Enter GreenWorld contest Contest judges
Lawrence Bender
Challenge
No offense to Thomas Edison, but the incandescent light bulb is a 130-year-old dinosaur. The modern compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) requires only one-third the energy and can last up to ten times as long. It takes 18 seconds to change a light bulb. If every American switched just one bulb to an Energy Star–certified CFL, we would collectively save $8 billion in energy costs, prevent the burning of 30 billion pounds of coal and prevent harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Become part of a movement that will help change the world: Visit www.18Seconds.org and enter your zip code to track the number of CFLs purchased in your neighborhood and the amount of CO2 prevented from polluting the air. Rally your community. How long will it take you to make the switch and help stop global warming?
Biography
Film producer and political activist Lawrence Bender’s most recent film, An Inconvenient Truth, was honored with the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary and Best Original Song. His other films include Good Will Hunting, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and Pulp Fiction. In television, Bender was nominated for a GLAAD Award as executive producer for MTV’s Anatomy of a Hate Crime. He is a member of the executive forum for the Natural Resources Defense Council and sits on the board of trustees of the Israel Policy Forum, the advisory board to the dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the board of the Creative Coalition. In 2003, he cofounded the Detroit Project, targeting the gas-guzzling SUV. Recently, Bender received the Torch of Liberty Award from the ACLU.
The 18Seconds Movement
Eighteen seconds is the amount of time it takes to have a positive impact on global warming. That’s all it takes to change one inefficient incandescent light bulb in a home or office to an Energy Star–labeled compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL). 18Seconds is a broad network of organizations, corporations (including Yahoo!), individuals, government agencies and elected officials working together to inspire a grassroots movement to make CFLs the light bulb of choice for American consumers. This group sees an opportunity to empower, educate and motivate every person in the country to take action to alleviate global warming by switching to CFLs. Every American can make a positive impact on global warming simply by changing a bulb.
Frances Fisher
Challenge
Environmental awareness is approaching critical mass: Witness Al Gore’s Academy Award–winning An Inconvenient Truth. What can you say in two minutes that can be distributed widely via YouTube and other video-sharing networks so that viewers—many of whom are not yet aware that they, too, are responsible—can, and will, wake up? We need to reach mass consciousness, and you can do it with your video.
Biography
Born in Milford-on-Sea, England, Frances Fisher’s itinerant childhood in Colombia, Canada, France, Brazil, Turkey, Italy and around the U.S. undoubtedly provided fodder for her thespian career. She studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and has appeared in more than 30 films including Titanic, House of Sand and Fog, True Crime and Laws of Attraction (SFIFF 2004). Her upcoming films include The Kingdom, My Sexiest Year and In the Valley of Elah.
Environmental Media Association
Founded in 1989, the Environmental Media Association (EMA) serves as a valuable link between the entertainment industry and the environmental community, educating and mobilizing industry professionals and millions of people worldwide to take action. By weaving environmental messages into film, television and music programming and utilizing celebrities as positive role models, EMA continues to have a profound effect on the public’s reception of environmental information
Shalom Harlow
Challenge
Film is a powerful medium for affecting change. An Inconvenient Truth has helped shift the debate over climate change, and viewers are flocking to films that educate and raise consciousness as well as entertain. The films of the future can—and must—mobilize the citizens of this planet to take action on issues that matter. Because we register film images in much the same way we do dreams, films also can be used to create a positive collective vision. Let us use the potential of this medium of imagination to focus on the kind of future we want to create together.
Biography
Shalom Harlow is a model, actor and lover of trees. She was raised by conservation-minded hippie parents who instilled in her a deep respect for nature. Our interconnectedness to the earth and the health of our planet remains a high priority for Harlow. She is thrilled with this opportunity to ignite others to contemplate new ways of using the medium of film.
ForestEthics
Since 1994, ForestEthics, an environmental nonprofit organization with staff across Canada and the United States, has stopped logging in more than seven million acres of Endangered Forests, including five million acres in Canada's Great Bear Rainforest, 1.2 million acres in the Inland Rainforests of British Columbia, and a million acres in Chile. ForestEthics’ flagship public outreach campaigns against industry giants Staples, Office Depot and Victoria’s Secret for their paper use have resulted in dramatic new industry standards, as have the environmental commitments it has procured from some of the largest corporations on the planet, including Williams-Sonoma, Home Depot and Dell computers.
Julia Butterfly Hill
Challenge
Imagine that you were so powerful that you could transform the world around you to be exactly as you envision it. We all know the famous Gandhi quote, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” but what if being the change meant you could see, touch and hear the change? Most of us want peace in the world. We write to our congresspeople and join the antiwar movement. We point fingers at the media, politicians and corporations for the way the world is. My mother always told me, whenever you point a finger, there are always three fingers pointing back at you. I tell people these three fingers stand for power, responsibility and love. What would it mean for you to be powerful, to be responsible for the way the world is, for your entire being to come from love of all life, including yourself? I challenge you to be a manifestation of your love, your power and your responsibility as you think about the GreenWorld Contest. As ecologist Rudolph Bahro said, “When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
Biography
Julia Butterfly Hill is best known for spending 738 days living in the branches of an ancient redwood tree named Luna. She is a poet, activist, chef, artist and the best-selling author of Legacy of Luna, published in 11 languages. While living in Luna, Julia founded Circle of Life, an Oakland-based nonprofit organization that inspires, educates and connects people to ways they can make a difference. A film titled Luna currently is in development and aspires to raise the bar on green film production.
