Abstract
While the contemporary biomimicry movement is associated primarily with the idea of taking Nature as model for technological innovation, it also contains a normative or ethical principle—Nature as measure—that may be treated in relative isolation from the better known principle of Nature as model. Drawing on discussions of the principle of Nature as measure put forward by Benyus (Biomimicry: innovation inspired by nature, Harper Perennial, New York, 1997) and Jackson (Consulting the genius of place: an ecological approach to a new agriculture, Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2010, Nature as measure: the selected essays of Wes Jackson, Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2011), while at the same time situating these discussions in relation to contemporary debates in the philosophy of biomimicry (Mathews in Organ Environ 24(4): 364–387, 2011; Dicks in Philos Technol, doi: 10.1007/s13347-015-0210-2, 2015; Blok and Gremmen in J Agric Environ Ethics 29(2):203–217, 2016), the aim of this paper is to explore the relation between the principle of Nature as measure and environmental ethics. This leads to the argument that mainstream formulations of environmental ethics share the common trait of seeing our ethical relation to Nature as primarily involving duties to protect, preserve, or conserve various values in Nature, and that, in doing so, they problematically either overlook or dismiss as anthropocentric the possibility that Nature may provide measures, understood in terms of ecological standards, against which our own practices, or at least some of them, may be judged—a way of thinking I call “biomimetic ethics”. The practical consequences of this argument are significant. Whereas mainstream environmental ethics has been applied above all to such issues as wilderness preservation, natural resource management, and animal rights and welfare, biomimetic ethics is applicable rather to the question of how we produce, use, and consume things, and, as such, may potentially provide the basic ethical framework required to underpin the transition to a circular, bio-based, solar economy.
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Notes
It is hard to see how there could be any ethical obligation to reproduce a particular natural strategy. A strategy, in this respect, is more like a technique—something one may or may not imitate. This in turn raises the important question of what in Nature belongs to the realm of strategy and what to the domain of laws or principles.
Of obvious importance here are Hume’s discussion of the “is-ought” problem and G.E. Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy”, both of which have been discussed in recent philosophical studies of biomimicry (Dicks 2015; Blok and Gremmen 2016). To the extent, however, that the primary aim of this article is to contrast biomimetic ethics with mainstream environmental ethics, rather than to put forward a comprehensive theorization of biomimetic ethics, it would exceed its scope to engage in serious discussion of the relationship between these longstanding philosophical problems and the complex meta-ethical issues raised by the idea of deriving norms for human behaviour from Nature.
Given that Jackson himself speaks of an “ecological ethic”, the question naturally arises as to why I have opted for the expression “biomimetic ethics”. There are three reasons. The first is that Nature’s laws and principles must be abstracted and translated into laws and principles for human action in a comparable way to how her techniques and strategies may be abstracted and translated into artificial techniques and strategies via the principle of Nature as model. The second reason is that the expression “biomimetic ethics” helps locate the principle of Nature as measure within the overall research framework of the philosophy of biomimicry. Indeed, while it is clearly important to distinguish between Nature as model, measure, and mentor, it is equally important to understand that they belong to a new philosophical framework analysable in its ontological, poetic, ethical, and epistemological dimensions (see Dicks 2015). The third reason is simply that the expression “ecological ethics” has already been used to denote an ecocentric ethics, understood as little more than the view that Nature is intrinsically valuable (see Curry 2006).
One could perhaps object that this definition does not entirely fit deep ecology, which, at least in some formulations or variations, focusses on promoting an expansive, transpersonal concept of the self, as is the case in Fox’s notion of “transpersonal ecology”. It is also true, however, that deep ecology, whether in its “formal”, “philosophical” or “popular” forms (Fox 1995, 91–118), has put forward strong assertions regarding what we may and may not do to Nature, in which case its specifically ethical (as opposed to epistemological, ontological, etc.) dimensions would nevertheless seem to fit this broad definition of environmental ethics.
I say “predominantly” rather than “exclusively”, for in the case of utilitarianism the measure may also extend to include animals.
Rolston says that this sixth chapter is also concerned with the tutorial sense, but it contains few if any clear examples of this.
By “true place”, I mean a place that exists in meaningful relation to its context and not just a portion of space.
Both Rolston and Eckersley would presumably agree with this. The connection they see between following Nature and anthropocentrism is empirical not logical in nature. But where a connection is empirical it is of course open to questioning not only from new evidence or differing interpretations of the available evidence, but also in observable changes in the objects of study.
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Dicks, H. Environmental Ethics and Biomimetic Ethics: Nature as Object of Ethics and Nature as Source of Ethics. J Agric Environ Ethics 30, 255–274 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9667-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-017-9667-6