A Bridge to Biomimicry

David McCullough & Velcro

Real Good: My book club talks about the Brooklyn Bridge

Real Good : Biomimicry — a big word for marveling & emulating nature

Anyone who claims habits are easy to revise is either lying or very fortunate. I love my history book club. I also love my recently completed classes with Common Earth. Books and classes are similar in this way. Both of them introduce me to new thinking and can be a call to action to incorporate what I have learned. I hope my Common Earth experience becomes as durable as my book club. Today’s story is JUST A BIT longer than usual (12 min) but it’s two stories in one!!!

This book is 50 years old. That’s nothing compared to the bridge which is 140 years old. I think it is safe to say it was a good plan to transform Brooklyn from its rural roots. Now I can refer to Brooklyn as an old cow patch.

A Quick Should Do

In the Central time zone, this is officially 5 hours belated. I recently read a very nice essay that captures a lot of what makes Father’s Day important to many of us. My Dad passed when I was 23. Much less time than I bargained for. Read this for a nice lift from

Aging Gratefully by CK Steefel

The Great Bridge

Can we ever run out of books to read? My answer is a hard no. I enjoy my monthly non-fiction history book club. I wrote a paean to the joys it brings in the link if you are a book club nerd in a very early Substack post. This is my favorite community library where we meet. I am pretty happy with the priorities here in Minnesota.

Book Review Time

As I age, I realize while there may be a long time yet ahead, the sand in the hourglass is inexorably passing. I recently wrote about the Carl Sagan book “Contact” and remarked how rarely I reread books. This month our book club selection was “The Great Bridge” by David McCullough. I think I may have recommended it but am not sure. I consider David’s writing a near-can’t-miss as I love his process and thoroughness. This, of course, leads to long books. In this case, 636 pages so not for everyone. I loved the book when I originally read it and enjoyed the PBS series by Ken Burns which it inspired. I skimmed a bit to prepare for a group discussion. All the things I forgot would be up to my fellow members to remind me.

Bridge Talk

I enjoy stories that are a mix of discovery, breakthrough, and faith. John Roebling initiated the design for the bridge while his son Washington and his wife Emily fulfilled it through completion in 1883. The world was changing rapidly. The first electric power station was opened in 1882 in Manhattan. It would burn down in 1890. We lionize Edison. In truth, he was pushed out as the leader of General Electric as the world rejected DC current. The record of the Roeblings and the Great Bridge was much more successful than the efforts of Edison and J.P. Morgan! The concept of the bends (nitrogen bubbles in the blood) was not understood and was largely discovered during the building of the bridge. The eventual gamble to stop digging before reaching bedrock is a fabulous backdrop to the greater construction. The legacy of the bridge is remarkable and holds up after 140+ years.

Since I spend a lot of my time in this Newsletter observing that almost all progress is recent, I must bow in reverence to the men and women who made the bridge possible. For the record, Washington and Emily Roebling as a team saw the bridge to completion. Emily managed the day-to-day operations during key parts of construction as her husband was bedridden. McCullough tells this part of the story with precision. The book was written in 1972. Married women could not legally open their own bank accounts until 1974. McCullough was ahead of his time!

Today, the NYC DOT operates 789 bridges and tunnels. The emergence of the great city largely rests on conquering the natural barrier of water. The Brooklyn Bridge set the stage for much of the future of the city.

I rated the book a 10/10. That is a lot of enjoyment despite a long read. The greater club voted the book a 9.37 of 10 across 20+ opinions, likely our top book of the year! Fair warning to prospective readers, McCullough thrives on details and will examine all sorts of facts about steel and cables before moving on. One of my fellow book club members remarked “I don’t need to know how to build a bridge myself!” — the best laugh of the night. The building of the bridge connected formerly rural Brooklyn (the 3rd largest city in the country) largely by hand. In the coming decades, NYC would be transformed into a place unlike anywhere in the world. This era signaled the rise of NYC as the greatest city in the world. McCullough, over his career, won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards. His writing is a commitment but well worth the time spent.

