An Environmental Video Playlist for PopTech Talks

Author: Kristen Taylor
Posted: 04/20/10 14:04 UTC
Info: Bio
Tags: Environment, reforestation, alternative, fuel, Biomass, Wildlife, Conservation, ocean, ice

We celebrate thoughtful stewardship of natural resources and new ways to tackle issues of conservation and regrowth throughout the year, but as part of Earth Week, we would like to highlight a few PopTech speakers on these themes:

Fuel Alternatives

2007 Speaker Stefano Merlin on renewable bamboo, coconut waste and sawdust to power factories in Brazil.

2008 PopTech Fellows Chip Ransler and Manoj Sinha convert rice husks into electricity at their Husk Power Systems (HPS) in India. (They’re hiring in Bihar, India; details on their site.)

2009 PopTech Fellow Jason Aramburu’s re:char converts agricultural waste into biochar—sequestering atmospheric carbon and improving soil quality. (Congratulations to Jason for recently appointing Dr. James Lovelock to the re:char Advisory Board.)

Forestry

2009 Speaker Willie Smits is using the forest (and with his company, Tapergy, the Sugar Palm) to generate biofuels with a carbon-positive impact:

2007 Speaker Sarah Otterstrom uses partnerships and employment generation to rebuild Nicaraguan forests.

2008 PopTech Fellow Tevis Howard alleviates poverty for rural Kenyan families with commercial tree farms that provide income and preserve indigenous biodiversity with his organization KOMAZA.

Wildlife

2009 Speaker Katy Payne founded the Elephant Listening Project (Facebook fan page) in 1999 to learn how acoustics shape these communities. Listen as she samples elephant sounds:

2009 Fellow Paula Kahumbu builds community through blogs in WildlifeDirect, as Executive Director, aiming to halt the loss of endangered animal populations in Africa (and globally) with awareness and donations (you can select a region and a species to protect on the site).

Oceans

2008 Speaker Carl Safina shows how simple solutions can help ensure we only catch what we are fishing with long lines.

2007 Speaker Enric Sala talks about perception, the lack of memory (he takes us back to a pristine remote archipelago 500 years ago), explaining why 99.9% of the world’s coral reef research is flawed.

Ice

2004 Speaker Ben Saunders was the youngest person to ski to the North Pole at 26; find out why, when the ice wasn’t flat, he “didn’t have a hope in hell.”

2008 Speaker John Priscu and his robots show what’s happening miles below the Antarctic ice, beyond the blue and the green of the planet.

Who are your favorite environmental speakers?