Earth Island Institute

Earth Island Institute supports innovators pursuing solutions for environmental sustainability worldwide. For more than 25 years our nonprofit organization has worked efficiently to leverage every donor contribution into meaningful solutions for a healthy future. Please lend your support today!

Our New Leaders Initiative (NLI) produced the 9^th annual Brower Youth Awards, awarding a prize of $3,000 to six amazing young environmental leaders and engaging them in a week of activities and training, including speaking at the Bioneers Conference, camping at Point Reyes National Seashore, and celebrating their achievements at our exciting awards ceremony attended by more than 900 guests. Expanding our investment in youth environmental leadership, NLI partnered with Ashoka Youth Ventures on The Lorax Challenge in nearly 1,000 U.S. schools and launched over 50 funded classroom-initiated projects, from which five were selected to attend a sustainability boot camp at the University of Florida. Also in 2008, the first-ever BYA Summit brought 25 of our past honorees together for a weekend of networking and strategic planning. To learn more about the New Leaders Initiative and see videos and photos from the Brower Youth Awards, visit the recently re-launched website: www.broweryouthawards.org.

Our Restoration Initiatives Fund in collaboration with the Southern California Wetlands Recovery Project awarded nearly $300,000 in small grants to 11 community-based restoration projects in Southern California. Building on this partnership, we launched a pioneering cross-border environmental cleanup and erosion-control initiative in the highly polluted Tijuana River estuary and provided resources and support for our South Coast Habitat Restoration project. Restoration Initiatives continues to lead innovation in wetlands and watershed restoration: restoration.earthisland.org.

Earth Island Journal was awarded the Utne Independent Press Award for Best Environmental Coverage in 2007. In 2008, to help build the resources for the Journal’s in-depth, investigative reporting — so rare in today’s sound-byte media-sphere — we launched our Green Journalism Fund. The Journal was expanded to 64 pages and given a fresh new layout, and published four theme-oriented issues over the year: Agriculture, Transportation, Water, and Forests. If you haven’t visited www.earthisland.org in a while, you will want to see our recently re-designed website, where you can stay up to date on the latest “news of the world environment.’’ Looking ahead on the editorial calendar for early 2009, the Journal will focus its unique brand of advocacy journalism on Oceans and Population in the spring and summer issues. The Journal will launch a series of panel discussions for the public based on the themes of our 2009 issues at our new home in the Brower Center.

In May 2008, our Project Support program convened a Project Director Summit, bringing together an unprecedented gathering of 35 leaders from around the U.S. for program evaluation, networking, and inter-project strategizing. At this three-day retreat, project directors presented their struggles and successes in launching public interest campaigns, discussed Earth Island Institute support systems, proposed joint initiatives, and developed strategies to help their projects become more effective in restoring the planet and its communities.

This year, we welcomed four new projects — coalSwarm, Connect the Dots, Kids vs. Global Warming, and Project Coyote — expanding the projects under our efficient organizational support model to 50.

Please see our project directory online for more information on the exciting work our projects bring to the Earth Island network.

Here are some specific 2008 achievements of projects under Earth Island Institute sponsorship:

• In 2008, Bay Area Wilderness Training facilitated over 35 wilderness trips, training teachers, youth leaders, and volunteers in back-country skills. In just ten years, BAWT has trained more than 574 teachers and youth workers to lead at-risk and inner-city youth on wilderness expeditions and has served more than 7,344 teens by providing camping and hiking experiences, loaning camping equipment, and facilitating safe and rewarding trips for young people who have little or no direct experience with nature.
• Borneo Project celebrated a major legal victory for Indigenous communities’ land rights when the High Courtof Sarawak in Malaysia upheld a lower court's rejection of criminal charges against 14 residents of longhouse Rumah Nor for illegal occupation of state land. The court ruled that native customary land rights extend to land that the state had claimed and planned to lease for logging and palm oil plantations.
• California Student Sustainability Coalition (CSSC) connects student sustainability activists across the University of California and California State University systems. This year, CSSC launched the Real Food Challenge with The Food Project in Boston, organizing campuses to demand organic, local, and sustainable food for students. In October, they convened more than 600 college students at their annual convergence at San Francisco State University.
• Center for Safe Energy hosted six delegations composed of more than 40 young Russian and Ukrainian environmentalists, community leaders, and educators. Funded by the Open World Program of the Library of Congress, this program provided training, mentoring, professional assistance, resources, and strategies for these visitors meeting with U.S. sister environmental organizations.
• EcoEquity directors Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou published the landmark The Right to Development in a Climate-Constrained World: The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework with the Heinrich-Boll Foundation. The book presents a climate protection framework designed to support an emergency climate stabilization program while at the same time preserving the right of all people to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development, free of the privations of poverty.
• Our Energy Action Coalition, in the wake of its spectacularly successful Power Shift 2007 conference, launched the Power Vote campaign to organize young people behind a clean energy agenda in the election season and to work beyond the election to hold successful candidates accountable for pursuing that agenda. As of October, the coalition had signed up 302,492 young Americans who are committed to “finding solutions to global warming by voting to create a clean energy economy, green jobs for all and to secure our climate.”
• International Marine Mammal Project — one of Earth Island’s longest standing campaigns, dating to our earliest days 25 years ago — has persistently fought for the rights of whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals, whether monitoring the international trade in canned tuna to enforce the dolphin-safe standard, or bringing to light the horrific slaughter of dolphins in the Taiji “drive fishery” in Japan, or fighting U.S. Navy sonar experiments that harm the hearing of marine mammals.
• In October, the case “Summers v. Earth Island Institute,” initiated out of litigation by our John Muir Project challenging Forest Service timber sales, was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case seeks to overturn Forest Service regulations that allow the agency to log on public land without getting public comment or allowing for an appeals process. The suit, if won, would preserve the right of groups such as Earth Island Institute to challenge general federal agency procedures through litigation rather than being limited to simply opposing a specific timber sale event in court.
• One of our newest projects, South Coast Habitat Restoration, working collaboratively with private property owners and multiple public agencies, has begun the construction of three substantial bridges across Carpenteria Creek near Santa Barbara. The bridges will enable the restoration of the creek to steelhead trout spawning. Completion is expected in 2009.
• In July, Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA) helped convene the African Women and Water Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. This incubator for micro-enterprise development and water technology training marked Phase I of WEA’s “Women and Water Program.” Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai joined the conferenceas the keynote speaker, and her organization, the Green Belt Movement, hosted the conference at its training center. Women leaders from eight African nations who attended the Conference learned how to construct low-cost, sustainable water treatment technologies and how to develop business plans. They also received seed grants from WEA to launch their own clean water micro-enterprises.

In 2009, Earth Island Institute and several of its projects — including Center for Safe Energy, International Marine Mammal Project, Sacred Land Film Project, and Women’s Earth Alliance — will become the inaugural tenants at the David Brower Center when this new landmark LEED Platinum Green Building opens next spring. Stay tuned and get involved as we launch public education programs in this new hub of the environmental movement, just across the street from the UC Berkeley campus.

For more information on these and other projects of Earth Island, please visit www.earthisland.org. Join Earth Island, Subscribe to our Earth Island Journal and/or make a special 2008 year-end gift or discover other ways to give.