Speaker 1: 0:15

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari and Natasha McElhone.

Speaker 2: 0:18

Today, we have the privilege of talking to Janine Benyus. Janine is the co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8. She is a biologist innovation consultant and author of six books, including Biomimicry Innovation Inspired by Nature. Since the book's 1997 release, janine's work as a global thought leader has evolved the practice of biomimicry from a meme to a movement, inspiring clients and innovators around the world to learn from the genius of nature.

Speaker 1: 0:48

She has personally introduced millions to biomimicry through two TED Talks, hundreds of conference keynote presentations and a dozen documentaries, such as Biomimicry produced by Leonardo DiCaprio's Tree Media, 11th Hour Harmony and the Nature of Things with David Suzuki, which aired in 71 countries In 1998, janine co-founded the Biomimicry Guild with Dr Dania Baumeister.

Speaker 2: 1:12

That consultancy morphed into Biomimicry 3.8, a B Corp social enterprise providing biomimicry consulting services to clients like Nike, general Electric, herman Miller, procter Gamble and Levi's.

Speaker 1: 1:25

In 2006, janine co-founded the Biomimicry Institute, a non-profit institute to embed biomimicry in formal education and informal spaces such as museums and nature centres. Over 11,000 members are now part of the Biomimicry Global Network, working to practice, teach and spread biomimicry in their region. In 2008, the institute launched AskNatureorg, an award-winning bioinspiration site for inventors.

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Janine believes that the more people learn from nature's mentors, the more they'll want to protect them. This is why she writes, speaks and communicates so prolifically about biomimicry.

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We talk about learning from biological systems.

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Waging war against nature rather than allying to it.

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How profitable emulating nature can be, fitting form to function. How ant colonies inspire mobile phone networks.

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The dependence of the agricultural system upon oil.

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The photosynthetic reaction center.

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How nature is our best chemist.

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AI helping the detective work of biologists.

Speaker 2: 2:29

And before we get biomimetic, just to get you in the mood, here is a question from William McDonagh. Imagine this design assignment, design something that makes oxygen, sequesters, carbon fixes, nitrogen distills water, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colours with the seasons and self-replicates. Well, it sounds impossible, doesn't it?

Speaker 1: 3:03

It's a tree, let's get into it.

Speaker 2: 3:10

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari and Natasha McElhone, and with us today, from across the pond, is Janine Benyus and glad to be here. Oh, thank you so much for joining us. So you popularized the term biomimicry, which has galvanized an entire movement. I know you'll have done this multiple times, but can you bear to explain the term for our listeners who aren't familiar with it?

Speaker 3: 3:37

No, I'd love to. I'd love to. It's my favorite idea of the century, so I love to talk about it. It's a simple idea. Biomimicry it's in the word. It's to emulate life and it's an innovation practice where the people who make our world, which is all of us, before we design something or before we make a decision, we ask what in the natural world has already solved what I'm trying to solve, because we're not the first ones to have tried to do what we're doing here on earth, which is to live sustainably, you know, in a way that enhances this. Life's been doing that for 3.8 billion years, so this is literally a. It's an ancient practice, but now it's become new again.

Speaker 3: 4:34

Um and biomimics, um make up, make a practice of looking into the natural world for models, for efficient and elegant forms, for processes like photosynthesis. How do you pull energy from the sun? All you leaves, all the way to the ecosystem level. How do these ecosystems work together to create conditions conducive to life? To create conditions conducive to life? These are all things we have to do, and we have forgotten that there are 30 to 100 million species that have been through this and figured things out. So that's what biomimicry is. It's literally, it's a design practice.

Speaker 2: 5:23

I know in your wonderful book you explain a lot of these processes and how we can copy nature. There's an overarching question, which is and you also address this in your book and whether we need to change all of our systems in order to adopt the kind of rethinking and restructuring that you're talking about, or whether you think it can happen incrementally.

Speaker 3: 5:47

You know, we as the unintended consequences. This emergency of our own making approaches us at increasing speed and we have so many metaphors like Milton happening right now. Doing that.

Speaker 3: 6:04

I, increasingly, I feel an urgency to move beyond incrementalism. There's something in the natural world, you know, evolution works incrementally, generation after generation. But there are also these things called punctuated equilibriums, and that's when life jumps to a whole new level of coping, and we see this in the fossil record that all of a sudden new innovations come up and then they spread you know, cambrian explosion, for instance these punctuated equilibriums, almost a phase change, and I think that that's what I think, that's what we need. I do think we need and biomimicry has always asked for this the deep redesign of everything, of how we live in relationship with the material world and with each other, because our ways of doing things, everything from our economy to how we manufacture, to how we build, to how we power ourselves and transport ourselves, to how we feed ourselves and to how we take care of or don't take care of the earth that nourishes us, take care of or don't take care of the earth that nourishes us those, all of those, are up for redesign in my estimation, and they're all.

