I met British ocean rower and environmental campaigner Roz Savage at a San Francisco fundraising dinner over five years ago.  It was fairly early on in her campaign “to bring us all together, by rowing by herself across our oceans for our planet and to demonstrate how we can change things, one stroke at a time.” I was very inspired by the lifestyle choices she had made and her commitment to a life purpose not to mention the courage it takes to row single handed across oceans.   And she rowed across three – Atlantic, Pacific and Indian! Last September when the opportunity came up to interview Roz I leaped and with cameraman, David Okimoto, interviewed her at the Aquarium of the Bay.  Now I can share her story with you.

Roz Savage talks about plastic pollution, often called a “man-made global catastrophe,” in the context of her first-hand experience as she rowed, solo, from San Francisco to Hawaii on the first stage of her Pacific Ocean crossing. Meeting up with the two scientists on the Junk craft, they shared dinner and their research with Roz several hundred miles east of Hawaii. She gives us the bottom line – use less of it – and calls on each one of us to significantly reduce our use of plastic and make a positive difference in the world.

Visit our newly created EarthSayers.tv special collection on Plastics in Our Oceans and view Roz’s interview here.  This is a very inspiring and motivating story from a woman I greatly admire.

Roz was in San Francisco with her friend and colleague Howard Lack, CEO of the UK-based Foundation, Plastic Oceans so I was able to interview him as well. You will find him in the same special collection here.

Ruth Ann Barrett, sustainability advocate, January 31, 2014, Portland, Oregon

Dear friends and colleagues,

Nothing is more fundamental to sustainability than water. It defines the surface of our planet, prescribes what is necessary to our life, and challenges hopes for worldwide prosperity.  The voices of sustainability who address water span a wide range of issues, programs, disciplines, professions, geographies, industries, opportunities, catastrophes, and toxins making it difficult, but not impossible, to organize and connect them under the one umbrella of sustainability. We have gathered together on EarthSayers over a hundred of these voices under three special collections – 1 Water, Oceans, and, most recently, Plastic in Our Oceans.  Our intent is to increase awareness of sustainability and advance the leadership.

It was by meeting one such leader, Howard Lack, CEO of the UK Foundation Plastic Oceans, that it became obvious to me that the big problem with plastic in our oceans needs to be called out and the various messages and approaches brought together in one place on EarthSayers.tv by creating a special collection.  We interviewed Howard when he was in San Francisco so we could share his passion, plans, and partners with you and contribute to his goal of increasing awareness. Howard, like the naturalist David Attenborough whom he quotes believes “when people are aware of the problem they want to solve the problem.” There are a good number of us around the world that are working under this belief and in my next blog post I will call out ocean rower and environmental campaigner, Roz Savage, to share her first-hand experience with plastic in our oceans.

Do visit the Plastic in Our Oceans special collection and give a listen to Howard here. Plastic Oceans is always looking for sponsors to cover the operational costs of achieving its objectives.  Sponsorship can of course be financial commitment, however it could also entail the provision of products or services that we need.  Talk to them about how you would like to be involved. We did.

Cordially, Ruth Ann

Ruth Ann Barrett, sustainability advocate, January 30, 2014, Portland, Oregon.

Sailors for the Sea has a cause and it’s ocean conservation.  The 34th America’s Cup, an international sporting event that is a regatta by any other name, came together under the sustainability flag with a focus on the Clean Regattas Program and ocean conservation.  Since July 2011, Sailors for the Sea has worked with the America’s Cup Event Authority to support the vision and plan of delivering a model sustainability sporting event.  Sounds simple enough.

In my previous blog post I featured three interviews with Jill Savery head of sustainability for the America’s Cup and if you listened to her (video here) you came to understand a sustainability plan for a sporting event of this magnitude was anything but simple and making it happen was a big challenge.

