Environmental Hall of Fame/Shame Poll
J.C. Moore, environmental activist [ 1 ] and a member of The NewsTalkers Climate Change & Environment group, has been taking a poll every year since 2009 to find those most deserving to be in the Environmental Hall of Fame or the Environmental Hall of Shame.
NewsTalker members are invited to place their nominations for each category in the comment section of the " Nominate Your Candidates for the 2014 Environmental Hall of Fame/Shame Awards " article, posted in the CC&E group on January 7, 2015.
The poll is available to all NewsTalkers members, you can click on the above link to read the article and place your nomination in the comment section.
2014 Winner;
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Bill McKibben an author, environmentalist, and activist. In 1988 he wrote The End of Nature ,the first book for a common audience about global warming. He is a co-founder and Senior Adviser at 350.org , an international climate campaign that works in 188 countries around the world.
2014 Loser;
Koch Industries Charles and David Koch, the third and fourth richest men in America, first gained notoriety when a remarkable expose by Jane Mayerin the New Yorker showed how theyd funded not only the Tea Party but also the hydra-headed campaign to undermine the science of global warming, all in the service of even more profit for their oil and gas business.
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This is a much more difficult assignment than I thought it would be. There are many people all over the world making significant contributions toward helping to preserve our environment. Choosing the one most deserving of recognition is very difficult indeed.
However, last fall I read about a student in the Netherlands that has come up with what seems to be a feasible and viable method for clearing much of the over 30 million tons of plastic and other debris that finds its way to our oceans every year. That student is 19 year old Dutch student/ inventor, Boyen Slat, now founder and CEO of The OCEANCLEANUP
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Boyen Slat had always enjoyed working out solutions to puzzles, and while pondering this one, it came to him - rather than chase plastic, why not harness the currents and wait for it to come to you?
At school, Slat developed his idea further as part of a science project. An array of floating barriers, anchored to the sea bed, would first catch and concentrate the floating debris. The plastic would move along the barriers towards a platform, where it could then be efficiently extracted. The ocean current would pass underneath the barriers, taking all buoyant sea life with it. There would be no emissions, and no nets for marine life to get entangled in. The collected ocean plastic would be recycled and made into products - or oil.
The high school science project was awarded Best Technical Design at Delft University of Technology. For most teenagers, it would probably have ended there, but Slat was different. He set up a foundation, The Ocean Cleanup , and explained his concept in a TedX Talk: How the Oceans can Clean Themselves . Then, six months into his course, he made the decision to pause both university and social life to try make it a reality.
On 26 March 2013, months after it had gone online, Slat's TedX talk went viral. "It was unbelievable," he says. "Suddenly we got hundreds of thousands of people clicking on our site every day. I received about 1,500 emails per day in my personal mailbox from people volunteering to help." He set up a crowd-funding platform that made $80,000 in 15 days. Read the entire BBC News Magazine article .
According to Bloomberg Business Week , in June of 2014, Slat, together with a team of about 70 scientists and engineers, released a 530-page feasibility study (pdf) that explains the technology and explores questions of legality, costs, environmental impact, and potential pitfalls. The Ocean Cleanup also kicked off a campaign to raise $2 million to construct and test large-scale pilots.
On September 15, 2014, Slats team announced that the funding goal had been achieved in 100 days, with support from more than 38,000 donors in 160 countries. They expect the first pilot to be deployed within a year, and they plan to have a fully operational offshore cleanup array in three years.
That is a great nomination. Thanks for you permission to post it as an article on my website .
No problem JC. Your website is very impressive and I'm pleased you're using it to further promote Boyan Slats' story.