Speaker 3: 7:34

We do them in very, very different ways than the rest of the natural world, this young species that we are. So I hope my urgency is for a fast, fast growing up for this young species that is Homo sapiens. Sapiens, you know we're about 200, 300,000 years old. You know up against 3.8 billion years right of these biological geniuses. The only way I think that we're going to have that kind of a growth spurt, that kind of a maturingurt, that kind of a maturing, is through the humility of realizing that we've got a lot to learn from the species that have been here before and thankfully, they're willing to gift us with their ideas.

Speaker 2: 8:16

If the people that are profiting and thriving from the current systems who also control most of the wealth or what we invest in? How do we get that shape shift? How do we achieve a mindset change?

Speaker 3: 8:34

I always look to the natural world. And how is it that the natural world, no matter where you look, it's sustainable, what we would call sustainable right? It gets better and better over time. It bounces forward, not backwards. Right, a forest knits itself closer and closer together and creates more and more opportunities for life, and those life forms actually enhance and sweeten that place, and that's what life has done. When this place was a ball of rock and fire, you know it, it slowly sweetened this place. Life did right, like that's. That's our heritage, and if you ask me how it did it, it would be that there is a single, unassailable criteria for what is successful, and what is successful is that which is good for life.

Speaker 3: 9:25

And so, if we are to have the kind of phase shift that I'm talking about, I can talk about a lot of amazing technologies we could do. You know that. Low carbon technologies, things that are not toxic, life-friendly chemistry I can talk about those and we're learning about those. Those are instances of the kinds of moves we're going to have to make. But the first thing, I think, is this change in what it is we value and what it is we think we're doing here on earth, and right now, our whole system works to value, as we know, the short-termism, the rewards to a certain small group of people at the expense of earth and humans. Right, that value system has to change and we're on our way to doing that with renewables.

Speaker 3: 10:19

As Amory Lovins used to say, what if we got energy too cheap to meter? What if it was free? The question is, what would we do with it? Would we use it to dig a deeper well to mine more quickly? What we value is that's what we'll get as a system. So all the people that are working in so many different places. There's no silver bullet right now, so to speak, but there's people like Kate Ray, working on a whole new way of thinking about economics for the 21st century. There's people working on how to heal this planet. I'm going to Colombia in a couple of weeks with the COP. There's a COP for Paris. Cop was for climate. This with the COP, you know, there's a COP for the Paris COP was for climate. This is the COP for biodiversity. There's going to be 150,000 people there working to see how we could change policy so that we start to go from denigrating the planet to healing the planet.

Speaker 1: 11:19

I think sometimes, when we think about how we will be able to change the whole system, it gets tricky to find the one solution. It's millions of actions of individuals, as you're saying, that come together and talk about this stuff, and maybe it takes a few generations. Hopefully we will not lose the race. Humans are always good at adaptation, not so good at mitigation, unfortunately. It's just our brains are linear. They don't think in the exponential world that we're in right now.

Speaker 1: 11:50

Um, but let me maybe take us a little bit in a different direction, and that is look, as you said, 3.8 billion years of time to probe the design space and come up with something that is omid, which is 100 trillion cells and like a billion reactions in each of these cells per second. This level of complexity is not something that we have any shot at creating as humans, right, and so we kind of had to maybe go through this whole industrial process, this crude burning and combustion phase, to get back to this phase where we can actually understand nature and its intricacies. So I wonder, do you think there's an alternate reality where we could really fully and truly understand nature without going through, you know, this AI and internet and technology and communications revolution?

Speaker 3: 12:48

You know, I'm hoping that what we're doing with all of that technology is sharpening our senses. You know, I think it was Yates who said the world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper, and I think that's what for me, that's what AI and all the technologies that allow us to understand how the natural world works. I think you're right. I think we're at a point where, because we're starting to understand at a deeper level how nature works or miracles and we're getting the enabling technologies that allow us to actually mimic what she is doing, To me that's the most hopeful thing, the most hopeful convergence. I think our sense is getting sharper is so that we can understand how our fellow planet mates have learned to live here so gracefully. That's part of it. I know it's part of it.

