Daily Score Blog

If only we lived like mussels. Or maybe termites. Scientists, architects and engineers are looking to creatures and plants in the natural world to figure out how humans could live more gently on the Earth. The Oregonian today has this fascinating story on "biomimicry" -- the study of "nature's best ideas and imitating them to solve human problems" such as pollution and energy over-consumption.

The researchers admire mussels for the super-strong adhesive that binds them to rocks. They'd like to use "mussel tech" to replace carcinogenic, man-made products. Termites are being studied for their energy-efficient abodes. Their tall desert mounds are marvels of passive air conditioning in which the outside temperature can top 100 degrees while it's 20 degrees cooler in termite town.

Could biomimicry be our salvation?

Alan ran across this aerial time series of Las Vegas sprawl, produced by NASA, which I turned into the animated image below. (Sorry if it takes a while to load.)

See how quickly sprawl exploded across the desert landscape at the Las Vegas urban fringe?  (If you can't see the time progression, you may need to change your browser settings to display animated images.)

Curiously, though, the growth patterns in Las Vegas have been remarkably compact.  A few years back we analyzed development patterns in a bunch of comparably-sized US cities.  And as it turns out, the arid ones like Las Vegas sprawled relatively little, compared with their pace of population growth, and had with very little ultra-low-density development at the urban fringe.  (Apparently it's hard to plunk a house down in the middle of an arid desert without a reliable water supply.)

I just took a trip to Portland and was reminded of the split incentive problem in rental housing.  Hotels face a split incentive too: once a guest has paid for the room, he has no incentive to conserve resources because the hotel foots the energy costs.

Now consider the way that hotels are dealing with the split incentives on energy use: they are appealing to our consciences. I have done a lot of traveling over the last few years, but I can’t remember a hotel that hasn’t included a card in the bathroom encouraging me to use the same towel over again if I am staying more than one night.