50 people who could save the planet

part II...

Bjørn Lomborg
Statistician

Bjørn Lomborg, 42, has become an essential check and balance to runaway environmental excitement. In 2004, the Dane made his name as a green contrarian with his bestselling book The Skeptical Environmentalist, and outraged scientists and green groups around the world by arguing that many claims about global warming, overpopulation, energy resources, deforestation, species loss and water shortages are not supported by analysis. He was accused of scientific dishonesty, but cleared his name. He doesn't dispute the science of climate change, but questions the priority it is given. He may look increasingly out of step, but Lomborg is one of the few academics prepared to challenge the consensus with credible data.

Gavin Schmidt
Climatologist

Gavin Schmidt, 38 and British, is a climate modeller at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. He founded RealClimate.org with colleagues in 2004. Offering "climate science from climate scientists", the site has quickly become a must-read for interested amateurs, and a perfect foil to both the climate sceptic misinformation that saturates sections of the web and the overexcitement of the claims of some environmentalists. Unapologetically combative, technical and high-brow, the site and its contributors - essentially blogging in their spare time - nail the myth that scientists struggle to communicate their work. Whenever a major flaw is pointed out in the global consensus on climate change, or new evidence is discovered to blame it on the sun, it is always worth checking RealClimate. The site has a policy of not getting dragged into the political or economic aspects of science, but it's fairly easy to guess which side it's on.

Rajendra Singh
Water conservationist
In 1984 Dr Rajendra Singh, now 49, was working in the semi-desert Indian state of Rajastan. He planned to set up health clinics in the rural villages, but was shocked when he went to a place called Gopalpura. "This area was devastated and people were fleeing, leaving their children, women and older people behind," Singh says. "It was then an old man told me that they needed neither medicines nor food. He said all they needed was water.
"It moved me so much and I started finding out ways to help. But the region was arid, all the rivers were dry and the land was parched. The only source of water was rainwater, but that was scarce and there was not nearly enough for all the needs of the region."
A mix of modern technology and villagers simply neglecting traditional ways of conserving water had led to an ecological disaster. Singh found that the villages no longer used small earth dams - or johads - to collect surface water but instead now relied on "modern" tube wells. As they bored their wells deeper and deeper into the ground and sucked out ever more underground water, so the water table had dropped alarmingly and ever deeper wells were required.
Lower water levels meant that the wells were not full, the forests and trees were dying off, and erosion was worsening. It was a vicious circle. With less irrigation water, farming declined and men migrated to cities for work. Women and children then had to spend up to 10 hours a day fetching firewood and water, and the shrinking labour force sapped people's will to maintain the old johads. The whole region faced disaster.
Singh and his colleagues began digging out an old johad pond in Gopalpura. Seven months later, it was, almost miraculously, nearly five feet full of water. And once the rains eventually came, not only did it fill to the brim, but a nearby long-dry well began flowing again. The following year, the village joined in to rebuild a second dam, and by 1996 Gopalpurans had recreated nine johads that between them held millions of litres of water. Meanwhile, the groundwater level had risen to 6.7m, up from an average of 14m below the ground. The village wells were full again.
"It was only due to political reasons that the [johad] system fell apart," Singh says. "We worked for four years in Gopalpura and slowly a huge area turned green. People came back, they started farming again and the visual impact was so impressive that people from adjoining areas started calling us for help."
Singh is now known as the Rain Man of Rajastan, having brought water back to more than 1,000 villages and got water to flow again in all five major rivers in Rajastan. He has so far helped to build more than 8,600 johads and other structures to collect water for the dry seasons. The forest cover has increased by a third because the water table has risen, and antelope and leopard have returned to the region. It has also been one of the cheapest regenerations of a region ever known - in Rajastan, villages have been brought back to life sometimes for just a few hundred pounds, far less than the cost of the single borehole that almost destroyed them.
"See the earth like a bank," Singh says. "If you make regular deposits of water, you'll always have some to withdraw. If you are just taking, you will have nothing in your account."
Erratic rains and longer droughts are becoming more frequent around the world with changing weather patterns and climate change, and the lessons taught by Singh in Rajastan are now being applied all over India and Africa. In the next 30 years, water "harvesting" is expected to become an essential way to save water everywhere from England to Uganda and Arizona. In south-east England, there is barely enough rainfall now, let alone for the expected population within 20 years. Procedures likely to be introduced will include gadgets that ensure you can't leave a running tap, baths that hold less water, gutters that collect water, systems for using waste water for gardens. "It's the same principle everywhere, but we all have to learn it," Singh says.