Speaker 3: 13:47

I know that my hope in AI is that we use AI to literally filter feed through all the biological literature we've had over the 250 years and begin to pull out and traditional ecological knowledge and we filter feed through all of that and begin with the lens of function and say how does nature filter water out of seawater? You know, we may not have to do that. How are you doing that mangroves? How are you doing that fish? You know you're all seabirds. How are you drinking seawater and then getting freshwater and expelling the seawater? What are those membranes like? Ai can look across taxa right From amoeba to zebras. It can ask a question like that read everything we know about it, everything traditional communities know about that, and then say, okay, how can we emulate that? To me, we're on the cusp of truly being able to emulate these other species that are so successful, and technology is the thing that has helped us get there.

Speaker 1: 14:58

Look, I think there was an innate and intuitive understanding, say in our tribal past, about the workings of nature in some shape or form.

Speaker 1: 15:06

But we at some point decided that we want to go from 2 billion people in 1940 to 8 billion now. So any solutions that we create really have to be working at a large scale and it's very hard to tell people, hey, sorry, but you kind of have to now be back to subsistence living because you know we made a mistake there. Give me back your heater and your washing machine, all right. So the way we're trying to figure out is to kind of reintegrate these, this really beautiful knowledge that you're highlighting, into the scale that society has at this point in time in the early 21st century. On that note, maybe you can dispel a little bit these critics who say, hey, this stuff is not scalable, it doesn't work. And in nature it works because it's been at it for so long and you know I love my Flyknit shoes, by the way, nike Flyknits and that seemed to have scaled quite well. So there are other examples.

Speaker 3: 16:05

Yeah, exactly, there's an enabling technology, for instance, right. So instead of gluing them together or sewing different materials together, we have found an enabling technology that allows you to have one material and knit together in a new way. So you know, back 25 years ago, when I was talking about how can we scale up a material system in which you use one material but you give that material different characteristics, like the different parts of your shoe some's more rubbery, some's more stretchy based on its design, how you put those weaves together. And people were like, well, that's impossible, and I would you know, like a dragonfly would come by and land, right, and I'd say, well, look at this dragonfly, like this looks. If you look at it, it looks like a science fiction machine, right, with the big eyes that move around those amazing wings. It can go forward, it can hover, it can stop, it can go up and down. I mean it's, it's amazing, and you know, and it, and when it's young, it looks entirely differently. So it goes through a metamorphosis. I say, look at this, this dragonfly is one material system. It's chitin, it's kind of protein. So everything that you're looking at is one material. If we were to make you know, if we were to make a brain, we'd use a different material, eyes, a different material, wings, muscles, a different material.

Speaker 3: 17:30

No, it's all one material, but life adds information to matter. Life has put design in the way it lays up the fibers, the fact that it puts it into fibers in some places it's not it's membrane, it's a gossamer membrane in the wings, same material, so that at the end of its life it can easily be put back into a circular economy. Right? So it's a really good example on your shoes, actually, because that's how you scale it up, right, you scale it up by beginning to notice that there's. You know that we use 350 polymers, or plastics at least, because every time we want a new functionality, if we want it to be stiff or stretchy, we do a new polymer that the world has never seen before, whereas life is working on two. You know, polysaccharides and proteins, and then adding elegant design to that.

Speaker 3: 18:30

Well, with things like the fly knit technology or 3D printing we can begin to, or the way we now cure things from a liquid, you know even injection molding we begin to be able to put those sorts of structures that we've studied in biology into common raw materials to give it the functionality during use and then a way to trigger at the end of its life. Trigger so that it breaks apart and becomes soil amendment. That's possible technologically and really you got to have people who want that right. Like David Orr, my friend, says, to have a sustainable world you first need to have a world that desires it. Right, it's desire. So that's the civil society side of it. Right. Asking for things like your shoes saying how was it built, how was it made? You know and you see parts of that with our food movement right and some of the things that we're putting in and near our body. Now it's not nearly large enough, but those are the beginnings that we have to fan and accelerate.

Speaker 2: 19:41

Janine, can I just go back to what David said? And in your book, in fact, you cite that we are and forgive me if I'm misquoting, but along the lines of human beings, are one vote in a parliament of millions of other species, and are we willing to accept that we're part of a food chain? And you also point out that the real survivors are the life forms that haven't consumed their ecological capital. But how do we change a mindset and I mean, I'm optimistic about this because we did it in the pandemic to some degree. We changed supply chains, we changed the way that we did things, we saw how quickly we could adapt to a disaster. We saw how quickly we could adapt to a disaster.

