Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Biomimicry can serve as a design template for an ecological civilisation by showing how cyclical, no-waste, mutually adaptive production systems designed ‘after nature’ could render human industry fully ‘sustainable’. However, unless the modes of praxis involved in such a reformed industrial base are also redesigned, the value orientation fostered by the new order would remain anthropocentric. Biomimicry would accordingly result in an eco-modernist-type scenario in which society was ‘decoupled’ from nature, with dystopian consequences for the larger community of life. Drawing on Indigenous modalities, I explore ways in which modern industrial systems could include participatory modes of praxis that would emanate in genuinely bio-inclusive forms of consciousness and hence lay the ethical foundations for an ecological civilisation.

Keywords

Biomimicry eco-modernism bio-synergy Indigenous law historical materialism praxis eco-civilisation

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Andrews

2014. Back from the Brink: How Australia's Landscape Can Be Saved. Sydney: ABC Books.

Appenzeller

2005. ‘Was the icy Arctic once a warm soup of life?’ National Geographic, interactive edition, May. Available at: ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0505/resources_geo.html (accessed 9 August 2014).

Balee

2013. Cultural Forests of the Amazon. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Benyus

2002 [1997]. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: Harper Perennial.

Bernal

J.D.

1969. Science in History, Vol. 1: The Emergence of Science. London: Penguin.

Black

2011. The Land is the Source of the Law: A Dialogical Encounter with Indigenous Jurisprudence. Abingdon: Routledge.

Bradley

2012. ‘Azolla (water fern) as protein-rich animal feed’. Available at: https://www.milkwood.net/2012/08/06/azolla-water-fern-as-protein-rich-animal-feed/ (accessed 21 March 2019).

Brennan

2015. ‘Environmental ethics’. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental (accessed 7 September 2017).

Brinkhuis

, and Schouten

. 2006. ‘Episodic fresh surface waters in the Eocene Arctic Ocean’. Nature 441(7093): 606–609. Crossref.

10.

Chu

2004. ‘Metaphysics of genetic architecture and computation’. Perspecta 35: 74–97.

11.

Diamond

1987. ‘The worst mistake in the history of the human race’. Discover Magazine, May, pp. 64–66.

12.

Doidge

2007. The Brain that Changes Itself. New York: Viking.

13.

Duarte

C.M.

, Losada

I.J.

, Hendriks

I.E.

, Mazarrasa

and Marbà

. 2013. ‘The role of coastal plant communities for climate change mitigation and adaptation’. Nature Climate Change 3: 961–968. Crossref.

14.

Engels

1968 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In Marx

and Engels

, Selected Works in One Volume, pp. 449–583. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

15.

Flannery

2017. Sunlight and Seaweed. Melbourne: Text.

16.

Fraser

2009. Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution. New York: Metropolitan.

17.

Gammage

2011. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Crow's Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin.

18.

Jackson

M.D.

1995. At Home in the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

19.

Jaggar

A.M.

1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Brighton: Harvester.

20.

King

F.H.

2004 [1911]. Farmers of Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. New York: Dover.

21.

Latour

2011. ‘Love your monsters’. Breakthrough Journal 2: 20–28.

22.

Margolis

1989. ‘The novelty of Marx's theory of praxis’. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 19(4): 367–410. Crossref.

23.

Marx

1968 [1859]. ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. In Marx

K. K.

and Engels

, Selected Works, pp. xx–xx. New York: International Publishers.

24.

Marx

, and Engels

. 1970. The German Ideology, ed. Arthur

C.J.

. New York: International Publishers.

25.

Massey

2017. Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, a New Earth. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

26.

Mathews

1994. ‘Terra incognita: carnal legacies’. In Cosgrove

(eds), Restoring the Land, pp. 37–46. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

27.

Mathews

2010. ‘Planetary collapse disorder: honeybees as portent of the limits of the ethical’. Environmental Ethics 32(4): 353–367. Crossref.

28.

Mathews

2011. ‘Towards a deeper philosophy of biomimicry’. Organization and Environment 24(4): 364–387. Crossref.

29.

Mathews

2014. ‘Environmental philosophy’. In Trakakis

and Oppie

(eds), A History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, pp. 543–591. Dordrecht: Springer.

30.

Mathews

2017. Global Green Shift. London: Anthem.

31.

Morris

2015. Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

32.

Nordhaus

, and Shellenberger

. 2011. ‘Evolve: the case for modernization as the road to salvation’. Breakthrough Journal 2 (Fall): 12–20.

33.

Pascoe

2014. Dark Emu Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome, WA: Magabala.

34.

Rose

D.B.

1992. Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in Aboriginal Australian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

35.

Shepard

1998. Coming Home to the Pleistocene, ed. Shepard

F.R.

. Washington: Island Press.

36.

Soule

J.D.

, and Piper

J.K.

. 1992. Farming in Nature's Image. Washington: Island Press.

37.

Soulé

M.E.

1985. ‘What is conservation biology?’ BioScience 35(11): 727–734. Crossref.

38.

Speck

. 2017. ‘Biomimetic, bio-inspired, biomorph sustainable?’ Bioinspiration and Biomimetics 12(1), 011004.

39.

Viveiros de Castro

1998. ‘Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3): 469–488. Crossref.

40.

Watson

2015. Aboriginal Peoples, Colonialism and International Law: Raw Law. New York: Routledge.

41.

Watts

2010. When a Billion Chinese Jump. London: Faber.

42.

Wilmers

C.C.

, Estes

J.A.

, Edwards

, Laidre

K.L.

and Konar

. 2012. ‘Do trophic cascades affect the storage and flux of atmospheric carbon? An analysis of sea otters and kelp forests’. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 10: 409–415. Crossref.

43.

Wilson

E.O.

2016. Half Earth: Our Planet's Fight For Life. New York: Liveright.

Biomimicry and the Problem of Praxis

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References