By embedding Life's Principles into our business operations, I believe we can turn Ray's dream of a restorative enterprise and a living, thriving future into a reality. Making history by making carpet a regenerative business? That's enough to get me out of bed every morning.

Photo courtesy of the author.