Ken Livingstone
London mayor
Ken Livingstone. Photograph: Michael Stephens/PA Ken Livingstone, 62, has dragged the capital to the top of the major world cities' environment league. He shocked the more timid Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when he set an ambitious 60% CO2 reduction target by 2025 - and now he is championing renewables, energy from waste, heat and power systems, and ways Londoners can adapt their homes. The capital has seen a huge increase in cycling, and from this month most of the city's public buildings will be "retrofitted" to save energy. It's beginning to work, he says: four years ago, more than one in three Londoners used their cars every day; now few er than one in five do. But he can do little about airports. Almost one-third of London emissions come from City airport and Heathrow, and there are plans for both to nearly double in size. He was nominated by Jonathan Porritt.

Ken Yeang
Architect
Ken Yeang, 59, is the world's leading green skyscraper architect. In the tropics especially, high-rises are traditionally the most unecological of all buildings, often wasting up to 30% more energy than lower structures built with the same materials. Yeang uses walls of plants, photo voltaics, scallop-shaped sunshades, advanced ventilation and whatever he can to collect water and breezes. The idea is to make buildings run as complete ecosystems with little external energy supply. He's not there yet, but the possibility of the green skyscraper is developing fast as ecological imperatives filter into the consciousness of the startlingly backward world of international architecture.

Massoumeh Ebtekar
Politician
Appointed Iran's first woman vice-president by President Khatami in 1997, Massoumeh Ebtekar, 47, later became an inspired environment minister. She made a name for herself in 1979 as the 19-year-old revolutionary student who became chief interpreter in the 444-day US embassy siege in Tehran. She left government office in 2005, is now a Tehran city councillor and heads the Centre for Peace and the Environment. Anything green has taken a back seat since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took power, and Iran's cities are choked with incredible pollution - but because of Ebtekar there are now thousands of environment groups led by women seeking change. 'We need to put spiritual and ethical values into the political arena... You don't see the power of love, you don't see the power of the spirit, and as long as that goes on, the environment is going to be degraded and women are going to be in very difficult circumstances," she says.

Rebecca Hosking
Camera operator
Rebecca Hosking, 33, is the young BBC camerawoman who went to an atoll in Hawaii, found wildlife dead or dying after ingesting bits of plastic, and returned to the small town of Modbury in Devon with a fine film, and a desire to try to ban plastic bags. In May 2007, the town became the first in Europe to go plasticfree and since then at least 80 other places have decided to follow suit. London Councils, the umbrella group for 33 local authorities, aims to reduce the 4bn plastic bags sent to landfill from the capital each year and has proposed a law that would force shoppers to use their own bags or buy reusable ones at the tills. Hosking has clearly tapped into a new public mood and has found that there is no need to wait for governments to effect change. Just do it yourself.

