To generate ideas for living more lightly on Earth, using up fewer resources, and lowering our contributions to climate change, sometimes we look to nature for lessons. Finding an elegant form or process, say the way leaves collect water, carbon, and sunlight to create food, energy, and oxygen, we may simply mimic that form or process. This is called biomimicry, and while its results may sometimes seem largely about aesthetics, they may also lead to practical improvements in sustainability. Or, in sharp contrast, we might pour resources into designing and manufacturing high-tech analogs, hoping often to go beyond mimicry to improving upon nature, to create, say, artificial leaves that do even more good work than natural ones. The articles here sample a variety of such efforts.
How nature does the job
Biomimicry in design and architecture
Small-scale but intriguing mixes of living materials with high tech
All from Anthropocene Magazine, where such stories are regular features:
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