The Sustainability Problems with GEOMIMICRY

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The previous video introduced geomimicry  as the imitation of physical geological processes in the design and manufacture products and services. The success of our modern industrial world is largely thanks to geomimetic processes and we are fortunate for the material comforts it has provided. But there is a major downside to geomimcry, lying in many of the pressing environmental sustainability problems we face.

At the very basic level, there is the straightforward environmental degradation that comes from geomimicry’s dependence on the extraction of natural resources, be it mining for minerals or logging for lumber. Resource extraction produces large-scale surface disruptions, so extensive that they can often be seen from space. But extracting resources is just the first step — industry then transforms the materials through geomimetic processes that rely geologic temperatures and pressures generated through the use geologically derived fossil fuels (petroleum is Latin for “rock oil”), which are also responsible for substantial amounts of environmental degradation in their own right.

The intense conditions of industrial forges don't occur naturally on the planet’s surface, except perhaps at volcanoes and hot springs, so life in the biosphere is not adapted to them. When things get out of control, catastrophic deadly consequences ensue — such as an oil refinery explosion or nuclear meltdown. But it is the slow-motion consequences that are perhaps most disastrous.

Geomimicry depends on the extraction and dispersion of substances from the Earth's crust that were once sequestered away below the surface, many of which are hazardous to humans and life. Add to this geomimicry’s ability to formulate synthetic substances through petrochemistry and you begin loading the biosphere with elements that life that was never adapted to deal with. The biosphere has no way to process these wastes, so they accumulate in the environment, wreaking havoc on natural systems. In the United States, there are over 1,300 active Superfund sites, which are no-man’s lands contaminated with the detritus of geomimcry. We have been we've been working to clean these up old industrial sites for more than four decades and yet, after billions of dollars, only 375 have been cleaned up and closed.

As bad as Superfund sites are, at least the pollution is concentrated in a single location. Bigger problems ensue as these chemicals disperse over time and dissipate into the environment. A study by the Environmental Working Group showed where they are going: Scientists tested the umbilical cord blood of newborn babies and found it contaminated by over 200 industrial chemicals. The chemicals come from pesticides, consumer products and the wastes arising from the burning of fossil fuel. When they get into the bloodstream of a living creature, the body protects itself by secreting the toxins away in body fats, a process that leads to the bioaccumulation of pollutants in living things. And not just humans: Everywhere scientists look, from Arctic polar bears to Antarctic penguins, they find industrial chemicals. The full implications of this great geomimetic experiment are still unclear.

Our mimicking of the planet's nuclear processes also has its consequences. Of course, there are horrific consequences from the explosive release of one the most destructive forces on the planet, but another slow-motion problem arises from the accumulation of depleted nuclear fuels. In the seven decades since the first nuclear power plant went online, we've made almost no progress in figuring out what to do with the generated waste. In nature, nuclear isotopes are found on the surface in low concentrations, something that makes natural radiation relatively harmless to life. But we failed to heed these lessons. Our solution is to concentrate this very long-lived material, then dig holes and bury it back in the ground. By doing so, we are implicitly turning the waste back over to the geosphere to deal with it.

What we'll discover in the next video is that this is not as crazy as it sounds. The Earth already has a fully functioning circular economy, one that we implicitly rely on at our folly.