Biomimicry by Janine Benyus

This is a brilliant short overview of a newish scientific discipline known as Biomimicry by one of its founders Janine Benyus. The film is produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, who is ever in the forefront on promoting good news ideas like this.

Janine’s thesis is basically that humans are often very wasteful in the way they solve problems, using more energy, more toxic materials than is ever necessary; whereas when we look at nature we find that many times the same problems have already been solved, but in low-energy, very sustainable ways.

Given this premise, when we face a design problem we should look to see how nature has solved it first, and then emulate that solution. That way we will be able to solve our problems but without the dire consequences of force and toxicity.

In this short film she outlines some of the ways this works, looking at carbon capture, energy systems, self-assembling hard materials, networking and structures found in nature that help us in developing better and more efficient materials.