The UK’s Daily Telegraph offers up a series titled “Challenging Ideas” to help Honda launch their new Accord. Here’s an excerpt from the first in the short six-part series titled “Natural Leaders”:

‘Biomimicry introduces an era based not on what we can extract from organisms and their ecosystems, but on what we can learn from them,’ Janine M Benyus, the author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, says. ‘This approach differs greatly from bio-utilisation, which entails harvesting a product or producer, as in cutting wood for floors or wild-crafting medicinal plants. It is also distinctly different to bio-assisted technologies, which involve domesticating an organism to accomplish a function, for example, bacterial purification of water or cows bred to produce milk. Instead of harvesting or domesticating, biomimics consult organisms; they are inspired by an idea, be it a physical blueprint or a process step in a chemical reaction.’ Continued…

(I normally wouldn’t write a post linking to ‘advertorial“, but this is a useful short read. Here’s to more advertising that makes a genuine effort to inform.)

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According to Janine Benyus and Gunter Pauli, co-creators of the upcoming Nature’s 100 Best project:

Life solves its problems with well-adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry, and smart material and energy use. What better models could there be?

This week Pauli unveiled the project at Ninth Conference of Parties to Convention on Biological Diversity. A book showcasing their work, titled Nature’s 100 Best, will be published in May 09 and further content will be made available via

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A great overview of varied biomimetic solutions for some of our most pressing problems is offered by Australian energy blog The Oil Drum, including Australian startup BioPower and local (to San Francisco bay area) Pax Scientific (founded by an Australian). Clever folks those Aussies!

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David Holmgren (futurist and the co-originator of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison) explains the issues and points to scenarios in this fascinating site/paper:

FutureScenarios.org presents an integrated approach to understanding the potential interaction between Climate Change and Peak Oil using a scenario planning model. In the process I introduce permaculture as a design system specifically evolved over the last 30 years to creatively respond to futures that involve progressively less and less available energy.

Continued at http://www.futurescenarios.org/

Read on and I’m sure you’ll find it simultaneously frightening, and enlightening.

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Nothing is more fundamental to sustainability than food. Thanks to a link passed on by my friend Ben de Vries, I recommend checking out the growing Slow Food movement:

Slow Food is good, clean and fair food. We believe that the food we eat should taste good; that it should be produced in a clean way that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health; and that food producers should receive fair compensation for their work.

Every day presents multiple opportunities to slow down and taste real food. Try it today!

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I’ve always liked the look and feel of those richly illustrated and thoughtfully produced Dorling Kindersley books, so I was pleased to read about their efforts to be a little greener:

UK book publisher Dorling Kindersley has created an imprint that aims to ‘green’ an industry whose dependence on dead trees doesn’t necessarily make it an eco frontrunner. So far, four titles have been released under the company’s Made With Care brand. All deal with eco-aware topics such, including green baby care and organic gardening. …continued at Springwise.

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We’ve probably all wasted more time on YouTube than we’d care to admit. But there are alternatives!

There are brilliant ideas, expressed everyday in public discussions and events, all over the world.

Don’t miss them.

FORA.tv delivers discourse, discussions and debates on the world’s most interesting political, social and cultural issues, and enables viewers to join the conversation. It provides deep, unfiltered content, tools for self-expression and a place for the interactive community to gather online.

Check out this great interview with Bill McKibben.

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As the price for staples like corn and rice escalate rapidly attention has focused on the (mis)use of food crops for fuel. Energy Farms Network is working on solutions:

Using science, proven tools, and evolving methodologies the Energy Farm Initiative seeks to demonstrate systems of agriculture that can sustain both farms and communities in the face of climate change and peak oil. This program weaves threads of the Relocalization vision into a fabric of local currency, local food and biofuel systems, revitalization of local industry, and community cooperation.

Energy Farms Network is a program of the Post Carbon Institute.

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In a line reminiscent of this blog’s mission, KPCB Partner John Denniston launched a new VC fund with these words: “The world has embarked on the next industrial revolution.”

Kleiner Perkins’ new Green Growth Fund will invest $500 million over the next two to four years in established companies that demonstrate progress in delivering clean-technology innovations, said partner John Denniston, who will co-manage the fund.

At the same time, clean-tech start-ups may join counterparts in information technology and life sciences to seek funding from Kleiner Perkins’ new $700 million KP XIII fund - the 13th in the firm’s storied 35-year history.

The Green Growth Fund comes less than six months after former Vice President Al Gore joined Menlo Park-based Kleiner Perkins as a partner.

- Press Release

KPCB partner John Doerr was talking up the opportunity a year ago at TED stating that green “may be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.”

This kind of money and business building methodology stands in stark contrast to my previous post on open sourcing enabling tools and technologies…but maybe not. Open source leader MySQL was acquired by Sun in January for $1B. If there ends up being a business in giving away the ’secrets’ to sustainability, all the better!

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Acquaintance Ben de Vries forwarded me this email:

Global Villagers,
Last week we spoke at the University of Missouri, Columbia, about the Global Village Construction Set: Open Source Engineering for Sustainable Living. I focused on the construction of economies that utilize local resources. I proposed the route of open source, flexible fabrication - applied to Community Supported Manufacturing – as a viable route to an industrial system free of geopolitical compromise.
Please view the presentation and pass it around: http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=198

This lead me to reading the Factor E Farm which journals an “experiment of Open Source Ecology“, and onwards to some quick reading on Open Source Economics:

“Our mission is to extend the Open Source model to the provision any goods and services- Open Source Economics. This means opening access to the information and technology which enables a different economic system to be realized, one based on the integration of natural ecology, social ecology, and industrial ecology. This economic system is based on open access- based on widely accessible information and associated access to productive capital- distributed into the hands of an increased number of people. We believe that a highly distributed, increasingly participatory model of production is the core of a democratic society, where stability is established naturally by the balance of human activity with sustainable extraction of natural resources. This is the opposite of the current mainstream of centralized economies, which have a structurally built-in tendency towards of overproduction.”

“Instead of waiting around for solar panels to become affordable, why don’t we collaborate and make them ourselves.”

I look forward to learning more…

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