00:04:03.800a nonprofit that empowers people to create nature-inspired solutions for a healthy planet.
00:04:09.420Undoubtedly the most recognized thought leader in the field, Janine's legacy includes inspiring
00:04:14.800millions through her work as an innovator, speaker, and as the biologist at the design table,
00:04:21.080using 3.8 billion years worth of brilliant time-tested solutions. So Janine, I am sincerely
00:04:29.280honored to have you on the show today. Your life's work energizing humanity to once again
00:04:35.480live humbly as a fledgling organism on earth is just truly incredible. And my deepest welcomes
00:04:43.020to you, Janine. Oh, thank you for having me. I just want to jump right into biomimicry and
00:04:49.860the idea to look to nature for innovation. And it really sparks awe of the brilliant
00:04:56.220adaptations that surround us in every ecosystem. I've heard you say that amidst such immense
00:05:02.680earthly diversity, life carries a hidden unity. So I'd love if you could begin by telling us some
00:05:09.080of the unifying principles of life and how our industrial approach to science and synthetic
00:05:14.940chemistry are fundamentally incompatible with such life-sustaining principles.
00:05:21.300That's a great place to start. I've spent my life in the natural world and reading about
00:05:27.680the natural world and writing about the natural world. And there is this hidden unity in the
00:05:34.980diversity. It's what gives me hope, actually, because we are part of nature, obviously. And so
00:05:42.160the impulse to do this is within us as well. What organisms do is they find a way over long
00:05:52.820periods of evolutionary time this is rewarded over and over again this impulse which is to
00:05:59.100continue life over the long haul and to fit in over the long haul and what organisms are always
00:06:07.200doing of course is taking care of their of their offspring but what they really do the really the
00:06:14.760ones that have succeeded and have been here you know over this 3.8 billion years they're the ones
00:06:21.180that have figured out that in order to take care of your offspring, not just in this generation,
00:06:25.820but 10,000 generations from now, the only way you can do that is to take care of the place that's
00:06:31.820going to take care of your offspring. So what life has learned to do is build soil, clean air,
00:06:40.880purify water, and cycle nutrients. And in that, in everything that life does,
00:06:48.460life creates conditions conducive to life so that really for me is the design brief
00:06:56.720of our time you know if we as a part of nature and as as you said a young species on this planet
00:07:04.920if we're going to become a welcome species on this planet we have to learn to create systems
00:07:11.880that in everything we do the byproduct is creating conditions conducive to life
00:07:16.800and life you know life does that in in life-friendly ways okay so you mentioned for
00:07:23.600instance how we make things how we relate to the material world life has to manufacture
00:07:32.060its shells and its its webs and its nests in the same in or near its own body so in order to do
00:07:44.240that, it has learned how to use non-toxic chemicals and to create non-toxic chemicals,
00:07:52.400how to make materials at body temperature and in water. You know, if you think about a spider's
00:07:59.240web, five times stronger ounce for ounce than steel. And yet it's basically, you know, the
00:08:05.920flies and crickets that fly into the web. And then those are manufactured at room temperature,
00:08:11.740right at body temperature and in water using this safe subset of the periodic table when you start
00:08:20.860to see we call them life's principles we've basically looked at what do all organisms have
00:08:25.520in common or most organisms have in common and that's one of the things is how they make things
00:08:32.680you know they use current solar energy they make things in ways that allow them to live in or near
00:08:38.840their manufacturing plant. And you think about, well, could we possibly do that? And there are
00:08:44.540people working on that, working on these fields of green chemistry, self-assembly, water-based
00:08:51.020chemistry, rather than toxic solvents, low-pressure chemistry, low-temperature chemistry.
00:08:59.000There are people working on this. And when you learn how to do chemistry in that way,
00:09:04.380And, you know, that's the basis of everything that we make. You are starting to be more and more plant-like, right? You're becoming more like the organisms that are outside my window right now and in every moment are creating miracle materials silently and in ways that I don't need to wear a hard hat or eye goggles, right, or a gas mask.
