PART 1
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Last year ended with the incongruous image of 10,000 politicians, businessmen, activists and scientists from 190 countries emitting vast quantities of greenhouse gases as they flew home from Bali clutching the bare bones of a global agreement on climate change. The agreement was to keep on talking to try to reach a deal by 2010. It was a diplomatic triumph, achieved after rows and high dramas, but it leaves all nations a mighty hill to climb. There is no agreement on what emission cuts need to be made by when or by whom, and the US is still deeply reluctant to do anything. It is a roadmap with no signposts.Some were optimistic that a start had been made; some said that the earth's ecological situation was in a far more perilous state than had been thought. The iconic images of 2007 - polar bears stranded, glaciers melting in the Himalayas, forests coming down all over Africa and devastating floods and droughts from Bangladesh to Ghana - may be as nothing to what will happen if people do not take immediate action.
But who are the people who can bring about change, the pioneers coming up with radical solutions? We can modify our lifestyles, but that will never be enough. Who are the politicians most able to force society and industry to do things differently? Where are the green shoots that will get us out of the global ecological mess?
To come up with a list of the 50 people most able to prevent the continuing destruction of the planet, we consulted key people in the global environment debate. Our panel included scientists - former World Bank chief scientist and now the British government's scientific adviser on climate change, Bob Watson, Indian physicist and ecologist Vandana Shiva, Kenyan biologist and Nobel prize-winner Wangari Maathai; activists - Guardian columnist George Monbiot and head of Greenpeace International Gerd Leipold; politicians - Green party co-leader and MEP Caroline Lucas, and London mayor Ken Livingstone; sustainable development commissioner for the UK government Jonathon Porritt and novelist Philip Pullman.
Then the Guardian's science, environment and economics correspondents met to add their own nominations and establish a final 50. Great names were argued over, and unknown ones surfaced. Should Al Gore be on the list? He may have put climate change on the rich countries' agenda, but some felt his solution of trading emissions is not enough and no more than what all major businesses and western governments are now saying. But in the end he squeaked through.
There was also debate over Leonardo DiCaprio. It would be easy to sniff at someone who seemed to have merely pledged to forgo private jets and made a couple of films about the environment, but we felt the Hollywood superstar who has grabbed the green agenda had to be included because of the worldwide influence he is expected to have. Thanks to his massive celebrity status DiCaprio could be a crucial figure in persuading and leading the next generation.
Some people made it to the final 50 not just because of their work but because - like the man who has found a simple way to save energy in a refrigerator, or the boy who collects impressive amounts of money for the protection of tigers - they represented a significant grassroots technological or social movement. And some got on the list because they were considered the driving forces behind the decision-makers. One church leader, for example, made it largely because the world's religions have huge investments and are shifting the political landscape in the US and Europe.
The final list includes an Indian peasant farmer, the world's leading geneticist, German and Chinese politicians, a novelist, a film director, a civil engineer, a seed collector and a scientist who has persuaded an African president to make a tenth of his country a national park. There are 19 nationalities represented. Nearly one in five of those listed comes from the US, and one in three is from a developing country, suggesting that grassroots resourcefulness will be as important as money and technology in the future. Nearly one in three of the people chosen has a scientific background, even if not all practice what they studied. It's not a definitive list and there are no rankings, but these 50 names give a sense of the vast well of people who represent the stirrings of a remarkable scientific and social revolution, and give us hope as we enter 2008.
John Vidal
Terry Tamminen
Climate policy adviser
Born in Australia, Terry Tamminen, 57, has been a sheep farmer, a sea captain, a property dealer and, until last year, environmental adviser to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Largely because of Tamminen's influence, Arnie greened up, passed a raft of groundbreaking environmental laws, put pressure on polluting industries and is now politically popular. The world's seventh largest economy now has targets and timetables to shame nearly every country in the world - a 25% cut in emissions by 2020 - and is hailed as a beacon of eco responsibility. Tamminen has moved on to run the state's climate plan and is working with other US states and cities to create a de facto national climate change policy, and in so doing forcing President Bush's hand. Tamminen argues that the 5% of the world population who live in the US are responsible not for 25% of the world's climate emissions, as the textbooks say, but for at least 50% of them if you include the energy needed to power the Chinese factories that are churning out plastic toys and other mass consumer goods for the voracious US market.
