In order to meet the needs of businesses striving for sustainability, the Biomimicry Project aims to:cultivate the transfer and application of biological knowledge to the business community, evolve the best model for integrating this knowledge with business, and create strategies for monitoring successful progress.

Conducting business in today's economy necessitates innovation, creativity, and capital. In the light of increasing burdens of competition and regulation, and breakneck advances in technology, maintaining profitability and growth is a daily challenge. In addition to quarterly survival, long-term sustainability issues underlie not only internal practices, but also community, national, and global issues. Finding a pragmatic, effective, responsible means to simultaneously ensure short-term profitability and long-term sustainability within the business community is both a challenge and an imperative for companies in the 21st century. Sustainable business strategies have traditionally focused on minor modifications of the status quo-less waste, less energy, less materials. With limited success, new theories of system design are infusing through management. Mantras of waste food, life-cycle analysis, and design for environment are taught by consultants in the field of industrial ecology. The underlying premise behind these theories is that nature and the way she functions may provide the solutions for our sustainability dilemma. For over 3.8 billion years, natural systems have sustained by following biological designs, processes, and laws. Biomimicry can foster the evolution of a sustainable society through several stages:

Stage 1: Realizing the common, universal goal of long-term sustainability while simultaneously meeting many of our demands for products and services. Stage 2: Understanding that long-term sustainability can be achieved by emulating natural systems and following biological designs, processes, and laws. Stage 3: Gaining in-depth, practical knowledge of biological designs, processes, and laws. Stage 4: Translating biological designs, processes, and laws so that they are accessible to those that seek to follow them. Stage 5: Applying knowledge of biological designs, processes, and laws to the design of human systems.

Biomimicry is the bridge linking natural systems and the biologists trained to interpret these systems with businesses and industry seeking knowledge to improve profit, ecological standards, and long-term sustainability. Please contact us if you are interested in having a member of our community conduct a 1 to 5 day workshop for your organization. Through our workshops we present the concept of biomimicry through creative, dynamic exercises AND train individuals to become biomimics so that they may continue to use this tool in their daily business.

The Sustainable Village is working with Biomimicry to help redesign refugee camps as ecologically sustainable settlements. For more information about this project, click here. If you are interested in learning more about the Biomimicry, please visit their webiste www.biomimicry.org