Our current meat-heavy system of food production seems to many unsustainable, a waste of resources and a source of pollution in the form of pesticides and hormones as well as methane gas from livestock manure.
Visiting Luc Schuiten's Vegetal City exhibition in Brussels back in 2009 served as an eye-opening introduction to the potential that biomimicry might play in helping us design a sustainable future.
Many projects are already underway; some young architects are designing structures made completely out of living trees, while others are imagining how our great cities might return to their more natural state.
A related website tried to organise all biological information by function and asked the question - what we can we learn from this organism (e.g. any inventor, anywhere, at the moment of creation, could ask "how does nature remove salt from water?")
Aurora Borealis glows in the sky above the Achavanich Stones in Caithness, Scotland, on the 9th January 2014.
The greatest engine for creating wealth today is green business - Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
The global market for green businesses is estimated to reach 1 trillion dollars in the next five years - Christian Science Monitor
Making this transformation could actually be fun. Electric cars are really very cool. Air-source heat pumps are great. But it's not going to be easy. We need to stop saying 'no' and starting saying 'yes' to some of these solutions - David Mackay http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/30/david-mckay-sustainab…
I think everyone in the future will probably blame us. We knew how to profit but not protect - Fernand Pareau, French mountain guide, who has witnessed the startling decline of Mont Blanc's snowpack firsthand.
So are we all really being watched over by "machines of loving grace"? If you've never seen the documentaries by Adam Curtis, full as they are of quirky and strangely compelling arguments, patterns and links between the seemingly unlinked, then sit back, ingest a huge pinch of salt, take it all in and think for yourself.
Many innovators are contributing to the development of a so-called global "impact economy" by developing and deploying cutting-edge business and financial models that generate financial returns and positive social and environmental change.
To ensure it remains a leader in developing impact economy strategies, the EU must learn to look beyond its own borders.
Would we curb our wasteful activities if only we knew more about what happened to our waste? Researchers from MIT think so, and in order to equip the public with the knowledge we need to change our behaviour, they've tagged our trash with GPS chips and tracked it across the globe.