I  generally focus on solutions rather than preaching to the choir about the issues, but sometimes a report like this is a wakeup call for me and everyone who believes there is a good chance that human influence climate change (chaos!) is underway.

“Number of Americans who believe in climate change drops, survey shows only 57% of Americans feel that the planet’s atmosphere is warming, a fall from 77% two years ago”

Continued:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/22/climate-change-us-pew-survey

http://people-press.org/report/556/global-warming

I just spent the last three days at the annual Bioneers Conference. The closing speaker was Ann Leonard - creator of The Story of Stuff. Her talk inspired me to put together a few thoughts and a ‘presentation’.

The fastest path to sustainability, to meeting the goals of Kyoto, 350.org, etc is to make exponentially more use out of the world’s limited resources. Buying more personal stuff - however ‘green’ - isn’t going to get us there. Instead we need to tap technology (and common sense) to radically increase the use of the products and resources we have today. Here are a few examples…

FastCompany giving biomimicry some attention:

Let’s say you’re looking to create a detergent that works superbly in cold temperatures. This would seem to be a Chemical Engineering Problem. But, as the zoo’s scientists tell us, it’s also an Antarctic Icefish Problem. When the icefish eats other fish, it has to digest the oils of its prey, and this process is remarkably similar to what happens in the wash with the oily taco stains on your T-shirt. Furthermore, the icefish typically dines in water as cold as — 2 degrees Celsius. (Try that, All-Temperature Cheer!) So, thanks to this cold fish, you have a working model for an ultra-low-temperature detergent — and it’s a solution that would have never occurred to an expert. Continued at FastCompany…

Congratulations to the San Diego Zoo, The Biomimicry Institute and Qualcomm/mirasol for putting on a GREAT conference in San Diego today.  The room was full and the event brought together a terrific cross-section of academia (students, teachers, professors), entrepreneurs (like me!), city officials (inc. Mayor of San Diego giving the opening keynote) and biologists (most notably the extraordinary Janine Benyus).

The zoo is promoting biomimicry to help its conservation efforts. If humans learn that nature is a treasure trove of engineering solutions perfected over millions of years, then conservation and environmental protection will take on commercial value, the reasoning goes. Continued at NC Times…

More on the event at http://www.sandiegozoo.org/conservation/biomimicry/ and I expect there will be additional stories in the coming days http://news.google.com/news

Wow! In the tech industry we would call this “disruptive” technology.

“…a new set of design tools, included in the newest release of ID CAD software SolidThinking. The technology, which ST is calling Morphogenesis, is a sort of semi-automated biomimicry toolbox…”

Continued at http://www.core77.com/blog/

Harold Raveche, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, offers an opinion piece suggesting a look at nature will provide answers as the US government works to overhaul the country’s financial system.

The options are stark and clear: Do we want an inflexible and stifled state-controlled economy or a vibrant and responsive free-market system that has human capital as its resource for competing in the global economy? Biomimicry provides the answer.  Continued at The Washington Times…

From : “Helen Cheng” <HCheng@sandiegozoo.org>

The San Diego Zoo and the Biomimicry Institute are pleased to announce the 2009 Biomimicry Symposium in San Diego, presented by mirasol^®, a display innovation by Qualcomm.

The symposium will be held Oct. 1-2 in Balboa Park, and online registration will open on Monday, Aug. 17, at 9am PDT.  It is expected to sell out quickly. Please visit www.sandiegozoo.org/biomimicry for more information and to register.

This 1.5 day symposium will include talks by local and national leaders in the field of biomimicry, as well as a biomimicry bus tour of the San Diego Zoo and an Invention Convention highlighting real examples of nature-based solutions and designs.

Symposium highlights:

1. Our featured speakers include nationally-renown experts, Janine Benyus, Jay Harman and Chip Heath.

- Janine Benyus is a biologist, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.  She recently was awarded a UN Champion of the Earth Award presented by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

- Jay Harman is a serial entrepreneur and inventor. His latest company, PAX Scientific, uses nature’s streamlining geometries to design energy efficient, quiet, and ecologically friendly technology.

- Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research examines why certain ideas survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas, and he co-authored the best-selling book titled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

Our Education panel features an international group of educators who have taught biomimicry both formally and informally. They will provide practical insight and advice on biomimicry education.

Our Business panel includes members of the business and government community who have been involved in the development of biomimetic inventions and can talk about the practical aspects of commercializing nature-based products.

2. Our presenting sponsor is mirasol^®, a display innovation by Qualcomm.  Additional sponsors include Jump Associates, Bioneers, Pax Scientific, InterfaceFLOR, Charles & Diane Smith, Corning, UCSD Sustainability Solutions Institute, UCSD Rady School of Management, UCSD Division of Biological Sciences, and UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Conference partners include the City of San Diego, Envision Solar, Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego State University, and the UCSD von Liebig Center.  For more information on sponsorship opportunities, please contact Helen Cheng at hcheng@sandiegozoo.org or 619-557-3927.

3. Participants will be treated to a special biomimicry bus tour of the San Diego Zoo, then stroll through a mini Invention Convention to see real examples of biomimetic designs and products. If you have biomimetic technology and would like to exhibit your product in this Invention Convention, please contact Helen Cheng at hcheng@sandiegozoo.org or 619-557-3927.

4. Scholarships will be available on a limited basis to students, educators and non-profit organizations. Please visit http://www.sandiegozoo.org/conservation/biomimicry/registration/ to download an application form.

We hope to see you there!

The Maharbiz Group at UC Berkeley has a long-term vision is to engineer devices and materials directly from living precursors - in other words biomimicry. First published a few years ago, the work has now found its way into NewScientist.

Inspired by the transport of water in plants, we resently presented a synthetic, microfabricated ‘leaf’ which can scavenge electrical power from evaporation-driven flow via a charge pump embedded in the ’stem’. In the device, evaporation at the surface of the device produces flow in microfabricated vasculature.  Continued at http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~maharbiz/Transpiration.html

Additional introductory info at http://www.inhabitat.com.

In a lecture broadcast on the UK’s BBC, the Prince of Wales issued a stark warning about impending environmental catastrophe, telling an audience: “If we fail the Earth, we fail humanity.” Giving the 33rd Richard Dimbleby lecture, The Prince set out his vision for tackling what he said were the pressing problems of the “environmental crisis”, and spoke of an economic system with “enormous shortcomings”. A new order was needed to combat these issues which moved away from a “mechanistic” approach to one that was more “balanced and integrated with nature’s complexity”.

…the emerging discipline of biomimicry puts what zoologists and biologists know about natural systems together with the problems engineers and architects are trying to solve, in order to produce technology that mimics how Nature operates. There are some remarkable examples – by studying the surface of lotus leaves, an exterior paint has been developed that enables walls to clean themselves when it rains; and from a tiny desert beetle comes a sheet that can harvest moisture from the lightest of mists in the driest parts of the world. They all blend the best of the old with the best of the new to produce highly efficient technology that works with the grain of Nature rather than against it.

Complete speech at http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk

News commentary via http://news.google.com

There are two biomimicry workshops coming up soon. Check them out at: http://www.biomimicryinstitute.org/education/training/