"....Preparing for this speech, I wondered whether such inquiries were happening in our Ceramic Engineering schools? Were our ceramics majors engaged in the quest? Were they being exposed to nature’s far better way? And I answered my wondering: Probably not, because I read that these pursuits are happening in biology laboratories with shoestring funding, while our universities remain locked in their traditional mind-set and curricula, teaching fossil fuel powered heat, beat, treat technologies - the very ones that industry is using to destroy the biosphere.
A similarly fascinating story follows the abalone’s. It is the spider’s production of its silk web, yielding a fiber that is five times stronger, pound for pound, than the aramide Kevlar®, the toughest man-made fiber yet developed by Dupont’s heat, beat, treat technology which employs sulfuric acid at boiling temperatures. Kevlar is strong enough to stop a bullet, but a weakling compared with spider’s silk, made from bugs at body temperature. And I wondered again whether our textile and chemistry students were learning nature’s better way by studying spider’s silk. I answered my wondering again: Probably not, because I read that these studies are happening in biology laboratories with shoestring funding, while our universities remain locked in their traditional mind-set and curricula, teaching heat, beat, treat technologies - the very ones that industry is using to destroy the biosphere.
The emerging field of work, endeavoring to answer the question "How does nature do it?" in material sciences and a growing number of other fields, is "Biomimicry" - nature as model, nature as measure, nature as mentor. Biomimicry is in the early days of inspiring and helping define our sustainable future, not only in materials science, but also in food production (polycultural rather than monocultural, perennial rather than annual, crops); easier on the land, especially vanishing topsoil; in energy production (as scientists probe the mysteries of the complex physics and chemistry of nature’s exclusive process of photosynthesis - easier on the atmosphere and climate); in medicine, e.g., pharmaceuticals that are identified by watching animals in the wild cure themselves naturally; in storing and retrieving knowledge (through studying shape-based computing, learned from how our own cells process information); in architecture (as we learn from termite mounds); and even in industry, as we begin to look to natural systems to teach us more intelligent organizing principles for production that does not consume and destroy nature. Abundance through waste-free processes: that is nature’s way. And we are light years behind in our feeble efforts thus far to emulate nature.
So I ask you who are shaping curricular and academic research: Why are our universities not teaching Biomimicry? Perhaps it is thought to be too new - and outrageous. Nature, 3.8 billion years old, is too new? Given the 50,000 year history of educating homo sapiens to live with nature, perhaps it is latter day ideas for destroying nature that are too new, and truly outrageous. The overpowering consideration that prompts the question about Biomimicry is the increasingly obvious destruction of the biosphere, being wrought by the industrial system that is being taught in our universities. The mind-set that grips the entire industrial system, of which our educational institutions are integral parts, takes nature for granted as if a finite Earth were infinite, both as a source of stuff and as a sink for the system’s waste - yours, mine, everybody’s. The universities, in their academic programs, credit requirements, curricula, course design, campus design, and campus operations, perpetuate this flawed mind-set from generation to generation, with scarcely a pang of conscience, much less a serious re-examination of the universities’ roles in the destruction of the biosphere. Obsolete curricula are clear symptoms of this obsolete, flawed mind-set. And the clear evidence of the flaw is all around us in the form of declining natural systems upon which all else depends...."
http://www.ncseonline.org/NCSEconference/2003conference/page.cfm?FID=2504
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