Four billion years of answers. Two hundred years of the wrong questions

Seven years ago, I sat in a boardroom with people who ran things like supply chains, energy grids, defense contracts, hospital networks, and I told them that the most sophisticated materials science laboratory in the history of this planet had been running, continuously, for four billion years, had never produced a single patent, and had never once generated toxic waste. I told them the organisms operating inside that laboratory had solved water scarcity in a desert, built structural materials stronger than anything our aerospace engineers could manufacture, developed distributed computing networks that reroute around catastrophic failures in milliseconds, and engineered climate control systems for structures housing millions of inhabitants that required precisely zero mechanical energy to operate.

They nodded. They were polite. And then they went back to their quarterly cycles.

What I didn’t understand then, what I’m beginning to understand now with something closer to the screaming urgency of a human discovering that they are aging, is that the problem was never the science. Science has always been extraordinary. The problem was the paradigm we have all adopted by default and have been living inside. A paradigm so saturated with its own assumptions about what counts as knowledge, what counts as progress, and who counts as an expert, that it literally could not process what nature is offering. We weren’t failing to see the answers. We were asking the wrong questions. And we had been asking the wrong questions for two hundred years, long enough that the wrong questions started to feel like wisdom.

That paradigm is breaking. I can feel it the way you feel a season turning, a refined but not so subtle experience from living in MN, not in a single moment but in the accumulation of small signals that suddenly cohere. And the question I want to put to the thought leaders, the researchers, the investors, the policymakers, the engineers, educators, and entrepreneurs who gather on a variety of platforms because they believe ideas still matter, is whether we’re prepared to name what we’re actually building. Because what’s emerging and being built, one member and one event at a time, is not a 'sustainability’ industry. It will be the cognitive infrastructure of the next civilization; earlier will be better, latter will be by default.

Why now. Not eventually. Now!

Five specific conditions have converged in 2025–2026 that didn’t exist simultaneously before and won’t wait.

The first is the collapse of ESG as a functional communications frame. The share of S&P 100 companies publishing reports with ‘ESG’ in their titles declined from a peak of 40% in 2023 to 25% in 2024, with data showing only 6% using the term in reports published in 2025. [1] Yet beneath those numbers, the actual commitment has not retreated: 87% of US companies have quietly increased sustainability spending despite regulatory uncertainty, and 87% of S&P 500 firms have disclosed climate-related targets. [2] Companies are continuing the work while abandoning the language, because the language became politically toxic. The consequence is a meaning vacuum — companies need to communicate what they’re doing without the label that used to do that work. A functionally grounded, politically neutral alternative frame is not just welcome in this environment. It is urgently needed. BiosVerse, grounded in four billion years of empirical performance rather than in contested political positioning, is precisely that alternative.

The second condition is market scale. The global biomimetics market grew from $33.77 billion in 2024 to $36.76 billion in 2025, projected to reach $55.46 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 8.61%. [3] A market growing at that rate, across that many sectors, with no common standards body, no shared certification framework, and no unified industry voice is exactly the market that a well-structured association can most usefully serve, and most credibly lead. Earlier would have been too fragmented. Later will be too consolidated around standards set by others. The window is now.

The third condition is defense validation, which matters because it crosses the partisan membrane that has trapped every previous sustainability argument. DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office is actively funding proposals at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biotechnology, explicitly targeting bio-inspired systems for supply chain resilience, advanced materials, and infrastructure. [4] When the defense establishment is funding bio-inspired infrastructure, the argument that biomimetics is a niche environmental concern becomes untenable across the political spectrum. That validation is new, specific, and available to us.

The fourth is the AI-biomimetics convergence. Neural networks are themselves biomimetic in origin. AI architecture derives from biological neurons. The current generation of AI researchers is actively mining biological systems for design principles, creating natural coalition-building opportunities between the biomimetics field and the technology sector, and generating publications, patents, and investment activity at a pace that makes 2025–2026 a fundamentally different landscape from 2020.

The fifth is the supply chain reckoning. The lesson of 2020–2022 for every operations leader who lived through it was that linear extraction-based supply chains are catastrophically fragile under stress. The termite mound’s distributed climate control and the mycorrhizal network’s fault-tolerant architecture are not abstract propositions to a supply chain executive who spent 2021 unable to source microchips. They are immediately legible solutions to a problem the person experienced viscerally. That audience exists now in a way it did not before the pandemic. And the reckoning will only grow.