Wangari Maathai
Environmentalist
No one can doubt the persuasive powers of Wangari Maathai, Nobel peace prize-winner and 67-year-old former assistant minister of the environment in Kenya. It is she who has coaxed the Mexican army, Japanese geishas, French celebrities, 10,000 Malaysian schools, the president of Turkmenistan and children in Rotherham to roll up their sleeves, dig a hole and plant a tree.
It was an off-the-cuff remark of hers in 2006 that led to this far-flung initiative. She was in the US accepting an award when a businessman told her that his company was planning to plant a million trees. Jokingly, Maathai, who has spent most of a lifetime planting saplings, responded, "That's great. But what we really need is to plant one billion trees." The UN - and the Green Belt Movement Maathai founded among African women - picked up the challenge.
In just over a year, in one of the largest mobilisations of people for a cause since the Asian tsunami, 1.5bn trees have been planted in nearly 50 countries, and a further billion more are pledged. Countries have fallen over themselves to plant the most and be linked with Maathai: Indonesia planted 79m in a day; Turkey says it has planted 500m, Mexico 250m, and India says that it will replant six million hectares of degraded forest.
Many of these saplings may not survive more than a few weeks, and the numbers are not to be trusted, but the billion tree campaign shows that Maathai - a professor of biology and mother of three children - has gone from being almost unknown in 2003 to a global treasure in just a few years. There is now barely a president or prime minister in Europe, Asia or Africa who has not invited Maathai to endorse their plans or tried to sign her up as a goodwill ambassador to show off their newfound enthusiasm for the environment. She has addressed the UN general assembly, carried the flag at the Olympic games, and received sackfuls of citations and awards. Maathai has succeeded in putting deforestation high on the agenda in developing countries, just as Al Gore made people in rich countries aware of climate change.
She has made tree planting an act of transformation in which everyone can engage. "The planting of trees is the planting of ideas," Maathai says. "By starting with the simple step of digging a hole and planting a tree, we plant hope for ourselves and for future generations.
"The first steps were really to talk to women," she explains, "and to convince them that we could do something about their environment. They didn't have firewood, they didn't have clean drinking water and they didn't have adequate food. A tree brings transformation."
Maathai has also made it a political act. Like many others in developing countries, she has been beaten up, arrested and imprisoned for speaking out against environmental destruction, government oppression and abuse of human rights. "When we were beaten up, it was because we were telling the government not to interfere with the forests," she says. "We were confronted by armed police and guards who physically removed us from the forests as we sought to protect these green spaces from commercial exploitation."
While Maathai is feted abroad as the first African woman Nobel laureate, she has always had a rocky time at home with party politics. She tried to stand for president in 1997, but her party withdrew her candidacy. She was finally elected an MP in 2002 with a 98% vote, but just before Christmas she failed to win even a nomination from the ruling party for the end-of-year election.
Maathai's strength now lies in what she stands for. "If I have learned one thing," she says, "it is that humans are only part of this ecosystem - when we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves, for on its survival depends our own."

Peter Garrett
Politician
Peter Garrett, 54, is the former punk lead singer of the disbanded Australian rock group Midnight Oil, who continued his weird journey from radical muso to establishment politician when he was appointed Australia's environment minister in November. He began with gigs outside Exxon offices and protests at the Sydney Olympics about Aboriginal rights, and found himself labelled a turncoat by some at the election. However, he was nominated here by Jonathon Porritt, for being "instrumental in shaping the Australian Labour party's climate change and environment policies". Within days of his taking office, Australia signed up to the Kyoto climate change treaty, and has broken with the obstructivist policies of President Bush.

Jockin Arputham
Urban activist
Jockin Arputham, 60, has lived in a slum outside Mumbai since 1963. As president of the National Slum Dwellers Association and Slum Dwellers International, he is rallying the world's poorest city dwellers to improve their environment. Urban squalor is one of the biggest problems of the age, and by 2030 the number of slum dwellers is projected to reach two billion - a recipe for poverty, disease and political instability. Arputham has pioneered a way to help the poor negotiate with city authorities to secure land ownership - the greatest barrier to improving slums. Dozens of other new urban groups are working in 70 countries and hundreds of thousands of people have benefited. Global urbanisation is inevitable, and these new federations will have more and more ecological influence.

Hermann Scheer
Politician
Hermann Scheer, 43, is the MP who persuaded the German government to get rid of nuclear power and invest heavily in renewables such as wind and solar power. As a result, in less than 10 years, Germany is heading towards selfsufficiency in energy. His greatest success has been a "feed in tariff law". This forces power companies to buy electricity generated by the public at more than triple market prices; 300,000 homeowners, farmers and small businesses have leapt in and started selling. Nearly 3% of Germany's electricity now comes from the sun. Spain, Portugal, Greece, France and Italy are all now introducing their version of Scheer's law and pressure is building in Britain and other countries.

Mohammed Valli Moosa
Civil servant
Mohammed Valli Moosa, 50, was South Africa's environment minister from 1999 to 2004. He has campaigned for transnational African "Peace Parks" for wildlife and pushed for reduced use of plastic bags. But he may play a much greater role in the global environment debate as chairman of Eskom, the state-owned power company that runs South Africa's only nuclear plant and, starting in 2008, is hoping to build dozens of fourth-generation small-scale nuclear stations. Known as pebble bed modular reactors, these are smaller, cheaper and reportedly safer than other designs and Valli Moosa says they could be the base of the 21st eco-economy - ideally for desalination plants and creating the raw material for the heralded but slow to appear hydrogen economy. South Africa has some of the world's greatest reserves of uranium: put them with the technology and it could start looking like a superpower.