00:09:28.460so that's our future if we're going to fit in here is to figure out how to how to do everything we do
00:09:34.720not just in making things but how we build and how we power ourselves how we grow our food in ways
00:09:40.000that create conditions conducive to life goodness thank you so much for that just beautiful
00:09:47.460introduction and this is a thought that i sometimes struggle with and i see that as there are infinite
00:09:56.020unique expressions of earth there's also infinite innovations to possibly develop
00:10:03.100but i question how we make decisions on where our creative impetus and energy is best put
00:10:11.620i'm so excited about biomimicry for earth renewal but i'm also wary of corporations and industry
00:10:20.440abusing biomimetic principles to perpetrate this over-consumptive death culture. And I would just
00:10:29.280love to hear your thoughts on how and where we draw the line to ensure biomimicry is not exploited
00:10:36.120to prolong the unnecessary selfish comforts of human civilization, but instead helps humans
00:10:43.440find a harmonious place for the long haul? Let's look at that. I certainly do. You know,
00:10:51.46020 years ago when I started to see this field evolving, emerging, it was a very faint signal
00:10:58.440at that point. And I also thought, wow, is this going to be the next gold rush that we,
00:11:09.120as Francis Bacon said torture nature for her secrets and then use use that knowledge to
00:11:16.760to build a more efficient well right that more efficient way to extract from from the earth
00:11:24.340I thought long and hard about what are the questions when you come to the natural world
00:11:30.580with with a question about how you should how shall we live here the questions are
00:11:38.060what would nature do here whenever you're about to design something? What would nature do here?
00:11:43.560And the here is very important because it has to do with what's appropriate locally because the
00:11:48.280world is not monolithic. And the second question is what wouldn't nature do here, which is just
00:11:55.660as important. So biomimics also look at what is not very common in the natural world. Transgenic
00:12:02.960engineering putting you know finding fish genes inside strawberries to produce frost resistant
00:12:09.920strawberries that doesn't happen right and there's something teaching us in that and the third
00:12:18.320questions after what would nature do here and what wouldn't nature do here the question is why
00:12:25.020and why not because if you're looking at nature as model emulating nature you can do that and
00:12:33.100create a torpedo that is shaped like a penguin which has been done but if you don't ask that
00:12:39.860next question which is what wouldn't nature do here right so would nature use these things in
00:12:44.720the service of destroying wantonly no no and why and why not that's that's nature as
00:12:54.680as mentor, right? Looking at nature as mentor. So you look at nature as model,
00:12:58.440as measure, and as mentor. Asking why and why not, that's where we sort of learn the ropes of
00:13:08.340how to be an earthling, right? You look at the natural world and you say, how is it that nature
00:13:16.240is not just creating more stuff? You know, nature doesn't create things, it creates things that
00:13:21.100disappear into systems when you do biomimicry at a deeper level not just a shallow we're going to
00:13:28.900recreate the form or the shape of something um we ask the people that we work with to also look at
00:13:36.540not just the form but also how would nature make this you know what's the process
00:13:41.720and then what is the ecosystem level strategy you know what is this necessary this thing that
00:13:50.400we're building? Is it beautiful? Does it fit within an ecosystem that will eventually regenerate the
00:13:58.900planet? And when we work with corporations, at this time in history, you're working with the
00:14:04.980people who make our world. So they are us. We use what they make for us. So it's our system right
00:14:12.340now. And we believe that if we're not working there, we're not going to get through this
00:14:19.180evolutionary knothole. I mean, we really, in order to scale these kinds of ideas,
00:14:23.880we have to have small companies, NGOs, municipalities, communities, and corporations
00:14:31.780starting to follow some of these design principles. Otherwise, I fear we'll lose a lot more of the
00:14:39.560biodiversity that we love if we're not working to change from the inside out. And I mean,
00:14:46.500from the inside of the person out the people we work with the champion adapters we call them
00:14:51.240the champions inside of these companies they're sort of roller skating in the halls of power
00:14:57.020many of them are people who want to see their grandchildren have a different life
00:15:04.220so they're trying to change things from within and for us that means changing how we make things
00:15:11.160and also how we actually run the companies that we work in.
00:15:15.420What's interesting now is that can we ask questions like how does nature cooperate?
