by Bryony Schwan

About Bryony Schwan

Bryony Schwan is the cofounder of the Biomimicry 3.8 Institute and served as the founding Executive Director for eight years. Prior to that, Schwan worked for eleven years as the Executive Director and then as the National Campaigns Director for Women’s Voices for the Earth (WVE), a nonprofit environmental justice organization that she founded in 1995. She is an affiliate faculty member at the University of Montana, where she teaches in the Environmental Studies program.

Biomimicry

book Keywords for Environmental Studies

Biomimicry is a relatively new design methodology that studies nature’s best ideas, abstracts its deep design principles, and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. The term “biomimicry” comes from the Greek words “bios,” meaning “life,” and “mimesis,” meaning “to imitate.” Related to yet also different from terms in earlier use, such as “bionics” and “biomimetics,” biomimicry—an approach popularized by Janine Benyus in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature—entails the “conscious emulation of life’s genius” (Benyus 1997), utilizing design strategies that have been fine-tuned through 3.8 billion years of evolution. Whether in the areas of energy, material manufacture, recycling, chemistry, engineering, transportation, or computing, other organisms have managed to do many of the things humans want to do, without depleting fossil fuels, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future.