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.

When the forest and the city are functionally indistinguishable, then we know we have reached sustainability.

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.

Biologically inspired materials could revolutionize materials science. People looking at spider silk and abalone shells are looking for new ways to make materials better, cheaper, and with less toxic byproducts.

For the 99 percent of the time we've been on Earth, we were hunter and gatherers, our lives dependent on knowing the fine, small details of our world. Deep inside, we still have a longing to be reconnected with the nature that shaped our imagination, our language, our song and dance, our sense of the divine.

Everyone is trying to jump on the biomimic bandwagon. But a cork floor is not biomimicry. Neither is using bacteria to clean water.

A solitary American monk named Thomas Berry writes that in our relationship to nature, we have been autistic for centuries. Wrapped tightly in our own version of knowledge, we have been unreceptive to the wisdom of the natural world. To tune in again, to have the "spontaneous environmental rapport" that characterized our ancestors, will take doing something that is perfectly delightful: reimmersing ourselves in the natural world.