Biomimetic Futures Contest: Winner!
Congratulations to Maria Law, the winner of the Biomimetic Futures Contest with her written piece “Future: Rev 1”!
We are excited to present the winning entry from the Manufactured Ecosystems: Biomimetic Futures Contest, a competition that challenged post-secondary students across Canada to imagine how biomimetic technology could replace essential ecosystem services in the future.
The contest invited students to showcase their creativity by submitting either a written or artistic piece that explored innovative ideas to address environmental challenges. Participants were encouraged to envision solutions inspired by nature—whether they addressed issues like climate regulation, pollination, waste decomposition, or other vital services.
The winning submission stood out for its creativity, relevance to the theme, and the impact of the proposed biomimetic solution. In this piece, Maria Law introduces an impactful concept that takes a leap into the future of sustainable technology. Explore the full submission below!
Maria Law performing at an Engineering Gala
Future: Rev 1
I wake from a dream where the world was beautiful. The trees were green and vibrant: alive, breathing. The air was bright blue and cool, and the sun beamed down, melting everything in its warmth. I saw a little boy, laughing as he ran across the fields chasing after a bumblebee, stumbling and tripping and falling headfirst into the warm dirt. He looked just like that photo of my great-great-grandfather.
I sigh and rub my eyes. I roll onto one side, and my eyes sweep past the little black clock facing the wall on my bedside table. Past the boxes of textbooks and other belongings strewn across the floor, and to my window, where the curtains are fluttering in the airstream from the ventilation system. I throw them open and gaze outwards: our world. The trees and fields are gone, a relic of about half a century ago, replaced by a network of tall buildings and sky trains and practical things.
I look at the eTREE snaking my past window. I can just see the base trailing into the ground, where its thin pipes would extend into the earth. In Enviro-Technology 20, we learned that the pipe structure matches the network of roots in trees long ago, extracting water from the earth and allowing it to evaporate on the sharp edges of its trunk. The trunk itself – all 300m – is composed of layers of thin but durable membrane modelled after “tracheid” fibres in natural trees, naturally conducting water due to negative pressure and strong adhesion. On the outside, the trunk has sharp metal protrusions, as if studded with porcupine quills, which serve to increase surface area. As the water in the membrane warms in the heat of the day, it slowly turns into vapor which is released through tiny holes in each quill. I see these quills at the side of my window, and I see the speckles of the quills on adjacent buildings. There’s an eTREE at the corner of most buildings… to maximize quantity while saving space.
I got an A+ in ET20, and I recognized the ingenuity that went into designing the eTREE (evapo-Transpiration Extraction Enclosure, or eTREE for short, I remember). The tree structure, while externally composed of harsh metal designed in shapes that were the cheapest to manufactured, mimics the evapotranspiration effect of trees from long ago. There’s not many of the natural ones left, so these do the job to create natural weather cycles and cool the air.
I look up to the eTREE’s crown. Their branches are built into the top of the buildings, usually at the 80th or 90th floor. I remember their description from our textbook – a “wonder of nature-inspired design” – snaking from building to building in an overlapping lattice of beams. These branches, similar to the natural ones, do their job to absorb or block the sun’s rays and provide shady structure for birds to build their nests. Everyone knows you can’t go outside in areas without the eTREEs or covering from the buildings: direct sunlight can be as hot as 65C. Actually, the metallic composite that makes up the external structure of eTREEs is designed to absorb heat, which helps to evaporate water and increases the cooling capacity of eTREEs past that of natural trees.
I sigh again. This scene is a far stretch from my family photos or my dreams. The sky is dim, only ever letting in filtered light from above. It is sort of blue, but more of a grey- blue, like a faded memory of what blue might have been, once. I remember asking my parents, as a child, why the sky always looked so much brighter and beautiful in photographs. When I was young, they told me it was because cameras took higher quality photographs than our eyes, and that made perfect sense. When I was older, I learned that this was due to the 800% increase in air pollution in the last two centuries. We had learned that the eTREEs filtered particulates from the air in their membrane quills. However, looking at them now, they seem a far cry from natural trees, with their large leaves and complex, unique designs. Of course, capitalism again wins: no company was willing to invest in sheet metal design or manufacturing processes that would allow printing such complex structures.
I sit back on the edge of my bed. Suddenly, I notice the humming noise. It is loud and getting louder, but I hadn’t noticed it until now. What is that? Suddenly, I see the bumblebee buzz past.
What?... I’m tired from studying, but bumblebees have been extinct for about 20 years now, without the flowering trees to support them. It actually made international news – I remember because I was 8 and it was my first day of middle school. I watch the bumblebee, in awe, and I watch it fly into a wall and the wall turns into a natural tree, green and beautiful, and then I open my eyes.
Now the humming brings me awake – truly awake. Back to reality. It’s 9am, which means the air filtering system just turned on. I see it through my closed window, a huge grey building where you can almost see the air swirling around it. Crude and powerful, the system pumps massive amounts of air through a series of grates. It’s effective – the sky looks blue enough to me. The Cooler buildings (named after James Cooler, not a snazzy acronym) also do their job to keep air temperatures in check, by pumping tons of coolant through their systems every day. Cooling stacks. Not smoke stacks.
I laugh to myself a little. Imagine having to hide from the sun under artificial trees. I’d rather go outside and live my life and not worry about it.
As I’m getting up, I don’t look at the little black clock by my bedside table. Everyone has one. Instead, I get up and put away the box of family photos, which I realize I had left open on the floor. I don’t look at the clock. Last time I did, it read 1 year and 2 months. The doctor wrote me a prescription for antidepressants that same week and I haven’t looked at the clock since. It’s the estimated time until we deplete our global fossil fuels supply.
References
[1] “How Trees Lift Water With Little Effort — Biological Strategy,” Asknature, 2016. https://asknature.org/strategy/xylem-conduits-transport-water/
[2] T. D. Wheeler and A. D. Stroock, “The transpiration of water at negative pressures in a synthetic tree,” Nature, vol. 455, no. 7210, pp. 208–212, Sep. 2008, doi:
https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07226.
[3] Y. Feng, Evapotranspiration from Green Infrastructure: Benefit, Measurement, and Simulation. IntechOpen, 2018. Available: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/63629