Capt Paul Watson
Marine activist
Paul Watson, 57, is the man Japanese whalers, Canadian seal hunters and illegal fishermen everywhere fear the most. The ultimate direct action man, he co-founded Greenpeace in the 70s and now has two boats that patrol the world 's oceans and confront anyone he has evidence of acting criminally. He is regularly denounced by governments as being an eco terrorist and a pirate after ramming and scuttling whalers, but Watson knows the law of the sea and has never been prosecuted. Now he is opening up a new role for environment groups. Last year the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society became an official law enforcement agency in Ecuador. Sea Shepherd partners the Ecuador police and can go on official patrols and make arrests in the Galapagos national maritime park. In one month last year he intercepted more than 19,000 shark fins and 92,000 sea cucumbers, and confiscated more than 35 miles of illegal longline. The idea of environmental activists becoming a new green police force may develop in years to come.
Vicki Buck
Entrepreneur
As the world scrambles to find a fuel supply that doesn't exacerbate global warming, New Zealander Vicki Buck, 51, has emerged as the acceptable face of biofuels. She's one-third of Aquaflow, a small company that was one of the first to crack the technology needed to harvest wild algae from sewage ponds, then extract fuel from it suitable for cars and aircraft. Companies from Boeing to Virgin are now beating a path to her Christchurch door. They're excited by the fact that it's theoretically possible to produce 10,000 gallons of algae oil per acre, compared with 680 gallons per acre for palm oil. Moreover, Buck has form: she was mayor of Christchurch, set up top eco-website celsias.com, is a director of NZ Windfarms, and is now working on a start-up to reduce one major cause of climate change: the methane gas emitted from billions of animals which make up 49% of NZ's greenhouse gases - chiefly by changing their diet.
Elon Musk
Entrepreneur
Elon Musk, 36, struck gold with PayPal (a system for paying bills online) during the 90s dot com boom and the South African wunderkind is now the major investor and chair of the board at Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley electric car startup. The company plans to shake up the moribund US auto industry and dramatically curb CO2 emissions, ripping out the internal combustion engine and the petrol tank, and replacing both with a motor that boasts few moving parts and the sort of lithium batteries found in laptops. A limited-edition Tesla Roadster, a sports car that reaches 60 mph in less than four seconds, and can do 245 miles per charge, is due this year. Hollywood eco-stars such as George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio have bagged the first of a 600-car production run being built by Lotus in the UK. Next up, says Tesla, is a mass-market family sedan that could be fuelled by solar panels on the garage roof.
Angela Merkel
German chancellor
Angela Merkel, 53, has inherited Tony Blair's mantle as the politician forcing climate change the hardest on to the world stage, and she is a formidable advocate. The only major player left who helped hammer out the original global warming agreement at Kyoto in 1997, she is one of the very few with a grasp of what it means if humanity fails.But it's what Germany does at home that gives Merkel authority. A quantum chemistry researcher brought up by a Lutheran pastor in communist East Germany, she was made German environment minister in 1994. The country now leads the world in turning away from coal and oil, and setting the highest targets for renewables and emission cuts.She's not so popular with Greens, who accuse her of being a lackey to nuclear power and a friend of Bush, but they accept that she gets things done. Ten years ago, she shocked people when she said Germany should aim to raise the proportion of its electricity generated from renewable energy to 50% by 2050. It's now 12% - compare Britain's 3% - and is on track to be 20% in 12 years' time. She asked Germans to believe her when she said renewables would provide more jobs. There are now nearly 250,000 people working in the sector. And at the UN meeting at Bali last month, she told the EU it had to stick together and be ambitious. It led the fight against President Bush.
The speed at which Germany under Merkel is pursuing climate change policies is embarrassing the UK and other countries, which talk up the need for action, but deliver little. The UK aims to cut emissions by 60% by 2050 and argues that it needs nuclear power to do so. Germany, meanwhile, wants 40% cuts within 13 years without resort to nuclear power - something far harder.
"The faster industrialised countries cut their emissions, the more willing other countries will be to do their bit," Merkel says. "An intelligent and fair regulation of CO2 reductions is in everyone's best interests."
