*If you haven’t heard or seen the advertisements for CNN’s new documentary Planet In Peril, be sure to save the date and time. Anderson Cooper, Animal Planet’s Jeff Corwin, and Dr. Sanjay Cupta report from around the globe on the very serious and real events that are changing our world, all life on earth, and our future due to the global climate crisis.
Watch the full documentary on CNN International on Wednesday 24th & Thursday 25th of October at 13.00 & 19.00 GMT. Here is the powerful trailer set to a new REM song “Until the Day Is Done.”
*Innovators around the world are using what is called biomimicry to create new ways to harness energy, and live sustainably. Here is an incredible quote thanks to Treehugger.com:
“Biomimicry [is] innovation inspired by nature. In a society accustomed to dominating or “improving” nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach, a revolution really. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her. …
“Doing it nature’s way” has the potential to change the way we grow food, make materials, harness energy, heal ourselves, store information, and conduct business.
In a biomemitic world, we would manufacture the way plants and animals do, using sun and simple compounds to produce totally biodegradable fibers, ceramics, plastics, and chemicals. Our farms, modeled on prairies, would be self-fertilizing and pest-resistant. To find new drugs or crops, we would consult animals and insects that have used plants for millions of years to keep themselves healthy and nourished. Even computing would take its cue from nature, with software that “evolves” solutions, and hardware that uses the lock-and-key paradigm to compute by touch.
In each case, nature would provide the models: solar cells copies from leaves, steely fibers woven spider-style, shatterproof ceramics drawn from mother-of-pearl, cancer cures compliments of chimpanzees, perennial grains inspired by tallgrass, computers that signal like cells, and a closed-loop economy that takes its lessons from redwoods, coral reefs, and oak-hickory forests.
The biomimics are discovering what works in the natural world, and more important, what lasts. After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. The more our world looks and functions like this natural world, the more likely we are to be accepted on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.”
Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (2002, Harper Perennial)
Wondering what in the world that massive crawling thing is in the picture above? Watch it move and hear from the engineering genius who created it here.
