Where’s the Blueprint for a Truly Sustainable Revolution?
In the new book: The Shark’s Paintbrush: Biomimicry and how Nature is inspiring innovation
Jay Harman’s new book “The Shark’s Paintbrush: Biomimicry and how Nature is inspiring innovation” launched in July 2013. Harman is a leading figure in the biomimicry movement.
Described as a “visionary” and “futurist” by the Science Channel, Jay’s expertise couldn’t be timelier. An award-winning entrepreneur and biomimetic inventor, Harman has taken a hands-on approach to his lifelong fascination with the deep patterns found in nature. In the process, he has founded and grown multi-million-dollar research and manufacturing companies that develop, patent, and license innovative products, ranging from prize-winning watercraft to interlocking building bricks, afterburners for aircraft engines, and non-invasive technology for measuring blood glucose and other electrolytes.
Here Harman introduces biomimicry and answers timely questions on the prospects for biomimicry in solving the world’s toughest environmental problems.
1. What is biomimicry?
Nature has already solved just about every problem that humans are facing — whether in energy use, climate control, food production, chemistry, packaging, transportation, or any other human endeavor. Biomimicry is a rapidly emerging design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies.
2. Was there an “ah ha” moment when you knew nature was to guide your work?
I fell in love with skin-diving and fishing when I was 10-years old. When I saw the efficiency and power of how fish swim, compared to my clumsy efforts, I was captivated and knew that I would learn from nature the rest of my life.
3. What are two or three of the most interesting and consequential biomimetic solutions coming on line at this time?
There are so many exciting developments that it’s hard to pick just a few. Biomimicry is having an increasing impact on the built environment, such as in ventilation systems for buildings that use no energy that are modeled on termite mounds or prairie dog tunnels, self-cleaning paint modeled on a lotus leaf, or completely recyclable carpet tiles. It’s also impacting transportation, from safer cars that avoid crashes by using bees’ “swarm logic,” to planes and ships that use less fuel due to “sharkskin” paint that creates less drag. Biomimicry is also offering tremendous benefits to the field of industrial chemistry, by teaching chemists how to design molecules that do the job without side effects or toxins.
4. How does the Biomimicry, or Sustainable, Revolution differ from the Industrial Revolution?
The Industrial Revolution was based on a model of “heat, beat, and treat.” That model uses a lot of heat, a lot of pressure and a lot of chemicals to melt, bend, and alter materials into tools that were advanced for their time, but continue to generate a host of deleterious side-effects, including toxins, waste, and inefficiency. We don’t have to be stuck with the “heat, beat, and treat” model. Nature is, by its nature, clean, green, and sustainable — by copying nature, modern scientific methods and tools can now allow us to build fantastically more efficient and benign solutions.
5. How big a deal is biomimicry for business? Or in other words: show me the money.
No less than the overhaul of the entire industrial world is possible. Biomimicry is already a multibillion-dollar industry and projections are that, by 2025, biomimicry could represent $1 trillion of gross domestic product, including $300 billion of U.S. GDP. Another $50 billion could be counted, just in the U.S., from the consequent reduction of carbon dioxide pollution and preservation of natural resources. It’s estimated that 1.6 million U.S. jobs could be created by biomimetic businesses in the next fifteen years.
6. In your book you review the difficulties in creating a biomimicry company. What are those hurdles?
We’ve found three ways that biomimicry businesses differ from other “start-up” companies. Biomimicry companies are almost always tackling big problems that have been addressed, even if sub-optimally, by decades of entrenched industrial development, including transportation, medicine, or energy efficiency. That means there are existing, multi-national market players and infrastructure that increase inertia and resistance to change. There are translation issues when bringing biological insights across to the engineering and business worlds. Finally, scaling up from a biological insight to mass-production takes time, and that means money. A company that is aware of and prepared for these challenges can better succeed.
7. Is it getting any easier now than 5 years ago?
Absolutely. Biomimicry is rapidly becoming a household word. Corporations and governments are seeing the benefits of learning from nature and are more open to trying innovative solutions.
8. What are some examples of biomimetic solutions on a large scale within the corporate world?
Interface is a good example of how biomimicry can transform an existing corporation. This highly successful company uses nature as a business mentor while it creates recyclable, replaceable, environmentally friendly floor tiles. Interface now has a $750 million market capitalization value. Its four thousand employees share a sense of higher purpose and have a strong, positive company culture.
9. What role does government have in fostering biomimicry solutions?
Government can play a critical role in fostering biomimetic solutions, by using “carrots” in the form of grants, which are an outstanding way to support early stage research, and by using “sticks” in the form of standards and regulations that enforce sustainable solutions.
10. The world is burning up and the outlook for the near future is pretty grim according to most climate scientists. How can biomimicry change the world?
I am completely confident that the solutions to our very real and pressing problems are available and accessible through biomimicry. Quite simply, the design discipline of biomimicry transforms the ways that we solve problems. By creating conditions conducive to life at every step of the problem solving process, we can create a healthier environment with safer and more efficient transportation, medicines, homes and cities, agriculture, and on and on. The future is both bright and exciting.
