In his capsule reviews of four new books dealing with how industry might be altered or persuaded to co-exist more benignly with the environment [“Small Leaps Forward,” February 9], Harold Henderson states: Even if…big plans for protecting the environment are just too 20th century, we still need to come up with modest plans–plans that, if they turn out to be mistakes, will at least be smaller mistakes. I appreciate the exposure he is giving the topic, but he’s doing Paul Hawkin, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins a disservice by characterizing their book Natural Capitalism as a smorgasbord of themes and then picking apart one of them, “biomimicry,” as ambiguous. In case anyone comes away thinking the whole book is so afflicted (I haven’t read the other three books and can’t comment on H.H.’s interpretation of them), I would argue it has an overarching thesis and agenda of which biomimicry is only a part. To summarize: Our present industrial system emerged approximately 200 years ago at a time when natural resources appeared to be infinite, while the pool of available human labor was finite. Ergo, it developed methods that used as much of the former as possible while striving to make the most efficient use of the latter as possible. Today the situation is reversed: natural resources (and natural water and air filtration services) are constrained, while human resources number six billion and counting. The original model won’t work under these circumstances and has to be changed: industries must concentrate on minimizing the use of natural resources and not worry about maximizing worker productivity. So much for making modest plans. The bulk of Natural Capitalism details how this alternative form of industrialism can be brought about, and yes, biomimicry is a significant principle in the mix.