These five conditions converging simultaneously are not a coincidence. It is the structure of a paradigm shift in its early crystallizing stage. And the people who most influence where it crystallizes are the ones who show up at the convergence points with the right institutional infrastructure already built.

The paradigm that’s dying and why it has to

Consider what we’ve been operating inside of for the last two hundred years. A paradigm built on a foundational assumption so embedded it rarely gets examined: that the natural world is a resource, something that exists at a lower level of organization than human systems, to be extracted, processed, and deployed in service of human ends. The industrial economy was architected on this assumption. Our regulatory frameworks were built to manage its consequences. Our academic disciplines were organized to optimize extraction within their constraints. And our collective sense of progress, the story we told ourselves about what improvement looks like, was indexed almost entirely to indicators that measured how efficiently we could convert the natural world into goods, services, and financial instruments.

That paradigm has produced extraordinary things. It lifted billions out of poverty, extended human lifespan across most of the planet, and connected eight billion people in a communications network that would have been indistinguishable from magic to every generation that preceded us. I don’t want to be the person who stands in front of that record and dismisses it, because the dismissal is dishonest and the people who need to join this conversation will correctly identify the dishonesty and stop listening.

But the paradigm also produced a civilization whose operating system is fundamentally incompatible with the living system that hosts it. Not symbolically incompatible. Not spiritually incompatible. Functionally, mechanically, biologically incompatible like the way a transplanted organ is incompatible with a body that will eventually reject it. You do not need to invoke ideology or ethics to make this case. You need only observe what happens when any organism organizes its behavior around extraction without regeneration: it consumes its substrate and then it stops….usually dead and extinct.

We have spent three decades arguing about whether this is true, which is itself a symptom of a paradigm’s failure. Paradigms cannot evaluate themselves from inside their own assumptions. The Ptolemaic astronomers weren’t stupid; they were reasoning correctly within a framework that had a structural error they couldn’t see from inside it. We are doing the same thing, with more sophisticated instruments and faster timelines.

Here is the number that should stop us: 45% of high school students in the United States now report persistent hopelessness and despondency. Forty-five percent. That is not a mental health crisis in the clinical sense, though it manifests that way. That is a meaning crisis, a generation that looked at the paradigm it was being handed and, with the unsentimental accuracy of young people who haven’t yet learned to rationalize, concluded that it was not worth inhabiting. They are right. The correct response is not to treat the symptom. The correct response is to build something categorically different and worth inhabiting.

Why sustainability keeps stalling and what it’s missing

I want to say something that may land awkwardly onto the people most likely to read this article, but I think it matters enough to say clearly: the sustainability movement, for all its genuine urgency and moral seriousness, has been operating primarily as a corrective to the existing paradigm rather than a replacement for it. We have been arguing for less bad when what’s required is categorically different. We have been managing the consequences of incompatibility when what’s required is compatibility. And the distinction is not semantic because it determines everything about strategy, coalition, narrative, and ultimately about whether the movement can generate the cultural gravity needed to shift the paradigm rather than just slow its worst outputs.

The evidence for this is in the ESG data. Young investors’ support for ESG-driven investment fell off a cliff between 2022 and 2024: the share of young investors who thought it was ‘extremely important’ for investment companies to use their power to influence the environmental priorities of their portfolio companies fell from 44% in 2022 to 11% in 2024. [5] This was a change in confidence, it reflects a growing conviction that the existing sustainability framework, for all its moral seriousness, was not actually solving the problem it claimed to address. When the people most committed to the cause begin to lose faith in the mechanism, the mechanism needs to change.

Think about where the resistance comes from more broadly. Not from people who love pollution. Not from people who want their children to inherit a depleted planet. The resistance comes from people who feel, with entirely understandable logic given the paradigm they’re operating inside of, that they are being asked to sacrifice economic security for environmental principles. And in a moment of widespread economic anxiety, widespread institutional distrust, that framing is nearly impossible to win. You cannot
argue people out of distrust with data. You cannot out-debate someone who has concluded, from hard personal experience, that the systems being defended by the people holding the data have not worked for them.

What breaks through is not an argument. It is awe! The involuntary response to encountering something so genuinely extraordinary that our cynical shells crack open, just for a moment, and the person inside remembers that there are things worth reaching for. And here is what I want to submit to everyone who has managed to read this far: biomimetics and the BiosVerse framework it operates within are the most powerful generators of genuine awe available to any movement right now. Possibly available to any movement in history. And we are dramatically underusing it.

