Activism

The Environment Agency have published a list of the “Top 100 eco-heroes” as voted by their peers.

“…some of these people aren’t nearly as well-recognised for their contribution to our planet’s welfare as they should be. We hope this poll will go some way towards putting that right.”
Mark Funnell, Environment Agency

Here are the Top 10:

(1) Rachel Carson (1907 – 1964)
Ian Christie, a New Economics Foundation associate, said: “The transition, from seeing the natural world as a mine, dump or playground, to seeing ‘the environment’ as the system in which we are embedded and that sustains us only as long as we respect its boundaries and rhythms, was to a large extent triggered by Silent Spring.”

“Her message was .. a call for humility in applying our ingenuity to nature, for ‘prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life’, and for ‘full possession of the facts’ to enable open and honest debate about our technological impacts on the Earth.”

(2) E. F. (Fritz) Schumacher (1911– 1977)
“(Schumacher) revolutionised the way we look at economics and provided insights – notably in his 1973 book Small is Beautiful – that have made a genuinely green economics possible. The book, subtitled Economics as if people mattered, sidestepped the main issue of environmental economics – how to price the environment properly in the economic system – and questioned whether the objectives of western economics were realistic or desirable,” said New Economics Foundation associate David Boyle.

Small is Beautiful is among the Times Literary Supplement’s 100 most influential books since the war.

(3) Jonathon Porritt
Educated at Eton and Oxford, Porritt started out as a barrister before switching career paths to teach in an inner London school, before eventually becoming an Ecology Party (now the Greens) activist in the 1970s and was later the party’s chairman. He gave up teaching in 1984 to become director of Friends of the Earth. In 1996 he co-founded the Forum for the Future.

A director of Friends of the Earth and appointed by Tony Blair as chairman of the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission, Porritt’s latest book Capitalism As If The World Matters, argues that capitalism is the only economic game in town, and says the green movement must forge an “evolved, intelligent and elegant” form of capitalism with sustainability at its heart.Read More »Top 100 eco-heroes