00:15:39.380and it can be used for any ideology so the question of what's worth doing with biomimicry
00:15:50.820is enormously important and we answer that question by asking what would nature do here
00:15:58.960what wouldn't nature do here why and why not because life on earth has figured out
00:16:04.560what works what's appropriate what lasts and also what's worth doing the deeper why lessons why are
00:16:13.380we doing this can also come from the natural world that's what we're trying to bring to
00:16:18.300innovators everywhere i think about how we can do things on scale with integrity and it's a
00:16:27.740question that i think we need to ask ourselves just like how you're saying
00:16:32.420what would the earth do? Why would the earth do? In what way? And it feels so necessary to be able
00:16:41.360to bring those questions in when we are designing the systems that we want to live in. Now I'd like
00:16:49.480to ask you about biomimicry and regional landscape and urban design. And I was just astounded to read
00:16:57.500about the project you worked on in Lavasa near Mumbai, which receives 27 feet of water during
00:17:04.980monsoon season. And from what I understand, the development, which was inspired by the native
00:17:10.800forest capacity to withstand such intense rains without significant erosion, yielded a 30%
00:17:18.020reduction in carbon emissions, 65% reduction in potable water consumption, and a 95% reduction
00:17:26.180in waste sent to the landfill. So would you tell us more about or how this design came about
00:17:32.820and then how does it emulate the native forest and does it incorporate the concept of a
00:17:38.640circular economy which is guided by waste-free flows in the natural world?
00:17:44.340This was a development and it was a master plan for development and we've been asked quite a bit
00:17:52.060in the last 20 years to work on city planning, urban planning, all the way down to the building
00:17:58.200scale, regional urban planning, all the way down to the building scale. And the question became,
00:18:02.700what is a biomimetic community? What is it? And for us, if you want your community
00:18:10.340to function like an ecosystem, the gold standard for that, the ideal for that,
00:18:16.420would be to look for local ecosystems, the healthiest local ecosystems you can find,
00:18:23.740the wildland next door. Go there and ask, what are the ecosystem services, that is the beneficial
00:18:32.100services being produced by this healthy ecosystem? Because really that's the exhale of a healthy
00:18:38.120ecosystem. It's the signature of a healthy ecosystem is what it gives away. So clean air,
00:18:44.380How much air does it clean a year? How much per acre? How much water does it clean? How much water does it store in a storm? How much sediment does it retain and keep from eroding? That's what we do. We call these ecological performance standards. We say that a community should be functionally indistinguishable from the wildland next door.
00:19:05.980and that's a really aspirational goal for any community i mean right now you know living
00:19:14.280building challenge and other things are looking at net zero creating you know basically meeting
00:19:19.560your own needs on site the next step is can we actually produce positive ecosystem services
00:19:25.540right can the air leaving our community be cleaner than it was when it came in
00:19:30.240is just incredible can we create corridors for wildlife right can we store the amount of water
00:19:37.420that we need and then some to send on more water downstream this is what ecosystems do right so
00:19:44.460we're challenging ourselves to meet those metrics we call them generous cities because we see
00:19:51.800ecosystems as being generous you know what we did in lavasa one of the cool things we did know we
00:19:58.080Our reference habitat, our healthy habitat, was the Western Ghats, which is an ecological hotspot that's been heavily studied, thank goodness for us.
00:20:06.260The land that we were working with was a very hilly area.
00:20:11.740And again, in these monsoons, just rivers of red earth would run into the lakes and paint the lakes red, literally.
00:20:20.180They were bringing bulldozers down into the lake dump trucks and getting the sediment back and bringing it back up on the hillsides.
00:20:27.160But when we went to the Western Ghats, we saw that there was even in these monsoons, there was very little erosion. So that became 100% erosion control became the goal of this so that they changed the way they did the foundations, they changed the way they did the roadways, all kinds of things on the landscaping to make sure that there was, you know, there were awnings and the buildings and the ecostructure or the green spaces.
00:20:56.440We ask those cumulatively to produce these ecosystem services, right?
00:21:01.120So we were saying, okay, well, one of the ways that this rainfall is intercepted is in all the layers of the moist, deciduous forest.
00:21:10.140So can we recreate that layering in our buildings with awnings, with kinds of landscaping that's going to cover the ground completely,
00:21:18.820and also the kinds of vegetation that's going to intercept raindrops so they lose all of their damaging energy?
00:21:25.340So that became really a design model for the development.
00:21:30.480But the coolest thing was that we realized that the moist deciduous forest from the top, like if you were flying over it, you'd see this rolling canopy of dark, dark leaves and trees at different heights.
00:21:46.260But they have this rolling appearance.
