The Gift of Hope

The Pulse and Politics of the Environment, Peace, and Justice

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The Prince of Wales is inspired by John F. Kennedy. As the gala Earthshot Prize awards ceremony at the MGM Music Hall in Boston opens, the Prince echoes Kennedy, saying, “we can restore the planet in a decade.” Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, who was five when her father was assassinated sixty years ago, looms up on the giant screen amidst live trees, a reflecting stage with moving waters, backdrops of sky, earth, stars, storms, lightning.

Caroline shows us reels of her father intoning in his elegant Boston cadence that we will go to the moon within the decade – “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” This call to look beyond ourselves, to look to the stars, to look to the future, to offer assurance, to take action in the face of adversity, reverberates today. “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Historians still debate Kennedy’s achievements during his too short presidency. By the measures of legislation, policy, politics, Lyndon Johnson was more successful. But it is hard to measure inspiration, to measure hope, to understand that we need to be lifted up, to transcend the grim realities of the Cold War, or of global pollution and climate change.

I was invited to join the Earthshot ceremony as the representative of the Rachel Carson Council which awards some 30 fellowships to young environmental leaders on American campuses. I went with my daughter, Dr. Emily Musil Church, Senior Director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy of the Milken Institute in Washington, D.C. Emily was invited because she also awards huge incentive prizes — for work on agriculture and tech in Africa, clean energy innovation, and more. She also finds, encourages, and advises extremely high donors and celebrities how to wisely invest their funds to do the most good.

Prince William’s foundation is giving out $6,000,000 tonight to the winners in five categories of entrepreneurial and social change projects around the world to combat pollution and climate change. It would be easy to ridicule the size and effectiveness of such a sum in the face of the existential crisis that now faces us. I even wince inwardly a bit at Prince William’s repeated declaration that we can solve the crisis within the decade.

Until I see the prize winners.

Charlot Magayi grew up gathering charcoal in Mukuru, the largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Now she is introduced and awarded her prize by a visibly moved Princess Kate in a $79 rented green dress. When Magayi became a mother, her charcoal stove tipped over, badly burning her 7-year-old daughter. Magayi determined to build a better stove that was less dangerous and emitted 70% less indoor pollution than traditional small stoves, a major cause of death and disease in the developing world. There are over 950,000 such small stoves that burn polluting wood and charcoal in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. That number is expected to rise to 1.67 billion by 2050.

But Magayi not only built a more efficient strove with less polluting fuel, she created Mukuru Clean Stoves. With the $1.2 million Earthshot Prize and the attendant publicity and access to donors, Magayi will be able to scale up her enterprise and quickly reach a million more homes.

The 44.01 Project, founded by Tala Hasan, takes its name from the molecular weight of carbon dioxide. It is an Oman-based group that sucks CO2 from the air, puts it into water which is then pumped into molten peridotite, common in Oman, where it is mineralized into rock. 44.01 will create 1,000 tons of peridotite per year until 2024 when, with the help of its Earthshot Prize and global attention, it hopes to create 1 billion tons by 2040.

Other prize winners include Notpla (for not plastic), a London startup created by design students that has replaced nearly ubiquitous, thin, plastic wrappings with a similar filmy wrap made from seaweed that grows rapidly and replenishes itself. Notpla can help make a dent in the 6.3 metric tons of plastic waste currently clogging the world’s streets and sea, while the seaweed the product is based on can capture carbon 20 times faster than trees. For openers, Notpla has already provided more than 1 million take-out containers to JustEatTakeaway.com, a global online food-delivery marketplace. It, too, will be able to scale up with the prize money and attention from Earthshot.

Another winner, Kheyti, a startup from India, has created modular, portable greenhouses made from light, sustainable materials that will help small farmers in India who have been devastated by climate change to grow produce away from floods and extreme heat, reducing hunger while saving energy. Kheyti’s modules are 90% cheaper than growing crops outdoors. They use 98% less water with seven times the yield of traditional methods. Kheyti has begun with 1,000 farms using its product and hopes to include 50,000 farms within four years.

But some of the most enthusiastic applause at the ceremony greeted the award to the Queensland Indigenous Women Rangers Network. Founded by Larissa Hale, who was the sole Indigenous Women Ranger in 2007, the network now has 120 women rangers. It blends traditional knowledge with modern technology, like drones, to watch over, protect, and replenish coastal areas including the Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea off Queensland. Extreme heat and weather in Australia has led to reductions in species and sea grass, essential food for sea turtles and manatees, some of the planet’s most loved, but endangered animals. In response, the Indigenous Women Rangers are educating large number of women and girls in both tech and traditional ways of knowledge to preserve and protect the corals and the creatures that inhabit them. Now, thanks to their Earthshot Award, they will expand in Queensland while linking up with other Indigenous Women in coastal areas worldwide.

Each time an award is given, I am able to watch the winners in real time, whether in Kenya or in India, celebrating, hugging, jumping, crying with their friends and family. This is the heart and soul of the ceremony. I simultaneously smile and laugh and fight back tears. These previously unknown, unheralded people have faced what Kennedy might have called “the maximum hour of danger” with optimism, ingenuity, caring, joy. They are the stars tonight, brighter even than David Beckham, or Annie Lennox, or Billie Eilish. They speak of their contributions to saving the planet with passion, authenticity, eloquence. To me they sound like the most distinguished voices we have heard here tonight – David Attenborough, Kate Blanchett, the Prince and Princess of Wales.

It would be relatively easy to dismiss the solutions we are enthusiastically applauding. Too little, too late. No mechanisms to ensure that these efforts will really continue, really succeed. Individual and small organizational and business effort are never enough. And, easy enough to denigrate the efforts of the environmental royalty gathered here.

Did John F. Kennedy and his brilliant and beautiful first lady, Jacqueline, our last regal couple, do enough, achieve enough? Did we need Pablo Casals at the White House, Robert Frost at the Inaugural, the trips to the moon? Did we not need more than soaring speeches about a divided Berlin?

Yes. We needed hope.

Prince William was inspired by John F. Kennedy. And so, with wealth and glamor, the Prince and Princess of Wales have built a glittering global stage that rewards and gives celebrity status to inventors, entrepreneurs, Indigenous women’s wisdom, a woman who once sold coal on the streets. These prize winners have transcended their own gloomy predicaments, and ours. They have given us the greatest gift of all – joyful caring for the Earth and for the future. They have given us hope.

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— Bob Musil is the President & CEO of the Rachel Carson Council and author of Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America’s Environment (Rutgers, 2016) and Washington in Spring: A Nature Journal for a Changing Capital (Bartleby, 2016). He is also the editor of the forthcoming annotated edition from Rutgers University Press of Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind with his Introduction, updated marine science, and historic and contemporary illustrations and photographs.