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Green cred: Polls show that climate change is one of the biggest issues for Latinos. But even within the environmental movement, their voices are often not heard. Which is why Quintero created Voces Verdes, “in an attempt to highlight and elevate Latino leadership on climate change,” she says. “While there’s been a tradition of environmental justice, there aren’t a lot of groups that are Latino led or Latino dominant.”

What to expect in 2016: “Right now we’re really focused on implementing the Clean Power Plan,” Quintero says. Obama’s plan to limit coal-based carbon pollution would not only help mitigate global warming, but could improve the health of Latinos across the country: According to the NRDC, 15 percent of Latinos live dangerously close to a coal-fired plant.

World view: Voces Verdes also tries to communicate how issues associated with climate change — like drought, wildfires, and flooding — will affect people living in Latin America. “The impacts [there] are very real, and very serious.”

Guilty pleasure: Buzzfeed. “After hours and hours worth of hard news, it’s nice to have a laugh.”

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Green cred: As a specialist in climate modeling and alternative energy, Jacobson has spent much of his career trying to understand, and find solutions to, global warming. He thinks the U.S. is now equipped with the necessary technology and economic means to get off of fossil fuels; in fact, he has done analyses to show how each state could do so by 2050. The only thing that’s missing, he says, is the political will.
But Jacobson isn’t just preaching an idealistic vision from behind the ivory tower: In 2013, he co-founded the Solutions Project — with actor Mark Ruffalo, businessman Marco Krapels, and activist Josh Fox — to engage policymakers, businesses leaders, and the public to try to put the 50-state plan into action.
What to expect in 2016: “We want to finalize the 139 country plan.” Yeah, that’s right: He wants to go beyond the U.S. to map out plans for countries across the world on how they can go renewable, and show how it is “technically, scientifically, and economically possible for each state and each country to implement them.”
On the ballot: New York and California have adopted partial versions of his schemes for clean energy — and presidential hopefuls Clinton, O’Malley, and Sanders stand behind them, too.

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Green cred: From Uganda to Tonga, Mocine-McQueen and Box have hosted storytelling workshops for more than 1,000 people from 60 countries with the Million Person Project. The goal: Teach unsung leaders how to project their voices and their causes using the public speaking and community organizing techniques developed by Harvard professorMarshall Ganz.
Mocine-McQueen and Box have helped embolden and amplify the stories of people who are already facing climate change — people who stand to lose their land, culture, and more with worsening tropical storms and sea level rise. MPP’s clients have gone on to share their stories everywhere, from the United Nations to international news outlets.
What to expect in 2016: Mocine-McQueen and Box will inch closer to their goal of helping to launch one million leaders into the world. In particular, they will continue working with climate activists in the Pacific Islands. Mocine-McQueen says he will never forget the stories they heard there: “They were honest, they were scary, and they were all very clear on one thing: Climate change is here.”
Proud moments: When their client Karanga John used MPP’s storytelling tips to raise $5,000 in one month to build an internet center in rural Uganda. When they worked with the artist Swoon to tell her story about her mother’s heroin addiction, which resonated with readers around the world.
New Year’s resolution they’ll likely bail on: For Box, sticking to moderate exercise. “I’m really good at extremes,” she says. “So I’m probably going to either end up running a half marathon or doing nothing.”

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“I have an unhealthy — or, I would like to say, healthy — obsession with poop,” says marine biologist Asha de Vos. Specifically, she’s stuck on kind that comes out of blue whales living off the coast of her homeland, Sri Lanka; in fact you could even say she built her career on a pile of this shit.

When de Vos found the red, gloopy stuff floating at the surface of the North Indian Ocean, it was her first clue that this population of whales behaves very differently than previously thought. While a student, de Vos was taught that all blue whales are migratory, feeding at the poles and coming to the warmer waters in order to breed and give birth. But blue whales are still a mysterious bunch — especially the ones near Sri Lanka, since no one studied that particular population until de Vos began to in 2008. After repeatedly coming across blue whale poop at sea, she realized that the local population actually stays there year-round.

For a woman growing up in Sri Lanka, marine biology was one of the most unorthodox fields de Vos could have chosen. “Most people are encouraged to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, or business people,” she says. But “as a child I wanted to be an adventure scientist. I wanted to be the one who discovered things and saw things that no one else saw, explore places no one else would go.”

After becoming the first Sri Lankan to get a PhD in marine mammal research, de Vos has become a pioneer in the study of blue whales, making discoveries that have been recognized across the globe. “My parents just said, ‘Do what you love and you’ll do it well,’” she says. “And I do what I love.”

We talked with de Vos about her smelly passions, the biggest threats to whales today, and why the Save the Whales movement needs a makeover. Here’s an edited and condensed version of what she had to say.

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On an early October morning in 1997, on the west side of the island of Kauai, 18-year-old Mike Coots got in the water with his bodyboard, as he had done hundreds of times before, and started to paddle out. He and his friends went about 300 feet from the shore until they reached the surf break, in water that was 30 to 40 feet deep. They were quickly rewarded by a set of good waves, each about four feet high. Everyone in the group caught one right away. Except for Coots.

It was just Coots and one other surfer still waiting when the last wave of the set came in. “I remember looking at him and we looked at each other wondering who’s going to catch the wave,” Coots recounts. “[A]nd I got on my board and started paddling.” And then, without warning, a tiger shark emerged from the depths and latched on to his leg.

The animal thrashed back and forth with his leg in its mouth. It finally let go when he punched it in the nose. Coots got on his board and began to paddle like mad back to the shore. When he felt his leg spasm, he feared the shark had taken hold of him again; it wasn’t until he looked back that he realized his leg was, in fact, gone. In its place, a raw laceration spurted out blood with every pump of his heart.

