Nature’s Ingenious Solutions to Humanity’s Challenges

Discover what nature teaches us about solving problems on our planet! Longtime safari guide and ecotourism executive Craig Glaathaar unpacks how biological controls and biomimicry help shape and sustain our place in the natural environment. From using dogs to protect livestock from predators to parasitic wasps that control aphid populations and nematodes that combat wine weevils – and many more fascinating examples – nature’s R&D department has been figuring out how to create balance for billions of years. While we humans try to invent our own solutions to the problems we invariably create, the best solutions often already exist in nature. Biomimicry is our human effort to emulate successful models in nature, whether in architectural design, engineering, tech or any number of fields, where we imitate what nature has done in order to solve an engineering or design challenge. An example is the kingfisher and its aerodynamic beak, which helped solve the design problem for the Japanese bullet train, reducing energy output by more than 15% and making the train cost-effective to run.


Originally presented September 21, 2020

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