Here is the specific structural failure worth naming: we have been making an environmental argument when we needed to be making a paradigm argument. We have been saying ‘protect nature’ when the more powerful, and more accurate claim is ‘learn from nature, because nature has already solved what you’re struggling with, and the failure to engage with those solutions is costing you billions of dollars, decades of time, and the functional stability of the systems you depend on.’ That reframe changes the coalition. It changes the business case. It changes who feels invited into the conversation.

A conservative supply chain executive who would tune out a climate presentation will pay close attention to evidence that a termite mound has already solved his logistics company’s temperature control problem at 10% of the energy cost.

The strongest objection, directly answered

The counterargument deserves a direct response, because it is a serious one: biomimetic solutions have been described as transformative for decades, and the gap between laboratory demonstration and commercial deployment remains stubbornly wide. Spider silk has been heralded since the 1990s; we still cannot manufacture it at commercial scale. The Eastgate Centre in Harare is cited constantly; comparable projects remain rare. If the paradigm shift is coming, critics reasonably ask, why has it taken this long?

The answer is not that the science is wrong. It is that paradigm shifts require institutional infrastructure replete with standards bodies, investment pipelines, cross-sectoral coalitions, and the kind of patient capital that doesn’t exist until a critical mass of people can see the convergence coming. The Eastgate Centre was built in 1996 with no industry association behind it, no certification framework to validate its approach, no network connecting its architect to the researchers working on analogous problems in materials science or agriculture. That is precisely the gap Biomimetics International exists to close. The question was never whether nature’s solutions work. The question was whether humanity would build the connective tissues to deploy them at scale. That connective tissue is being built now, and I hope that the timing conditions above describe why this specific moment is different from every previous moment when the promise was made.

There is no doubt that the implementation gap is real. It is also exactly what an industry association is built to close. And closing that gap is the work at hand. 

Four billion years is not a metaphor 

Let’s be specific, because specificity is where awe actually lives.

The Namib Desert beetle has evolved a surface architecture on its back, an alternating pattern of hydrophilic bumps and hydrophobic troughs, measured in microns, that collects drinkable water from fog. Not a little water. Enough water to sustain itself consistently in a landscape that receives less than 2 centimeters of rain per year. Researchers at MIT have replicated this architecture in materials that can supply water to communities in arid regions with zero mechanical infrastructure. Two billion people
currently lack reliable access to clean water. The beetle has been solving this problem for longer than our species has existed.

The cathedral termite mounds of sub-Saharan Africa maintain a constant internal temperature of 31 degrees Celsius in an environment that swings between 3 and 42 degrees daily, using a passive ventilation system of such precision that it inspired the Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe. It was the first ‘modern age’ building designed on biomimetic principles. The economics are compelling but never applied, it uses 90% less energy for ventilation than comparable conventional structures. Not 10% less. Not 30% less. Ninety!! The termites solved this engineering problem in the Cretaceous period.

Spider silk is five times stronger than steel by weight, three times tougher than Kevlar, and fully biodegradable. It is simultaneously the strongest and most elastic natural fiber known to science. The spider has been producing it for 300 million years.

The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled organism with no nervous system, no brain, no neurons of any kind, yet when placed on a map with food sources at the locations of Tokyo’s major population centers, it spontaneously grew a network that replicated the Tokyo subway system. A network that had taken human engineers decades and billions of dollars to optimize for fault tolerance and efficiency. The slime mold did it in 26 hours.

The humpback whale fin carries tubercles along its leading edge that eliminate fluid dynamic stall in ways our aerospace engineers couldn’t achieve through conventional modeling. Applied to wind turbine blade design, these structures increase energy efficiency by 32% and reduce noise. The same architecture is being explored for helicopter rotors, ship propellers, and ventilation fans.

The mantis shrimp has sixteen types of color photoreceptors. We have three. Its visual system inspires hyperspectral imaging for cancer detection, because certain cellular abnormalities are visible in spectral ranges our instruments weren’t designed to capture. They are now.

The mussel adheres to wet rock surfaces using a protein-based adhesive that bonds in seawater without toxins or mechanical anchoring, and is now being replicated for underwater construction, surgical tissue bonding, and dental applications that replace adhesive systems that release byproducts we don’t want into environments we can’t easily remediate.

