Beth Stevens: Disney's Conservation Champ and an Audubon Rachel Carson Award Winner
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06/30/2010
 Disney's Dr. Beth Stevens (Photo by Mariya Stepanyan) |
To Beth Stevens, winning a Rachel Carson Award fits: Carson is her role model and the namesake of the center where Stevens conducted her doctorial research. But Stevens, who has been with Disney for more than a decade, is also humble, crediting her larger Disney family for the environmental strides the company’s made.
And if you don’t necessarily associate Mickey and Minnie with conservation, maybe you should. Stevens says the company’s been in the green game since Walt’s day; today, it has seriously ambitious goals for cutting water use, energy consumption, waste, and emissions. As senior vice president of environmental affairs, Stevens is in the thick of it all. Audubon talked to her about what it means to be a female conservation leader, as well as Disney’s unique ability to reach thousands of children daily.
Audubon: Is it challenging to be successful as a woman in conservation?
Stevens: Conservation is as much about understanding how to work with different people and understanding how to bring all the disciplines together as it is about having a scientific answer or having a public relations answer. It’s like a big puzzle. And it’s about bringing the puzzle pieces together. I really don’t feel like it’s any harder being a woman.
How do you feel about earning this recognition?
To get anything done, it has to be very collaborative and it depends on partnerships. Nobody can do it by themselves. It takes a team, no matter what you’re doing in conservation. So I really feel humbled because I’ve been privileged to be part of many great teams of people who’ve done some really positive conservation work.
What do you say to people who don’t consider Disney an environmental company?
This is not a new idea to Disney at all. We have a very long and rich history and legacy of environmental stewardship. While it may sound trite, it started with Walt himself. He loved nature. He loved animals. If you think about it, the True Life Adventures—which he started—were really the first nature documentaries. And Walt, he had a lot of foresight. When he bought all of the land in Florida to build the Magic Kingdom, he set aside almost half of the land as a conservation area.
Disney has a unique stage from which to teach crucial environmental lessons. What advantage does that offer?
I spent my first 11.5 years at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park. There, we have a huge opportunity to inspire, every single day, all of our guests to care more about the future of wildlife and wild places. It’s a great immersive experience, and there are so many experiences there. I believe that there’s one that will touch somebody. For everyone there’s somewhere in that experience at Animal Kingdom, someone’s heart strings are going to be plucked, and they’re going to leave the park caring more about the future of wildlife than when they came in.
In my current role, I work with every business across the company, and we’re a very large company. We have amazing potential because we’re such a powerful, far-reaching brand. We have the potential to really educate and inspire all of our many consumers—guests, viewers, fans—to inspire everybody to care more about the planet, and to inspire a sense of environmental stewardship. Certainly with youth, we have just untapped potential.
Describe the environmental programs geared toward children.
We really recognize that kids are aware of environmental problems. They want to know what to do about it. They really care. So we took that passion and we developed two programs. They’re really designed to empower kids in a positive way.
Planet Challenge is a program geared toward classrooms, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade classrooms, and it’s a project-based learning competition. Classrooms come up with environmental projects that they want to do in their school or community. It’s very student-driven. They carry this out over the course of time. It’s a competition in the sense that we give out prizes and grand prizes to the winning classes.
Disney’s Friends for Change is a fabulous program set up to help kids help the planet…A lot of the Disney Channel stars came together to start this campaign. We give kids great tips on simple actions they can take in their everyday lives that can make a difference. They can go online and make a pledge and see immediately the impact of their pledge. They also can vote on how they want Disney to spend $1 million on conservation programs around the world. And in fact, National Audubon has been the recipient of two Friends for Change grants for two different projects.
What do you consider the biggest environmental concern today?
As a society, we’ve sort of taken for granted the fresh air that we breathe. We’ve taken for granted that there will always be water. Our natural resources are really undervalued…It’s really important that we start to value those because then we’re going to pay attention to them, and we’re going to try to save them.
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Congratulations to Beth Stevens
I would like to nominate a retired professor for the next Rachel Carson Award.
There a precious few scientists like Professor Emeritus Gary Peters who have chosen not to remain silent but instead to accept their responsibility to science by rigorously examining extant evidence of human population dynamics. Please consider now the perspective of Dr. Peters on the research of Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel, which is found in the journal, The California Geographer, 2009. The title of his article is, Population, Resources and Enviroment: "Beyond the Exponentials" Revisited.