Aubrey Meyer
Musician and activist
Can a 60-year-old South African violinist living in a flat in Willesden, north London, actually change the world? It's a serious question because the odds are increasing that over the next two years rich and poor countries will come round to Aubrey Meyer's way of thinking if they are to negotiate a half-decent global deal to reduce climate change emissions.
Nearly 20 years ago, Meyer devised what he believed was the only logical way through the political morass dividing rich and poor countries on climate change. After a letter from him was published in the Guardian, he gave up playing professional music to set up the tiny Global Commons Institute in his bedroom. There he developed the idea that not only did everyone on earth have an equal right to emit CO2, but that all countries should agree to an annual per capita ration or quota of greenhouse gases.
That was the easy bit. But then the musician, who had played with the LPO and had written for the Royal Ballet, went further. Meyer proposed that each country move progressively to the same allocation per inhabitant by an agreed date. This meant that rich countries would have steadily to cut back their emissions, while poor ones would be allowed steadily to grow theirs, with everyone eventually meeting in the middle at a point where science said the global maximum level of emissions should be set. He called it "contraction and convergence" (C&C).
Meyer is nothing if not determined. Since 1990, earning next to nothing and sometimes practically begging for money so he could lobby international meetings, he has pressed C&C at every level of global government. Early opposition came from British civil servants, who said it was akin to communism, and major environmental groups, which were ideologically opposed to any kind of trading emissions. For many years the US government had no interest in any such deal.
But the climate stakes have risen with every new scientific report, and the politicians and environment groups have moved on. As the urgency for a global agreement has grown, so C&C has emerged as one of the favourites to break the international impasse.
"Its advantage is that it is far simpler and fairer than the Kyoto agreement, which applied only to a few rich countries," Meyer says. It also allows science to set the optimum level of emissions; it gets round long-standing US objections that poor countries should be part of a global agreement; and it is inherently pro-business, because it encourages rich and poor countries to trade emissions between themselves.
The long years of single-minded lobbying mean that Meyer's idea now has some powerful backers, including, in Britain, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution; 180 MPs have supported it in an early day motion, and the government, equivocal so far, is moving towards a version of it. It has become official policy in India, China and most African countries. Germany and India are expected to run with it in UN meetings. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has backed C&C publicly.
Other proposals are emerging and it will take two more years to thrash out a system that will please everyone. But few have the elegance of C&C. "It's the least unfair of all the proposals that have been put forward," Meyer says. "It secures survival by correcting both fatal poverty and fatal climate change in the same arrangement."
Writing music and calculating emissions have a lot in common, he says. "Look at a sheet of music and you would not know what it was. But when you hear it played, then it's beautiful. Equally, when you read the calculations on countries' gases, they mean nothing. But when you work out how you can reduce them, it's clear that it's the best thing for humanity."
Meyer still plays the violin every day, but seldom with an orchestra. "I just did not realise that it would take quite so long to change the world," he says.

Monica Howe
Bike activist
Monica Howe, 31, is the sharp end of the grassroots debate in Los Angeles, the global car culture's smog- choked, road-raged, increasingly grid locked spiritual home. Her Bicycling Coalition group is remapping the megalopolis's mean and potholed streets by forging bike routes, organising cycle rallies, helping fledgling cyclists overcome traffic fears, and challenging the mindset at City Hall, where cyclists tend to be greeted with disbelief. Howe says membership is rising, and cyclists are pedalling into the cityscape as public attitudes, swayed by concerns about air quality, traffic congestion and global warming, begin to shift. She's no Al Gore, but she is winning the battle for American hearts and minds, despite the overwhelming odds.

Al Gore
Politician
More force of nature than wooden presidential candidate now, Al Gore's reinvention as Mr Climate Change is based on a long-standing passion for the environment. As a boy he worked on his family's farm, as a young congressman in the 70s he held the first hearings on greenhouse gases, and shortly before becoming Bill Clinton's vice-president in 1992, he wrote a bestselling clarion call - Earth In The Balance. And despite or because of the hanging chads debacle in 2000, he is still beating the drum. It was his Oscar-winning slideshow-cum-documentary An Inconvenient Truth, that helped gain him a half-share in the 2007 Nobel peace prize, and he can be heard tirelessly lecturing around the world (at a reported $100,000 a throw). His latest book, The Assault On Reason, takes swipes at the media, cowardly politicians and the Bush administration. But his speech last month at Bali, where he managed to criticise the US without saying it should commit to anything, shows that, at 59, he remains a politician at heart.