4 billion years. 8.7 million species currently operating. The most extensive, iteratively refined, ruthlessly tested research and development operation in the history of this planet. Every failure is recorded and addressed. Every successful solution has been refined over millions of generations in conditions more demanding and more variable than any laboratory we have built. As I have written and stated many times, nature is the ultimate arbiter. It doesn’t care what you think or believe. It does, however, respond to what you do. 

And the operating principle underlying every successful solution is the same: compatibility with the living system is not optional. It is the operating constraint. Systems that work with the living world persist. Systems that work against it are selected out.
We are currently being selected.

The convergence already underway

Here is what gives me something that functions, some days, like genuine confidence about what comes next: the convergence is already happening. It’s just not yet been named at a scale commensurate with what it actually represents. 

At Biomimetics25, our Industry Strategy Symposium at the University of Minnesota in November 2025, we had in the same room: DARPA’s Director of Microsystems Technology. Target Corporation’s Vice President of Responsible Sourcing. Microsoft’s Director of Integrated Technology and Biomimicry. The Father of Green Chemistry. The Co-Founder of Global Citizen. The former Deputy Director for Industrial Innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Researchers from the Biomimicry Institute, Arizona State University, the University of Minnesota, UNC Charlotte, Cal Poly. Venture investors. Supply chain architects. Biosensor pioneers. Architects. The CEO of CEEBIOS, France’s national center for biomimetics strategy.

What we held was not a sustainability conference. The room was not organized around shared ideology or shared alarm. It was organized around shared observation: the frameworks we have been using to solve civilization’s hardest problems are structurally inadequate to those problems, and nature has already developed, tested, and deployed solutions that work at a level of elegance and efficiency we haven’t approached from inside the industrial paradigm.

Paradigm shifts don’t begin in legislatures or boardrooms. They crystallize at the convergence points, where people thinking rigorously within their separate domains find that their separate observations point to the same underlying structure. Thomas Kuhn described this precisely: anomalies accumulate at the edges of the existing framework (snow melts at the edges), isolated researchers in separate domains start noticing the same anomalies, convergence occurs at the boundary where the old framework is thinnest, and then, sometimes suddenly, sometimes over a generation, the new framework becomes the new default.

The anomalies in the industrial paradigm are no longer at the edges. They are at the center. And the convergence in biomimetics is the collision between 4 billion years of nature’s design intelligence and humanity’s most urgent, unresolved problems, and it is happening faster than most people realize, precisely because it is unfolding across so many domains simultaneously that no single vantage point captures the full picture. No one organization or even a network sees it all, but a network of networks has a chance to see the accumulating anomalies, come together and create an impact and a new paradigm.

Biomimetics International was built to provide that vantage point. The connective tissue, if you will, is building a network of possibilities.

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Sources

[1] The Conference Board, “Sustainability Terminology and Climate Disclosures,” April 2025. conference-board.org/press/climate-disclosure-and-sustainability-terminology. The share of S&P 100 companies publishing reports with ‘ESG’ in their titles declined from 40% (2023 peak) to 25% (2024) to 6% (2025 YTD).

[2] EcoVadis, cited in SLR Consulting, “What the ESG Backlash of 2025 Means for Corporate America in 2026,” January 2026. slrconsulting.com. 87% of US companies quietly increased sustainability spending despite regulatory uncertainty. Conference Board (April 2025): 87% of S&P 500 firms disclosed climate-related targets.

[3] Research and Markets, “Biomimetics Market Size, Competitors & Forecast to 2030,” 2025. researchandmarkets.com. Market grew from USD 33.77 billion (2024) to USD 36.76 billion (2025), projected to reach USD 55.46 billion by 2030, CAGR 8.61%.

[4] DARPA Biological Technologies Office, “AI BTO Pitch Days,” September 2024. darpa.mil/news/2024/ai-biotechnology-pitch-days. DARPA BTO Broad Agency Announcement, October 2025. defencescienceinstitute.com. DARPA explicitly seeks proposals leveraging biological properties to revolutionize warfighter protection, resilient infrastructure, and supply chains.

[5] Stanford Graduate School of Business, “Young Investors’ Support for ESG Dropped Dramatically in 2024,” January 2025. gsb.stanford.edu. Share of young investors rating environmental influence as ‘extremely important’ fell from 44% (2022) to 27% (2023) to 11% (2024). Conference Board survey (May 2025): 90% of executives expect anti-ESG sentiment to increase or persist over next two years.