Learning from Nature - Circular Economies & Biomimicry | Seth Galewyrick | TEDxHieronymusPark
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fidi8Js0Qjs Video ID: Fidi8Js0Qjs ============================================================ [Music] what do you live here maybe you were born here maybe you fell in love with a local or moved here for a good job but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that at least part of why you live here has something to do with this our access to nature in this valley is unrivaled we are so spoiled by this how many people get to say that they live next door to the largest American wilderness south of Alaska 3.6 million acres of pristine wild land if you take the boundary of the Selway Bitterroot Frank church wilderness and lay it over the East Coast it covers New York City to Baltimore and a population of 20 million people and yet here it's essentially empty this land is valued for so many reasons right it's a place to play it's a hub of biodiversity it's a place to escape and reconnect in my line of work a huge intact ecosystem like this serves another purpose as well and that's as a reference library or a model perhaps of a world that works you see I'm lucky enough to work in a discipline called biomimicry we're learning from nature is our mission and it's not just learning about nature it's taking those lessons and figuring out how to apply them to solve problems now if you were here last year you probably remember seeing this TED mainstage recording of local Stevensville hero Janine Benyus who literally wrote the book on biomimicry and if you haven't seen these Ted videos do take it from me they might change your life so what is biomimicry simple example so you go hiking in the woods you come back and your boots look like this a lot of people know where this is going in the 40s the Swiss engineer noticed how birds were sticking to him and his dog and he came home and invented velcro that's biomimicry in a nutshell we take the way that something works in nature and we apply it to solve a problem and it's easy to just blow right on past this example because a lot of people know it it's pretty straightforward but I just want to stop for a second and say isn't that freaking amazing I mean think about what that bird is doing imagine you're a plant you've got to disperse your seeds you don't have any feet you can't walk around your seed is too heavy to be blown by the wind and it doesn't hold up well to being eaten what's the solution turn your flower into that the spiky points both keep it from being eaten and at the same time they let it hitch a ride on those exact same organisms they can't eat it it's brilliant right the closer you look at even seemingly simple things like this the more in all you are at nature's genius speaking of genius how about this guy right the people headed woodpecker bangs his head against a tree at a thousand Gees an estimated 80 million times over his life and yet no brain damage right people been asking for a long time why don't woodpeckers get brain damage and it turns out there's a whole suite of strategies that all play a role but one of the most recent discoveries also appears to be the dominating factor and it has to do with blood flow to the brain so in a woodpecker much like in your own body the blood returns from your brain to your heart through the jugular vein in the neck and there's a nearby muscle called the omohyoid and in the case of the woodpecker while it's drumming it uses the omohyoid to put pressure on the jugular which slightly restricts the flow of blood back from the brain and as a result the brain swells ever so slightly now why would this matter it turns out that the vast majority of damage in repeat mild traumatic brain injury like slamming your head against the tree over and over again is due to a factor called slosh and that's the technical term and it's exactly what it sounds like there's a little bit of space inside your skull and the brain sloshes around during those impacts and builds up subsequent damage unless you're a woodpecker in which case you've done this and you have taken up all that space you have a perfect snug fit of your brain to your skull and you don't get brain damage again that's a pretty awesome solution right this woodpecker can eat things other things can't eat it can create incredible shelters all because of this adaptation and it turns out that it works in people too so this is a product called the cue collar and what it does is it puts a little bit of pressure on the jugular just like in the case of the woodpecker and that pressure prevents the same kind of injury that it prevents in the woodpecker so their data shows not only is it perfectly safe it doesn't impact performance at all and it dramatically reduces changes in the brain so the MRI on the left is half of a high-school football team and the changes in their brain after one season of play the MRI on the right is the half of the team then where the cue collar pretty impressive so so far we've looked at the burr in the velcro this is an example of what we call biomimicry of a form it's the actual shape of those hooks that make it do what it does in the case of the woodpecker it's biomimicry of process it's the process of applying pressure it's the buildup of pressure back into the brain the swelling of the brain etc that make this work now there's a third kind and that's biomimicry of systems and in this case it's not a specific organism or strategy but it's the interconnected network of species the relationships the flows of energy and resources and material one of the biggest lessons that we can learn from a system like this is about how resources flow throughout the system now I'm going to guess