More on The Shark’s Paintbrush
Biomimicry Solutions Explored in New Book
White Cloud Press publishes Jay Harman’s debut book on how to capitalize the power of biomimicry in new technologies: The Shark’s Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature Is Inspiring Innovation
In a world of depleted resources, entrepreneurs and scientists are turning to nature to find inspiration for future products, and how to build them in a way that is not only more energy and cost-efficient but friendlier to the environment. Jay Harman has been at the forefront of this movement as a nature-inspired designer of fans and mixers, and founder of a company to bring these products to market. His new book, The Shark’s Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature Is Inspiring Innovation, is equal parts memoir, explanation of biomimicry breakthroughs, and business advice.
A native of Australia and now a U.S. citizen working out of San Rafael, California, Harman is a gifted storyteller and successful businessman. Best selling author Paul Hawken says of Harman and The Shark’s Paintbrush, “Imagine Indiana Jones, Huckleberry Finn, and Erasmus Darwin rolled into one person, and you will have some sense of what it is like to roam and see the world through Jay Harman\’s biomimetic eyes. The Shark’s Paintbrush is a memo of kindness from the living world in a time of crisis and doubt: life in all its intricacy offers untold possibilities for the transformation of civilization.”
Biomimicry is at the heart of the next revolution, the Sustainable Revolution. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers have built things by a process now known as “heat, beat, and treat.” They’d start with a raw material, use enormous amounts of energy to heat it, twist it into shape with heavy machinery, and then maintain its design, strength, and durability with toxic chemicals.
Biomimicry, the science of employing nature to advance sustainable technology, is arguably one of the hottest new business concepts. A force of change in industries as diverse as construction, biomedical devices and pharmaceuticals, transportation, and information technology, biomimicry is inspiring a new industrial revolution that will dramatically alter the landscape of the business world.
Harman encourages readers to respect nature’s talent as the ultimate designer of more effective, efficient, powerful, profitable, and cleaner technologies. Furthermore, he highlights some of the most profound biotherapeutic discoveries made by applying nature’s secrets to biotech and the business of public health.
Among the many fascinating topics Jay explores:
• What the human heart and dust devils have in common, and how this parallel structure can lead to better technologies in medicine.
• How studying seaweed can lead to resistance-free antibiotics.
• How the noxious-smelling durian fruit can offer ideas for helping humans live on Mars.
• Why a diabetic may want to pay respects to the North American gila monster.
• How the blowfly maggot could lead to breakthroughs in materials science, helping to lower production costs and manufacture higher-efficiency substances.
• How the tiny scales making up the skin of sharks are being replicated on boats and airplanes to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency.
• Why businesses need to start operating like a redwood forest to not just survive, but thrive—and how to do so.
The Shark’s Paintbrush is organized into three parts. In Part I, readers gain a basic understanding of biomimicry in action both from a business perspective and futurist outlook. Harman describes how profitable this industry will be, becoming a $100 billion business sector relatively soon. An examination of the Worldwide Patent Database between 1985 and 2005 shows the number of appearances of the terms “bioinspired,” “biomimicry,” and “biomimetics” jumped 93 percent, compared with a 2.7 percent increase in patents overall. In the past five years, universities and research institutions in the United States, Mexico, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere have opened centers focusing on the subject. And according to the Biomimicry 3.8 founder Janine Benyus, “We are at that early, explosive-growth phase.” Sun Microsystems co-founder and venture capital tycoon Vinod Khosla has declared biomimicry “the VC target of the twenty first century.”
In Part II, Harman takes readers on an in-depth journey through a variety of biomimetic applications currently in research and development. Readers meet an eclectic community of biomimics in all corners of the globe, from classic lab scientists toiling with test tubes to visionaries that take to the outdoors, such as Zimbabwean architect, Mick Pearce, who constructed a midrise building modeled after termite mounds, thus maintaining a nearly constant temperature of 31 degrees Celsius even as the outside temperature varies from 3 to 42 degrees.
In Part III, Jay reveals the three principles of running a bio-inspired business and details how to reorganize your business to take part in this tremendous opportunity. He explores the challenges to nature-inspired technology, offers ideas on how we can overhaul our current industrial world, and leaves readers feeling informed and optimistic about this new horizon for humanity. Readers will gain a wealth of practical strategies to consider, including the 10 tips for business success based on how forests naturally operate.
The book launched in July 2013 and Harman will be supporting the book with lectures and talks around the country. He will be a featured presenter at the Aspens Ideas Festival in June and at the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, and speak at the San Diego Zoo’s Global Centre for Bioinspiration this fall.
Lectures and presentations at universities and science centers are being planned for Fall 2013 through Summer 2014.
The Shark’s Paintbrush is available nationally from all major booksellers including Amazon.com, independent bookstores, Barnes & Noble stores, and from the publisher at www.whitecloudpress.com
More information on Jay Harman and the book can be found at: http://thesharkspaintbrush.com
or
http://thesharkspaintbrush.com/the-book
