The Biomimicry Revolution

This book advances the argument that biomimicry--adapting strategies found in nature to solve design problems in the human built environment, such as passive cooling construction techniques modeled on termite mounds--can serve as the basis for a new philosophical approach to human existence. It has long served as a strategy for technological innovation, but only recently has nature been widely appreciated as a resource of ecological lessons about how we might enduringly inhabit the Earth. Nature runs entirely on renewable energy, recycles everything, produces zero pollution, and supports an extrordinarily diverse range of life forms. Following its guidance as model, measure, and mentor, as proposed by Janine Benyus in her pioneering book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature and utilizing examples from the scientific literature and the ancient Greek concepts of techne, physis, and mimesis, Henry Dicks rethinks our ideas about technics, ethics, and epistemology, including a new ontology of nature as that which produces itself, in order to recognize that human autonomy cannot be achieved by relying on ourselves alone if we are to respond to ecological crises and live well as part of the Earth ecosystem using the Earth's technologies--