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When the forest and the city are functionally indistinguishable, then we know we have reached sustainability.

Janine Benyus

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Janine Benyus
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Inventor
Science Writer
Scientist
New Jersey
United States
Janine M. Benyus
Forest
Reached
Forests
City
Cities
Functionally
Indistinguishable
Sustainability

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Organisms dont think of CO2 as a poison. Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block.
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Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that's already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn.
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The answers to our questions are everywhere we just need to change the lens with which we see the world.
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The real survivors are the Earth inhabitants that have lived millions of years without consuming their ecological capital, the base from which all abundance flows.
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There are three types of biomimicry - one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem's level, like building a nature-inspired city.
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Water is at the center of every chemical reaction, and therefore should be the earths most precious gift.
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Cooperation in the most natural thing in the world
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For the 99 percent of the time we've been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.
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Conserving habitats is a wellspring for the next industrial revolution.
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The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.
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Everyone is trying to jump on the biomimic bandwagon. But a cork floor is not biomimicry. Neither is using bacteria to clean water.
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For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.
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There are literally as many ideas as there are organisms.
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Nature works with five polymers. Only five polymers. In the natural world, life builds from the bottom up, and it builds in resilience and multiple uses.
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In reality, we haven't escaped the gravity of life at all. We are still beholden to ecological laws, the same as any other life-form.
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Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones.
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What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked, 'How would nature solve this?'
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Trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress. This algorithm has been put into a software program that's now being used to make bridges lightweight, to make building beams lightweight.
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Virtually all native cultures that have survived without fouling their nests have acknowledged that nature knows best, and have had the humility to ask the bears and wolves and ravens and redwoods for guidance.
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Listening to nature's operating instructions.
Janine Benyus