Summer days have an intense energy. For us, it’s easy to pack a lot of activity into long, sunlight-filled days. The atmosphere is packed in a different way, with thick, heavy humidity and sun-baked heat. You have probably experienced one of these particularly sweltering days where periods of calm are interrupted with a sudden summer storm. One moment you are relaxing, the next, you hear the rumbling of thunder, and it begins to rain, instantly cooling the hot ground and taking the stickiness from the air. You don’t have long to take in the scene as the intensity of the heat gives way to an intense storm. This is a different kind of energy in the air; this is a summer storm.

Nature holds the answers for how to be more efficient with managing our supplies of earth’s natural resources. In fact, nature serves as the inspiration and blueprint for many structures and objects we use every day! Biomimicry is a practice of engineering that creates designs based on structures and sequences from the Earth’s natural world, including but not limited to plants, animals, and geographies. Biomimicry designs are meant to imitate functions that already exist and occur in nature. These designs are being transferred over and scaled up to provide solutions to human caused problems. There are three main core principles that make up biomimicry: recreating natural shapes, processes, and entire ecosystems.