---begin
"The world’s population in 2009 was close to 6.8 billion. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, we can expect about 55.7 million people to die this year, so in purely demographic terms 300,000 deaths amount to just over half of one percent of all deaths. Furthermore, there are about 15,465 births per hour worldwide, so again in a purely demographic sense those 300,000 deaths can be replaced in less than 20 hours.
Paradoxically, the very fossil fuels that have allowed us to feed the vast increase in world population over the last century or two may 113 The California Geographer n Volume 49, 2009 also be starting to increase mortality rates, even if only slightly so far. Currently we add about 80 million people to the planet each year, and we know that population growth exacerbates most environmental problems, including global warming (Speth 2008, Diamond 2005, and Friedman 2008).
Pimentel (2001), Hopfenberg (2003), and others have established in a series of articles that human population growth is a function of food supply, yet we continue to expand food supplies to accommodate future growth—even if that growth threatens the planet’s socioeconomic systems, ecosystems, biodiversity, oceans,
and atmosphere. Continued expansion of food supplies has come at considerable cost both to people and to Earth. As Pollan (2008, 121) commented, “Clearly the achievements of industrial agriculture have come at a cost: It can produce a great many more calories per acre, but each of those calories may supply less nutrition than
it formerly did.... A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished, two characteristics seldom found in the same body in the long natural history of our species.” According to Heller and Keoleian (2000), it takes seven to ten calories of input, mainly from fossil fuels, to produce one calorie of edible food in the United States. Looking at the American landscape, Babbitt (2005, 100) observed that “[I]ndustrial agriculture has been extended too far, and the price has been too high for the land and waters to bear.” In many places, agricultural landscapes are no longer what Tuan (1993, 143) had in mind when he wrote that “In common with the vast majority of humankind, Americans
love the small intimate world that is their home, and, immediately beyond it, a rich agricultural land.”
According to Pimentel (2001), humans already use more than half the planet’s entire biomass, leaving less and less for other species. From there, as Hopfenberg (2009, 2) noted, “It is not a far logical leap to determine that, if human population and resource use continues to grow and we continue to kill off our neighbors in the biological community, one of the many species facing extinction will be the human. Thus, the impact of civilized humanity on the rest of the
biological community can be seen as lethal to the point of destroying our own ecological support". It is a reminder that, as Bush (2000, 28) noted, “If there is one lesson that the geological record offers, it is that all species will ultimately go extinct, some just do it sooner than others.” With the expansion of human numbers has come a steady increase in the background rate of extinction.
But even among environmentalists, population has been dropped from most discussions because it is controversial; it has been snared in the web of political correctness. As Speth (2008, 78) somewhat ironically pointed out, “By any objective standard, U.S. population growth is a legitimate and serious environmental issue. But the subject is hardly on the environmental agenda, and the country has not learned how to discuss the problem even in progressive circles.” Cobb (2007, 1) put it this way, “Even if some politicians, policymakers and reporters in wealthy countries can see beyond the daily mirage of plenty to the overpopulation problem, they do
not want to touch it.”
---end
It is one thing for "politicians, policymakers and reporters" not to touch research of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth. It is something altogether different when the elective mutism of scientists with appropriate expertise hides science in silence. Such a willful refusal to scrutinize peer-reviewed and published evidence and report findings strikes me as a betrayal of science and also a denial of what could somehow be real.
How are global challenges of the kind we can see looming before humanity in our time to be addressed and overcome if any root cause of what threatens us and life as we know it is not acknowledged?
Of course, it could be that Professor Peters' assessment of the research by Pimentel and Hopfenberg is incorrect; that their work is fatally flawed. If that is the case, we need to know it. On the other hand, if that is not the case and the research is somehow on the correct track, then discussion of the research needed to have begun years ago, at the onset of Century XXI, because this research appears, at least to me, to possess extraordinary explanatory power with potentially profound implications.
Thanks to those within the community of scientists and to those in the population at large with a perspective to share who choose to examine the evidence to which your attention is drawn and report your findings.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://www.panearth.org/
Professor Emeritus Gary L. Peters stands alone....
Many thanks to Dr. Gary Peters for being a participant, not a spectator of events, and for fulfilling what President Barack H. Obama (quoting former President Abraham Lincoln) asked of us earlier this year,
"We are not bound to win but we are bound to be true; we are not bound to succeed but we are bound to live up to the light we possess."