Speaker 2: 20:24

But I guess that's the question is, you said earlier on that you didn't think we could afford for this to be incremental. How do we incite? Where's the motivation for us to upscale these? And I won't run through because all of this information is available online and we'll cite it in our opening anyway. But the wonderful inventions that you and your team and other teams that you work alongside, the sort of the U-pod that has a natural way of getting the mosquito population down, you know learning from caxuses, or cooling systems based on termite mounds, and all these stomach of a cow, digestive systems helping with get rid of waste in water, and these incredible innovative systems that copy nature. How do you get that to upscale to, as Omid referenced earlier on, 8 billion people living in different landmasses, with different sets of laws and different loyalties and different faalties? How do we come together in this war?

Speaker 3: 21:23

You know, that's one of the questions we're asking ourselves constantly, natasha. We have a for-profit consultancy where we work with inventors, and then we also have a non-profit, the Biomimicry Institute, and there we've been giving people the tools. We have a thing called Ask Nature, giving inventors the tools to be able to start to understand biological systems so that they can emulate them. And then we also have an accelerator called Ray of Hope, in which the biomimicry startups that are coming now Fast and Furious. It's amazing, there's 300 startups, biomimicry startups, a year coming to us. These are companies and we try to help accelerate them into getting them finance, getting them well-known, getting them what they need to take that next step so that people can sort on the alternatives.

Speaker 3: 22:17

So, for instance, you know you can talk about paint, as we've been doing it forever, and there's a lot of toxicity in paints, a lot of toxicity in dyes. That's a big problem with our fashion industry. Or you can look at how the natural world does it and its structural color Meaning. Like I was saying before, they take a fiber or a wing, a butterfly wing, and it puts design into it so that it refracts light, to create a color to your eye A few millimeters away, a different layout, different color. So now we can do that. There are companies that we're actually telling the world about showcasing, in which you're leapfrogging beyond non-toxic paint. You're leapfrogging beyond paint entirely. You're basically now talking about changing a fiber structure or changing the outside of your car, so you're not painting it, but it's playing with light, right. So it's a complete paradigm shift.

Speaker 3: 23:15

So those alternatives are super important. But first you have to have people who want those alternatives, right. So then you've got all of civil society and they're the ones that are buying. Consumers are buying and saying, okay, I don't want toxic dyes on my clothes. What's the alternative? And we have to be ready to have that alternative. And, of course, in the natural world you can't have toxic wings you would die. So you find a way to make color in a new way.

Speaker 3: 23:47

So it's civil society saying I want this. It's at the policy level. It's people saying we need to do things in lower energy ways. We need to completely turn off greenhouse gas emissions down to zero, right. Turn off greenhouse gas emissions down to zero, right. We need to now move over to renewables and we need to make things in the following ways and we need to grow things in the following ways. I know people working on all of those kind of new alternatives. The thing is to turn those the best practices. That we know is no longer, for instance, organic farming, it's regenerative farming. It's like a step up and people have been working on that and now consumers that loved organic need to start asking for regenerative. But that's only a small group of people who can afford that right now.

Speaker 3: 24:41

So then you go upstream and you work with the companies who make these products, these agricultural products, and you say you've got the ability to ask your farmers to farm in a certain way, to create quality for your coffee or whatever. But you also have the ability to ask them. You know Nestle has 680,000 farmers that it works with. They could change their contracting rules to say really no pesticides, don't till the soil, keep cover crops on and put trees in for shade grown. They've got the ability to do that. So that's when you start to scale right, because then you've got the people and then you've got the ability to do that. So that's when you start to scale right, because then you've got the people and then you've got policy instruments asking for them. Those are some of the ways I see, but like I said, it's an all hands on earth policy. It's all of us.

Speaker 2: 25:38

I was amazed in your book when you cited that agricultural, the farming process, when you cited that agriculture or the farming process, that it's nine-tenths fossil fuels and one-tenth farming. I had no idea of that ratio of dependency and also just how the beginning of agriculture was the beginning of us losing touch with natural cycles and seasons and trying to override that system. But how?

Speaker 3: 26:10

Yeah, you don't find monocultures like that in the natural world that last very long.

Speaker 2: 26:17

Yeah, you talk a lot about extractive versus cyclical systems, but I remember there was this lovely quote around maintaining an energy balance that can't be borrowed against, and of course we've done exactly the opposite. But you are confident then that these big companies that own most agriculture have incentives from governments or independently of governments I mean, which way is it and are going to change their practices.

Speaker 3: 26:55

You know, I think that those companies have drivers on them. There are some that I've had the pleasure to work with that will do it voluntarily, but there are drivers. They've got context that they have to operate within and that we, the people, give them what they call, what companies call the social license to operate. And they talk about that. In five years Will we have the social license to operate when they realize that we've ruined this water source? They are increasingly in a regulatory framework that is getting global in its demands. So what I mean by that is, you know, the carbon reporting, the greenhouse gas reporting that companies have to do right now are now because of the Paris Agreement. The 191 or 192 countries that agreed to that Paris Agreement made pledges. Companies within there made pledges. They're not meeting them fully, but at least there's a process in place for them to meet them. At least there's a process in place for them to meet them.

