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TEDxOilSpill: XPRIZE Announces $10 Million Clean-Up Challenge | Social Enterprise
TEDxOilSpill: XPRIZE Announces $10 Million Clean-Up Challenge
Posted On: Today
A much-anticipated TEDxOilSpill gathering kicked off today in Washington, the 70th day of the Gulf oil crisis, with repeated urgings by speakers for stepped-up nationwide efforts to both cap and clean up the spill.
Just before the gathering broke for lunch, Francis Beland, VP of Prize Development for the X PRIZE Foundation, announced the oganization will be launching a special "challenge contest" that will divvy up some $10 million in prize money among those who come up with the best ideas for cleaning up the Gulf Coast's waters and shoreline. "This will be a special prize, not exactly like the others we give," Beland said. He urged entrepreneurs to email him directly with their cleanup ideas and their input about how to further structure the contest. Beland says he hopes to officially launch the contest within the next two weeks and asked people to email him at francis@xprize.org.
The announcement, for which few further details were immediately available, was the latest in a series of recent actions being offered to spur greater levels of civic action around the spill. "Most people don't understand the issues that led to this happening," conference organizer and DC tech entrepreneur Nate Mook, 28, told CNN over the weekend. "The spill has brought to the forefront a lot of things that have been on the sidelines for a long time," Mook said, such as "the problems with our oceans, how important the marine eco-system is, where we are getting our energy and what we are putting at risk."Mook and co-organizer Dave Troy, 38, both DC tech entrepreneurs, said they began organizing the event four weeks ago in hopes of helping people "fill the information void" about the environmental impact of the spill.
The event, held in a theater in downtown Washington, DC --and livestreamed to an estimated 1 million additional people watching from their homes and from some 129 Meetup locations across the United States, Asia, Europe and Australia -- kicked off with a view of the spill from several thousand feet, literally. A team of photographers organized specifically for this conference took the stage to report on their nearly two weeks of photographing the spill from the air and on the ground. Called TEDxOilSpill Expedition, the team shared its work and urged more people to take photographs and create a public record of the spill's impact. [The team's photographs are available for free download on Flickr.]
Team leader James Duncan Davidson, TED's conference photographer, described mounting difficulties getting access to the worst areas affected. "Air space over the spill is controlled by BP," he said. "We could find only one pilot willing to take me out over the Gulf" -- and when he got there, Davidson added, the air "smelled like you've dumped oil, gas, propane and Windex all over your garage." Team members later told conferees to tell people who want to help to "go make art, go make media, raise money."
Among other conference highlights so far:
* Phillippe Cousteau, the grandson of the late ocean environmentalist Jacques Cousteau, said the spill's impact is being "enormously under-reported." He said "the cost to wildlife of the spill is very bad. We're only just beginning to get a full picture. ... The estimate now is that for every bird found, there are 10 birds not found." Cousteau, the founder and CEO ofEarthEcho International, a nonprofit, added that governments around the world have "under-invested in oceans for decades. ...We don't really understand the ecosystems in the best of times, much less in times of crisis."
* Casey DeMoss Roberts, of the nonprofit Gulf Restoration Network (HealthyGulf.org), told conferees that when she was 17, she lost her father, an oil rig worker, to a typhoon. She said the country is becoming more desperate in its search for oil. "He should never have been out there [looking for oil] in the first place," she said. "How can we stop making human sacrifices for a tank of gas?" Roberts said the toll of the spill is also causing coastal wetlands to die at an alarming rate. "In the Gulf, we lose of football field of wetlands every 45 minutes" due to the spill, she said, as containment efforts continue to fail. She said the spill also is affecting long-held cultural traditions in the region: theShrimp & Petroleum Festival, the oldest festival in Louisiana, is still scheduled for September 2-6, she said, but "I wonder what that will look like this year?" Roberts ended her talk blaming the federal government, not BP, for doing too little to find alternative energy sources so as to break the nation's dependence on oil. "We can't expect companies that make catastrophic mistakes to stop making them," Roberts said, her voice quavering. "It's time to force our government to think outside the barrel."
* Latosha Brown, a native of Mobile, AL and a community organizer there, warned of the potential impact of BP's use of toxic solventsto break up and disperse the oil in the Gulf. "I have yet to meet a fisherman who is supportive of oil dispersants," said Brown. She fears the fishing industry will be "all but wiped out" if the spill is not contained soon, and urged policymakers in the audience to help local residents diversify their economy, retrain workers and encourage entrepreneurs.
* Lisa Barry of GrassrootsMapping.org demonstrated the New Orleans-based nonprofit's crowdsourcing project to help citizens produce and collate their own aerial photographs of the spill and its ongoing impact. For more on this project, see Justmeans' June 5 reporton the initiative. "We're collecting images of places that no one ever bothers to photograph, and doing so over time to see the impact," Barry said. "It will help hold authorities responsible and create a public record so people won't forget."
