What Made Us Stray from Nature?

She took a tongue-and-cheek approach to explore Eco-travel, noticing that this group, once taken into the jungle and out onto the reefs, found the simple beauty of nature as the most interesting focus of their trip. She flashed photos of crabs, exotic insects, plant life and fungus, unlike any that most of us had ever seen. With her group in Costa Rica, she reported on the kinds of probing questions she might ask while they observed nature. “How does nature grow in twenty to thirty minutes? How does it grow in harsh habitats? How does nature mimic society?” She went on to explain that she and the group were “consciously being nature’s student.”

I was able to understand the Biomimicry concept further once Jay Harman, founder and CEO of Pax Scientific and Pax Water, took the stage. He has taken real-life models from nature in order to create his own inventions, which give nature a hand in correcting the damage caused by outdated inventions. He began his talk by mentioning that alternative energy is the fastest growing business right now and explained that the innovations of pumps and fans, from years ago, are what use half of all of the world’s energy (many from air conditioners used in the United States). His company has taken steps to decrease this energy consumption. He held up a contraption that looked like the part that you might attach to a high-end restaurant mixer, except that it had been designed as a tool to help clean our water supply, which can deteriorate if left stagnate in holding tanks by creating microbial contaminates.

The invention is the Pax Water Mixer, and it was created using Biomimicry, by copying nature’s efficiencies. As the Web site states, “In nature, this design is the optimal shape for fluid movement. It’s found everywhere you look in the natural world, and nothing works better.” Pax takes natural designs and mixes them with state-of-the-art engineering and rigorous testing to create optimal devices. In this water mixer case, they looked at the eye of a hurricane, the inside of a snail shell, and other spiral forms in nature as inspiration. As he put it perfectly, “Nature’s already modeled the solutions for humans; we have the technology.”