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.

In reality, we haven't escaped the gravity of life at all. We are still beholden to ecological laws, the same as any other life-form.

The answers to our questions are everywhere; we just need to change the lens with which we see the world.

Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that's already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn.

Organisms dont think of CO2 as a poison. Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block.

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.

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.