By Bryan Walsh
Tuesday, Sep. 15, 2009
Each year the Heinz Awards go to 10 headliners in a wide variety of disciplines — the arts and humanities, public policy, science and economics — ranging from writers like Dave Eggers to doctors like Paul Farmer. "We wanted to identify people who were full of promise," says Teresa Heinz, who created the awards after her then husband, Pennsylvania Sen. John Heinz, died in a helicopter crash in 1991. "We wanted to continue John's work."
But this year Heinz decided to focus the awards on a single issue, rather than recognizing many. The winners of each $100,000 award, announced on Sept. 15, were acknowledged for their work toward one cause: protecting the environment. The idea was to highlight that in this moment — in the run-up to the all-important U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen at the end of the year — we're reaching a turning point for the planet. "This is absolutely the issue that defines us," says Heinz. "We wanted to make a statement that across America, there are people taking on these problems, and that it's something we can all do."
Of course, the winners of the Heinz awards do a bit more than the average person. Recipient Christopher Field is the founding director of the Carnegie Institution's department of global ecology and a biology professor at Stanford University, who shared in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In recent years, Field has become the go-to scientist in his field, the one who perhaps understands — and can explain — best how man-made global warming will change our planet and the life that depends on it.
Scientists make up the bulk of the other award winners: Dee Boersma, a marine biologist at the University of Washington who found that the effects of climate change force penguins in Antarctica to swim 25 extra miles for food, putting them in greater danger of extinction. Ashok Gadgil, an environmental engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, won for inventing simple, inexpensive water purification systems and stoves for use in the developing world. Kirk Smith, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, was recognized for his work connecting indoor air pollution — mostly from cooking — to the premature death of women and children in developing countries. But scientists weren't the only winners: Joel Salatin, a pioneering sustainable farmer in Virginia, and Chip Giller, the publisher of the green website Grist.org, both won for changing attitudes in mainstream agriculture and the media.
For Heinz, the point of the awards isn't just handing out money — although a six-figure check goes a long way in the weakly compensated world of environmental science and activism. Rather, she wants us to see those winners as role models at a time when news of the environment can seem unremittingly dark. "This is a message of hope," says Heinz. "I want this to push people into action."
linkTuesday, September 15, 2009
It’s not every day you get a phone call saying you just won $100,000.
Chip Giller, the founder of Seattle-based online environmental news publication
Grist, is one of the
10 recipients of the Heinz Award, distributed by the
Heinz Family Foundation in Pittsburgh.
In a departure from years past, the foundation, which is chaired by Teresa Heinz, wife of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., this year gave each of its awards to environmental advocates and experts.
Grist is the oldest online news outlet dedicated to environmental journalism. According to a spokesman, Grist has more than 800,000 unique visitors each month and through distribution of its content on other sites reaches 3 million readers each month.
The Heinz Award carries a $100,000 check for Giller, who didn’t know he had been nominated for the award until Teresa Heinz called him to break the news. Giller plans to use a portion of the money to support Grist’s editorial coverage.
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