Janine Benyus

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Janine Benyus is author of Biomimicry and cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild and Biomimicry Institute. Benyus coined the term in 1990 to describe the condition of imitating nature’s genius. At the Greenbuild Conference and Expo in Boston in November, she announced the release of AskNature.org, a part research/part social networking Web site funded by Autodesk. I sat down with her at the conference to discuss how she became a “biologist at the design table.”

Education
Well, I wanted to be a science writer but there was no science writing degree, so I took a five-year course in natural resources management to figure out how to investigate a system. They teach you everything from soils to wildlife to water, the whole thing. At the same time, I took an English literature degree with a writing major, so it was very schizophrenic going from poets—I was the head of the poetry magazine at Rutgers—to the folks with flannel shirts and buck knives, but that’s my life now. I knew I wanted to write about science, but there just wasn’t a program, so I basically created that.

What did you do out of school?
School was exhausting, so I took a little break and did a co-op thing and wrote speeches for the Forest Service. I went down there when I was 19 and got to their information shop, where I wound up being the chief speechwriter. I don’t know how that happened. That was kind of scary to me: that a 19 year old would be writing the chief’s speeches. From there, I started to work for Forest Service Research in St. Paul. I wrote my first book there; I wrote five natural history books, so Biomimicry is my sixth book.

What are you currently reading?
I’m reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman right now, and Sustaining Life [edited by Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein], which is the new thing about biodiversity and human health. It’s a big tome. It’s about why biodiversity is important to human health. It’s one of these large, multi-author things and it’s really definitive of all the things we’re learning in the health professions from organisms.

How did you become interested in biomimicry?
There really wasn’t a term “biomimicry.” I had written these five natural history books, and they were all about plant and animal adaptations. They’re about functional adaptations to place, so how a whale is able to dive deep into the ocean and slow its heartbeat down and all of those functional adaptations that allow organisms to live beautifully in place. I wrote about that over and over again, and one day I just said: “Wait a minute. Everything we’re trying to do, these organisms are doing, and they do it elegantly.” They make chemistry. They have the most amazing sensing technologies, building technologies, locomotion technologies, pumping technologies. Everywhere I looked, I started to see it as an engineer would, and what I realized was that engineers don’t ever get to see it. Architects don’t ever get to see it. They don’t take biology classes. So I asked: “Is there anybody at that Fertile Crescent between biology and design who’s actually taking the biology and saying how can we mimic it?”

The first paper I found was by people in Arizona State University who were looking at leaves and trying to create solar cells based on photosynthesis. I put it in a folder and said: “Well, what is this? I know they’re doing artificial photosynthesis, but really what is it?” I went to the dictionary and got bio and mimesis and I named the folder “biomimicry.” Then I just kept collecting until it was a file drawer, and then it was a cabinet, and it was like: “Whoa! Something’s happening. It doesn’t have a name, but something’s happening.” This was in 1990. I started collecting and I’ve been following it ever since.

A self-defined “biologist at the design table,” why did you focus your interest on design?
I didn’t. The design community did. The book came out in ‘97. I went back to write my next book and the phone started to ring. First it was the architecture community. The first talk I ever gave, Jane Jacobs asked me to come. Then I gave a talk at an AIA environmental committee [COTE] meeting in Chattanooga, and I thought this is a great thing. What happened was the design profession and then companies started to call—companies like Interface—which wanted to do bio-inspired designs and asked: “Can you bring a biologist over to our design table session?” I just sat in my home office looking around and thinking, it’s just me.

About that time, a woman called Danya Baumeister, who’s my business partner at the Biomimicry Guild, was taking a PhD at university. She read my book and said: “Can I come and talk to you? I think this is what I want to do.” I said: “What do you mean this is what you want to do?” We started to think and I said I’m getting all these calls from the design community, so we cooked up workshops and talked about how to take the noun biomimicry and turn it into a verb; how to actually look to the natural world for models and then emulate what we see. That’s how the biologist at the design table profession got started. It was the design and architecture community that basically had the imagination to say: “We need to pull up another chair to the design table.” We pulled up human factors. We’ve pulled in psychologists. We’ve pulled in all kinds of people to the design table, and now it’s time to bring biologists.

Biologists had been there, but they had been doing environmental impact statements because they had basically been saying how many fishes and frogs were going to die as a result of this building project, so to have biologists come in upstream in the design process is great. We can ask questions like: “How can we build a building in Saudi Arabia that deflects sand like a Sandfish lizard so that we don’t have to wash the building.” That is what they do in Saudi Arabia. They wash the buildings with precious water.

There are all kinds of organisms that live in sand storms all the time. That’s actually one of the projects we’re working on: this particular kind of skin that is slipperier than Teflon and polished steel. It has a particular structure that when the sand hits it, each sand grain rides on about 200 ridges, so there’s very little contact. The Sandfish lizard swims through the loose sand dunes. It’s very rarely on the top of the sand. It’s underneath, but it stays glossy and it doesn’t abrade, which is because of the structure. Putting that on a building skin, for instance, sounds unusual, but it’s basically the most natural thing in the world to look at an organism that has been handling sand storms without water, without cleaning itself for millions of years. If you really want to know something about how to live in a landscape, ask the plants and animals that live there. They’re the answer to the question the land’s asking. Architects will study local culture and see the vernacular there. This is another level of that.

It sounds a lot like the American Indian philosophy of looking at the four worlds: natural, animal, human, and spirit.
They were biomimics. I think when we lived closer to the landscape we paid really close attention to the fine details of our world and we paid particular attention to organisms that we admire. So, if you were fishing and you made nets, you would pay real attention to spider webs and [ask] how that’s done…We used to do that naturally, and so I think when you talk about Native American tradition and indigenous peoples and how they looked at the wisdom in the natural world, wisdom was: “How do you live here in a way that enhances this place? How do you live well on the lands you settle?” They paid attention to the patterns of that landscape. This is what we’re trying to get back to in our work with HOK, for instance. The first thing we do in our building charrette is take people to an example of a native ecosystem that would be there if we weren’t building. If you’re in Phoenix for instance, you go out to a desert and learn a lot of lessons about how to catch water. Desert organisms are a map of the water availability there.

Those kinds of lessons are not one size fits all. They’re very locally adapted lessons, but it takes going out and actually seeing a place, but not in the same way that we think about going out and siting a building. It’s a different kind of site visit. It’s a functional site visit.

What advice would you give to architects about designing sustainably and incorporating biomimicry?
Get outside and trust your powers of observation. I think that architects are incredibly good at walking into a place, as Mr. Alexander said, and intuiting the pattern language of buildings and the patterns that humans need to feel comfortable, delighted, inspired, and productive. Use those same powers of observation and focus on function and go outside and ask: “How are these organisms getting water up to the top level of the canopy? How are they protecting themselves against insects? How are they protecting themselves against fire? How are they caching water for a dry time? How are they getting solar energy to the very lower branches? How are they rooting themselves?” Then ask the larger question: “How is it that this system actually grows more fertile as the years go by? How does it create more and more opportunities for life? How does it become more and more beautiful? And how can my building through time grow as gracefully and give back as abundantly?” So, look at the system after you look at the patterns of the pieces. Look at the wisdom of the system.