Environmental activist Winona LaDuke, center, and “water protectors” stand in front of the construction site for the Line 3 oil pipeline near Palisade, Minnesota, on January 9, 2021. Some Native American communities in Minnesota have opposed the project on the basis of treaty rights. (Photo by Kerem Yucel / AFP)
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While the consequences of climate change—rising air and sea temperatures, droughts, extreme storms and even insect outbreaks—have an impact on all humans around the globe, they have a disproportionate effect on women. This is because women are more likely than men to live in poverty and, according to a recent U.N. Environment Programme report, are “often discouraged from learning coping strategies and lifesaving skills, such as how to climb trees or swim,” which hampers their ability to escape or even migrate away from extreme weather conditions.
Women are also at the frontlines of the fight to save the earth’s environment. From Swedish activist Greta Thunberg to British primatologist Jane Goodall, it is due in large part to the work of women that the public’s understanding of nature’s benefits —and dangers of carbon emissions—has grown deeper and more nuanced in recent years. It is also due to the work of women over 50. And so, in honor of Earth Day and as a part of our ongoing series, in partnership with Mika Brzezinski and Know Your Value, to highlight women over the age of 50 who are changing the world, here are the women who are fighting to save the environment:
Dr. Sylvia Earle, 85: The legendary oceanographer has been called “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker and “Hero of the Planet” by Time magazine, both for good reason: In 1979, she walked untethered on the sea floor at a lower depth than any living human being before or since. By the early 1990s, she was the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, and today she is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and the founder of Mission Blue, an nonprofit that works to protect the ocean.
“The overall mission of Mission Blue is to stabilize the decline of the planet and make people aware that it is happening and make people aware of what they can do about it,” Earle recently tweeted. (Like other leaders, she has taken to Twitter to spread her message—and peppers them with photos of coral reefs, subterranean creatures, sharks and even the occasional sea gull.)
Through Mission Blue, Earle works with 120 communities across 69 countries to restore and protect their local ocean environments. It is working to apply protections to 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030, a goal set by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
“We, as humans, depend on the ocean to stay alive—and the time is now to use our power to protect it,” Earle has said.
Lisa Jackson, 59: Born in Philadelphia and raised in New Orleans, Jackson is a chemical engineer who, in 2009, became the nation’s first Black administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 2013, she left the EPA to become Apple’s first head of environment, policy, and social initiatives. As such, she is in charge of the company’s renewable energy strategy, use of greener materials and progress towards resource conservation.
One of Jackson’s newer programs at Apple is something called the Restore Fund, a carbon removal initiative the company announced last week. Launched in partnership with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International, it’s a $200 million fund that will aim to remove at least 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually from the atmosphere while boosting investments in forest restoration.
“Through creating a fund that generates both a financial return as well as real, and measurable carbon impacts, we aim to drive broader change in the future —encouraging investment in carbon removal around the globe,” Jackson said. “Our hope is that others share our goals and contribute their resources to support and protect critical ecosystems.”
Winona LaDuke, 61: A Native American land rights activist who lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota and who twice ran as Ralph Nader’s vice presidential candidate on the Green party ticket (in 1996 and 2000), LaDuke is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which works to buy back land that non-natives have acquired. She is also the executive director of Honor the Earth, an organization that educates the public about native land and raises funds to support native communities.
In recent months, LaDuke has been actively protesting against the Enbridge Line 3, a $2.9 billion oil pipeline project in Minnesota. The project is a 337-mile replacement of a piece of an existing pipeline, but LaDuke and others argue that the carbon emissions from the new piece would be greater than all the emissions Minnesota produces, as a whole, in one year.
“Our way of life is entirely dependent on this water and this wild rice and this land,” she has said. And to local press, she noted: “The last place I wanted to be was watching them tear apart my forest limb from limb—it was just devastating.”
Katherine Lucey, 61: Lucey spent 20 years on Wall Street working as an investment banker (in the energy sector) before becoming a social entrepreneur working to bring clean energy to communities in Africa. In 2010, she founded Solar Sister, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that trains women on how to use and distribute clean energy solutions—like solar-powered radios, fans, lights and water filters—to their communities.
Lucey first got the idea for the company during a 2008 visit to Uganda, when she met a woman using solar lights in her chicken coop. The more light this woman used, the more eggs her chickens produced—and the more income she had for her farm. It’s a model Lucey has replicated thousands of times over; she recently estimated that Solar Sister is working with 5,000 female entrepreneurs across Tanzania and Nigeria.
“The work we do has never been more important, because what we do is really giving women a way to earn an income in a very flexible and resilient manner,” Lucey told environmental blog Clean Technica, noting that income that women are earning through Solar Sister has kept some families afloat during the pandemic. “Solar power is distributable, makes people in control of their own energy and sources. It creates a sense of independence and it just fits in so many ways with the work of these women entrepreneurs on their own terms,” she says.
Solar Sister has received plaudits from the Clinton Global Initiative, Social Venture Network, and most recently, the Greta Thunberg Foundation.
