You may have heard about biomimicry, a technological and social movement predicated on the idea of designing systems inspired by biological processes. The theory is that natural systems, over millions of years of evolution and adaptation, must have optimized certain processes — and that humans can adapt these processes into our own systems. Innovations discovered through the study of biology and ecology have already contributed to important advancements for our species, from artificial spider silk to biological systems for data storage.
While much of the conversation around biomimicry focuses on technological applications, several environmental thinkers in recent years have called for social and economic systems to take inspiration from nature. For example, reciprocal, gift, and ecological economics are based on the principle of symbiosis, where unrelated species perform mutually beneficial services for one another. By developing economic structures modeled after mutual collaboration between two or more species, proponents argue, we can establish kinder and more equitable social relations, where goods and services are shared between individuals based on convivial exchange — an economy of flowers and pollinators over an economy of lions and gazelles.
Social biomimicry has transformative potential, just as technological biomimicry has helped to inject new ideas into the realms of engineering, robotics, and materials.
The field, however, lacks some of the critical assessment and rigor necessary to optimize these novel ideas. To achieve truly transformative potential, social biomimicry must evolve.
Personally, I have developed an understanding of the practice of biomimicry through my graduate research with perennial wheat, a newly domesticated species. This research is part of an effort to design crops that emulate the biology of prairie plants, particularly their deep roots that improve soil and water quality. As I reviewed the history of this work, it became apparent that a big reason for the success of this research was the extensive trial and error necessary to integrate ecological inspiration into human systems. Recent breakthroughs were only possible due to a deep commitment to experimentalism and caution when scaling these new technologies.
As I have become more involved with biomimicry within the context of social systems, I believe the field could benefit from some of those qualities as it evolves.
Scholarship Through Analogy
The foundational idea driving thinking within social biomimicry comes from the Gaia hypothesis, which posits that natural systems have evolved in concert with the planet to be self-regulating and self-perpetuating, continually pursuing the optimal arrangement of organisms for mutual prosperity. The Gaia hypothesis is symbiosis on steroids, the totality of all biological kingdoms singing in a magnificent chorus of life.
While we are becoming increasingly knowledgeable about how collaboration underlies many ecosystem functions, some proponents, philosophers, and commentators overemphasize or even deify such processes, which can cloud our understanding of the forces that power ecosystems. This leads us to center a subset of culturally idolized processes as opposed to soberly assessing constituent parts and processes governing ecosystems.
Many calls for social biomimicry start at the position that nature is inherently worthy of emulation, and that anything deemed natural must be a valuable model for designing social systems. This view places nature on a reverential pedestal where ecology becomes a “sacred scripture” of sorts — a screen onto which we project existing values and desires. Those who value community and sharing can point to more cooperative relationships in the natural world, like the bee and the flower, as a justification for their preferences. Conversely, those who prefer a society of cutthroat competition can point to the elk clashing horns over a mate. Nature nurtures just as much as it brutalizes. Both worldviews can draw justifications for their preferences from biology and ecology.
By relying on these analyses in promoting biomimicry, we are using nature, a system with no consciousness, as a source of ethical guidance. Morality is not what we glean from studying ecology.
The processes that ecosystems have spent eons refining are where the real utility lies.
In seeking these material benefits, social biomimicry must pursue a program of empirical experimentation. As it stands, a lot of the rhetoric around social biomimicry operates in the realm of analogy. A natural system is described and related to a human social dynamic, with the author gesturing as to how humans could emulate the ecological phenomenon being observed.
Take alternate bearing in trees as an example. Oaks or pecans will coordinate a surge of nuts to overwhelm herbivore populations, like squirrels or raccoons, resulting in more saplings becoming established. It’s a great lesson in the power of collaboration to defeat an adversary.
Most biomimicry literature would wax poetic on how we can apply similar strategies in our societies. But all this amounts to is a parable, with limited information on the actual design of novel systems. To evolve the field, empirical analysis of and experimentation with the material parallels between natural and human systems is necessary.
A good example can be found in the book Honeybee Democracy, where biologist Thomas Seeley shows how beehives operate a deeply democratic system of decision-making when choosing where to locate a hive. Scout bees rigorously collect information and present proposed sites to the group, which are then debated through the famous waggle dance until a consensus is established. Once a new site is chosen, the bees dedicate themselves to this decision, even if they argued strenuously against it. As opposed to the system of adversarial democracy employed in many governments today, this method of consensus and unity seems like a refreshing alternative.