for those of you that spend time in these mountains one of the reasons to go is for all the things that are not there no cell phone signal no electricity bill no city noise I'm curious when you're out there do you ever see anything that looks like this of course not there's no such thing as waste in nature everybody knows that and it's totally true in nature every organisms waste is another raw material materials flow through endless closed loops so let me give you an oversimplified example of what this looks like here we have three local organisms ponderosa pine tree the carpenter ants that live inside of it and the aphids that they farm for food now the first takeaway from this system and almost every other system in nature is that the only new energy that comes in here is from the Sun nowhere else and in this case the Sun allows the tree to make sugar the aphids eat the sugar and the ants do not actually eat the aphids they eat honeydew which is a concentrated sugar solution that the secrete and in return the carpenter ants protect the aphids unfortunately for them nobody is protecting them so along comes our favorite friend the pileated woodpecker whose favorite lunch is carpenter ants and of course at some point the woodpecker could become food for a fox for example and as anyone who has read the children's books knows everybody poops luckily we have an army of organisms fungi dung beetles bacteria in the soil that break what is a disgusting waste product to us into raw materials for brand new life this is a pretty simple straightforward loop but the actual relationships are more complicated than that the woodpecker for example makes a new nest every year and so the one from the last year is available for other organisms to use again a valuable resource that gets shared and distributed in this case by a mountain Bluebird whoo yes also poops and the Ponderosa pine tree provides habitat to a huge array of different organisms including squirrels who live in in the branches and lichen the crows on the tree and yes the squirrel poops and this entire network as oversimplified as this is right imagine hundreds of organisms involved simultaneously in a network like this the key takeaway no matter what you're looking at is that there's very rarely new material coming into or leaving this system it just changes form the nutrients flow around they are exchanged they are consumed they're built into new structures like trees and then they're broken down and used again that is the definition of a circular economy this is in stark contrast to the way that we generally use materials so I spent the first fourteen years of my career as a product development consultant and these are some of the things that I helped design and we did some cool stuff some medical devices that were very innovative some consumer electronics some industrial equipment but I've got to tell you that once you see the ugly side of a products life cycle it's a lot harder to get excited about it you know imagine you buy some new something and you're so excited about it it weighs a pound there was 70 pounds of trash generated in the manufacture and shipment of that whatever it is this is the process that is used to make almost everything that we buy and consume we extract raw materials we make things we use them sometimes four minutes and then we throw them away this is a linear economy I'd it only goes one direction and it has us on a path quite frankly towards our own extinction and the possible extinction of up to 60 percent of the other life currently on the planet and that's a pretty heavy thought but before you go suck your thumb in the corner it doesn't have to go that way right we have a beautiful working model four miles west of where you're sitting right now it's raw materials are made via a water-based light friendly chemistry when they're no longer needed they're broken down its materials flow in closed loops are used again and there's no such thing as a garbage dump so how do we get there we need to rethink how we make polymers and spiders have so much to teach us with their silk and we need to rethink adhesive systems so they're reversible so that when your stupid cell phone breaks you can actually take it apart and repair it instead of throw it away and get a new one and starfish have so much to teach us and we need to rethink business models so that they're based on equitable sharing of resources instead of strict competition and mushrooms and funghi have so much to teach us but here's the thing with these technical things I don't think that by themselves they're enough right they're critical and people the world over brilliant people are asking nature to figure out how to solve these problems but by themselves what are these solutions mean to us here and I'm afraid that the answer is not much unless we can start rethinking our own systems as circular and we can start to reimagine our relationships with the things that we buy and use and consume and throw away everyday the first thing to understand is this is not an either/or proposition right your economy is not 100% circular or 100 percent linear it's a mix and full circularity is an aspirational goal right one you can probably never fully achieve if for no other reason then we can't grow coffee here and some things are totally not negotiable but we can take a lot of steps in the right direction we can make a lot of progress so let's imagine that you buy something off of Amazon that's this blue arrow comes to your house in two days very convenient then you dress something at Target bring it home right imagine the amount of stuff that you buy times 40,000 people who live in this valley and that is an insane amount of stuff and where does it all go when you're done