Speaker 3: 28:11

Now I'm going to the COP for biodiversity in Colombia next week, and that's really exciting for me because in 2021, the global biodiversity framework was signed, and what that said was, in the same way, as we, as a global species, need to start doing things in ways that help halt and reverse climate change. We also need to do things in ways that halt and reverse biodiversity loss, and this is, you know, I don't. I can talk all day about why those two things were ever separate, but finally they're getting together in our policy mix. And what's interesting is that right now, every company that I work with and municipality and nation, they're looking, they're starting to look at the what's, the risks, and all the financial institutions looking at the risks and dependencies right now. And that is, in what ways are we dependent on nature? Right, and this computer is dependent on nature. You go back in the supply chain and you find that mine, where those rare earths were right, and all the water that was used to make make it, that's a dependency, right. You, all the water that was used to make it, that's a dependency, right. You start to go back. Literally, this is what they're asked to do and they have to report all their dependencies. And so then you start to go wow, I really depend on clean water. I depend on a fishery, ocean, fishery being healthy. Oh, my goodness, I depend on, you know, shaded water. You know they start to realize no pollinator, no coffee bean, no Starbucks. So that's what's happening now, but the next step, the next step that'll get people's minds right Thinking about it. The next step is opportunities.

Speaker 3: 29:59

And this is where it's exciting for me and I work in this space, in biomimicry. Our company's been working in this space for about 15 years and what we're doing we call it project positive. We're saying now that you've added up all the bad things you do and you're going to reduce the bad things, what are you going to do for nature? Can you learn from nature for nature? What if you asked yourself in and we're starting with the built world, in every factory I build, in every corporate campus I build, in every university campus, I build new municipality district as I build it, and this is actually what we do.

Speaker 3: 30:38

We go and we find an intact ecosystem that would be growing there if we weren't there. So we'd go to a forest. We measure it for all and we find it as healthy as we can. And we measure it for all the things it's doing for free for us, which is what life does. They call them ecosystem services, but there are things like it cleans this much air, it cleans this much water, it softens noise, it cycles nutrients, it stores water, it stores carbon dioxide, it supports habitat. We measure that.

Speaker 3: 31:13

And then we come back to the building site and say, okay, acre per acre, how can you do this with your site and with your infrastructure?

Speaker 3: 31:22

Like, instead of a parking lot, you're going to store water, so maybe you put in permeable pavement Instead of a roof. You're going to want to support pollinators and nesting birds and cool the air, so maybe you want to put in a green roof or a blue roof. And we've been doing this. And it's asking of our designs to do something to give back to the rest of the natural world beyond your borders. And that is where things change. It's a value system. You ask how are you going to scale this? And I keep going back to value, keep going back to value. So if you ask your designs or if you ask your building to just make it comfortable for the people within the building, without thinking about what's outside the walls, that was step one of our maturity. Step two is what goodness are we gifting away downstream, downwind, because that's what the ecosystems do. So we literally measure it and we hold them to that.

Speaker 2: 32:28

Internalize nature's system. You're talking about anything that we make that's new. Our starting point should be internalizing what nature would have done.

Speaker 1: 32:39

So I agree with this approach. So you were talking about a Cambrian explosion earlier. Yes, of course those inflection points occur. It's hard to ignite that naturally, start a revolution. Naturally there's a few things that are going the right direction. I think this new generation, for all their faults, are very aware of a lot of these ecological issues that are happening, this awareness that you're creating. I think in general there's a higher awareness. What I'd love to maybe focus on I loved this example with the parking lot is we know the incentive systems of this current world and while I do think we have to shift the value, that said, I do think pragmatically what are things that we can apply from nature's principles that make things more profitable for our company? And not thinking about the next annual report, but maybe five annual reports down, maybe we can shift people to think that way right, and if we get them to think that way a little bit more, what are some angles here? How are we going to push people to adopt these principles, to drive their bottom line, so to say?

Speaker 3: 33:45

Well, you know what? The companies that are out there now are profitable. I mean, people don't realize how much biomimicry there really already is. You know, if you flew in from somewhere today, you went past one of those screening tools where you lift your hands up. That's a completely new way of doing screening. It's lift your hands up. That's a completely new way of doing screening. It's an acoustic camera and it's based on the Brazilian free-tailed bat and how it echolocates. There's really a lot of things that you're already using. If you're sitting in London and you make a cell phone call, your call is being routed through the different exchanges using what's called an ant colony optimization software.

