“I wonder about the trees,” Robert Frost wrote. Monumental in size, alive but inert, they inhabit a different temporality than ours. Some species’ life spans can be measured in human generations. We wake to find that a tree’s leaves have turned, or register, come spring, its sturdier trunk. But such changes are always perceived after the fact. We’ll never see them unfold, with our own eyes, in human time.
Visiting Luc Schuiten's Vegetal City exhibition in Brussels back in 2009 served as an eye-opening introduction to the potential that biomimicry might play in helping us design a sustainable future.
Many projects are already underway; some young architects are designing structures made completely out of living trees, while others are imagining how our great cities might return to their more natural state.
A related website tried to organise all biological information by function and asked the question - what we can we learn from this organism (e.g. any inventor, anywhere, at the moment of creation, could ask "how does nature remove salt from water?")