00:21:48.460And what happens is that wind going over that during the monsoon, up to 30 percent of the water is turned into water vapor and is volleyed back up into the clouds.
00:22:01.640And those clouds go to inland India and water inland India.
00:22:10.760And what we're doing when we cut those trees, we lose that capability.
00:22:16.680Now, on this site, this site had been degraded for about 400 years.
00:22:20.540It hadn't had trees on it for 400 years.
00:22:23.580It had been degraded by overgrazing of goats.
00:22:27.020And so what we were doing was a restoration project in many ways.
00:22:30.960But we said that the buildings themselves, they were sort of these townhouses close.
00:22:36.500Think of like Italian Hill country sort of housing.
00:22:40.260And we said, why don't we make the roof lines different heights and with green roofs?
00:22:45.680So we recreate this hydro canopy, we called it, in our building, and we contribute to watering inland India.
00:22:57.380That idea, we would never have asked ourselves if we hadn't compared the function to how the wildland next door was performing.
00:23:08.180And this is what's really interesting to me about this exercise of comparing yourself to the wildland next door.
00:23:16.500The designs are very different as a result because the questions are different.
00:23:21.820For so long, we've asked, you know, will our buildings keep us well, right?
00:23:26.040That's the new thing now, well.org, you know, well buildings.
00:23:30.020When we're inside the building, is the air quality good for us?
00:23:33.640Does it remind us of nature being inside the building?
00:23:36.160And I'm thinking, let's also extend that wellness outside the walls of the buildings, right? Do our buildings create well conditions for all life? When you have a framework like the ecosystem services framework, which is essentially, you know, things like pollinator support, biodiversity support, how much soil is being built each year, how much nitrogen and phosphorus is being cycled each year.
00:24:02.100you're asking yourself questions that normally we would never ask that of our buildings you know
00:24:09.500how much nitrogen and phosphorus are you cycling right but in asking that question you might
00:24:14.360actually wind up with composting toilets you might wind up with green roof that you know you're
00:24:20.900looking at the soil and building soil there building soil on every surface that you possibly
00:24:25.760can right if you're sequestering if you're asking to sequester carbon to have these buildings
00:24:30.880to sequester carbon dioxide. You might use the coral reef inspired concrete from Blue Planet,
00:24:38.860a company called Blue Planet in California, that's bubbling CO2 through brine to create
00:24:45.240limestone and the raw materials for concrete and road aggregate. But it sequesters CO2.
00:24:52.300You might use timbers in your interior to sequester CO2, sustainably grown timbers.
00:24:59.920That's something we didn't ask ourselves before.
00:25:02.680And I think if we're going to be a welcome species on the planet, you get to stay here when you learn to fit in.
00:25:09.940And learning to fit in means being a contributor to all the cycles, actually a welcome contributor, positive benefits for all.
00:37:04.300Blossoms of rich and woe will soon confess
00:37:12.300Cause I live in a garden, a garden of dreams
00:37:20.700Where the midnight sun shines down its blessings
00:37:28.000Cause I live in a garden, a garden of trees
00:37:36.580Where the midnight sun shines down its blessings
00:37:50.700This question arises for me that our overstressed and oversimplified
00:38:18.220agricultural systems, they speak to the toxic and competitive paradigm that has left
00:38:24.120countless biological relationships compromised or just lost entirely. And it seems that
00:38:32.160biomimetic agriculture is often less about innovation and more about humans learning
00:38:38.620how to once again be mutualistic facilitators, like you've been speaking of. And for example,
00:38:45.640restoring the fungal plant relationships in localized polycultures, which in turn,
00:38:51.220it uses less water, it builds soil, enhances resilience. And so I'm curious, what is your
00:38:58.040opinion on restoring historic biological partnerships in light of all that we don't
00:39:05.900know that's been lost? Does it make sense to fixate on restoring historic partnerships that
00:39:11.500now may be obsolete as the climate changes? Or is it more valuable to try and create conditions
00:39:19.900where opportunity for mutualistic adaptation, you know, adaptation of interspecies relationships
00:39:26.480is the greatest? I think it's the latter. I think we're at the point where, you know, just if you
00:39:36.140think about how many species are on the move right now as a result of climate change you know they're
00:39:42.520moving you know the meta studies have shown us that they're moving from south to north in order
00:39:48.660to get cool you know because it's getting too hot they're moving their ranges in other words they're
00:39:52.980moving from lower elevation to higher elevation the higher elevation organisms are having a really
00:39:58.900hard time when you have that kind of movement going on not everybody's going to get there and
00:40:04.220at the same time that's the fear right that that a flower moves and its pollinator doesn't yet
00:40:10.300right so you're gonna have and it's bloodlessly called ecological decouplings
00:40:15.400um and those are the things that really really really worry me when i work and i do for climate
00:40:24.480change i'm on the board a drawdown and a project drawdown which is a project to reverse climate
00:40:30.200change actually brings back to Holocene conditions. I do it as a biologist who knows that the world
00:40:38.020that we're in right now did evolve to, to excel in these conditions, right? And organisms are
00:40:44.540adaptable. Yes, they will move around, but not all of them will make it. So those historical
00:40:50.340landscapes, they can teach us a lot about what that land would be, what would be growing there.
