Greenr - Accelerate the Change!

Making it three articles in as many months, Fortune covers the recently announced collaboration between HOK and The Biomimicry Guild:

What gets people excited about biomimicry is its potential to help solve environmental problems like climate change. If we can design buildings and products to operate more like nature, which does not pollute and creates no waste, we’d be much better off. Continued at Fortune/CNN Money…

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ZDNet looks at new research that mimics electric eel cells to produce energy:

A team of U.S. engineers has found that it’s possible to build artificial cells replicating the electrical behavior of electric eel cells. In fact, these artificial cells deliver better performance than the real ones, called electrocytes, which can generate electric potentials of up to 600 volts. Continued at ZDNet…

If you find research and development like this interesting, then set aside Monday, Oct 20th for the Biomimicry Institute’s first conference.

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Answer: A lot…

Ultimately, biomimicry seeks to understand how we ought to integrate ourselves with nature. I find hope in the principle that, in nature, there are no hard boundaries or edges; materials merge together seamlessly. Perhaps through the emulation of nature, we will come to live more symbiotically with it, and our environments will become both closer to nature and less invasive to it.

Read the complete post a:

http://greenerbuildings.com/column/2008/09/08/what-can-architecture-learn-from-nature

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According to VentureBeat, local San Francisco home energy audit and retrofit company Sustainable Spaces has raised $6m. Congrats to Matt Golden and team.

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A biomimicry update from a fellow Biomimicry Institute board member, and long-time cleantech commentator Joel Makower.

Will biomimicry blossom, joining green chemistry among the burgeoning tools available to build the next generation of cleaner, greener products? It remains to be seen, of course, but biomimicry makes too much common sense to be dismissed as a niche or fringe activity. If we can marry the wisdom of millions of critters with human’s unbounded ingenuity, we’ll stand a chance of effectively addressing climate change, water and energy challenges, and the need to feed and house the global village. Continued…

And be sure to check out Joel’s recently published book: Strategies for the Green Economy:

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The lastest issue of Fast Company magazine has some terrific biomimicry-related images by Jonathan Kantor. The online version doesn’t quite do justice to the images, but if the printed magazine isn’t handy, you can still check ‘em out at: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/129/truly-intelligent-design.html

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I posted about Open Source Sustainability a few months ago, so I was pleased to read about an upcoming event:

We are gathering together a large community of like-minded groups and people, called the Open Sustainability Network (OSN), to work on overcoming barriers to openness and collaboration. Our first conference will be at San Francisco State University on October, 18th-19th and admission is free.

To register for OSNCamp 2008 see: http://osncon.eventbrite.com

For more information: http://opensustainabilitynetwork.org

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