Consider this story - Power of the Mangroves

Consider this: A story of The Crying Engineer

 Janine Benyus tells a poignant story illustrating how schools have focused on what humans can do with technology while ignoring how to learn from nature’s technology.

I had gone to the Galapagos. One of the perks of this job as a biologist is that we do our workshops in amazing places where there are lots and lots of habitat types to expose architects, designers, engineers—the people who make everything that you’re sitting on—who make our world…

I had taken this group of waste-water engineers to the Galapagos.

They said, “Why are we here?”

I asked them, “What do you do?” and they said, “We filter.” And I said let’s go snorkelling because everything in the ocean basically is filtering salt out of the water. Everything lives on freshwater. Everything [in ocean] lives in salt water but has fresh water within it including plants like mangroves. They’re filtering; they’re filtering mechanisms.

So one day I came upon this guy Paul, this engineer, this very reserved guy and he was crying. He was looking at a mangrove plant crying, standing there, the tears coming down his eyes.

And I said, “What’s going on?” And he said, “Why have I never learned in all of my education about mangroves? Why don’t I know or have ever considered that these guys are a solar-powered desalination plant? They have their roots in salt water and are living on freshwater.”

He said, “We use 900 pounds per square inch to force water against a membrane to get salt out of it and we wonder why it clogs. And this is silent, solar powered, desalination.”

Engineers are trying to make tools for living–technology. Nature has technologies too!