Nature
Janine Benyus (http://www.biomimicry.net/) has probably done more than anyone to reveal the way that natural organisms have adapted to resource-constrained environments. Amongst the most inspiring of these are the Namibian fog-basking beetle that creates its own distilled water in a desert; the bark beetle that can detect a forest fire at a distance of 80km; the abalone whose shell is a masterpiece of design and is twice as strong as the toughest man-made ceramic; and coccolithophores that build exquisite structures from calcium carbonate.