Design Like Nature: Biomimicry for a Healthy Planet

Design Like Nature: Biomimicry for a Healthy Planet — page 5
Natural Materials Natural Materials Can you imagine playing soccer with a ball made of tree sap Or growing the material for your T-shirt and then dyeing it with smashed bugs For as long as we have been around about 300,000 years humans have been making tools clothing and houses Until just a few hundred years ago all the materials had to be gathered from the natural world stone bone wood plants animals and insects Clothes could only be made from natural materials such as woven cotton wool or linen or leather from animal skins in mostly gray brown or off-white colors Buttons were made of materials such as shell or metal and were so costly that only the wealthy could afford them There were no plastic toothbrushes Instead people used toothbrushes made of sticks with brush-like ends or wild-boar hairs carefully threaded through handles drilled with small holes When we think of armor we usually think of metal suits or chain mail But the ancient Greeks had cloth armor First they made linen from the fibers of the flax plant Then they stuck 30 layers of the fabric together with a glue made from rabbit skins The armor was light and comfortable but could stop any arrow When modern-day researchers made a copy of this ancient armor they trusted it enough to wear it while getting shot with an arrow Royal Purple Royal Purple But natural materials have some limitations They wear out They get moldy They can be heavy or smelly or hard to make And sometimes it is difficult to harvest enough material to make enough armor or toothbrushes or clothing dye for a whole village never mind a huge city Take dye for example We consider it perfectly normal to go to the store and pick out a shirt in any color imaginable But for The Coast Salish Peoples of southern British Columbia traditionally used a type of reed called a scouring rush also known as horsetail as a natural toothbrush TIKTA ALIK SHUTTERSTOCK COM During testing some of the arrows bounced off the armor but this one didn’t GREG ALDRETE 10