For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.

Jay Harman is the quintessential biomimic, a principled inventor who sees solutions everywhere he looks in the natural world. And he looks deeply, with the soul of a student. He moves with grace from a world of waving sea kelp to the world of sustainable design, bringing nature's wisdom into the board rooms of global companies, to the design tables of the engineers and designers who make our world. This is more than a business book, more than a memoir, more than a new way to solve global challenges. It's a book about a new way to think.

The most irrevocable of [natures] laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all resources--there has to be some sharing. Any species that ignores this law winds up destroying its community to support its own expansion.

The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.

Life solves its problems with well-adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry and smart material and energy use.

Listening to nature's operating instructions.

Virtually all native cultures that have survived without fouling their nests have acknowledged that nature knows best, and have had the humility to ask the bears and wolves and ravens and redwoods for guidance.