00:40:58.860But I think we have to be a lot, lot more cognizant of the fact that the organisms that are inhabiting these places now may be somewhat different.
00:41:09.700And they're trying to work out their mutualistic couplings.
00:41:13.760You know, they're trying to imagine moving up into a new range and all of the adaptation that you have to do, right, to that climate changing condition, including the organisms that are in that habitat with you.
00:41:26.500So creating healthy conditions for them is really, I think, what we can do.
00:41:33.680I think that there's a move towards looking at functional traits of plant life, for instance, rather than fixating on species types.
00:41:45.580So when we're working with our urban planners, for instance, we're looking at what are the landscape attributes?
00:41:54.240we have an ipad enabled app that allows us to go into the reference habitat look at landscape
00:42:00.100attributes that are causing things like cooling temperatures in the summer it's a certain amount
00:42:05.440of shade cover certain amount leafy feria index and then when we go back to the built world site
00:42:10.860we say look try to create this amount of leaf area index right and and you can do that with
00:42:18.200perhaps different species right but the functional traits and of course using natives as much as you
00:42:25.240possibly can because they are food and nesting and shelter sites for organisms that is super super
00:42:31.500important but the functional traits now a lot of restoration ecologists are looking at these
00:42:36.060do you have these functional traits even if you're unfortunately the kind of tree that used to be
00:42:43.580able to survive there doesn't survive there can't survive there anymore you know in the southwest
00:42:48.240they're saying we've got 40 years before the pignon pines are gone so what is the function
00:42:52.880of the pignon pine and we have to get really smart about that it is a changing it's a changing world
00:43:00.140it is so then the function that is most selected for is going to be adaptability and so how do we
00:43:11.760can create conditions in which organisms can exercise their adaptive qualities. So in other
00:43:19.280words, that means don't overstress them by overgrazing or give them something that they need.
00:43:26.460I mean, in some cases where I'm living in the Bitterroot Valley, that's where holistic ranching
00:43:31.760comes in, where you've got actually mob grazing that mimics the buffalo and other ungulates that
00:43:38.000used to move in herds across the landscape. Can we mimic that? Because there's things happening
00:43:43.280that actually help open up that soil, create divots for water, fertilize that soil with
00:43:50.440urine and defecation. And can we sort of recreate some of those conditions that led to healthy,
00:43:59.080diverse ecosystems? And in that case, looking back at historical regimes like fire regimes,
00:44:05.700buffalo and mob mob grazing regimes i think those are pretty important but the focus on
00:44:13.060individual species may have to change with climate change yes i've been feeling that
00:44:20.040as well thinking about trying to restore ecosystems to historical species arrangements
00:44:28.640say 200 years ago but we're not living in the world 200 years ago and how do we
00:44:35.000take what we understand now and apply it to what could perhaps survive and be resilient
00:44:41.960into the future grazing the rotational grazing led me to this other thought i wanted to ask you
00:44:48.680about bio sequestration and in this age of unnaturally plentiful atmospheric carbon
00:44:56.340we're faced with just the overwhelming question of how to best draw it back down into the earth
00:45:03.080in the soil and designs such as perennial polycultures and rotational grazing, they're
00:45:09.960rising in recognition and practice. And I've also been hearing about methods that pull methane from
00:45:16.720the atmosphere to create biodegradable plastic or concrete that's assembled from CO2 and seawater.
