North America 2020 Finalists

Alex Paullin

Earthsong: Putting Music to Work for the Planet and its People

By developing and offering specialized tools, content, and training, Earthsong empowers artists, activists, and educators to restore balance between humankind, nature, and society.

Earthsong produces educational media, develops classroom resources, and hosts unique workshops with artists, youth, and communities. Our work with over 100 musicians has reached millions of people in locally relevant genres and languages. Our volunteers have engaged face-to-face with over 10,000 individuals in vulnerable communities. Our compositions deliver a message, hold attention and memory, and evoke an emotional response. 77% of our listeners have learned new, useful information.

Localization is essential. We identify talented youth leaders and empower them with structures, resources, knowledge, and guidance to lead their own organizations at the national level. They maintain relationships with artists and broadcasters, engage communities and schools with solar-powered video screenings and activities like tree planting and waste cleanup, produce and distribute local educational songs and videos, and more.

Natalie Knowles

The Kayapo Project; Adventures for the Amazon

The 10.5 million hectares of officially ratified Kayapo indigenous territory has proven a formidable barrier to deforestation in the southeastern Amazon thanks to the ~10,000 Kayapo indigenous inhabitants, who have defended their lands for generations. Intensifying global demand for beef, soy, gold and timber drives illegal invasion and resource extraction, yet global consumers remain disconnected from these challenges facing vulnerable people and places. Working with nine Kayapo communities, The Kayapó Project harnesses conservation-based adventure travel to protect the indigenous culture and natural resources unique to the pristine Xingu River Basin. By expanding and diversifying successful local catch-and-release sport-fishing tourism to include indigenous-led birding, photography and wildlife-viewing tourism micro-enterprises, this project supports continued efforts to defend Kayapo lands, provides sustainable equitably-distributed income, and creates an avenue to immerse, educate and engage international tourists in local cultures, traditional ecological knowledge and global environmental threats.

Niria Alicia Garcia

Run4Salmon - indigenous-lead conservation

The Run4Salmon prayerful journey engages government officials, lawyers, advocates, and everyday people on a 300-mile journey that the endangered Chinook salmon make along the waters of California’s largest watershed. The project is aimed at inspiring, educating, and engaging people in restoring this endangered keystone species that is essential to the health of California lands and waters. In the face of climate change, ecological collapse and pandemics, indigenous-led species restoration is key to building a resilient future that can withstand and thrive as climate change continues to unravel. The project is coupled with advocacy, campaigns, and indigenous curriculum.

Riley Kuffner

Miravel - wall-to-table food

Today, our global agricultural system for fresh food is completely broken. Miravel (mirəvel – “to look at the marvel of life”) has created the world’s first fully functioning agriculture system that empowers people everywhere to effortlessly and cost-effectively grow their own food. The company’s hardware product is designed to look beautiful on the wall, but, better yet, it automatically grows a wide range of plants with programmed LED grow lights, fans, and watering. This device works in conjunction with proprietary “seed squares” that contain seeds and nutrients within a specialized growth media for each plant type. A user simply has to pick what they want to grow, place 10 seed squares within the system, fill it with water, and sit back to watch their plants thrive. In 3-5 weeks, they’ll have nutrient-packed produce that’s healthy, sustainable, and fresh from wall to table. The company’s driving mission is to help transition our entire world to this more sustainable model of decentralized food production.

Xiangkun “Elvis” Cao

Converting harmful emissions into commodities

The sun is the ultimate inexhaustible power source for human civilization. We at C2X are passionate about utilizing solar energy to convert CO2 emissions into useful products. “C2X” means carbon to X, where X represents various possibilities. Our vision is to see CO2 as an opportunity rather than a liability. Our team has developed a highly efficient “artificial photosynthesis” process that transforms CO2 into alcohols, such as ethanol, which is a renewable fuel and can be used for producing hand sanitizer. Our reactor design is modular, scalable, and expandable. C2X has partnered with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) through the Young Changemakers on Sustainable WASH Solutions Programme. Our team aspires to use our CO2 conversion technology to kill two birds with one stone: combatting the COVID-19 pandemic while mitigating global climate change. By converting harmful emissions into solar commodities, we are enabling a circular carbon economy.