Dan Pingaro

In this post I am focusing on an interview with Dan Pingaro, Executive Director of Sailors for the Sea.  Published in three parts, America’s Cup Clean Regatta, emphasizes their work with Jill and the collaboration it took between their organizations and among a whole host of partners and vendors, not to mention fans from all over the world, who all contributed to reducing significantly the carbon footprint of this event.  A second video, Ocean Conservation and Sailors for the Sea Programs, is about their Clean Regattas Program and Rainy Day Kits, environmental lesson plans focused on marine ecology that can be taught to students in sailing programs and other low resource environments around the world.

While interviewing Dan I took the opportunity to ask him about his career as a sustainability and ocean conservation advocate and in this, the third video, A Passion for Ocean Conservation, he talks about how his passion, education, and experience combined with an emphasis on collaboration all came together to help his team grow Sailors for the Sea into an international organization.

In October Sailors for the Sea awarded the 34th America’s Cup their highest level Clean Regattas certification! According to David Rockefeller, Jr., chairman and co-founder, Sailors for the Sea, “The collaborative efforts between Sailors for the Sea and ACEA resulted in an expanded Clean Regattas program that will benefit the ocean that boaters rely on, and established a model framework within which other world-class sporting events can strive to achieve the highest possible levels of sustainability.”

We can all learn from this collaboration and the leadership provided by Jill Savery and Dan Pingaro, their staff members, and the hundreds of volunteers who all worked hard and together.

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, Portland, Oregon, October 31, 2013.

Roger Renaldi

We recently added to our video collection (keyword phrase, beliefs and attitudes) the CBS news story by Steve Hartman about the NY photographer Roger Renaldi and his project, Touching Strangers. It got me to thinking how often we think of sustainability solely in the context of environmentalism, ignoring the social element of sustainability and most particularly the values and beliefs we carry with us that blind us to our own humanity and interconnectedness. We often ignore our artists and musicians as sustainability advocates because they are addressing culture and consciousness – a major category of social sustainability encompassing keyword phrases such as beliefs and attitudes, conservation, consumerism, and spirituality.

I think Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer and artist known for his large-format photographs of industrial landscapes, expresses this shift  from an “ism” to sustainability and the importance of consciousness very clearly in a radio interview:

“Well, I don’t know if I’m technically an environmentalist. I see myself more as an advocate for sustainability and that does include looking after the environment but also includes looking at the fact that we have employment, that our economy is in shape, that we

Edward Burtynsky

have a good judiciary that’s there, that’s part of the sustainable movement, it just isn’t environment,  if you don’t have those two other components  then environment doesn’t come into play.”  He goes on to add,  “I think it is interesting as an artist to create dialogue to bring these issues into consciousness…”  Listen to the entire interview, The Scale of It All.

However, many environmental leaders aren’t that different from artists if we listen closely and even if they don’t actually use the S word.  As an example,  environmental advocate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. noted in a recent video interview, “When I started doing environmental advocacy I understood that first of all we are not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and birds so much as for our own sake because we recognize that nature is the infrastructure of our communities.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Seek out and advance our visionaries, wisdom keepers, and leaders with the ability to direct our attention to the elements of people, planet and prosperity and represent them as nested together rather than as columns or pillars and, most importantly, as connected to the unifying principle of sustainability eloquently expressed by Mr. Kennedy in the same interview,  “to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and prosperity and good health as the communities that our parents gave us.” A guiding principle of sustainability nearly everyone can understand and embrace and a good response to the question, What is sustainability?

Kumi Naidoo

In the same vein, I recently listened to the Bill Moyers’ interview of Kumi Naidoo, environmental and human rights activist, now heading up Greenpeace International talking about the urgency of climate change. Mr. Nadoo says he constantly in his conversations with the leaders of fossil fuel companies says to them, “…put your children and your grand children’s future in the middle of our conversation. I think history is going to judge this generation of adult leaders extremely harshly…there is no excuse for not taking bold, urgent action, and do it in a  creative way that gives us a win for the climate, jobs and addressing things like economic development.”

