SEAL Awards are an environmental advocacy organization that uses annual awards for businesses and journalists to support environmental initiatives and to fund grants in the field of policy research. The name is an acronym for sustainability, environmental achievement, and leadership. [1] The Awards were created in 2017 by businessman Matt Harney. [2]
These awards honor corporate sustainability initiatives, sustainable products, and environmentally responsible innovation. Application fees for this award fund social impact campaigns and research grants. [3] [4]
Twelve journalists each year receive recognition for environmental reporting, particularly investigative journalism. [5] Past award winners include writers for traditional news media such as The Guardian [6] [7] and more recent, web-based platforms like Grist [8] [9] [10] and Mongabay. [11] [12] [13]
SEAL Awards have advocated for the creation of a credit card whose interchange fees would pay into climate change programs rather than a traditional credit rewards program, [14] targeted cup waste in the Starbucks café chain [15] and Yelp reviews of restaurants using plastic straws, [16] and endorsed Jay Inslee for the 2020 United States presidential campaign. [17] The environmental rewards credit card was presented as an open-source concept in a detailed business case launch memo. [18]
The research award is a monetary grant for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers at the beginning of their careers in environmental policy. [19] [20]
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a regular column for The Guardian and is the author of a number of books.
People & Planet is a network of student campaign groups in the UK. It is "the largest student campaigning organisation in the country campaigning to alleviate world poverty, defend human rights and protect the environment."
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is a global environmental organization headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. As of 2021, it works via affiliates or branches in 79 countries and territories, as well as across every state in the US.
Grist is an American non-profit online magazine founded in 1999 that publishes environmental news and commentary. Grist's tagline is "Climate. Justice. Solutions." Grist is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has about 50 writers and employees. Its CEO is former state representative Brady Walkinshaw.
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. The school is the owner of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper and the International Fact-Checking Network. It also operates PolitiFact.
Mongabay (mongabay.com) is a conservation news web portal that reports on environmental science, energy, and green design, and features extensive information on tropical rainforests, including pictures and deforestation statistics for countries of the world. It was founded in 1999 by economist Rhett Ayers Butler in order to increase "interest in and appreciation of wildlands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging local and global trends in technology, economics, and finance on conservation and development". In recent years, to complement its US-based team, Mongabay has opened bureaus in Indonesia, Latin America, and India, reporting daily in Indonesian, Spanish, and English respectively. Mongabay's reporting is available in nine languages.
Katharine Mieszkowski is an American journalist.
Chip Giller is an American journalist and environmentalist. He is best known as the founder of Grist, an online environmental news organization. Giller has won numerous awards for his media innovations and environmental work, including receiving a Heinz Award, and being named a "Hero of the Environment" by Time magazine. He has been featured in media outlets like Vanity Fair, Newsweek, and Outside, and has participated as a guest on broadcast programs including NBC's Today and PBS's Now.
Climate crisis is a term describing global warming and climate change, and their impacts. This term and the term climate emergency have been used to describe the threat of global warming to humanity and the planet, and to urge aggressive climate change mitigation. In the scientific journal BioScience, a January 2020 article, endorsed by over 11,000 scientists worldwide, stated that "the climate crisis has arrived" and that an "immense increase of scale in endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis."
Dan Fagin is an American journalist who specializes in environmental science. He won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his best-selling book Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. Toms River also won the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the National Academies Communication Award, and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award of the Society of Environmental Journalists, among other literary prizes.
Robert Doyle Bullard is an American academic who is the former Dean of the Barbara Jordan - Mickey Leland School Of Public Affairs and currently Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University. Previously Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, Bullard is known as the "father of environmental justice". He has been a leading campaigner against environmental racism, as well as the foremost scholar of the problem, and of the Environmental Justice Movement which sprung up in the United States in the 1980s.
Philip David Radford is an American activist who served as the executive director of Greenpeace USA. He was the founder and President of Progressive Power Lab, an organization that incubates companies and non-profits that build capacity for progressive organizations, including a donor advisory organization Champion.us, the Progressive Multiplier Fund and Membership Drive. Radford is a co-founder of the Democracy Initiative, was founder and executive director of Power Shift, and is a board member of the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. He has a background in grassroots organizing, corporate social responsibility, climate change, and clean energy. He currently serves as the Chief Strategy officer at the Sierra Club.
Andrew C. Revkin is an American science and environmental journalist, author and educator. He has written on a wide range of subjects including destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the 2004 Asian tsunami, sustainable development, climate change, and the changing environment around the North Pole. From 2019 to 2023 he directed fthe Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at The Earth Institute of Columbia University.
Climate Central is a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate science. Composed of scientists and science journalists, the organization conducts scientific research on climate change and energy issues, and produces multimedia content that is distributed via their website and media partners. Climate Central has been featured in many prominent U.S. news sources, including The New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, NBC Nightly News, Time, National Public Radio, PBS, Scientific American, and The Washington Post.
The Society of Environmental Journalists is a non-profit national journalism organization created by and for journalists who report environmental topics in the news media. On its website, the organization says that "SEJ’s mission is to strengthen the quality, reach and viability of journalism across all media to advance public understanding of environmental issues."
Ray Ring is an American novelist and journalist. Ring has been based in the American West since the 1970s, with stints in Arizona, Colorado and Montana.
The Intercept is an online American nonprofit news organization that publishes articles and podcasts.
Julie Cart, born in Louisiana, is an American journalist. She won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, with her colleague, Bettina Boxall, for their series of stories looking at the cost and effectiveness of combating wildfires in the western United States. She has worked for the Los Angeles Times and several other news organizations. She currently covers environmental issues in the California state capitol as a writer with CalMatters
Jon Mitchell is a Welsh journalist and author residing in Yokohama, Japan. Mitchell has written widely about Okinawa, especially on issues created by the ongoing presence of the United States Armed Forces. He was awarded the inaugural Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan's Freedom of the Press Lifetime Achievement Award for this work in 2015. In 2021, Mitchell's book, Poisoning the Pacific: The US Military's Secret Dumping of Plutonium, Chemical Weapons, and Agent Orange, won Second Place in the Society of Environmental Journalists annual awards for Reporting on the Environment.
Rhett Ayers Butler is an American journalist, author and entrepreneur who founded Mongabay, a conservation and environmental science news platform, in 1999.