Speaker 3: 34:31

So, it's acting like ants because, they're so efficient.

Speaker 3: 34:34

So people who have studied ants have seen how efficient they are at finding food and how efficient they are at switching if something's crowded and going to something else, and so they took that and they put that software into and that's. There's many, many things that are already profitable and some of them are huge differences. We had a we had a winner in our Ray of Hope prize last year, green Pod Labs. It's a guy that studied plant chemistry and he studied this phenomenon that plants, basically, when they're hit by an insect, they give out warning signals to the plants around them and they're chemicals. They float in the air or they go through the mycorrhizal fungi and they warn the other plants and what those plants do is beef up their defenses, meaning they put in a few compounds that the insects don't like so that when they come they're less palatable than when the insects come over. So he said, huh, that's interesting.

Speaker 3: 35:33

He wanted to do something for India and he looked into it's the second largest fruit and vegetable producer in the world is India and he realized that 40% of all produce is spoils on its way to town in India on those trains, and that means the farmers are not profitable, the co-ops are not being profitable. Right, there's 40% plus. It's a massive greenhouse gas, the methane coming off of wasted food. And so what he did was he created. He emulated these plant alarm signals. He created these little sachets that he's able to throw into and he works with the people who, the co-ops, who aggregate the farmer's food before they put it on the trains and trucks, and he puts it in there.

Speaker 3: 36:29

The fruits and vegetables are still alive at that point and able to respond, and so they take in that compound you know it's just floating around in the air and they beef up their defenses and he's able to up to 50 to 80% more vegetables make it. He's able to really, really, really cut down on loss. That's super profitable. That's an incredibly profitable thing, and there's hundreds of these ideas that, I think, are. They just change things at such a deep, paradigmatic level and it is profitable. It's not that people have to wait to make profit for this.

Speaker 2: 37:09

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 37:10

This is, I think, the story that needs to be told. I do think we need a total system reset and rethink, but if we can work within the incentive systems that have been created, obviously we're going to achieve things faster. And I do think that you know, swiftly acting at this point would be preferred.

Speaker 2: 37:26

I wanted to get you to describe or talk about. I'm just curious. Since the book was written, I'm imagining there's been a ton of progress in this particular field. But the Photosynthetic Reaction Center would you describe the work that that's doing and what its ambition is?

Speaker 3: 37:44

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's a fun race to watch. So this is the idea that you know, leaves should be the model for solar cells, right? And, for that matter, because they're like, they're ubiquitous little solar panels everywhere you look. Interestingly, they're made from common raw materials. At the end of their lives they become some of them become leaves again, right, so they've got the circular economy thing going on.

Speaker 3: 38:13

In my book I wrote about the scientists at Arizona State University who were studying this incredible set of molecules that live within a leaf, in chloroplasts, that respond to those photons, this drizzle of thousands and thousands of photons hitting a leaf and are able to grab one and start to move the energy from that photon in such intricate ways. It's amazing. I think I described it as a pinball machine, because and the ball was the electron being moved through these elegant, elegant systems in order to eventually turn that energy along the carbon dioxide into sugars and starches and eventually cellulose, right, and that has been the holy grail for such a long time, and people are finally realizing how to emulate it. Where it's evolved to is very interesting. It is now evolved, I think, to where it should be, which is, you know, at first they tried to make solar cells that worked like a leaf. They were called dye-sensitive solar cells and they worked like a leaf and they turned sunlight, that energy, into electricity, flow of electrons. Now what they're doing is what a leaf actually does they take the dye, sensitized, you know part that, the photosynthetic reaction center, mimic, and they attach it now to another molecule that will turn photons into fuel. Right, that will actually do chemistry. Right, because life really doesn't have a wire running out of a leaf. It immediately turns it into chemistry which stores it for later use.

Speaker 3: 40:02

And so now the artificial photosynthesis world is saying, okay, can we do light-driven chemistry that we can now make fuels? And yes, the answer is yes, we can. That can make fuels. Another thing that life does is splits water to create hydrogen. So the green hydrogen movement is very much looking at photosynthesis, because leaves that's the first step they split water into oxygen, which we breathe, and hydrogen, hydrogen protons, and so the whole hydrogen economy thing that you're talking about, that's looking at photosynthesis.