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Inspiration from the Unexpected

When this Substack goes paid I will offer a FREE perpetual subscription to the first reader with a picture of them holding a real pangolin.No AI photos accepted. If you have eaten one keep it to yourself.

In a recent post, a reader

Anne Kadet

(who happens to live in Brooklyn — see Bridge story) went down the rabbit hole and discovered the scales on a pangolin (a favorite of the Chinese wet markets) are made from the same stuff as our fingernails. Cool — this is perhaps another reason why you should not chew your fingernails.

In a tribute to how my mind works, her comment made me return to an unfinished draft which brings us to today and biomimicry. In a recently completed Common Earth class, we explored all sorts of concepts. Most of them are guides to how life on Earth will change in the coming decades. We are finally smart enough and capable enough to carefully study how life works on the planet and marvel at the amazing capacity of nature to do things better than we might ever imagine! Nature operates with efficiencies that are inconceivable when compared to any modern endeavor. It is finally time for us to focus on mimicking nature rather than subverting it.

Polymers

In the movie “The Graduate”, Dustin Hoffman is taken aside and told the future is plastics. We’ve been at it for about 75 years and have focused on making all sorts of plastics the largest extent from oil. While we might put some of them in the blue receptacle, very few get recycled and typically are used once. It is time to compare ourselves to nature and perhaps learn a lesson or two. Nature has been making polymers for about 500M years. Nature in all its wonders focuses on a couple of remarkably versatile substances. Humans, by contrast, ingest a credit card's worth of plastic per week (about 5 grams). Something needs to change!

Meet the Keratins

Keratin is everywhere! All sorts of animals use it in different ways. I have a link to an old post that explains keratins in great detail. Among mammals, the hair (including wool), horns, nails, claws, and hooves, are made primarily of α-keratins. Among reptiles, scales, claws, and, in the chelonians, such as tortoise, turtle, terrapin, the shells, which are made primarily of β-keratins. We all instinctively know how durable these keratins are. Only “Florida Man” is asinine enough to wrestle an alligator encased in keratin armor. Asians attribute aphrodisiac qualities to rhinoceros horn (it’s just hair dude). Nature has figured out (and shared the plans with us) how to do this. Burning a barrel of crude oil is not required to make some fingernails or beaks. What does nature know that we don’t?

Nature’s Rules & Principles

The study of nature with a focus on emulating and learning a better way to manage processes is recent. Practitioners established the guiding principles. If you want to learn more about biomimicry I recommend Janine Benyus’s book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997)

The original 9 Biomimicry Life's Principles were

1. Nature runs on sunlight

2. Nature uses only the energy it needs

3. Nature fits form to function

4. Nature recycles everything

5. Nature rewards cooperation

6. Nature banks on diversity

7. Nature demands local expertise

8. Nature curbs excesses from within

9. Nature taps the power of limits

In the spirit of respecting your time (and not overwhelming with David McCullough-like detai), we will focus only on items 1, 2 & 4. Evaluating biomimicry more comprehensively leaves me breathless with the opportunities that lie under our noses (a mustache is made of keratin). When pressed, humanity has applied the principles. When it has, it has led to towering achievements.

1. Nature runs on sunlight

When photosynthesis emerged on this rock of ours the world’s greatest parlor trick which turns CO2 into O2 (oxygen) kicked life into high gear. The C6H12O6 is just a chemical name for the bane of many dieters. It’s a carbohydrate and is a handy way to make some sugar which we all like anyhow. Those carbohydrates fueled plant growth. Nature has this cool virtuous cycle. The ONLY fuel to make this reaction go is sunlight.