00:45:24.600And I understand that carbon is a primary building block for life and that these techniques are
00:45:29.820earth inspired, but I'm admittedly hesitant about more concrete and more plastic. And I want to ask
00:45:38.020what happens when biomimetic plastic or concrete is left to degrade?
00:45:44.420Well, the concrete, it's basically a limestone, you know, it crumbles. I mean, essentially,
00:45:52.520when you take co2 and you sequester it into limestone or concrete you know you're doing
00:46:00.300geo sequestration in that case and i think it's incumbent on us to make sure that that
00:46:09.120that we continue to use that so in other words when it's no longer able to be used say in a
00:46:17.500building and there's a pile of rubble and construction waste can we take that limestone
00:46:22.040and then use it i was just talking to interface carpets who's a client of ours and and they're
00:46:27.620looking at using that as a filler for some of their carpets rather than mining limestone
00:46:34.280they want to look at co2 sequestering limestone and then and then using even at the end quote
00:46:42.120unquote end of that life how can they use it as a filler if they're not using it in their buildings
00:46:47.200And this idea of a circular economy, which you mentioned, is key. Because in any of these things, when you talk about making things, if you make them without any thought to how they are going to be remade, or remanufactured, or what they're going to turn into at the end of their current life, you're really not designing in a biomimetic way.
00:47:09.940Because, you know, in an ecosystem, for instance, say you've got a log that has fallen. We have a mistaken idea that life basically takes that log and breaks it down into its component parts. And those are then in the soil for other things. And it's not quite that stark as how that happens.
00:47:31.760What actually happens is that that log is then eaten by fungi.
00:47:37.140So the materials in the log get upcycled into the fungi, and then the fungi might create
00:47:42.720a mushroom and be nibbled on by a mouse, and that material gets upcycled into the mouse
00:47:48.120body, and that gets eaten by a hawk, and it's upcycled into the hawk body, along with some
00:48:37.040If it's in the technical loop, as a circular economy, folks talk about it.
00:48:41.700If it's metal, say, you would be putting it into another product.
00:48:44.680So the idea is not to make more products, but the idea is to get the products into cycles in which those materials of one product are put into another product quickly.
00:48:59.260Life has those, life has very, very quick fluxes, they're called, where you go from all of a sudden you're, you know, you're sitting in a cellulose and then you're turned into fungi.
00:49:11.020it isn't like the cellulose is taken apart and it's transported somewhere to a landfill
00:49:16.900right where then it'll be picked up it happens right it happens right there it happens locally
00:49:21.820so i'm really excited about things like 3d printing because i'm hoping that we'll be using
00:49:32.080local raw materials and we'll be able to take those local raw materials and print them into
00:49:39.640a new product. You know, when you go into your neighborhood kitchen store, you'll bring in a
00:49:44.820spatula that's broken, they'll put it into the 3D printer, an enzymatic bath will take that,
00:49:50.360and then instantly it'll be brought back to life as a spoon or as another spatula.
00:49:56.680With little leakage of material, you don't see a lot of leakage out of a healthy forest.
