We have seen a recent resurgence in “being green”, and with it have come a plethora of companies and organizations fumbling to appear as environmentally-friendly as they can. This is a welcome development, to be sure, and while this has surely helped, most of it still represents what I would argue is fundamentally shallow change. We have shifted our mindsets only slightly, and in too many cases we’ve just applied different technologies and techniques to the same old broken thought patterns and assumptions from before.

It’s great that Wal-Mart is putting solar panels on the roofs of some of their stores, but the structure of the store is itself environmentally suspect. Big suburban box stores which necessitate driving are bad for the environment no matter how many solar panels they have on top. Driving a Prius is a great choice, but not driving at all is a better one. Putting triple-glazed windows on your huge suburban house helps, but not nearly as much as moving somewhere which uses less resources to heat, cool, and generally maintain.

Janine Benyus is the author of Biomimicry, which attempts to show the reader what designers have to learn from nature itself. Nature is, after all, the most elegant, beautiful, powerful, and efficient designer there is. It’s thinkers like Benyus I hope will usher us past the era of building hugely inefficient box-stores and tract housing from the cheapest materials, and then using abhorrent amounts of energy to keep them hot or cool, and other such needless wastes our society seems hellbent on pursuing. Nature doesn’t design that way and neither should we.

The April issue of Seed had the following quote from Benyus which applies to this idea of shallow design:

People mimic form and shape, which can be very powerful, but that’s just the beginning - the next level is mimicking process. How is the turbine made? What materials are involved in the process? How was the energy captured in order to make the turbine? And then the deepest level of biomimicry is emulating the entire economic ecosystem. Who is giving me the supplies with which I make this turbine? What happens at the end of its life? It becomes context-dependent design.

These sorts of deep changes in our assumptions and processes are much more difficult than small and shallow changes. They take time and can be painful for some people involved. They are important though, if real progress is to be made.