It's heady stuff for the world's energy watchers. German energy efficiency is to be improved by 3% a year for 20 years. The country expects to use 10% less electricity within a decade; all power stations are to be modernised; there's £30bn for more renewables; railways will be further subsidised to lure people out of their cars and away from aeroplanes; plans for more wind turbines, photovoltaic electricity and biofuels will all be fast-forwarded; there is £1,500m to reduce CO2 in existing buildings; and the solar market is growing by 40% a year. Few doubt that Germany is on track to achieve one of the greatest transformations in any country's use of power.
Merkel is matter of fact about the costs. One leading thinktank recently calculated that climate change would cost Germany nearly £100bn a year by the middle of the century, so stumping up £4bn over the next few years to avoid that is cheap, she reckons."The costs of reducing emissions should be seem as a sound investment," Merkel says. "Unabated climate change will slash prosperity by between 5% and 25%. Rigorous climate protection will cost only 1% of this prosperity and makes economic sense."
She is lucky in that Germany has a secret weapon in the battle against global warming: called the Renewable Energy Sources Act, it sets minimum prices for generating electricity. Anyone generating electricity from renewables now gets a guaranteed payment of up to three to four times the market rate, guaranteed for 20 years. This has not just kickstarted the whole German renewable industry beyond its wildest imaginings, it also reduces the payback time on such technologies and offers a high return on investment. The idea has since been adopted in many other countries, and was picked up by the Conservatives in Britain in mid-December.
Germany is far from green. It has immense ecological problems and is still the world's sixth greatest polluter, but for now it has gone renewable-mad with farmers, householders and businesses competing with each other to profit the most. If under Merkel Germany doesn't meet UN and EU targets, then it's nowhere will.
Caroline Lucas
Politician
Caroline Lucas, 47, is Green MEP for SE England and is likely to be elected the Greens' first sole leader next year when members have a referendum (hitherto the party has had a joint leadership). She was nominated here by Jonathon Porritt: "She is the most inspiring politician the Green party has had since its inception - honest, articulate, passionate." In the meantime, she is intensely disliked by EU commissioners and much of big industry after drafting laws to force airlines to pay the true environmental and social costs of flying, forcing a legal investigation into nuclear power, taking on chemical companies and harassing the commission at every opportunity on trade, GM crops, globalisation and animal diseases.
Bob Hertzberg
Financier
Bob Hertzberg, 53, founder of venture capital firm Renewable Capital, is one of a new breed of financier piling unprecedented amounts of money into renewable technologies. He ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 2005, finishing in third place. Renewable Capital has holdings in electric car companies, solar electric firms and windfarms. He is also backing a company in Cardiff that produces solar cells that do not need direct sunlight to generate electricity. In a process similar to photosynthesis, it uses nano-sized titanium crystals to turn light into electricity.
Carlo Petrini
Food activist
Carlo Petrini, 58, is the only anti-McDonald's activist who has been welcomed to the offices of David Cameron, David Miliband, Prince Charles, Al Gore and Barack Obama. The founder of the international Slow Food movement, nominated here by Vandana Shiva, is idolised by rich and leisured foodies for promoting high-quality, small-scale farming and organising a relaxed life around long lunches. But Petrini, an Italian leftie of the old school, has a far more serious purpose than saving the pilchard or Parma ham. The Slow Food movement has now expanded across 100 countries and is throwing poisoned darts at the whole fast food culture and the multinational food producers that between them have wrecked so much of the environment.
Tewolde Egziabher
Scientist
Tewolde Egziabher, 67, a slight, Gandhian figure, is a UK-trained biologist who runs Ethiopia's environment protection agency and has proved himself an extraordinarily effective negotiator. At 2am at the 2002 Earth Summit , he made one of the most impassioned speeches heard at a global meeting. It had looked certain that the world's politicians would back a US proposal giving the World Trade Organisation the power to override international environment treaties, but he shamed the ministers into voting it down. No one could remember a personal intervention having such an impact, and his battles on behalf of developing countries to protect them from patents, unfettered free trade and GM crops are legendary. He was nominated by Vandana Shiva.