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We’ve had plenty of reasons to get scared about sharks. From the recent “summer of the shark” attacks in North Carolina to Discovery Channel’s Shark Week to this nightmare, close encounters with the infamous marine predators seem to be cropping up left and right lately.

In the midst of the media mania, scientists continue to try to reassure the public that the odds of being a shark attack victim are in fact incredibly small. You are orders of magnitude more likely to suffer a drowning incident, get killed on yourbicycle, or meet your end in a collapsing sand hole than in the jaws of a shark.

Yet sharks continue to be one of our favorite things to feel horrified by. Those furtive fins gliding above the water! Those huge, lithe, cartilaginous bodies! And let’s not forget — though how could we? — those rows upon rows of teeth.

Before his attack, however, Coots spent little time thinking about sharks. “I never really had any fear of them, even though I’ve been around them my whole life,” he tells me. “It was just a thing that’s in the ocean that you’ve got to respect and be careful of, but all in all they just do their own thing.”

But after the incident, Coots did fall into to a certain shark obsession — though not the way you might expect. The Hawaii-based surfer and photographer turned his experience into a call to action. Except that, rather than fixate on the harm sharks present to us, Coots is more concerned with what we’re doing to them.

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Eating the right seafood can be a tricky thing. You don’t have to look too far to find examples of species that have been overfished to satisfy our hunger, or creatures that are unintentionally threatened by our nets, or our bad habit of shuffling species and ecosystems together. But ocean advocate Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly still wants you to indulge in the good stuff — so long as it comes from the right sources. She’s the executive director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, the country’s leading program for sustainable seafood.

Seafood Watch is based on the premise that consumers, armed with the right information, have the power to drive change. The SFW website, app, and handy pocket guides provide info so that shoppers and diners can decide what seafood to order based on its environmental impact. Kemmerly’s not asking you to give up lox for breakfast or sushi for dinner; she just wants you to ask where it came from.


“Change happens when people are persistent,” Kemmerly says. “We want people to make a little noise and show the business community that this is an important issue. Ask where that seafood comes from. Ask if they have a sustainable seafood program where you shop. And if they do, say thank you.”

We got Kemmerly to give us the scoop on sustainable fishery management, the rising role of aquaculture, and how, in the face of wide scale ocean woes, we fish eaters have the power to turn the tides. Here’s what she had to say.

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“Ocean explorer” sounds like a pie-in-the-sky job description, like “adventure archaeologist” or “Jedi.” But for David Gruber, it’s his actual title. A 2014 National Geographic emerging explorer who studies bioluminescence and fluorescence, Gruber hones in on the areas of the world that are still big unknowns and dives deep into them — way deep. Over the years, as Gruber has studied what goes on hundreds of meters below the surface of our seas, he has discovered hundreds of species and even identified entirely new marine phenomena, including some that could lead to breakthroughs in medical research.

A deep thinker, Gruber brings a philosophical approach to his science. He was first drawn to study bioluminescence because it was “an area that was artistic and beautiful to me, and that was really unknown.” Plus, he has an eye for the big picture: “It’s not like we’re just looking at it right now at this moment in time, we’re seeing the ocean as a compilation of genes and organisms that took millions of years to get to this place we’re at now.” And that, he says, gives us a context to understand how we’re changing things now.

We talked with Gruber about his explorations and discoveries, what it’s like to see in a primarily blue world, and what it means that we’re still, today, plumbing the unknown depths of our oceans. Here’s an edited and condensed version of what he had to say.

Long Beach, Calif., where I spent my first 17 years, has had many notable contributions to the world. Snoop Dogg. Cameron Diaz. Sublime. Some not-so-classic Paris Hilton music videos. I’m proud to have grown up there for more substantial reasons, too, like the fact that it makes the top five in America’s most diverse cities, and has one of the best public school districts in the country.

But when it comes to living green, Long Beach’s pedigree leaves something to be desired. Oil is big business. The city was designed with cars in mind and little attention to transit alternatives. And, being in the desert, Long Beach has to take half of its water from the Colorado River or Northern California’s Bay Delta Region (neither of which are exactly well-supplied with the stuff themselves).

To further illustrate: As I walked down the beach near my father’s house when I visited in February, I saw far more bits of colorful plastic than I saw seashells, more dead animals than live ones, and the view looked out onto oil drilling sites and a fleet of tankers lined up to enter the harbor. When I came back, the bottoms of my feet were covered in splotches of tar.

New Mayor Robert Garcia, elected last June, wants to clean up Long Beach’s environmental rep. At his first State of the City address in January 2015, Garcia issued an urgent call for global warming adaptation. “That means changing the way we produce and use energy, supporting transportation that is not reliant on fossil fuels, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, creating green space, and looking at every way we can to reduce our carbon footprint,” he said in his address. He’s already commissioned the Aquarium of the Pacific to craft a Climate Change Action Plan — i.e. suggestions on what the city should do in order to get ready for everything from sea-level rise to heatwaves. The plan is due at the end of this summer.

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What ever happened to “Save the whales”?

In the 1970s and ’80s, it was the quintessential environmentalist cause, the one that anyone who cared about the earth could unequivocally rally behind. It was the topic of international negotiations and treaties, and endless campaigns from environmental groups. (“Uh-oh, that guy down the street with the long hair has a clipboard, and is that a Greenpeace T-shirt he’s wearing? Quick, act busy!”)

These days, we’ve got bigger things to worry about — climate change, mass extinction that could wipe out half of the species on the planet by mid-century, and a human population rocketing toward 9 billion.