00:50:02.300You know, it's using the material and reusing it over and over. That again is biomimicry at the
00:50:08.280at the systems level it's not about creating more and more stuff we for 20 years now we've been
00:50:16.700trying to answer you know what would nature do here and asking you know how does nature
00:50:20.900working for people like patagonia and saying you know how does nature repel water it doesn't use
00:50:26.120teflon you know and then we go and we learn in as many different ways as we can amoeba through zebra
00:50:31.600we call it. How do bacteria repel water? How do fungi? How do plants? And then we bring those to
00:50:39.860the inventors. But those incredible design principles are our scientific heritage. They
00:50:45.940are our commons. We feel really strongly about that. So it worried me to think that people might
00:50:53.000be learning how a gecko walks on walls. And then they might want to patent how a gecko walks on
00:51:00.660walls and then be the only one who can make a tape or whatever, a non-toxic adhesive. That would be
00:51:07.700an example of patenting the scientific knowledge. And I was worried about that because, you know,
00:51:16.120we can bring a bacterium to the patent office and if we've changed one gene, we can patent it and
00:51:21.800own it. How do you keep this from happening with nature's ideas, with nature's designs? So what we
00:51:29.900were told early on when we asked a lot of lawyers this is that you know the way a gecko walks is
00:51:37.120written up in the scientific papers but it's not published in in a design context there because it
00:51:44.120may just be a paper about geckos and how they attract mates and on the side it might be talking
00:51:49.060about how they walk right how they stick to walls so they said what you want to do is you want to
00:51:56.300publish that scientific information in a design context and then it becomes prior art what's
00:52:03.160called prior art which keeps people from patenting the method of how a gecko walks they can patent
00:52:10.580a tape that they make but they can't patent the gecko itself or the way it walks and so that's
00:52:17.840when we started asknature.org which is a website that tries to we're trying to organize biological
00:52:25.040information by design and engineering and management function by functions so how does
00:52:32.140nature cooperate and up comes biological strategies or how does nature adhere to surfaces up comes
00:52:37.760the gecko the fact that we have it published in a design context uh protects it so we are trying
00:52:46.240so i would encourage everybody it's a wiki kind of a form and you can also upload strategies of
00:52:53.700organisms that you love and just by putting them in a design context that is what might we learn
00:52:59.840from this the minute you answer that question it becomes protected that's important to us
00:53:05.260so important thank you for sharing that i feel like a lot of people in the audience
00:53:10.580need to know that i think a lot of people in general need to know that information
00:53:16.240and it's really something that we believe in it for the wild is open source information especially
00:53:23.360when it's for the betterment of the entire earth. So thank you for making sure that we
00:53:29.600heard that. And to go back to carbon sequestration, I would just really love to hear your thoughts on
00:53:38.380why industrial reforestation is not the most effective way to sequester carbon. And how can
00:53:45.660reforestation efforts be more biomimetic unfortunately you know this idea of plantation
00:53:52.920growth trees and plantations right this is part of the human our tendency is to focus on one parameter
00:54:01.900like growth or growth rate as you know as a proxy for sequestering more carbon well we now know it's
00:54:14.080It's more complicated than that. Right. And that if you want if you want healthy soils, which is what where actually the lion's share of the carbon will be stored, you need deep rooted species.
00:54:30.840You need a variety of root lengths and depths.
00:54:36.340You need a diverse amount of species that are, in turn, feeding their sugars and starches to a diverse microbial ecology.
00:54:46.420It's that diversity that allows us, that will allow us to store carbon, even in years that are dry or unusually wet.
00:54:56.460There's two kinds of diversity in natural ecosystems.
00:55:00.060And one is response diversity, which is there's enough diversity of different kinds of species that with different kinds of capabilities, some of them are really good in dry conditions.
00:55:13.540Some of them are really good in wet conditions.
00:55:15.820That response diversity is what we need.
00:55:19.340So having one species of plantation tree is not the way to do that.
00:55:23.780The other kind of diversity is called functional diversity.
00:55:26.800and that's looking out at my pasture right now of native grasses that if we just had native grasses
00:55:33.800it wouldn't have functional diversity we also have to have legumes we have to have nitrogen
00:55:39.040fixers more than one kind of nitrogen fixer you know you've got lupines as well right you've got
00:55:45.040then you've got response diversity so you never only have one nitrogen fixer so when we again
00:55:53.320when we start to think functionally of how these, you know, mapping the relationships and looking,
00:55:59.100asking each of these organisms, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?
00:56:02.980You start to realize really the map of what it takes to have a healthy ecosystem, come what may.
00:56:11.160And we've learned enough from industrial agriculture, one species for miles, pesticides
00:56:17.060killing everything in the soil we've learned how brittle that is and so to apply that to forestry
00:56:24.020is a is a repeating sins of our fathers and mothers right um so i'm glad we had this
00:56:30.720conversation me too i know we'll see each other yeah at some point yeah i can't wait to meet you
00:56:36.620in person well enjoy the spring the springing spring and um yeah i will right now yeah all
00:56:46.160enjoy your day thank you bye thank you
00:56:49.640it's high on a mountain the warm winds are blowing and where the winds are blowing to
00:57:01.620there ain't no way of knowing the mountain grass is short it's dry and close to burning
00:58:36.860The jaybirds call, my mind grows dry and thirsty, as the memories linger, drifting on the wind, through the mountains like a river, sweet smell of pine, tall western cedar, drifting on the wind, through the mountains like a river.