How Do You See Nature?
With the advent of water-related issues in cities, mostly man-made, there is a need to act fast and come up with solutions that are already working. What I mean here is that we need to start borrowing more of our technological solutions by biomimicking or biomimetics and getting ideas for solutions through bioinspiration. Even if we create more technology, which I do not think we need to, let’s build technology using ideas that already work. The natural world, especially at the micro-level, currently functions better than most of the technology we build ourselves.
In the Nature published research paper “Nature-Inspired Micropatterns”, Yunhua Wang et al, offer up ideas on how we can borrow biological micropatterns from nature to build solutions to many of our current problems. The authors consider the idea of using patterned materials or structures with feature sizes in the nanometer to micrometer range. The small size results in effects that can impart novel functions without altering bulk properties of the end product. An example of this can be found in the solution that some scientists have developed to address water contamination and filtration. Contamination in water continues to be an increasing issue in the US. Based on an estimate by the United Stated Geological Service, ~40% of taps are currently spewing out contaminated water, contaminated by 12 (out of the 10k) Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of synthetic chemicals used in a wide variety of common applications (PFAS). PFAS are now known to contain carcinogens which are dangerous to humans. Data currently suggests that these are now everywhere around us and there is a need to solve this increasing problem.
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Bioinspiration - A 'creative approach based on the observation of biological systems' that is influenced by nature but not a direct imitation.
Biomimicry - Derives from the Greek words bios (life) and mimesis (imitate). Involves studying and imitating nature's designs and processes to solve human problems.
Biomimetics - Similar to biomimicry, involves imitating nature. The paper cites the ISO definition of biomimetics as the "interdisciplinary cooperation of biology and technology to solve practical problems through functional analysis of biological systems, abstraction into models and application to a solution."
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Unai Pascual et al, in the research paper Diverse Values of Nature for Sustainability, argue that achieving sustainability requires recognizing and integrating the diverse values of nature into decision-making. The authors present a typology of four interrelated layers of value (in our perceptions of nature):
Worldviews and knowledge systems: The different ways people conceive and interact with the world
Broad values: Moral principles and life goals held by individuals, groups and, institutions.
Specific values: Contextual judgments regarding the importance of nature as means to ends (instrumental), inherent worth (intrinsic), or through relationships (relational).
Value indicators: Quantitative and qualitative measures used to denote nature's contributions.
the authors find that current policies and decisions tend to prioritize a subset of values linked to markets. Essentially we think of nature in terms of resources and resource availability for our economic needs. The base layer of ‘value’.
As much as we desire to solve this increasing problem based on new technology, we will only address this by going back to the true source of all the solutions we have to climate problems; nature. And this is what some scientists out of UBC and China’s Sichuan University have done. According to the article in Futurism,
“researchers out of Canada's University of British Columbia and China's Sichuan University, created the "bioCap" purifying filter which is comprised of compounds from fruit and wood that are able to eliminate almost all microplastics in water…Using fruit tannins — the chemicals that make under-ripe fruit taste bad — coated over sawdust, the researchers were able to create a cylindrical water filtration device that eliminates between 95.2 and 99.9 percent of microplastics depending on what they're made of.”
An organic filtration solution that works by combining natural plant compounds to a layer of wood dust, making it an organic and sustainable approach, is just taking what we’ve always known about how the water cycle works and how aquifers use several layers of sand and rock material to clean the water that ends up in consumable form in our natural groundwater storage systems. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we can get better at simulating combinations and variations of these types of solutions at a scale that we have never had the opportunity to before now. We live in exciting times for how much we can learn from our natural environments to address the concerns we have in the maintenance and sustainable use of our natural resources.
The sooner we pay attention to nature for our solutions, the sooner we start to ensure we have a future on this planet. Nature (and the planet) will recover, we’re the ones we should worry about. The whole point of this article and the biomimicry example above? We need to look more to nature as a source of the solutions to the problems we’ve caused. More inspiration, less extraction.