However, Seeley writes, the applicability of the lessons we learn from the honeybee depends on biological context, which subsequently affects how they are applied to human systems. Bees have an intense cognitive disposition towards unity. Within the hive, human traits like tribalism are absent, not due to ideological dedication but genetic codification. For organizing units of thousands to millions of individual humans, such a unified front with a complete lack of dissent is incredibly difficult to achieve. Bees have a neurology that predisposes them to prioritize unwavering cooperation, a trait that is absent in human psychology.
As Seeley illustrates, this model of consensus decision-making has been shown to work for small groups of people that have a sense of unity among them, such as a faculty meeting or activist group. These situations partially replicate the conditions that allow this form of governance to function in the hive.
But he also cautions that upon changing the scale in which we attempt to import the Honeybee Democracy framework into human decision-making, the model breaks down and the lessons are less workable. This meticulous analysis of how a process plays out in nature, in this case by comparing bee and human psychology, can inform its translatability to human contexts.
Empiricism in Social Biomimicry
When mimicking nature, I have found that factors such as scale, sector, geography, and culture influence how a natural process is operationalized into human systems.
For example, gift economies rooted in symbiosis work well for food or clothing, as these are goods where sharing and reciprocity are culturally familiar and logistically feasible to execute within local communities. If I have excess produce from my garden, I can distribute cucumbers or strawberries to neighbors and friends. Then, come spring, my foraging friends will return the favor with fresh morels. Reciprocity functions well in tight-knit social networks and within certain domains of consumption.
On the other hand, this model would fail in areas like healthcare, where there are a small number of highly skilled individuals with decades of education providing specialized services using expensive equipment. It’s intensive on both an individual and system-wide level, and it’s unlikely that I would have anything I could give to my doctor that would come close to covering the resources they expended on me. Modern healthcare simply cannot function through a symbiosis-like exchange of resources, as there is no organismal relationship that has achieved mutual benefit with such a heavy resource imbalance between participants. The difference in resource and energy investment between producer and consumer will change whether symbiosis is possible across different sectors of the economy.
This analytical approach to adapting social innovations from the natural world, I would argue, would greatly improve proposals originating within social biomimicry. In my own work, I found some of the following questions to be powerful tools for exploration: What are the behaviors participant organisms exhibit, and could these be reasonably replicated by humans given what we know about our psychology and social dynamics? What levels of investment in energy, nutrients, or labor do each organism put into and get out of their relationships? Do similar proportions in investment exist within a segment of our economy where such a relationship could be recreated? What aspects of the natural system could be quantified in a manner that parallels human systems?
Instead of simply pointing to various ecological interactions and saying, “We should emulate that,” we should be analyzing these systems and their potential human analogues systematically. For example, we could design political or organizational models that adapt over time based on mechanisms learned from studying evolution. Or we could build new economic systems that have a diversity of forms and functions fashioned after the types of heterogeneity present in wild populations.
A great example of this more empirical form of biomimicry in action is the Kalundborg Ecopark in Denmark, an industrial park modeled off of the cycling of resources that underlies ecosystems. A core aspect of ecosystem functioning is every scrap of sunlight, water, and nutrients left after the death and decay of one organism is consumed by another. Resources flow circularly through a web of creatures. This is antithetical to modern methods of industrial production, which produce prodigious volumes of waste as the result of linear production chains. The Ecopark was designed to emulate this cycling of resources by basing the production lines of unrelated companies on one another’s waste streams. The designers studied natural processes, identified spaces in human systems where reorganizing processes along ecological lines proved advantageous and experimented to ensure that it worked well as an alternative.
It’s not perfect, but broadly the Ecopark has been able to drastically cut down on material and energy waste for participant firms, serving as a powerful example of what is possible when we study nature with a critical eye.
Social biomimicry should conduct experiments exploring how these ideas may work in human contexts. Concepts should be introduced on a small scale and slowly grown out, with ample measurement to determine whether our needs are being fulfilled by the model. As new systems grow, we can adapt them to the needs of the situation.
Fundamentally, our attention should remain on studying and translating processes from the natural world into the human world. Values, doctrines, and ideology are inexorably human and are areas that should remain the domain of people.
Previously in The Revelator:
Who Heals the Earth’s Healers? Ways to Avert Burnout for Environmental Advocates