Chris Tuppen
Businessman
Chris Tuppen, BT's head of sustainable development, wrote the company's first environmental report in 1992. Since then his lead has been followed by thousands of other companies, yet BT has managed to stay one step ahead. It was a pioneer in buying electricity from renewable sources and has cut down on travel. Last year the company announced it would build its own windfarms to help meet its mammoth demand for electricity, and published a set of ambitious targets which include reductions in the carbon footprints of its employees. Chief is a pledge to slash its greenhouse gas emissions within a decade to 80% below what they were in 1996. BT is an example of how being green pays: the company says its efforts have saved more than £119m in power bills since 1991.

Dieter Salomon
Mayor of Freiburg
Freiburg in southern Germany is the most ecologically-aware town in Europe and possibly the rich world. The city of 250,000 people dubs itself a "solar region" and gathers nearly as much power from the sun as is collected in all of Britain. It's stacked with research establishments and its solar firms employ thousands of people. It is also the playground of architect Rolf Disch, who builds houses that need to be heated for only a week each year and whose cost is paid for by the electricity generated by the panels on their roofs. Salomon, 47, says that by 2010, at least 10% of all the energy consumed in Freiburg will come from renewables. To attain this, a huge area of the city centre has been turned into a pedestrian zone and there are 500km of bike paths. More than a third of all journeys are made by bike, and there are fewer than 200 parking places for cars in the centre compar ed with 5,000 for bikes. The snag? The quality of life is so good in Freiburg that too many people want to live there and it's hard for anyone to buy a house.

Bija Devi
Farm manager
Bija Devi saves seeds for future generations. She already has in her "bank" 1,342 types of cereals, pulses, fruits and vegetables, though she has no idea of their scientific names. She has worked as a farmer since the age of seven, never went to school and has never heard the words "wheat" or "turnip". Yet she now heads a worldwide movement of women trying to rescue and conserve crops and plants that are being pushed to extinction in the rush to modernise farming. And in so doing she is helping rejuvenate Indian culture.
Apart from collecting and storing seeds from all over the country, Devi is teaching farmers, distributing seeds and experimenting with them. It's called the Navdanya (Nine Seeds) movement because it was inspired by a southern Indian custom of planting nine seeds in a pot on the first day of the year. Women would take the pots to the river nine days later to compare and exchange seeds so that each family could plant the best seeds, thus optimising food supplies.
Today, Devi has farmers queueing up for seeds at her project's base, a 40-acre farm in the foothills of the Himalayas in Dehradun. When she started 14 years ago, with ecologist Vandana Shiva, she had to plead with the farmers to accept that ecological security was of fundamental importance, and that there were advantages to sowing older, indigenous seeds rather than the newer, high-yielding "hybrid" or GM seeds. These give larger crops but require considerable input of pesticides and fertilisers, and more water.
Women are responsible for sowing, harvesting and storing food, while it is up to the men to prepare the soil. "There was no tangible benefit for them in using our seeds," Devi says. "But over time they realised how the soil was retaining its fertility, how the crop was free from diseases and pests. Now they come to us on their own."
She now has 380 varieties of rice seeds alone. There are something like 200,000 people benefiting from 34 similar community seed banks set up in 13 states across the country. The banks are seen as an insurance against changing conditions, such as climate, new pests or consumer demand. People who receive the seeds pay nothing for them, and in return pledge to continue to save and share them. "Indiscriminate use of chemicals has harmed the soil to an enormous extent," Devi says, "but we can still restore fertility and conserve water if we act now."
The work is backed by Dr Debal Deb, an ecologist who has established the only gene bank of indigenous rice in India. The Green Revolution was environmentally disastrous in India, he says: "In the 80s, the drastic erosion of the genetic diversity of rice and other crops was irreversible. Thousands of rice varieties no longer exist in the farms where they evolved over centuries. They are extinct for good and not even accessed in the national and international gene banks." This, he says, translates into a threat to the country's food security.
Collecting seeds from a large and diverse country such as India is no easy task. "I depend on the traditional knowledge of the farmers and go to different corners in the region in search of new varieties," Devi says. "The farmers explain the qualities of a particular strain and how to cultivate them. We then collect the seed, cultivate it on an experimental basis and note down the results. If it is satisfactory, we distribute it among the other farmers. We also need to sow the seeds regularly to continue with the strain. Today, traditional knowledge is almost lost in the euphoria over new varieties."