Amory Lovins
Physicist
Think of a world where cars burn no oil and emit drinking water - or nothing at all. Where central power stations are redundant and buildings and parked vehicles produce enough energy to drive factories. Where no house is built that cannot generate electricity for others. Where carbon emissions have long been declining, and industries no longer waste almost all their material. This is not a pipe dream, but an increasingly likely scenario, here within a generation or two; that is the prediction of Amory Lovins, 60, an experimental physicist turned energy reduction pioneer who has had as profound an influence on the way people use energy as any man alive.From a base in the Rockies, Lovins and his team of engineers and analysts show governments and large car, aviation and energy companies, as well as the likes of Walmart and Monsanto, how to profit from using less energy by applying knowledge of composite materials, engineering, design and energy storage. He says: "Optimism beats fear or despair any time. There are excellent reasons to be encouraged. The global consciousness is higher at all levels. Revolutionary changes are taking place."
The car industry is speeding towards solutions Lovins proposed nearly 20 years ago, when he developed the idea of a "hyper car" - a carbon fibre hybrid petrol- and electricity-run machine that weighs next to nothing, has far fewer parts than conventional cars, does 150-200mpg and emits practically nothing. Last November, Toyota unveiled just that: a four-door carbon fibre model the same size as its green Prius but about a quarter of the weight of some Minis. It emits only one third of the Prius's greenhouse gases and does more than 100mpg. Now most car makers, with one eye on $100 dollar a barrel oil prices and an understanding that there is a vast market for green, are playing catch-up with Lovins' ideas.
While at Oxford in the 70s, Lovins helped set up Friends of the Earth in Britain and stopped Rio Tinto digging up Snowdonia. By the age of 28, he had worked out that the US could phase out fossil fuels not at a cost, but at a profit. "We stand here confronted by insurmountable opportunities," he wrote. Now the revolution he helped shape is coming, and Lovins says the US can eliminate all oil use by 2050, "and know unprecedented prosperity".
"We're finding in the auto sector speed of change at a fundamental level," he says. "Change is coming out of fear and the car makers are gazing into the abyss. It is widely understood that incremental change is a high-risk strategy. Those who take the opportunity to change will do very well. We can save half the oil we use and the rest we can save with advanced biofuels."
He dismisses nuclear power as the fantasy of control and command states stuck in the 50s. "New nuclear plants are so costly that spending the same on micropower can save two to 10 times more CO2, and sooner. In 2005, renewables produced one sixth of the world's total electricity and a third of new electricity. This revolution already happened - sorry if you missed it!"
Lovins works by seeking efficiency at every point. Take the most energy-efficient existing hybrid car, he says. Drive it carefully and you can double efficiency. Make it ultra-light, and you can redouble it. Run it on an advanced biofuel, and you can quadruple its oil efficiency again. If you then give it batteries that can be recharged by connecting a plug to an electric power source and have a good economic model to pay for the batteries, then you at least double efficiency again. Put all this together, and you can be down to about 3% of the oil per mile you started with. And Lovins says he has never known any company invest in energy and not make a profit.
He's working with the Pentagon, which spends nearly a third of its vast budget on moving troops and equipment around. If it invested in really energy-efficient goals, in the same way as, say, it invested in the internet, GPS and chips, Lovins says it would shift the entire global energy landscape. The knock-on effect would transform civilian car, truck and plane industries, too. The cost? It's a $180bn investment, he reckons - or roughly what the UK spends on its health service in a year.
Madhav Subrmanian
Schoolboy
Madhav Subrmanian is the next generation's face of conservation, a 12-year-old Indian boy who goes round Mumbai collecting money for tiger conservation. With his friends Kirat Singh, Sahir Doshi and Suraj Bishnoi, he set up Kids For Tigers which works in hundreds of schools. He writes poems, sings on the streets, sells merchandise and has collected Rs500,000 (£6,500) in two years. Conservation awareness is growing in middle-class India, largely through young activists like him.
Marina Silva
Politician
Marina Silva, 49, is Brazil's environment minister. The daughter of a Brazilian rubber tapper, she spent her childhood collecting rubber from the Amazon forest and demonstrating against the destruction wrought by illegal loggers. In one of the great political journeys, she rose from being illiterate at 16 to become Brazil's youngest senator, and is now the woman most able to prevent the Amazon's wholesale ruin. Under her watch, deforestation has reduced by nearly 75% and millions of square miles of reserves have been given to traditional communities. Last year 1,500 companies were raided and one million cubic metres of illegally felled timber were confiscated. But the future, says Silva, is peril ous. The only way that long-term loss will be averted is with foreign help. "We don't want charity, it's a question of ethics of solidarity," she says.
