In Our Nature
he lodgepole pine cone is a curious thing. Squat and egg-shaped, the pine cone seals its symmetrical scales shut with a sticky resin, protecting precious seeds within.
Such a design appears to disadvantage the lodgepole. Survival seems slim when your seeds are locked in a botanical safe. And, yet, lodgepoles dot landscapes as wide-ranging as the wild, sparsely populated Yukon and the balmy coasts of Baja, California—growing in cold, wet winters and dry, hot summers.
Extreme heat such as that produced in wildfires, it turns out, is one of the magical keys that unlock the lodgepole’s seeds, scattering them to the ground. (The other is direct sunlight, of the kind rarely available in dense forests.) Lodgepoles don’t just survive catastrophes. They thrive in their aftermath.
As clever as the lodgepole’s propagation strategy is, its ingenuity is not unique. Endlessly inventive, unrelenting, and forever evolving, nature’s hallmark is resilience. Engineers, designers, and scientists have long looked to nature, emulating its genius to innovate and improve upon human pursuits and inventions from wind turbines to bullet speed trains. The field of biomimicry, or biometrics, observes the way “nature uses diversity, redundancy, decentralization, and self-renewal and self-repair to foster resiliency,” as the Biomimicry Institute puts it. Japanese engineers designed the Shinkansen Bullet Train’s nose after the narrow, cone-shaped beak of the kingfisher, for instance, mimicking the bird’s ability to soundlessly dive into water and