Pan Yue
Environmental adviser
Arguably, the best news of 2007 was a promise by China, the world's biggest polluter, to blaze a greener path of development rather than follow in our filthy footsteps. One of the worst was the attempted sidelining of the man who has done more than anyone to secure that promise. Pan Yue, 47, deputy director of the state environmental protection administration, has become a hero for his willingness to stand up to corporations and local governments that jeopardise public health in the rush for economic growth. In so doing, he has won the ear of the PM and president, whose political mantra of "scientific development" emphasises the need for sustainable, not just rapid, growth, and has helped set ambitious energy efficiency and pollution controls targets.
All this has made him some powerful enemies, particularly in energy, steel and construction, who seemed to have won a victory over Pan late last year at the 17th Communist Party Congress where more business-oriented cadres were promoted, but Pan was left a deputy director and must now fight for his political life.
Even so, Pan's warnings that the economic miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace have goaded China's leadership into action. He has also warned that 26% of the water in the seven biggest river systems is so polluted that it has "lost the capacity for basic ecological function".
The International Energy Agency estimates that China will overtake the US as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by the end of next year - some say it's already done so. In November, China belatedly released a five-year plan for environmental protection, for the first time mentioning the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but it gave no targets or deadlines for doing so. "Currently the conflicts between China's economic and social development and its limited environmental resources are getting more and more serious each day," the paper said.
Pan Yue is on the frontline of that conflict. Given its global importance, the world - as well as China - needs him to succeed.

Ma Jun
Writer and activist
Ma Jun, 39, became an environmentalist in 1997 after hearing Chinese engineers boast that the Yellow River was a model of water management, even though he knew it was so over-dammed and exploited that it failed to reach the sea on more than 200 days each year. Now he is one of a growing number of people challenging the Chinese culture of official secrecy and saving face. His website names and shames companies and local governments that violate environmental standards, and the former journalist has called to account corporate executives and Communist party cadres with pollution maps. Ma Jun set up the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, which cooperates with the central government in a non-confrontational - but highly pragmatic - campaign strategy. Despite the tight controls imposed on independent organisations by the Communist party, there are now 3,000 registered green NGOs, up from fewer than 50 five years ago.

Michael Fay
Conservationist
In 1999 Michael Fay, an American, set off on a 15-month 2,000-mile expedition to cross the forests of Gabon. He returned with an extraordinary set of pictures and visited President Bongo of Gabon in his New York hotel room. "I showed him pictures of surfing hippos, gorillas in clearings, elephants in the forest and gorillas and chimpanzees caressing their young. The president was transported into the computer. He was there. You could see right away that he was completely blown away by what he saw. He kept asking his foreign minister, 'How come I don't know about these things? We must act quickly.' He said, 'We're going to do something dramatic.' " Bongo set up 13 new national parks, covering more than 10,000 sq miles, thus immediately protecting 10% of the country. Fay, 51, continues to press for conservation in central Africa.

Guy Lamstaes
Inventor
Guy Lamstaes and colleagues have invented a way to make fridges far more energy-efficient. Barely a few inches across and made of wax, his device had little impact until last year, when it was reinvented as a simple way to reduce household and industrial emissions. Now called the eCube, the box has taken sectors of British industry by storm, and is now doing the same in the US. It won't save the planet, but it offers a perfect example of the simple steps that can make a difference. The cube mimics food and fits around a fridge's sensor, which usually measures the temperature of the circulating air. Because air heats up more quickly than yoghurt, milk or whatever else is stored inside, this makes the fridge work harder than necessary. With the cube fitted, the fridge responds only to the food temperature, which means it turns on and off less often as the door is open and closed.

Jia Zhangke
Actor/director
Jia Zhangke, 37, is among the most prominent artists raising awareness about the environment. His film Still Life, which won the 2006 Golden Lion award at Venice, is a tale of social upheaval and ecological destruction set against the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam in China - one of the world's biggest hydroelectric projects which has forced millions of people to move. It tells the story of a man and a woman who are searching for their spouses in a town that has been flooded by the rising waters of the mighty reservoir behind the barrier. The film was passed by the Chinese censors despite its portrayal of official corruption, land seizures and thuggish violence. This is the best-known cinematic critique of the ecological destruction in China, but many other artists and film-makers are now addressing the problems of the country's breakneck race for economic growth.

