SUMMARY
Earth’s richness of life, of which man is a part, is increasingly under threat from his activities. Current environmental design guidance draws upon a wealth of experiences with the products of engineering that damaged humanity’s environment. Efforts to create such guidelines inductively attempt to tease right action from examination of past mistakes. However, the environmentally conscious engineering design community overlooked a fundamentally different approach to the creation of such guidance. A complex, multi-scale, inherently sustainable system worth benchmarking rests at mankind’s doorstep. Life, the collection of processes that tamed and maintained themselves on planet Earth’s once hostile surface long ago confronted and solved the fundamental problems facing all organisms. Given life’s long history of persistence, it is logical to turn to the living world for guidance. This work proposes to develop a holistic approach that uses biomimicry as a guide to environmentally benign engineering. As a motivating question, it asks: How can biomimicry guide environmentally conscious engineering? The proposed work will advance an answer to this overarching question in the form of an environmentally benign engineering design method – holistic biomimicry. Drawing upon various biological and ecological source materials, the work will construct a framework for holistic biomimicry. Then, the framework will be applied in a number of design scenarios, and the results will be assessed along environmental dimensions. This work will contribute (1) a set of biologically inspired sustainability principles for engineering (2) a translation of these principles into measures applicable to design, (3) examples of a new form of biomimicry and (4) a deductive, novel foundation for environmentally conscious engineering.