Speaker 3: 40:38

In fact, one of our winners of the Ray Hope Prize, the ice accelerator at the Institute, was. He's called New Iridium, the company, and they have replicated the catalyst that works with light. What that means is, instead of heating chemical reactions up to high heats or high pressures, you just shine a light on them and then the chemistry progresses. And so you can imagine a time when light, instead of high heats or high pressures or heavy toxins, light itself is used to start a chemical reaction in which bonds are formed and important stuff like fuel is made, like methanol fuel. They're able to do that now to take light, to take photons and turn it into fuel, right, and I can imagine a time when a lot of our industrial chemistry, we move away from these enormously high heats and high pressures and high energy intensity, right, and instead use light, and that's what life's been doing for so many billions of years.

Speaker 1: 41:45

Yeah, I mean, I think it's so funny to see that life just works with ATP, this energy source across the spectrum, and we just went to combustion and I think that's the source of all evil, the invention of fire. But let me ask you the following we, having an anthropocentric arrogance, think that we know better. Right, and you know. Obviously you're uncovering the wisdom of nature here. Biomimicry, as far as I understand, as you're actually describing it, doesn't even mean just to copy nature. It actually means we're using the principles, but we are sometimes even going beyond the principles of nature and beyond the design of nature to adapt it to a human world.

Speaker 3: 42:25

Absolutely. You know, every year that goes by there's a new group of people who come and say could you bring a biologist to our design table? We'd like to know how the natural world works to the rest of the natural world, because we are nature and so the social innovation folks have been very interested in this and what they're looking at. They're saying, okay, well, is there anything that we can learn from the natural world about, say, cooperating or collective action? And of course we can. I mean there's the prevalence of mutualisms, which are mutually beneficial relationships in the natural world. Most organisms will have hundreds of mutualisms during their lifetime. Then these are relational hookups in which one organism gives something to the other, the other organism returns some sort of service and they both get net benefit. Those are called mutualists. And so what we do is, as the biologists at the design table at B3.8, we go and we go deeply and learn everything we can about how mutualisms get formed.

Speaker 3: 43:41

What makes an enduring partnership? What's the etiquette? Because there is an etiquette, there's a fairness doctrine for sure in these mutualisms, so one doesn't become a freeloader, and we're in the biological literature learning about that. And then we extract the design principles and we go and work with. You know we've worked with nonprofits who are trying to work with their clients. We've worked with merger and acquisition two companies coming together. How did they become mutualists when they used to be antagonistic, did for the same job and we give them best practices around mutualism. We're doing a project for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the nature of trust. We're looking at trust in the natural world and what are the best practices around keeping trust, maintaining trust. It's very related to our mutualisms but yeah, there are things in the natural world we can learn in social realms too.

Speaker 2: 44:41

Janine, there's this lovely passage where you describe nature as being the best chemist. But specifically, animals are I think you call them fur-covered pharmacists how they know how to eat and not poison themselves. And we've lost that ability. Um, we wouldn't really well, I certainly wouldn't be able to. You know, forage safely um if I was stranded?

Speaker 2: 45:03

um, yeah and uh, we, you know, we don't know how to shop the land. I think you said anymore and one of the things I was gonna ask you about was just the role and you mentioned it earlier on about the role that AI can play in speeding up some of this knowledge gain, I suppose, avoid toxins or digestive inhibitors or things like that, and how we can learn from animals If we are part of nature and if we are the sort of conduits of inventing a new super intelligence that's going to help us understand the planet in a way that we haven't thus far. That's going to help us understand the planet in a way that we haven't thus far. Is there an idea because you have this lovely measure of our time on Earth at the beginning of your book that I think we were a day? We would just have been here for 15 seconds after midnight or something?

Speaker 3: 46:08

I've probably got that wrong, but you get the analogy 15 seconds to midnight To midnight, yeah.

Speaker 2: 46:16

But what happens if we wait then for another minute? Would we be past this and through this? And okay, we, we may be part of the sacrifice, but is what we have shepherded through actually going to be progress in the end? Is it going to be a new age?

Speaker 3: 46:32

I am really rooting for us, natasha, I really am you still see us? As the destroyers ultimately.

Speaker 3: 46:42

I know Like I'm the one who has, you know, like everybody else, cleaning up after I call us toddlers with matches. You know that's how young we are, and we've all been cleaning up our, you know, since I was born, cleaning up after the toddler, right? So it's not that I don't know what we're capable of on the negative side, but I also know that every species and we are a young one every species that's been on this planet, 99.9% of them, have gone extinct this planet, 99.9% of them have gone extinct. They tried and either their adaptations were not well adapted or because of a bad asteroid day, you know, for whatever reason, we're here with the ones that have figured it out, and so I asked myself are we going to be one of the ones that figures it out? I'm hoping.

