A Forest in Generative Surplus

Abstract

In 1997, two botanists at the University of Bonn, Wilhelm Barthlott and Christoph Neinhuis, published a paper on why the leaves of the sacred lotus stay clean in muddy water. The answer, seen under a scanning electron microscope, was a surface of tiny wax-covered bumps. Water does not spread across it; it beads, and as it rolls off it collects the dirt. The leaf does not spend energy cleaning itself. Its structure makes dirt leave with the rain. The paper became one of the founding examples of biomimicry, and it is worth starting with for a reason beyond its fame. It is specific. It is about one organism, one surface, one mechanism, measured. It does not say that nature is wise or that leaves are good. It says that a particular structure produces a particular result at no running cost. That is the ecologist's habit of attention, and it is the habit the living-systems reading of economics asks for.