Robin Murray
Industrial economist
Central government and local authorities in the UK turn to Robin Murray, 67, when they need to reduce waste. The author of three influential books, he came up with the phrase "zero waste" - the idea that people can mimic biology and produce, consume and recycle everything without throwing anything away. Instead of seeing waste as a problem, he argues that it can become a resource for someone else, and instead of thinking about recycling, he says it is more sensible to think about design so that products do not need to be recycled - instead they could be used repeatedly or composted. It may need an industrial revolution and a total makeover of the global economy to achieve Murray's truly wasteless society, but zero waste is now the goal of hundreds of local authorities and is spreading around the world, back ed by designers, planners and companies from San Francisco to Wellington in New Zealand.
Laurie David
Activist
Laurie David, 49, is a powerhouse with some heavy-hitting connections even by Hollywood standards. Whether spreading the word about global warming on Oprah, writing a children's bestseller on the subject, producing Al Gore's breakthrough film, An Inconvenient Truth, or making the HBO documentary Too Hot Not To Handle, which shows what lies in store for the US if it does not reverse its policies on climate change, David has become a showbiz standard-bearer. She has reached across the US political chasm by co-founding the Stop Global Warming Virtual March with Robert Kennedy Jr and Senator John McCain, though her critics say her lifestyle leaves a hefty carbon footprint.
Patriarch Bartholomew
Leader of the Orthodox Church
Patriarch Bartholomew I, Archbishop of Constantinople and New Rome, is the spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians around the world. He's also extremely green, each year taking church leaders of all denominations to areas of the world beset with environmental problems - including the Amazon, the Arctic and the Danube. After announcing, on an island in the Aegean, that attacks on the environment should be considered sins , he called pollution of the world's waters "a new Apocalypse" and led global calls for "creation care". Way ahead of his time, he has made the environment an increasingly powerful strand of Christian thinking in Britain - and latterly the US, where traditionally right wing churches have followed his lead and now openly counter President Bush's stance. Bartholomew, 67, is now heavily influencing the Pope and has shared a green stage with him several times in Rome. It all suggests institutional Christianity is greening up fast after centuries of ambivalence and outright hostility.
Leonardo DiCaprio
Actor
Icebergs are becoming a recurring theme in the life of 33-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio. First, his acting career went stellar after playing the lead in Titanic. Now it is dramatic footage of icebergs and polar bears, both threatened by climate change, that is a striking feature of his documentary The 11th Hour (released in the UK next month), a powerful call to arms for our species to protect the environment a great deal better.
Combining the diametrically opposed worlds of the A-list Hollywood star and the impassioned environmentalist is a fraught, sometimes contradictory process, but DiCaprio has pulled it off, becoming one of the world's most high-profile campaigners.
His primary aim, he says, is to raise awareness, not to preach: "It's not about imposing a certain belief system or a way of life on people in any economic background. It's about just being aware of this issue - that's the most important thing - and really trying to say, 'Next time I vote, next time I buy something, I'm just going to be aware of what's really going on.' "
The first campaigning steps were taken a decade ago after he found himself the target of angry environmentalists. During the filming of The Beach, the bestselling novel about backpackers seeking a shangri-la off the Thai coast, the production team was accused of damaging a pristine beach in a national marine park - in an attempt to make it look even more "perfect" for the cameras, some palm trees were temporarily planted and sand dunes moved. Despite the authorities giving the film-makers permission, their actions made headlines around the world.
Evidently stung by the criticism, in 1998 DiCaprio established the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, which has since collaborated with the likes of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, Oceana, the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Dian Fossey Foundation to raise awareness, particularly among children, of environmental issues.
In 2000, he was the US chair of Earth Day, the annual celebration of the environment. "Enough is enough," he told the crowd in Washington DC. "We must set an example now and move environmentalism from being the philosophy of a passionate minority... to a way of life that automatically integrates ecology into governmental policy and normal living standards. We are entering an environmental age whether we like it or not." But it was his Earth Day interview with President Clinton on ABC News that caused the biggest ripples: ABC journalists were said to be furious that a young, heart-throb actor had been allowed to do such an important interview. The final edit of the interview itself was fairly soft in tone, but it did include questions that now seem ahead of their time - namely, about the science of climate change, the lobbying power of Big Oil, ways to decrease the use of SUVs and how vulnerable New Orleans was to sea-level rises. There was even a lengthy exchange about hybrid cars, long before they became the car du jour of Hollywood stars.