Speaker 3: 47:35

I think we're heading for, unfortunately, an evolutionary knothole and not everybody's going to get through, like not all the species to. That's the thing I mean. We are such good mimics, right, and we created these senses that we all talked about. We're now understanding, and we understand our predicament. We're the storytelling animal, so we can see where we came from.

Speaker 2: 48:13

We can kind of see where we're going to go, and that's why we drive away from Milton.

Speaker 3: 48:18

We've got that predictive, like we can tell us that story. So can we change our story? I do think it comes down to that very much of how we see ourselves, and so, for instance, when I work with these companies and I say, okay, you know, we work with Microsoft on creating the data center of the future, and is there a way in which a data center becomes something a community wants, please, in my backyard, pimby instead of NIMBY, right?

Speaker 3: 48:51

And if that is the case, then you've got to function like the forest, the wild land next door and produce all these ecological gifts. Well, that's new thinking. For humans, they're like excuse me, I am under no obligation to give clean water to my neighbor or to abate sound for my neighbor. I'm not, I don't have to do that. It's like yep, the big leap is that we want to do that. You know, if we, as humans, get to the point where we realize, really, the trick that made life of the 0.1% that are here, the trick that made it work, is that they're constantly creating abundance beyond their borders, not just for themselves, but they're creating cleaner air, cleaner water. Right, they're cycling nutrients, they're getting better each year.

Speaker 3: 49:41

That trick, if that was put into our value system, that that's just how we do things, and we could get over this myth that we are desperately and irretrievably selfish. We tell ourselves a lot of stuff about ourselves that is not helpful, right, it's not helpful to say, well, that's just human nature. I'm like, no, we're biological beings and biological beings figure out a way. You know I watch my little world is watching design and I've watched sustainable design. Every year, the bar gets higher and higher and higher for what good is. So my goal is that, like, if we get to get through that on the other side and bloom on the other side, our goal for what is good design, or what is normal design, has to be design that is life-friendly, from start to finish right and intentionally designed to actually make things better throughout their life cycle. And there are people working. You know people going through design school. Now, that's what they learn, that's what they're. It's not here yet in front of us, but I have to hope it's coming.

Speaker 1: 50:56

Well, that is such a great point to end it on, and we thank you very much for doing your work and telling the story, changing the story and moving the world into the right direction.

Speaker 2: 51:08

Thank you so much, Janine. That was so inspiring. I feel a lot more positive you so much, janine.

Speaker 3: 51:15

That was so inspiring. I I feel a lot more positive. You are quite quite welcome. I dare I, I I fear to ask uh, do you, do you agree that we? Are you rooting for us? Do you think we? Oh yeah, I think we have a chance.

Speaker 1: 51:24

I I think the only way to get up in the morning and, uh, keep going is to have a positive story. Right, and so we, just we have to be hopeful, hopefully, realistically hopeful. But yeah, it's all about creating those positive stories of the future yeah, knowing what we know, right it's a choice we know it's definitely a choice, optimism, but you know what?

Speaker 3: 51:48

what else is there to do? Yeah? But, you're an optimist and you're also a pragmatist.

Speaker 1: 51:51

That's what's so inspiring?

Speaker 3: 51:51

you're actually optimist and you're also a pragmatist.

Speaker 1: 51:53

That's what's so inspiring.

Speaker 2: 51:54

You're actually doing something about all of this I said, you may be an optimist, but you're also a pragmatist. You're actually doing something about all of this and my goodness, so much. It's so inspiring. I hope everyone reads your book. It's so informative it was. I learned more in your book than I did in my whole time at school.

Speaker 3: 52:15

Wow, thank you so much. And that was such a long time ago and I thought I would just go and write another book, right, and that was my sixth book. You know I'm a writer, I'm a, you know I write about life, and anyway. So I went back to write my next book and company started calling and asking me to bring biologists to the design table and I realized, oh my gosh, this is like something wanting to be born. And but I kept saying that, not me. You know, you got the wrong person. Yeah, I found business partner after business partner and we just said, okay, the world's wanting this, let's do it.

Speaker 2: 52:49

So 25 years later, here we are Amazing, amazing, what a great life.

Speaker 3: 52:55

Yeah, we're halfway through, you know, the Rogers diffusion curve of 50 years to get something really in the zeitgeist.

Speaker 1: 53:01

Yeah, it's, I guess, nearly three decades now for you, right, since the book. Yeah, yeah, more than halfway through.

Speaker 3: 53:10

Anyway, but things like this help, conversations like this help. I'm now subscribed to your podcast. I'll be listening in on you.

Speaker 1: 53:17

That's lovely. Thank you so much for your support.

Speaker 2: 53:20

Thanks so much for your time as well. I know how busy you are Really really appreciate it. Thank you, Bye.