means for groups of humans to acquire more food than was needed in the short term. Over time, increasingly dependable agricultural food surpluses provided the requisite accumulation of wealth that would enable distinctly different occupations to appear within groups of humans and that made available the free time necessary to develop a variety of other cultural components such as religion, written language, mathematics, political systems, engineering, and trade relationships with other people. Other examples of significant human behavioral adaptations include health care, manufacturing, and building design.
In the long term, however, our intellectual ability to organize complex social processes is ironically contributing to our undoing. Our legacy of technological change has established systems for living that produce quite different results from those systems used by all other biota. Historically, we have viewed our technology as a positive divergence from all other life and as an example of our species’ unique superiority. A close examination of the insidious effects of this prolonged strategy reveals a corresponding steady decline of natural processes and services upon which all life, including man, depend. Fortunately, independent thinkers such as Benyus and others have recognized the critical opportunity to borrow from nature’s wisdom and remodel our industry after the most thoroughly tested life-supporting processes in existence. The genius of the natural world has always been present for us to glean, and finally, some of our contemporary designers have begun to take notice. Here are just a few examples of how designers have used nature to inspire our current products:
•Cockleburs and the fabric fastener VELCRO®.
•Abalone mother-of-pearl and high-tech ceramics.
•Spider silk and stronger-than-steel cord.
•Mussel shell adhesive and in-the-water ship hull repair.
•Fish-shaped and decreased-drag coefficient vehicle design.
•Toe-pads of geckos and strong, dry, and clean adhesives.
•Porcupine quills/bird bones and structural support improvements.
Benyus also identifies large perspective applications of the genius of nature for a sustainable world. She suggests we model our cities after Type III ecosystems such as a redwood forest. Type III ecosystems typically reward diversity and interdependencies, build natural capital, procure locally, cycle all materials, and use the sun as their sole energy source.6 Evidence suggests that these durable Type III natural communities have existed for many millions of years and provide an appropriate touchstone for the redesign of human communities around the world. The next few sections include even more nature-inspired systemic opportunities for sustainable business.
2.3Pernicious Material Processes
Consider that nearly all your possessions will end up in a landfill, a solid waste incinerator, or a junk yard. Some items will reach the end of the line in only a month; others will take years. Clothes, furniture, appliances, vehicles, plastics, cardboard, and construction materials are part of our linear production systems (materials are extracted, processed, sold, used, and discarded). To make matters worse, our material preparation and refinement processes often yield substances that are used only once, are not designed for reprocessing, and have persistent toxins mixed with benign natural materials. Persistent toxins are long lasting, man-made, and not readily decomposed by natural processes. Unfortunately, many of these toxins eventually enter the human body through a variety of pathways, such as by air, water, and food, and disrupt various body systems, cause cancer, and contribute to numerous other serious health problems.
Interior carpeting is an example of a commonly used product that is made of multiple persistent toxins. These contaminants fill the air inside our buildings via the wear and abrasion dust from foot traffic or from harmful vaporizing materials. Common nylon carpet pile material often contains polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), a brominated fire retardant that damages the thyroid gland, the lymph system, and the nervous system. Benzene and p-dichlorobenzene are known carcinogens contained in some carpeting pile. Carpet padding is commonly made of polyvinyl chloride and polyurethane, two other seriously toxic petrochemicals. Carpet adhesives, such as 4-phenylcyclohexene (4-PC), styrene, ethyl benzene, and toluene, add even more to the harmful mix routinely found in carpeted interiors. These persistent toxins tend to be most densely present in the air closest to the carpet: the exact locations of the particularly vulnerable toddlers in our homes.
Nature cannot afford such shortsighted and dangerous linear industrial processes. The natural world, powered by the sun, safely reuses all materials endlessly while using low-energy and low-temperature processes without persistent toxic compounds. The natural world’s approach for material use is universal, durable, and effective. To illustrate this point, let’s examine one of nature’s most common industrial activities — the capture, storage, and use of energy.
2.4Nature’s Path of Production
The sugar maple tree, common in the northeastern parts of the U.S., provides us with a good example of a natural production path that needs to be examined. A wide variety of benign chemical compounds are found in the leaf of a sugar maple tree. In summer, during the daytime, the leaf captures a portion of the sun’s energy that has traveled through space to Earth, while simultaneously reflecting the harmful ultraviolet portion of the solar energy spectrum back into space. Tiny openings in the underside of the leaf called stomata take in carbon dioxide, while a million root tips absorb water. During the night, the leaves of the maple tree convert this stored energy into incalculable chemical bonds of countless simple sugar molecules that become food for the tree. In the late fall, when the maple tree stops its sugar production because of cold weather and reduced daylight, the leaf falls to the ground, and eventually, this former food factory is eaten and broken down by a variety of detritus organisms, such as bacteria, fungi, and insect larva. Suspended in water and percolating through the soil, the dissolved materials gradually move downward, attaching and detaching from soil particles at various depths. During the time when these digested nutrients are in the root zone, root systems absorb and transport the valuable materials (formerly food factories) back into another plant where they will be used again, perhaps for leaf construction.
Natural processes like these routinely and repeatedly cycle vital elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous while using the locally acquired energy from the sun, and produce no persistent harmful materials. Rather, they add tremendous value to their community: green plants discard the only significant source of molecular oxygen on Earth as air emissions during the process of sugar production. Take a moment to consider the contribution of the Plant Kingdom to nature and our own lives. In addition to oxygen, the maple tree offers us delicious maple syrup for our pancakes, the beautiful grain and hue of maple furniture, and the glow and warmth of a fire from logs in our fireplaces.
Some early visionaries have already begun to tackle some of the core deficiencies in our industrial material strategies. In the early 1990s, the German chemist Michael Braungart conceived what he calls the Intelligent Product System, which consists of only three categories of industrial products: consumables, durables, and unmarketables.7 Partnering with the leading architect and designer William McDonough in the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle, he further refined this concept to two product categories. The first type, consumables or products of consumption, would be made only of biodegradable materials. When products of consumption lose their usefulness, they would be broken down in their entirety by detritus organisms of the natural world, and the resulting material would be made available for use by other organisms. Examples of products that might fall into this category are packaging materials, shoes, and ink pens. The second type of product, durables or products of service, would be made of materials toxic to living things, such as heavy metal alloys and some petroleum-based compounds. Products of service would be routinely leased by the customer and owned by the producer, and when they lose their usefulness, they would be returned to the