Gary Peters is true and living up to the light he possesses. He is providing stand-alone analyses of vital matters, that is to say, looming global threats to human and environmental health already visible to humanity on the far horizon.
It is not clear to me why so many experts have chosen not to follow Dr. Peters' example, but instead choose to remain electively muted spectators of what is happening on Earth in our time. Willful silence of experts who possess knowledge derived from the best available scientific evidence strikes me as a tragic anomaly, one that has unfortunately become a dominant, widely shared characteristic of many too many human population professionals in our time. How are we to address and overcome human-forced global challenges when population experts with appropriate expertise fail to acknowledge certain scientific evidence, however unforeseen and unwelcome, by hiding the evidence in silence?
Keep speaking out loudly and clearly about what is true, as best you can see it, Gary.
Acknowledging rather than denying extant scientific evidence
I do not know if I am right or wrong to ask directly and repeatedly for truth, as each of us sees it, to be spoken loudly and clearly so that people can share an understanding of the global predicament looming ominously before humanity. But, it does appear to me that if people with knowledge lose faith in God's gift of science by denying its presence and remaining electively mute while selfish, shortsighted leaders go forward unsustainably on the basis of specious, preternatural thinking, then the human community has no chance whatever of responding ably (ie, in sustainable ways) to the human-induced challenges before all of us.
I am trying to encourage the lighting of candles because the darkness enveloping the "primrose path" many too many so-called leaders are so adamantly advocating and recklessly pursuing is anathema to me.
The predicament posed by human overpopulation...
Perhaps I am mistaken about the scientific research to which I draw attention. If that is shown to be case, I will end the AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population immediately. I make all of you the promise that from that moment forward you will not hear from me again. Given the human-induced global challenges that appear, at least to me, to be looming before humankind in our time, it will just fine if it turns out that I am indeed the fool so many people take me for now. Such an outcome has certain benefits. Fool that I am, still I will be free of a “duty to warn” and gratefully released to fulfill the promise I made years ago to my long-suffering spouse: end the AWAREness Campaign.
For a recent discussion of the global predicament posed by the unbridled growth of absolute global human population numbers in our time, please click on the links below.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6676
http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/6680
Thank to all of you.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Calling out to those who embody the spirit of Rachel in our time
Dear Friends,
One day I hope Professor Emeritus Gary L. Peters will be invited to comment on experts' widely shared and consensually validated misperceptions of human population dynamics as well as peer-reviewed research of the population dynamics of the human species that appears to identify a root cause of the human overpopulation of Earth in our time. Boosting people's understanding of human population dynamics could help ovecome the global gag rule that has precluded such discussion during the past decade and begin educating the human family to the necessity for changes in its conspicuous per-capita overconsumption, outrageous individual hoarding, unsustainable economic globalization and unbridled overpopulation activities now overspreading the surface of the Earth.
Thank you,
Steve
Comment on the blessed world we inhabit.......
If we take a moment to observe God's Creation, we readily see that immense simplicity is beautiful and elegant; however, when we look at the complex constructions of the artificially designed, leviathan-like, distinctly manmade world, immense simplicity correlates with colossal stupidity.
Rachel Carson saw what was
Rachel Carson saw what was coming.......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czvxyDgqxmM
Lyrics : David Gray Lyrics : Draw the Line Album : Full Steam
Full Steam Lyrics - David Gray
All our lives we’ve dreamed about it
Just to find that it was never real
Coming closer each turn of the wheel
Forlorn， adrift on seas of beige
In this our Golden Age
Even in our darkest hour
Never thought that it could get so bad
Bullied， suckered， pimped and patronised
Every day your tawdry little lives
So loose your head
And step within
The silence
deafening
Now you saw it coming
And I saw it coming
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it
You saw it coming
And I saw it coming but still
Running full steam ahead
In and out of consciousness
It breaks my heart to see you like this
Crying， wringing hands and cursing fate
Always so little far too late
It’s 3am I’m wide awake
There’s still one call to make, one call
Now you saw it coming
And I saw it coming
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it
You saw it coming
And I saw it coming
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it
Running full steam ahead
Running full steam ahead
Running full steam
Gonna cover my eyes, gonna cover my eyes
Runnin' full steam, yeah
Now you saw it coming
And I saw it coming
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it
You saw it coming
And I saw it coming
We all saw it coming
But we still bought it
_end_
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, est. 2001
Chapel Hill, NC
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
http://www.panearth.org/
Dear Friends of Rachel
Dear Friends of Rachel Carson,
Given the general mind-set, the one driven in our time by economic globalization and the global political economy, it is difficult to believe how change to whatsoever is sustainable could occur. The mantra of endless growth of unsustainable lifestyles and too-big-to succeed corporations appears pervasive and unassailable.