Bunker Roy
Educationalist
Bunker Roy, 62, set up the Barefoot College in India, the only school in the world known to be open only to people without any formal education. Roy's idea is that India and Africa are full of people with skills, traditional knowledge and practical resourcefulness who are not recognised as engineers, architects or water experts but who can bring more to communities than governments or big businesses. The college trains the poor to combine local knowledge with new green technologies : 15,000 people have learned to become "barefoot" water and solar engineers, architects and teachers. It has helped hundreds of communities across India - and now in seven other countries - install water supplies and solar voltaic lighting systems, develop bicycles that can cross rivers and design buildings that collect every drop of water.

Olav Kårstad
Chemical Engineer
Olav Kårstad, 59, is the world's leading collector and storer of carbon dioxide. He works for Norwegian oil company Statoil which, rather than pay a carbon tax on the 1m tonnes of CO2 it produces a year, has learned to compress it into liquid form, transport it by pipeline out to sea and then inject it into deep, porous rocks, instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. The plan now is to collect the exhaust gases of power stations. This could save 90% of CO2 emissions, but the snag is that it costs hundreds of millions of pounds for every station and it uses as much as 35% more energy to collect the gas, transport it and bury it. But many oil and power companies, as well as the UK, US and Australian governments, are now plunging billions of dollars into the technology which they hope will provide them with a carbon "get out of jail" card within 10 years.

Cormac McCarthy
Writer
The Road, by the 74-year-old American writer Cormac McCarthy, imagines a father and his son trudging south through a landscape where nature and civilisation are in their death throes. It's oppressive, horrifying and poetic, and is widely seen as both a parable and the logical extension of the earth's physical degeneration. His predictions may be scientifically fanciful, but the book, published last year, may have far more influence in the next 30 years than any number of statistics and fro nt line reports. It was nominated by George Monbiot, who says, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem."

Peter Head
Civil engineer
Peter Head, 60, is an unlikely man to be leading a cultural revolution. The soft-spoken Englishman, a director of Arup and one of the world's leading bridge builders, is now the master planner of the world's first true eco city.
His brief from the Shanghai city authorities may have been simple, but in building and design terms it was the equivalent of a moonshot: to build on an island at the mouth of the Yangtze a city for 500,000 people that can lead the world's fastest growing economy out of the industrial age into the ecological one. Dongtan will cost $50bn or more, and be a prototype for 400 or more similar Chinese cities over the next 30 years.
Nothing like this has been tried before, Head says. "It's a complete paradigm shift. It is to be three, four or five times an ecological improvement on anything that exists. China is trying to use ecological efficiency to detach resource use from economic growth, the traditional development path. It's a different way of thinking. They believe a new economic model will come out of it."
Dongtan will be all but self-sufficient, powered by wind, wood and sun. Its cars will be electric or hydrogen-fuelled, and its buildings will be mini power stations. There will be no landfill sites and 80% of waste will be recycled. Enough local food will be grown to supply much of the city's needs. Turf-covered rooftops will collect, filter and store water, and solar panels will heat it; wind turbines will provide nearly 20% of its energy needs.
"China came to us with the idea. I was shocked by the scale of their ambition but they're deadly serious. Every province in China is building a demonstration eco city like this."
Other countries are catching up, too, and Head sees a 21st-century revolution gathering pace: "We will look back on Dongtan and say it was a pretty crude effort, but it will be seen as a first step. It's significant but it's nothing like the answer. What will develop over the coming years is an 'ecological systems approach' to cities, one that uses nature to get us out of the mess we're in."
• Words by John Vidal, David Adam, Peter Huck, Jonathan Watts, Leo Hickman, Philip Oltermann, Ian Sample and Aditya Ghosh
• The following clarification was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday January 26 2008. George Monbiot has asked us to point out that he was one of those who was invited to submit nominations for 50 people who could save the planet, but was not a member of the adjudicating panel, contrary to the impression given in the introduction to the list.

part I...

The Guardian, Saturday January 5, 2008