biomimicry
Episode 02: Biomimicry → listen as Bodega Ltd.’s Creative Director, Liz Gardner and Senior Designer, Mad Lenaburg chat about how admiration of nature through biomimicry and reciprocity are key to sustaining our future.
Salonnière continues to explore our need for a reciprocal relationship with nature (and each other) and the role beauty plays in sustaining hope and connection. This visual podcast focuses on biomimicry, which is innovation inspired by nature. By orienting ourselves within the words of experts like Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Institute, Robin Wall Kimmerer author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Merlin Sheldrake author of Entangled Life and Jill Purce, who’s research on the spiral form were documented in her book The Mystic Spiral and the BBC documentary of the same name.
Transcript
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Liz Gardner: We are framing our relationship with the world and the challenges and opportunities within it through this concept of sustain. It's our theme for issue one, and we really love the definition just to give support or relief to. To sustain through buoyed hope. Or even the idea of a musical note that is extended for a period of time.
Mad Lenaburg: So this overarching theme comes to a finer point in three categories, in issue one. They are biomimicry, recontextualize and identity. So let's begin with biomimicry. And Liz, I'd love it if you could give us kind of an overarching idea of what that means to Salonnière.
LG: Absolutely. So for the category of biomimicry, we looked quite a bit at the work of Janine Benyus, who is a scientist who has kind of devoted her career to this discipline. And she defines biomimicry as innovation inspired by nature. And she kind of expands beyond just that definition to a bit more robust perspective, which I love. It's about learning from nature, not just extracting from her. And our whole relationship with nature has been really focused on extraction in the industrialized world. And so I think it's just such a healthy and smart thing to kind of look at as we are in this environment where we're hoping to sustain our relationship with nature.
Merlin Sheldrake: You have all these different levels of selfhood, levels of tissues accomplishing certain tasks, of microbes working with other parts of the body wanting to accomplish certain tasks. And maybe if we could soften the boundaries of ourselves or at least think about the way that selfhood might be a question rather than an answer, and in advance, we might start to reevaluate our relationships. It's by imagining ourselves as neatly separable from each other and from the modern human world that we justify exploitation of the natural world. And so it strikes me that if we could reevaluate those relationships that we form, the way that we form those relationships, we might end up in some more responsible places with regard to the ecosystems that sustain us. If we see the ecosystem that sustain us and these flows of nutrition and energy that pass between us and the ecosystems, if we see ourselves as part of these systems, which of course we are, then it becomes harder to justify pollution or justify an extractive behavior that would sabotage a biogeochemical cycle in which we depend.
“Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. In a society accustomed to dominating or ‘improving’ nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach, a revolution really. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.”
Janine Benyus: But at its heart, sustainability, the way we think about it, is embedded in this worldview that we as human beings have some ownership over these what we call resources, and that we want the world to be able to continue to keep that human beings can keep taking and keep consuming. The notion of reciprocity is really different from that. It's an expansion from that, because what it says is that our role as human people is not just to take from the Earth and the role of the Earth is not just to provide for our single species. So reciprocity actually kind of broadens this notion to say that not only does the Earth sustain us, but that we have the capacity and the responsibility to sustain her in return.
Maurice Wilkins: The form of a thing, in this case, the spiral form, is the visible expression of the essence of the thing, the underlying essential nature. Take, for example, the snail shell.
TikToker: Oh my god, there’s so many. Ooo! Oh my god, it’s a colony.
MW: Here you have a particular mathematical form in the shell of great simplicity.
TT: Oh my god, there's so many.
MW: And this is an expression of the special nature of the growth of the snail.
TT: Come here. It's okay. Come here. Okay. You're going to stay here. Are you sure? Okay, that's fine. That’s fine.
MW: It's the simplest type of growth. The purest sort of growth without any change of shape.
TT: Wow. That was a lot.
Jill Purce: Like the Nautilus shell. And it seems to be that in nature, there is one speed of growth which we find in the galaxies and we find in shells and plants. The spiral is dynamic, and it grows, and it grows fast.
LG: I think when we look at a shell, it's like a perfectly mathematically structured organism. It operates in that plane, and then you can, like, 3D extrude it, and then it becomes like a structure that resonates sound, like it takes on another. You know, the idea of totality just becomes exponential.
ML: I think when a lot of people think about the term biomimicry, they maybe think of it through an architecture perspective, which can become quite technical and focus on the structure. And I think that something Salonnière does is broaden that definition.
LG: I've been really thinking about the idea of biomimicry as what you said, not a structural study, and it has been applied in these ways that we all can call to mind. But I think that there's a really interesting way to overlay that structural thinking to things like industry or even infrastructure. And so it's kind of taking something out of one environment and recontextualizing it into another.
I think when looking and just remembering all the research around Neri Oxman’s work and this idea of can humans collaborate with nature? I think that's kind of an interesting thought, especially as we're reaching this impetus where it's not really an option anymore. Like we don't have the option to be as destructive as we have collectively been. What does it look like to collaborate with nature?
ML: Yes. And a form of respect that we have denied the planet for so long.
LG: One of the things that Janine Benyus talks about so much is that biomimicry in its origin was actually a survival mechanism of early humans. And it still really has a lot of threads in Indigenous cultures. Like, what you’re saying Mad, this respect of nature and admiration and that admiration of nature was key to sustaining and surviving. And so to really reconnect with that idea, I think, is something vital to this time.