As DiCaprio's acting career matured, he continued his parallel life as an environmental activist, speaking at colleges and campaigning on behalf of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign. And for his new documentary, he has mustered the likes of Stephen Hawking, Bill McKibben, David Suzuki, Mikhail Gorbachev and Wangari Maathai (below) to take part. He limits his own appearance in the film - essentially a series of talking heads set against library footage - to that of host and narrator. Since its release in the US last year, it has been dubbed the unofficial sequel to Al Gore's The Inconvenient Truth.
"It was a learning process," says DiCaprio, "and I wanted to play the role of investigator - from watching documentaries at a young age, from seeing films on rainforests in Brazil and really appreciating the beauty of our planet, and then learning more and more about human impact and wanting to do something about it."
His next eco-project is already in production - he's a producer for a Discovery Channel show called Eco-Town, which records how a Kansas town devastated by a tornado in 2006 attempts to rebuild itself as a "model of green living".
Andrew Kimbrell
Lawyer
Andrew Kimbrell, 51, was a concert pianist and music teacher in New York before he joined an emerging breed of activist lawyers forcing governments to take the environment much more seriously. Last year in the US Supreme Court, he defeated the Bush administration's policy of refusing to regulate global warming. It was a defining moment in the American debate and forced Bush to regulate carbon dioxide pollution from motor vehicles under the Clean Air Act. Kimbrell is now working with others to devise a new concept of 'natural law' based on the idea that humans are just one part of a wider community of beings and that the welfare of each member of that community depends on the welfare of the earth as a whole. It sounds heretical now, but is traditional in many societies and one to watch in the west.
René Ngongo
Biologist
Congo DRC is home to the world's second greatest stands of tropical forest after the Amazon, mainly because no timber company could work there during the decades of civil war and insurgency. Now that the war is over, European, Asian and US logging companies are piling in, with the help of the World Bank and international donors, to strip Congo of its most valuable wood. Potentially, it's an ecological and social disaster: more than 20 million people, not least the Pygmies, depend on the forest for their living. Ngongo, 36, is a biology academic from Goma, who has travelled the country investigating the corrupt timber industry and taken his findings to London, Washington and Brussels. He's the new face of environmentalism in the south and was nominated by the head of Greenpeace International, Gerd Leipold, as the kind of activist who will make waves in the next 20 years.
Zhengrong Shi
Scientist
Dr Zhen grong Shi, 44, is living proof of the cliché that every crisis presents an opportunity. China's search for alternative energy has made the solar cell scientist and businessman one of the country's richest men. The value of his company, Suntech Power, one of the world's 10 biggest manufacturers of solar panels, has risen above the $6bn mark since it became the first Chinese firm to list on the New York stock exchange. Dr Shi is a farmer's son from Jiangsu province, and was put up for adoption because his family were too poor to raise him. He set up Suntech in 2001 , and the company expects to grow far bigger, possibly helping China overtake Japan as the world's leading supplier of the technology. Shanghai plans to subsidise 100,000 solar panels for the city and the state is preparing to build the world's biggest solar generating facility in the Gobi desert.
Joss Garman
Activist
Joss Garman, 22 and just out of university, has been a British environmental activist for eight years. Dubbed the "new Swampy", he has been arrested more than 20 times and helped set up Plane Stupid, a direct action group which in its short-haul life has infuriated airline companies and airports, disrupted the transport select committee and shut down easyJet's London offices. BAA tried to stop Garman and others organising the climate change camp at Heathrow last summer, but the camp went ahead and Garman demonstrated elsewhere. He was nominated by George Monbiot and Philip Pullman as one of the activists of the future. "He's now a campaigner at Greenpeace, though he's only about 12," Monbiot says.
Craig Venter
Geneticist
Craig Venter is often referred to as a "maverick" scientist, with the implication that he is a rogue, a bad boy of biology. Yet it is the strict dictionary definition of the word that suits him best: a person of independent or unorthodox views. And when it comes to addressing the world's environmental problems, that may be just what we need.
