Many critiques of biomimicry note the field’s “fatal ambiguity” which can lead to harmful consequences. Among these is the probable exploitation of the same organisms and systems biomimicry claims to protect, ultimately creating a new human-dominated nature. Like the previous article (“Biomimicry: New Nature, New Enclosures”), “Biomimicry and the Problem of Praxis” by Freya Mathews discusses the need for shifts in mindset and standards to ensure a movement away from anthropocentric and unsustainable industry habits. Mathews identifies that the “fatal ambiguity at the heart of biomimicry” can lead to two opposing understandings:

  1. “a system that entirely replaces the elements or components of natural systems with engineered or fabricated ones” designed based on biological functions. In other words, replacing ‘original nature’ for an anthropocentric ‘second nature.”
  2. “Or an effort to “imitate original nature in the sense that it works towards the ecological re-integration of humanity back into the larger community of life, following the synergistic patterns set by other species”. This second understanding is more directed towards sustaining all life, not just human life.”

Throughout the rest of the paper, Freya Mathews explains how these two different understandings can be arrived at. The first anthropocentric understanding of biomimicry is based on an ecomodernist framework. Ecomodernism is a “thing” and “human” centered environmental philosophy. Ecomodernists strongly believe that society should always move towards more progressive and modern ways of living. Rather than blame the environmental and social crises of our current period on modernity, ecomodernists believe that “we have yet to modernize modernity (i.e., render it sustainable).” In their eyes, humans can invent their way out of anything. Enter biomimicry… a new, “more sustainable” source for design and innovation inspiration. Biomimicry can easily be assumed to mean that a synergistic socio-environmental relationship can be achieved through a technological revolution but Mathews is careful to note that “the roots of poverty [identified as one of the factors ecomodernists believe will be fixed with modern innovation] lie as much in the politics of power, and in the consequences of conflict and war, as in a lack of resources: inegalitarianism, and with it, inequality in the distribution of resources, will surely persist despite any technological potential for universal prosperity”. One can slip down this ecomodernist rabbit hole easily especially since biomimicry’s core motivation is innovation.

Conversely, the second point explores a more inclusive interpretation of biomimicry.  Freya Mathews uses the word “bio-inclusiveness” to describe this new way of thinking that values the biology from which we learn how to live more sustainably. She points out that a state of bio-inclusiveness must “grow out of practice” to “gain real traction”. A successful pursuit will require a value shift away from technocentric and anthropocentric mindsets toward a bio-inclusive one. Mathews uses Karl Marx’s doctrine of historical materialism to assist in explaining the requirements and processes of a value shift:

“According to the doctrine of historical materialism, norms and values that genuinely inform consciousness originate not so much in discourse or debate as in the specific forms of praxis in which a given society, or a given class within a particular society, is engaged at any historical moment. Praxis consists of the practices whereby societies, or groups within societies, intentionally act upon the world to extract their livelihood from it.”

Praxis is a fancy word for describing societies’ practices at a certain time. Freya Mathews provides examples from different time periods to illustrate the rise of ecomodernist-like praxis. It is important to note that not all praxes have been innately destructive and exploitative. In earlier societies and many indigenous societies still today, there was a praxis of provisioning rather than production. Hunter-gatherer societies are a good example of this. These societies are known to forage sustainability with a “sophisticated ethos of adaptiveness and accommodation”. Once understood as a hunter-gatherer society with passive practices, Aboriginal Australia is now being re-described in a far more active sense. Some of the practices of the Aboriginal people included “patch burning to promote grasslands for favored herbivores”, constituting an active ‘management’ of ecological systems. Though this can appear to be anthropocentric in nature, it is important to understand the fundamental differences in Aboriginal people’s motivations.  Mathews notes that “‘management’ in this sense involved encouraging local ecosystems to develop in ways that increased their utility for humans but in no way interfered with their own ongoing flourishing – in something like the way a gardener might ‘guide’ or ‘train’ a self-sown, otherwise wild vine to climb a wall. Encouraging wild ecosystems to serve human ends in this manner without destroying the ecological integrity of the systems themselves is important – I would say categorically – different from management in the dominate-and-control mode associated with traditional agriculture.” To contextualize this ecological effort of management, Mathews defines this synergistic practice as “custodialism”.

With the birth of Agrarian societies in the 16th and 17th centuries, human-nature dualism took off. Food production intensified and farming families settled and expanded creating a divide between farmland and natural forestry. “Production and storage of food surplus, in turn, gave rise to social specialization” which catalyzed social stratification and political hierarchy. Differing greatly from the Aboriginal people, agrarian societies “produced what they needed by replacing those ecosystems and performing themselves the arduous work of providing: selecting, clearing, tilling sowing, domesticating, genetically altering, in a word, farming.”

Next is industrialization, otherwise known as, “the advent of modernity”. I think we are all familiar with the mechanical models that began to take over our societies. Today we are still in the grip of the industrialism of the 17th century, although, it has evolved dramatically. According to Mathews, with the digitization of our industrial and information systems, we are likely at the start of a new trajectory. These informational societies take on a semblance of being less invasive and more attune to the well-being of our natural surroundings. However, as we have discussed previously, this new informational era that promotes biomimicry presents an opportunity for a new kind of anthropocentric extraction- the extraction of ideas rather than natural resources.

Freya Mathews expands on this:

“From an informational perspective, we no longer see ‘nature’ – the realm of sentient, suffering, fleshly Earth life – in mechanical terms as merely a machine, inert but at least still material. We now see it in positively Pythagorean terms as information – as information in its most abstract, digital (i.e., numerical) sense: in other words, as sheer ideality. This represents the ultimate triumph of dualism and hence of anthropocentrism: ‘nature’, as background to the human, is not only devoid of life or mind; it is not even in its essence material but ideal.”

So… where do we go from here? “For biomimicry to serve bio-inclusive ends, as Janine Benyus intended, and for it to become the basis for a genuinely ecological civilization, it must prescribe, as our root praxis, neither production, the replacement of the natural with the human-made, nor communication in an exclusively digital mode, but forms of participatory engagement with natural systems that will give rise to participatory consciousness, just as the praxis of custodial peoples did.”

Freya Mathews presents this praxis as biosynery defined as a “mode of engagement that allows us to use natural systems in the service of our own ends but only in ways that are compatible with, and ideally enhances, theirs”. History informs our future. To blindly take on this new method of innovation would likely result in an anthropocentric biomimicry movement that would create a “new” modern privatized nature. We must be mindful of our motivations and values as a society to ensure we are pursuing a sustainable effort of design that is, in fact, sustainable. Biomimicry has the potential to improve our relationship with non-human nature by highlighting nature’s genius and inspiring more sustainable systems. This potential can only be realized with truly bio-inclusive values and bio-synergistic praxes.

References:

  1. “Biomimicry and the Problem of Praxis” (2019) article by Freya Mathews: researchgate.net/publication/334586603_Biomimicry_and_the_Problem_of_Praxis
  2. robertjordan.wordpress.ncsu.edu/origins-of-the-culture-nature-dualism/ [image]

*All quotes and material above are sourced from “Biomimicry and the Problem of Praxis” by Freya Mathews. [1]

*Some words are bolded to emphasize their use as key terms.