\(6CO_{2} + 6H_{2}O→C_{6}H_{12}O_{6} + 6O_{2}\)

Once the plants started converting CO2 to O2 animal life was just over the horizon. The O2 didn’t magically form an atmosphere. Most got dissolved in the ocean and then grabbed by all the free iron near the bottom. We needed almost 1B years of photosynthesis before the iron was done sucking up oxygen. Finally, some of that free oxygen started accumulating in the atmosphere!

Every living thing manages to get along with just sunlight as a source of energy. Nature found no benefit to localized sources of energy. EVERYTHING we need just shines down free of charge.

If we had only ended up with some amoebas and an occasional ant, maybe nature wouldn’t be so worthwhile to mimic. What we have with 9M+ species is simple proof that you might just be able to manage the whole show with some sunlight and that approach is worth mimicking.

2. Nature uses only the energy it needs

Wasting energy meant risking your life. So wasting energy, regardless of what the economic system has warped its cost to be is dumb. How do we warp the cost? Pretty simple. We charge only for the extraction, conversion, and transportation cost plus some profit. We do not charge the FULLY LOADED cost of hardly anything. This is the simple distortion we pretend does not matter. This is how excessive use allows the profit extraction to escape responsibility for the downstream cost of their products. This is WHY we end up with so much waste.

Only when the costs are EXTREME do we intervene in “the perfection of markets”. We pretend otherwise, in nearly all cases that products are not imposing costs on the remaining living things not involved in the transaction. Removal of lead from paint and gasoline are those VERY RARE interventions and only when we realized it was a neurotoxin for our brains. In the case of Flint, MI we’ve managed to ignore such horrific consequences and just bring in bottled water. Nature doesn’t do any of this of course. Nature doesn’t use Bitcoins or currency nor does it flourish when one tree suctions all of the nutrients in the soil and sacrifices all surrounding life. There was never a FOREST magazine article listing the ten most prolific trees in the world and pointing out those ten trees are now larger than all the other trees on the planet combined. A Musk or Bezos tree has not evolved in the last 3.8B years for a reason. Such a tree would be a threat to life on the planet and nature would squash it.

The evolution of minimized energy use has led to the diversity of the planet. This is why the experiment of the last 175 years is dangerous despite the short-term comforts it has brought — at least in the first world.

4. Nature recycles everything

Where do all the hair, shells, claws, beaks, horns, and hooves go? With oil, we make hundreds if not thousands of different plastics. Nature largely makes two with only subtle differences in the proteins. All of the keratin break down into their component amino acids. It is always 100% recycling. For those that have been on this ride with me for a long time, I think Nature’s Cookbook is one of my very best posts ever. It is the story of how everything that matters is made (until we came along).

I’m Not Anti-Progress

There is nothing wrong with progress. The lesson of biomimicry in nature is if you make it, you return it to its constituents. If such a SIMPLE PRINCIPLE were applied to the making of everything, the true and fully loaded cost of everything would be arrived at. We’ve made amazing advancements and many were inspired. What would be so wrong to apply THE SAME PRINCIPLE to everything? My sense is we would arrive at the valid cost of progress and our world could be on a path to sustainability.

I am not sure we would make any less. What I know is what we make would be markedly different. It would be better for the world and better for the future. It doesn’t seem that radical to me.

Where Does It All Go?

There are no vast landfills full of pangolin scales or robin beaks or pre male-pattern baldness hair. All of these things are just keratins. Keratins are just a string of amino acids. There are perhaps 500 different amino acids on the WHOLE PLANET. Every living thing and all of its parts are made from the same stuff. Lastly, it is all water-based chemistry. No oil-based stain required! We are all based on water and it is the only medium needed. Despite what you might have heard, no bleach is required for a “cleaning” — it is profoundly harmful.

What’s Next?

The topic of biomimicry is amazing IMO. If this turns out to be a popular post I will expand on it. I believe it is the blueprint for our future. The inherent efficiency has been refined for billions of years.

The Poll & Music

The song was in my head when I began writing about the Brooklyn Bridge.