with it right by and large a landfill heads right out again linear economy so how do we change it you can't change it all at once but you can change it in gradual micro steps instead of buying your coffee in a in a one-time reusable bag you can bring in a mason jar and they will fill it up with coffee for you and together you will have closed a teensy tiny loop of a circular economy now imagine that it's springtime you're gonna put in a garden by itself incredible circular economy step growing some of your own food but now imagine you need a rototiller to fill up some some new ground well you could go buy a rototiller of course or you could participate in the tool share program where you only use it when you need it together you would have closed another little tiny loop of a circular economy and these kinds of individual actions sometimes get an approver look down upon as not big enough like they don't make a difference and it's true that in isolation they don't but when you put them together and entire communities come together and rethink their relationships and everybody starts making these changes the changes add up to real change and the more of them happen the closer we get to functioning the way that that wilderness functions so what are some more things that it can teach us let's take a subset of the organisms from before and talk about organic waste so this is things that were once alive a lot of your food yard waste things like that in nature this loop shows us there's only one option and that's composting and composting is amazing one all of that cool stuff gets turned into new awesomeness like new woodpeckers or new Tomatoes in the summer time in your garden in addition the carbon dioxide that was originally sequestered by the tree is released as carbon dioxide and so the whole process is carbon neutral of course we humans in our infinite wisdom have created other options you can throw without organic waste in the trash and you can pay money to have it all 40 miles away burn a lot of gas in the process and buried in the ground and when you do that it will decompose not into carbon dioxide but methane which molecule for molecule does 30 times as much damage to the atmosphere what a ridiculous idea that is why would we ever do that composting is where it's at and sometimes it's a little bit you know it's hard or ownerís so you have to learn how to do it I hope you might have neighbors who can help you out or if you live in the city this is different on a municipality by municipality basis you have another option and that's your garbage disposal because in our community that organic waste hits the wastewater treatment plant and it's composted and returned back to the local soil at 100 percent it's a hole it's a hundred percent closed-loop which is awesome there's one tiny caveat to this and that's that if it's not ground up well enough it plugs up the screens at the wastewater treatment plant and I promise Donnie and Public Works that I would not needlessly make his life more difficult by telling you to all stick everything down your garbage disposal so I did a little bit of research in Donnie's best interest and it turns out that older garbage disposals have a tendency to not grind the food up well enough for this to work so if garbage disposal is your approach to composting it might be time to invest in a new garbage disposal all right here's another set of relationships okay here we have the tree again making food from the Sun and it makes only as much as it needs we talked already about the woodpecker and the shared resource the reuse of the nest and here we have organic waste loop which is making new things from old so what are we looking at here reduce reuse recycle now we all know reduced reuse recycle right and so what's the value of biomimicry if it's teaching us something that we all already know in this case what it's telling us is that this can actually work this is not an idea that somebody had in the 70s nature's been doing reduce reuse recycle for 3.8 billion years and it shows us quite clearly that you can build a hundred percent circular economy on this kind of foundation so it's not that you don't know this but studying the natural world gives us validation that this kind of approach is worth taking we talked already about the mutualistic symbiosis between the carpenter ant and David there's another really interesting one that has a few different dimensions between the tree and the fungi yes they exchange resources the fungi actually connect the tree to other trees and even other different plant species underground where it allows them to share information resources threat warnings about incoming pests right so this is a symbiosis is exchanging both materials and information and lichens seemingly innocuous growing on the side of everything these are actually a symbiosis of sometimes two sometimes three different organisms there's a fungus here and algae at least sometimes perhaps always a bacteria and so what are these kinds of relationships tell us about circular economies they tell us that you can't build one alone nature is full of relationships and partnerships and communities that only thrive when they work together and this is our place so shop at the farmers market join the O'Hara Commons and take advantage of their services including the tool share open up your compost bin to a neighbor if there's too scared to try it and think about the things that you buy a little bit harder think about them as valuable resources because that's what they are think about how to use them for a long time extend their life share them and get outside a lot this place is a gift let's let it teach us how to come together as a community and build an economy that works thanks you