Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, economist Hazel Henderson, and restaurateur Judy Wicks will discuss Life in a Win-Win World. While severe challenges threaten the well-being of our species and life as we know it on planet earth, there are viable solutions available to us. We will look at these solutions from a cosmic perspective, see global economic models, and witness the success of the practical applications in the real world of Judy’s White Dog Café.

Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world’s most innovative biologists, is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance, which leads to a vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory. He first worked in developmental biology at Cambridge University, and is currently Director of the Perrott-Warrick project. He has appeared in many TV programs in Britain and overseas, and was one of the participants (along with Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Toulmin) in a TV series called A Glorious Accident, shown on PBS channels throughout the US.

Hazel Henderson is the author of Building A Win-Win World, Paradigms in Progress, Creating Alternative Futures, The Politics of The Solar Age, and Redefining Wealth & Progress. She is a world-wide syndicated columnist and consultant on sustainable development. Henderson rejects the inevitability of global competition. Moreover, she proposes that our future will be far better if cooperative approaches to dealing with human needs were to replace the destructive aspects of competition. She finds particular hope in the trend toward a "grassroots globalism" being created by countless social movements around the world that deal with poverty, social inequities, pollution, resource-depletion, violence and more. She believes these movements are leading us toward the creation of a win-win world in which the rewards will go to the ethical and caring.

Judy Wicks is owner and founder of Philadelphia’s 24-year-old White Dog Cafe, and is a national leader in the local, living economies movement. She is co-founder and co-chair of the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and founder of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBN). She is also president of the White Dog Community Enterprises (formerly White Dog Cafe Foundation), a non-profit 501c3 dedicated to building a local living economy in the Philadelphia region. Judy has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Business Enterprise Trust award, founded by Norman Lear, for creative leadership in combining sound business management with social vision. More recently, she received Business Ethics Magazine’s first “Living Economy Award,” and the James Beard Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year, 2005. Other accolades include American Benefactor’s “America’s 25 Most Generous Companies,” Oprah Magazine’s “5 Amazingly Gifted and Giving Food Professionals,” and Inc. Magazine's 25 favorite entrepreneurs in the country. Judy co-authored The White Dog Cafe Cookbook: Multicultural Recipes and Tales of Adventure from Philadelphia’s Revolutionary Restaurant, and is currently working on a book about her business and the local living economy movement to be published by Chelsea Green.