Publication Mapping the global transition to the solar age

Executive Summary

Increasingly, business leaders are acknowledging that we cannot continue doing business the
same way while trying to do it better. We have to do things differently: the assumption that
society and environment are the variables that need to flex to meet the way we do business
needs to be turned on its head and we must recognise that society and environment are
now clearly limiting factors to which business models must adjust. This is not just to meet
longer-term (and perhaps seemingly more abstract) societal expectations but to adapt to
shorter-term and more immediate business risks, although these are of course connected.

In this thought-provoking and agenda-setting publication, Hazel Henderson offers a new
solution to obsolete frameworks. She advocates a transition to a ‘solar age’ as a pathway to a
more green and sustainable economic future.

Hazel’s publication builds on her lifetime of extraordinary achievements. It lays out a road
map advocating a paradigm shift for a future through a multi-disciplinary approach. It calls for
a changed way of understanding the world through systems thinking, and by the adoption of
new values and innovation. It also reassures us that as we stretch the systems of understanding
our dynamic relationship with the planet beyond the lenses of economics and GDP we shall
not be left ‘flying blind’.

In 2009 we published Hazel and Fritjof Capra’s essay Qualitative Growth and we are
delighted to have the opportunity once again to publish Hazel’s thinking.