Excerpted from Hazel Henderson:

“Cynics and media editors delight in ridiculing the UN and all humanity’s painful efforts at learning how Earth’s systems actually function. The past 50 years of official global conferences, and hundreds of thousands more meetings by NGOs, concerned business and investor groups, environmentalists and social justice networks of the World Social Forum nevertheless produced the new systems thinking and curriculum now entering academia, governments and the new media.

The human family is awakening everywhere to our potentials and awareness of how we and 30 million species sharing planet Earth have innovated, thrived and survived for 3.8 billion years.

Biomimicry

Enter the science of biomimicry, invented by Janine Benyus, whose 1997 book Biomimicry is a perennial best-seller. Her Biomimicry 3.8 group of scientists around the world teach how our living biosphere maintains itself and evolves. Biomimicry consultants help companies, governments and academia, with Biomimicry workshops, Janine’s TED talk and lectures, explain how nature uses energy, creates materials, produces food and fibers without combustion, toxic catalysts or the wasteful methods and pollution of the past 300 years of our fossil-fueled Industrial Era.

Biosubstitution

As industries and governments caught on, they rushed to biosubstitution, thoughtlessly substituting petroleum with food-based biofuels and plastics. Rio+20 provided many learning experiences, together with over 55,000 NGOs and scientific groups teaching the official delegations of those 193 countries participating.

We are witnessing everywhere the acceleration of global learning – speeded up by all the new communications tools we have invented. Since I wrote Creating Alternative Futures in 1978, I have tracked this human story and our race between expanding our awareness and the destructive forces threatening our common future. The Politics of the Solar Age I foresaw in 1981 is now upon us!”