Circle of Life
Circle of Life is a nonprofit organization founded by Julia Butterfly Hill that activates people through education, inspiration and connection to live in a way that honors the diversity and interdependence of all life. Circle of Life is a leader in eco-friendly tour and event production and currently is pioneering an open-source civic engagement effort called the Engage Network, which will launch in mid-2007.
Q’orianka Kilcher
Challenge
Popular culture is a bad joke; In Touch and People magazines are always sold out! We collectively know more about Paris Hilton’s love life than we do about global warming and human rights abuses. My question to all of you is this: How can we encourage people, youth in particular, to care about and become involved in the critical environmental and social issues of our time, rather than in what is on the cover of In Touch this month? Or, maybe the magazine could highlight a globally relevant issue on its cover. Any suggestions?
Biography
Having embarked on an acting career at age six, Q’orianka Kilcher emerged as a major talent at age 16 with her portrayal of Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World. She also is an acclaimed singer/songwriter and dancer and a committed activist. Kilcher is the founder of the youth-driven environmental and human rights organization on-Q initiative and lends her voice and presence to organizations such as Amazon Watch, Amnesty International, Thursday’s Child and Community School for the Arts Foundation. She is currently producing a documentary through her production company iQ Films in collaboration with Amazon Watch, highlighting the 35-year struggle of the Achuar people of the Peruvian Amazon against multinational oil companies. Kilcher drives a hydrogen fuel cell car with pure water steam as emissions.
Amazon Watch
Founded in 1996, Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending the rainforests and supporting the rights of indigenous peoples of the Amazon Basin. In coordination with local indigenous and environmental groups, the organization challenges industrial projects that threaten forest communities and biodiversity and advocates for local groups by providing videomaking training.
Isabella Rossellini
Challenge
As a child growing up in an urban environment, I would look at my pets and wonder, “Do they feel like I feel? Do they have rights?” This eventually led me to deeper questions as an adult: “What is the essence of intelligence? What is the difference between an animal and a human?” You watch your cats and dogs, and you wonder how animals in the wild will survive. Eventually, you realize that we can’t take animals for granted. We have to protect them. Yet, the world of conservation is so vast that you wonder whether it’s possible for one person to make a difference. Through my work with Wildlife Conservation Network I’ve realized that there is hope. Each of us has a role as well, whether it’s donating time or money to wildlife conservation, or taking a stand against injustices toward animals. Working together, we can preserve the wonder and joy that animals bring to our lives.
Biography
Best known for her work as a model and actress whose credits include Blue Velvet, Big Night and The Saddest Music in the World (SFIFF 2004), Isabella Rossellini has had a lifetime passion for animals and has been a longtime supporter of wildlife conservation. She served as Chairman of the Board of the Howard Gilman Foundation, a leading institution in the fight to save wildlife, and is Board Member Emeritus of the Wildlife Conservation Network in California. Rossellini recently was one of five recipients of the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund Award. Isabella’s dog, Macaroni, did her part for conservation as well by donating her $5,000 acting proceeds to conservation.
Wildlife Conservation Network
Wildlife Conservation Network was founded in 2002 to fund and foster individual conservationists focused on implementing community-based conservation programs in Central and South America, Asia and Africa. WCN provides fundraising, marketing, administrative and technical expertise to conservationists, enabling them to work more effectively and spend more time in the field. This network of leading-edge conservationists, committed philanthropists and passionate community members utilizes innovative venture capital solutions to save endangered species and create peaceful coexistence between people and wildlife. WCN will hold its 2007 Wildlife Conservation Expo in San Francisco on October 5–6.
Aisha Tyler
Challenge
Sometimes it's hard to feel connected to this huge global environmental problem that feels so insurmountable. But getting people, especially kids, to fall in love with nature and want to care for it starts by getting them outdoors. That's where the Trust for Public Land comes in. They make parks, pure and simple. Parks where kids and families and animals can play, be outside and understand that the environment isn't just some big, remote idea but something that we can enjoy every day. And by enjoying it, learn how to take care of it. Passion for something big can start with something very small, like a neighborhood park.
Biography
Called a “multi-genre threat” by Daily Variety, Aisha Tyler began acting in high school in San Francisco and went on to study Government and Environmental Policy at Dartmouth College, where she also continued to perform sketch and improv comedy. A regular on Politically Incorrect, Tyler was the first female host of E!’s Emmy-winning pop culture crucible Talk Soup. Appearances on Friends, Nip/Tuck, 24 and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation led to roles in three upcoming films: Balls of Fury, .45 and Death Sentence. She is currently preparing to direct her first film from an original screenplay that she wrote, to be executive produced by John Woo. Tyler recently published her first book, Swerve: Reckless Observations of a Postmodern Girl, and has contributed articles to Glamour, Oprah, Jane, Movieline and This Day in the Life of American Women. She is an advisor to the Trust for Public Land and a board member of the American Red Cross and the Kanye West Foundation.
Trust for Public Land
The Trust for Public Land is a national nonprofit land conservation organization that conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, community gardens, historic sites, rural lands and other natural places, ensuring livable communities for generations to come. For a free subscription to TPL's magazine, Land&People, visit www.tpl.org/freemag.