HRH Prince Charles reiterates the same  underlying principle when addressing climate change deniers at a conference, The Road to a Low Carbon Prosperity (2011).

Prince Charles

“I ask how these people are going to face their grandchildren and admit to them that they actually failed their future.  That they ignored all the clear warning signs by passing them off as merely part of a cyclical process…that they had refused to heed the desperate calls of those last remaining traditional societies throughout the world who warned consistently, consistently of catastrophe, because they could read the signs of impending disintegration in the ever more violent extreme aberrations of the normal patterns of nature.”  You can hear his comments in this video.

A shift in our thinking and language towards representing sustainability as nesting elements, rather than columns or laundry lists of issues and programs, coupled with integrating the guiding principle of seven generations into our conversations, would go a long way in breaking down the sectors, silos, realms, disciplines, and “isms” that have become polarizing forces.  The negative impact of our unconsciousness and disconnectedness should not be minimized, but like the future for our children, moved front and center into our conversations, speeches, and presentations. The highly commercial laden language of the status quo tinted green should not be confused with that of sustainability.

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, October 18, 2013, Portland, Oregon.

“Climate change is changing the statistics, we can’t use the past as a very good predictor anymore.”

Tom Harmon

Dr. Tom Harmon of the Water Sustainability Project goes on to say, “We’ve relied on past history to try and judge how much water we’ll have and statistically that used to work out, but now climate change is changing the statistics and we can’t use the past as a very good predictor anymore.” He’s talking about this limitation in the context of the Sierra Nevada Snow Pack & Snow Melt that provides drinking water to about 30% of California residents, irrigation water to the $35B agricultural industry, and water to run the hydroelectic power industry that serves up 15% of California electricity.  Being able to predict how much water and when is crucial to the management of water resources.

The connection of climate change and water to sustainability is made clear in an online video series, Sustainability:Water. The series brings into focus the challenges we have around “wanting water that is healthy, enjoyable, and safe” here in the United States in our cities, farmlands, mountains, rivers and lakes.

Martha Conklin

The Sierra Nevada Snow pack and Snow Melt video featuring Scientists Tom Harmon and Martha Conklin of UC Merced is one of si x videos in the collection, Sustainability:Water, produced by NBC News’ educational arm NBC Learn, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The seventh video is The Water Cycle an animated primer on the flow and storage processes that supports life on earth. This collection aims to help people become more conscious of the threats to our water supply, from human activity and climate variability, and understand the steps that need to be taken to maintain it.

The other five videos in the collection are:

The Ogallala Aquifer, Kansas farmers Stan  Townsend and Mitchell Baalman with Scientist David Hyndman from Michigan State University -pumping out water for crop irrigation far faster than natural seepage of rainwater can replenish it;

Los Angeles and Water Import featuring UCLA researchers Stephanie Pincetl and Mark Gold – nearly 10 million people needing water;

Baltimore’s Urban Streams with Scientist Claire Welty of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County – the Chesapeake is facing an environmental crisis due to pollutants;

Nutrient Loading in Lake Erie, Researchers Anna Michalak, Tom Bridgeman, and Pete Richards, University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center – a vital source of drinking water for 11 million people; and

Dead Trees and Dirty Water In The Rockies, with Scientists Reed Maxwell of Colorado School of Mines and John Stednick of Colorado State University – the Rocky Mountains supply water to more than 60 million homes in the West.

Partnership

Through private-public partnerships such as the one that produced this collection, sustainability awareness is increased and the focus on water and the effects of climate change brings home the need for education and research around threats to our water supply.  The NSF with an annual budget of about $7.0 billion (FY 2012), is the funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities. NBC Learn is the educational arm of NBC News dedicated to providing resources for students, teachers and lifelong learners.

Let’s work to promote the series by linking and embedding the videos in our blogs, on our Websites, and in educational  published as part of CSR programs.

Ruth Ann Barrett, Sustainability Advocate, August 1, 2013, Cleveland, Ohio