Learning from nature

When future architectural historians will look back to the twentieth century, from their sustainable world in the second half of this century, they must wonder why we did so little about sustainable living in the second half of that century. It wasn’t because we didn’t have enough money, cause we had. It wasn’t because we didn’t have the knowledge, cause we had. It wasn’t because we didn’t have the technology, cause we could have had. But, shockingly, we just didn’t care…

We were happy with our fossil fuel, consumption-driven economy and just accepted the environmental damage that came with it. We thought that mankind’s growth could go limitlessly at the cost of Mother Nature. But we are finally more and more realizing that it is limited and that it can no longer continue like this. This led us to an understanding of the need for balance between ourselves and the living world around us.

A source for a new balance can be found in the link between architecture and nature, called biomimicry. Biomimicry can be defined as ‘mimicking the functional basis of biological forms, processes and systems to produce sustainable solutions’ (Pawlyn, 2011). It’s learning from nature. And learning from nature means learning from a source of ideas that has done almost 4 billion years of research and development to survive, in a sustainable way. Organisms possess technologies that are similar to what we invented, but in most cases they solved it with far more ingenuity.

We have been inspired by nature for centuries. Before the industrial revolution people looked to nature for inspiration for building forms and decorations. But since that revolution we can see a diversion from the ingenuity that we once had. The use of fossil fuels made it possible to be more efficient, to do mass production, but it also made it possible that inefficiency developed: inefficiency in the use of (limited) resources. The lessons from nature were hereby more and more lost.

So how do we get sustainable world? Three things are needed. First, we need to achieve an enormous increase in resource efficiency. Second, we have to change from a fossil-fuel economy to a solar economy. And third, we have to transform our linear, wasting and polluting way of using resources to a closed, circular way where nothing is wasted. Nature has optimized this to perfection. It is giving us perfect examples how to do this and now all we need to do now is open our eyes and learn from it.

References
Pawlyn, M. (2011). Biomimicry in Architecture. London: RIBA Publishing.