Biomimicry - bios, meaning life, and mimesis, to imitate

Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new discipline that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. 

Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example. It can be thought of as "innovation inspired by nature."

The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems people are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, humans are imitating the best adapted organisms in their habitat. This discipline is learning, for instance, how to harness energy like a leaf, grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, self-medicate like a chimp, create color like a peacock, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest.

The conscious emulation of life's genius is a survival strategy for the human race, a path to a sustainable future. The more the world functions like the natural world, the more likely human beings are to endure on this home that is for them, but not for them alone.

Looking at Nature as Model, Measure, and Mentor.

Nature as model: Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s models and then emulates these forms, process, systems, and strategies to solve human problems – sustainably.  

Nature as measure: Biomimicry uses an ecological standard to judge the sustainability of our innovations.  After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned what works and what lasts.  Nature as measure is captured in Life's Principles and is embedded in the evalute step of the Biomimicry Design Spiral. 

Nature as mentor: Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature.  It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but what we can learn from it.