Henry Dicks is an environmental philosopher who specializes in the philosophical aspects of biomimicry and learning from nature. His recent work, The Biomimicry Revolution: Learning from Nature How to Inhabit the Earth, explores the philosophical significance of biomimicry, the imitation, emulation, and process of learning from nature. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Dicks discusses the epistemological questions biomimicry raises, the concept’s historical roots, and its contemporary implications.
What is your work about?
It’s about two things: biomimicry and philosophy. Biomimicry is the idea of imitating, emulating, and learning from nature. Agroecology, for example, is the attempt to develop more sustainable agrosystems by learning from the workings of natural ecosystems. Likewise, artificial intelligence often takes human or animal intelligence as model. ChatGPT, for example, is an artificial neural network inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. I argue that the world is in the early stages of a profound shift towards a new way paradigm for innovation, the central principle of which is learning from nature.
The work is also about philosophy—the love of wisdom. And my starting point is the idea that it is primarily in nature that wisdom may be found. Interestingly, however, the links between biomimicry and philosophy have been little explored. So, while the book that launched the biomimicry movement—Janine Benyus’s Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997)—starts by putting forward three foundational principles that are highly philosophical in nature (Nature as model, Nature as measure, and Nature as mentor), stylistically it is very much a work of popular science and has nothing explicit to say about philosophy. The result is a paradoxical situation in which biomimicry is advancing a new philosophy based on the idea of seeking wisdom in nature, but without directly engaging with philosophy. My book seeks to rectify this by bringing biomimicry and philosophy into dialogue.
In what ways exactly does biomimicry revolutionize technological innovation?
For over two thousand years, it was widely believed that techne was imitation of nature. This idea was rejected by Hegel in the early nineteenth century and then by the first philosophers of technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nature, in their view, furnished us only with energy and raw materials, with the ideas for technology all coming from the human mind. Biomimicry breaks radically with this conception of technology, seeing nature instead as providing models and sources of inspiration for technological innovation. Take chemistry, for example. Conventional chemistry adopts a “heat, beat, and treat” approach; it uses high temperatures, violent pressures, and toxic chemicals to force raw materials extracted from nature to do our bidding. Nature’s approach is quite different; it operates at ambient temperatures and pressures, without recourse to toxic chemicals, using water as a solvent. So, whereas the strongest human-designed material, Kevlar, is made by boiling petroleum in sulfuric acid at 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, and is then drawn out under enormous pressures, spider’s silk—in some respects a much stronger fiber—is produced without recourse to any of these extreme processes, from nothing but dead flies. Taking inspiration from spiders, mollusks, diatoms, plants, and the like, chemists are already producing sustainable materials by following nature’s low-energy, life-friendly ways.
How do you relate your work to other well-known philosophies?
I situate biomimicry mainly with respect to environmental philosophy, arguing that biomimicry can not only broaden the scope of environmental philosophy but also revolutionize its content. For a start, it makes possible a powerful new environmental philosophy of technology, based on a renewal of the ancient idea—present notably in Democritus and Aristotle—of technology as imitation of nature. It also introduces a profound shift in environmental ethics. Moving away from the traditional focus on protecting or “letting nature be,” it calls on us to adopt a new ethic of emulating or “being like nature.” And lastly, it makes possible a new approach to environmental epistemology, the key insight of which is that knowledge (and wisdom) may be acquired from nature.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
Probably the idea of learning from nature, the central focus of what I call “biomimetic epistemology.” Conventional epistemology recognizes five main sources of knowledge: the senses, reason, introspection, memory, and testimony. The common denominator here is the idea that knowledge is generated by human beings, initially through our sensory and cognitive faculties, though it may also be acquired through the testimony of other humans. The idea that knowledge may arise first in nature and only later be acquired by humans is virtually unheard of in mainstream discussions of epistemology. And yet, it undoubtedly raises all sorts of fascinating philosophical questions. How is knowledge generated in nature? What different types of knowledge does nature generate? If knowledge is generated in nature, does that mean that nature possesses mind? How do we learn from nature and how does that learning differ from the ways we learn from other humans?
Of course, there will inevitably be criticisms of the very enterprise of biomimetic epistemology, such as the objection that nature generates only information not knowledge, let alone wisdom, or that the whole idea of taking “nature as mentor” is but a metaphor. But whatever one might think about these criticisms, the idea of nature as a source of knowledge is at the very least worthy of discussion, and at most a game-changer not just for epistemology, but potentially also for the future of life on earth.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
Biomimicry offers an inspiring vision of a world that has been made sustainable by basing human-made products and systems on natural models. Imagine a world in which agriculture, industry, and even cities all work like natural ecosystems, running on solar energy, recycling everything, generating no pollution, and providing habitats for other species. There is genuine poetry in this vision. “Imagine a building like a tree, a city like a forest,” write Braungart and McDonough. And yet, perhaps because philosophy and the humanities have not really engaged with biomimicry, it has yet to be taken seriously. I am constantly reminded here of something that Aldo Leopold, the father of environmental ethics, said in the late 1940s about conservation. The “proof” that conservation has yet to change the “foundations of conduct,” he said, is that “philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it. In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.” The same is true today of biomimicry. The attempt to make it popular and accessible has led it to be seen as just a novelty design method, unworthy of profound reflection. If the contemporary world is to realize biomimicry’s inspiring vision, as I believe it must, then it needs to engage with the sort of foundational philosophizing that my work attempts.
How is your work relevant to historical ideas?
Benyus opposes the Biomimicry Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. But in seeing the Biomimicry Revolution not just as a technological revolution, but also as an ontological, ethical, and epistemological revolution, the principal historical opposition I establish is with the Enlightenment. On Kant’s view, Enlightenment involves having the courage and resolution to be able to do without the “guidance of another” and instead to take the path of autonomy. The result is an epistemology based on reason and the senses, an ethics based on pure reason, and a view of technology—developed later on by philosophers like Friedric Dessauer—as invention by rational design. The ecological consequences of all this are proving catastrophic. In seeking to develop our own ways of doing things, using only our senses and reason as a guide, we have ignored and laid waste to the wisdom present in nature. I conclude my book by calling for a “New Enlightenment”—one in which enlightenment is to be achieved not through the arrogant and reckless attempt to do everything on our own, but rather through having the humility to turn to nature as guide.
What effect do you hope your work will have?
Every now and then an idea emerges outside of philosophy and the humanities that grabs their attention. The concept of the Anthropocene is an obvious example. I would love my work to do the same for biomimicry. It’s an idea whose time has come!
Henry Dicks
Henry Dicks is an environmental philosopher who specializes in the philosophical aspects of biomimicry and learning from nature. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, has published in leading academic journals (e.g., Philosophy and Technology, Environmental Values) and teaches advanced courses in environmental ethics and philosophy of biomimicry at various higher education institutes.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