Gigantic, multinational conglomerates are adamantly engaged in the production of goods (both needed and unnecessary), business and finance, the marvelous edifices housing the great religions, large-scale agriculture, the military complexes. These entities are the actual constructions that drive the process of economic globalization and give the global political economy its leviathan-like structure.
What you are reporting appears correct. It seems to me that two things could happen. First, an internet-driven transformation of global human consciousness will somehow occur in order to bring about necessary changes in the self-serving, destructive behavior of the fossil fools among us. Second, something embodied in this shift in human consciousness will give rise to completely unexpected, somehow interlocking events like the one which occurred at the city of Jericho in ancient times when “the walls fell down”. Even the leviathans of human enterprise in our days could crumble.
Recently we witnessed the near collapse of some of the giants of the automobile industry and the virtual implosion of investment houses and big banks on Wall Street. Are the titans of big business and finance not only “too-big-to-fail” but also “too-big-to-succeed” precisely because they are soon to become patently unsustainable on a planet with size, composition and ecology of Earth?
We have also seen in the past several years the poisonous fruits to be derived from extolling as ‘virtues’ outrageous greed, obscene overconsumption and relentless hoarding of wealth by many too many leaders. Never in the course of human events have so few stolen so much from so many....with a sense of pride. That these people reward each other with medals and awards for their pernicious activities is shameful. I believe we can agree that the unbridled overgrowth activities of the masters of the universe now overspreading the surface of Earth can much longer stand neither the test of time nor the biophysical limitations of the planetary home we are to inhabit and not ruin, I suppose. Following self-proclaimed masters of the universe down a primrose path could be the wrong way to direct the children to go.
The children deserve the chance of facing the prospect of a future that is good enough. I am no longer thinking of leaving the children a better world than the one that was given to their elders. That appears out of reach now. It remains my hope that the elder generation, with responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, will do better than we doing now by changing our ways for the sake of keeping Earth fit for habitation by children everywhere. As examples, we could pay our debts instead of mortgage the children’s future; we could clean up the ecological messes that have been made in the course of the past 65 years; we could eschew “bigger is better” and “the biggest is the best” in favor of “small is beautiful”, doing more with less, and embracing the spirit of living well by living more simply and sustainably.
Perhaps changes toward sustainable lifestyles and right-sized enterprises are in the offing.
And perhaps we have been travelling down a long road over hundreds upon hundreds of years, a road of growing production and distribution capabilities, of wanton overconsumption and reckless hoarding, and of unbridled overpopulation. These activities have been occurring for a long time on a small scale, but only recently exploded in seemingly uncontrollable ways, within the natural world we inhabit and without sufficient regard being given either to human limits or Earth’s limitations. An improbable combination of narcissism, arrogance, foolhardiness and greed blinded leadership to the practical requirements of living on Earth; to the “rules of the house” in our planetary home. Too many leaders decided to willfully behave like kids who were left alone and given the run of the house by their overseers. All the rules were ‘forgotten’ or simply ignored. Laissez faire, whatever will be will be, living without limits and all that ruled!
The children tore everything up and made a big mess. When they realized what they were doing, they felt stuck as if between a rock and hard place. Do they stop their destructive activities or else choose to keep tearing up the house? This is a tough choice for kids at play. Who knows, perhaps they will not be caught red-handed at what they have been doing. And if they are caught, they could always blame the wreckage on other bad boys. How many times have we seen kids at play and men at work blaming their wrongdoing on others and not ever taking responsibility for their own dishonest, deceitful or destructive behavior?
Either the choice to turn back and begin the clean-up or the choice to keep tearing things up is fraught with danger. From a kid’s (or fossil fool’s) perspective they could face more danger by trying to clean up the mess they made than they would be exposed to by continuing with their rampage. Either choice presents its own challenges and threats. After all, so much damage has already been done. There is no longer any easy way forward, that is for sure, even under the best circumstances.
What to do here? Now what? These are the questions, I suppose.
Sincerely yours,
Steve