Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

The new issue of The Sun features an interview with Janine Benyus, President of the Biomimicry Institute (based in Missoula).  If you don’t know about biomimicry yet, this interview is a great way to get an idea of what it’s all about—looking at nature’s design principles in order to form more sustainable practices and products.  It’s a really inspiring school of thought that will have an integral part of shaping a more energy-efficient future.  Benyus has also written a comprehensive book on biomimicry (Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Harper Perennial, $14.99), which we have in stock in our science section.

“What mining does is go down and get metals from beneath the earth’s crust.  Instead of going down to where the ore is, we need to learn how to gather and concentrate all the metal that is already on the earth’s surface.  Some bacteria need to gather small amounts of metals, such as iron, for their metabolism, so they use chelating molecules to catch metals.  Our dream is to mimic these molecules to pull metals from water in industrial-waste streams, landfills, and polluted rivers.  You can make a specific chelator for iron, mercury, or gold, and you can actually gather enough molecules to produce solid metals.

We should think of river remediation not as cleaning water but as mining metals.  A community can actually make money by mining its river and create clean water as a byproduct.  That’s how organisms view the process: they want to obtain the metal.  But the byproduct of the organism meeting its need is clean air, clean water, and better soil.  Everything that an organism does in a natural setting also creates conditions conducive to life.”

—”The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Janine Benyus On The Virtues Of Imitating Nature,” September 2009 issue of The Sun, IN STOCK ($4.95)