As the head of various firms and institutes, some public and some private, Venter has ambitious plans for the planet. By harnessing the power of microbes that his scientists have discovered deep in the sea and under the ground, he thinks we could revolutionise fuel production and bring down emissions. Venter has put his army of bugs to work on everything from renewable supplies of energy-rich gases such as methane, to advanced biofuels that don't threaten food production and could be used to fuel aeroplanes.
One has the ability to turn the carbon dioxide into methane; it could be put to work converting CO2 captured from coal power plants and stored underground. "You could pump the CO2 down, convert it into methane and burn it all over again," he says. Another turns coal into natural gas, speeding up what is essentially a natural process and reducing both the energy needed to extract the fossil fuel and the amount of pollution caused when it is burned.
"Theoretically, there's no limit to what we're doing," Venter says. "Most people working on these problems talk about linear progress. I like to think in terms of exponential patterns of change."
He talks of hundreds of thousands of biological refineries spread across nations, each churning out green replacements for fossil fuels. "It's the sheer volume we're talking about with oil, gas and coal that makes the problem so large. But what I've made work really well is massively parallel processes [a system of linked computers tackling problems on a super scale]. Now I would like to apply that to fuel production."
A former high-school drop-out, surf bum and Vietnam veteran, Venter earned his reputation for working outside the boundaries of conventional science with his efforts earlier this decade to decode the entire human genetic code, the genome. At the time, scientists believed that deciphering this alphabet soup of genes would unleash a revolution in medicine. Venter agreed, and saw commercial as well as medical gain.
He envisaged a giant DNA database that drugs companies would pay to search through, and led a company aiming to do just that. His vision clashed with a publicly funded scientific initiative to sequence the genome and make the information available for free, led by numerous Nobel prize-winners. The acrimonious race that ensued was eventually declared a draw, though Venter's notoriety was complete when he subsequently revealed that most of the DNA his team had decoded was, in fact, his own.
Venter is not giving up his human genomics work, but says that he is now drawn to environmental problems by their urgency - and by the rapidity with which he thinks he can find solutions. Rather than the two decades or so it can take to bring a drug to market, he envisages his modified micro-organisms producing commercial fuels within just a few years.
Recently, Venter has spent much of his time cruising the world's oceans, sifting them for useful microbes, and was distressed by what he found. "Not a day went by when we didn't see huge amounts of plastic trash in the water. We're treating the planet as our toilet and we think when we flush the chain the problems disappear, but they don't. We have to find ways to change."
One of Venter's more controversial suggestions for tackling environmental problems involves a synthetic lifeform. Not content with setting existing microbes to work, he wants to create an artificial bacterium, with genes, traits and abilities introduced from beyond nature's catalogue. He hopes to announce its creation next year, a step forward that will place him firmly back in the spotlight. "We need advances in every field," he says. "We're not going to come up with a miracle solution - we'll need thousands or tens of thousands of solutions."
Henry Saragih
Union leader and farmer
Henry Saragih is a small farmer who has hardly seen his wife and children in 15 years since taking on the Indonesian government and the palm oil barons of Sumatra and Kalimantan. Companies with links to government are devastating vast areas of Indonesia and southeast Asia to grow palm oil to supply Europe's cars and kitchens with biofuel and cooking oils, and Saragih is one of the few people standing in their path. Not only does he lead a union of several million agitated Indonesian peasants, but he also heads Via Campesina, the global movement of increasingly militant peasant farmers which campaigns for land reform in 80 countries. Saragih and his colleagues are lobbying the UN and the World Trade Organisation. How this struggle plays out in the next 20 years will determine whether there is any rainforest left intact south-east Asia in 50 years' time, and possibly the political future of many developing countries.
Eric Rey
Bioscientist
Eric Rey is not a natural ally of the broad green movement, at least in Europe. He leads a biotechnology company, Arcadia, that develops GM crops. One of his biggest customers is Monsanto. Yet Arcadia's GM technology could help the fight against climate change. Its plants are engineered to require less nitrogen fertiliser, so lowering emissions of nitrous oxide - a greenhouse gas some 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. World agriculture accounts for 17% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions, more than the transport sector. Arcadia's first commercial crop could be rice. Swapping global rice supply to the GM version, the company says, would save the equivalent of 50 million tons of carbon dioxide each year.
to be continue ...part II...
The Guardian, Saturday January 5, 2008
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