Grist 50 2024
Meet the people shaping the future of our planet
Each year, the Grist 50 identifies emerging leaders in climate, equity, and sustainability, as nominated by you, our readers. These brilliant souls are politicians, artists, butchers, and scientists. They’re inventing new substitutes for plastic, defending their communities from environmental hazards, writing better public policies, and creating ways to reduce food waste. And they’re just getting started.
The 50 visionaries on this year’s list are regular people who also happen to be sustainability stars. They hail from all walks of life and every part of the country. Simply put, these are ordinary people who are achieving extraordinary things. Around here we call them Fixers, because they’re not afraid to face problems head-on and work toward just solutions.
Each of their stories is a tiny tale of inspiration, revealing why they vowed to make a difference and how they made it happen. Through grit and determination, these everyday climate champions are demonstrating that a better, cleaner, more just future is still possible.
Read more about these fixers in Arts + Media, Business + Tech, Science + Energy, Food + Farming, and Policy + Advocacy. Read about them and get inspired. Tk tk. This is where the intro ends.
Timothy Barat
Growing up in small-town Australia, Timothy Barat dropped out of school to work with his hands. He found work as a lineman and learned a lot about how essential the grid is to everyday life — and how fragile it is. He eventually returned to school, and then, beginning in 2015, ripped through three associate degrees, and a bachelor’s and master’s in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in just five years. During his studies, he saw energy generation and storage technology accelerating, but few people focused on fortifying the grid infrastructure that connects them.
He knew from experience that the grid is in desperate need of improvements to prevent power outages and the massive wildfires now so common in California and elsewhere.
As a lineman he learned a lot about how essential the grid is to everyday life — and how fragile it is.
One of the biggest problems is the lack of data to detect pending disasters. “Utilities are unable to obtain ground truth measurements from the field frequently enough,” he says. He invented a device that attaches to utility poles to monitor grid performance and collect other data — providing lineworkers with a constant stream of information that “takes the guesswork out of linework,” he says. The boxes can detect, for instance, when a branch has fallen across the wires, allowing the utility to cut power and prevent a fire. The gizmos can also identify signal patterns that suggest an imminent problem, showing utilities where to target their repairs.
Barat had planned to stay in academia, but then the nightmarish 2018 Camp Fire, sparked by a bad transmission line, killed 86 people in Northern California. He launched Gridware at the end of 2020, and the company deployed its first devices in May 2021. It now has sensors in Southern California and Colorado, and is about to go live with six more utilities across Northern California, Washington, and Utah in the coming months. Four more utilities are on the waiting list.
Jason Chow
He’d grown up fishing and diving in Hawaii, so Jason Chow noticed when the fish started disappearing, and he wanted to do something about it. He earned a degree in marine biology, but since few conservation and management jobs were available, he worked at restaurants while interning with natural resources groups.
That expertise turned out to be perfect for a project launched by Conservation International to create a community-supported fishery in Hawaii. It was a success, but Chow knew from his time in kitchens that there was no equivalent for local meat. Up to 90 percent of the food eaten in Hawaii is imported. “As an island you can only rely so much on outside sources,” he says.
Up to 90 percent of the food eaten in Hawaii is imported. “As an island you can only rely so much on outside sources,” he says.
That insight launched another quest. He moved to California to learn butchering and business know-how at The Local Butcher Shop, an innovative specialty shop in Berkeley. He and his baker wife, Harley Tunac, returned to Hawaii and opened The Local General Store in 2019. It provides locally grown beef, pork, venison, and chicken, as well as croissants and pastries, at farmers markets and pop-up locations. “It’s our effort to not just make food, but make us a more sustainable island,” he says.
In the past, almost all of Hawaii’s many ranchers shipped their cattle all the way to the mainland before slaughter. But Chow says ranching is starting to change. More animals are raised and slaughtered entirely in the state, and local meat is becoming more widely available. He is now working closely with ranchers to improve the quality of locally raised beef.
Jenette Ashtekar
As a graduate student at Purdue University, Jenette Ashtekar wrote an algorithm that predicts where farmers should take soil samples to best estimate the natural variations in nutrient and carbon levels across their acreage. Among other useful and cost-saving suggestions, maps created from this data show growers where they can apply less fertilizer, a major source of greenhouse gases. Ashtekar founded an agricultural analytics company in 2015 around her tech, and the system has now been used by thousands of farms in the U.S. and Canada. “Taking an idea and some math and turning it into a product that somebody is now using was mind-blowing,” she says. “I caught the startup bug.”
“We need change in our system, and there are management practices that can help everybody.”
Four years ago she joined the ag-tech firm CIBO, where she’s developing ways of quantifying the impact of regenerative practices like planting cover crops and reducing erosion. Such methods allow row-crop farmers to store more carbon in the soil, but it’s hard to pinpoint just how much. Ashtekar combines models, simulations, and satellite data so farm managers can better measure the value of what they sequester and get reimbursed for the carbon offsets they provide. The goal is to eventually enable growers to report this info throughout the supply chain, so companies can then market “carbon-smart” foods in the vein of organic or fair-trade products. “We need change in our system, and there are management practices that can help everybody,” she says.
Xavier Cortada
During a trip to Antarctica with the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program in the early 2000s, Miami artist Xavier Cortada had a realization: “I’m literally standing on the ice sheets that could melt and drown my city.” That inspired a body of work dedicated to making sea-level rise tangible to other people. Cortada started with a series of about 100 paintings created with sediment and melted ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Antarctic sea. Those art pieces provided the backdrop for yard signs he made for a 2018 project called Underwater HOA. Each sign features a number from zero to 17, which represents how many feet of sea-level rise it would take to submerge a house based on its elevation.
The project includes an ongoing education and engagement component as well. Members of the Underwater HOA, a group of homeowners from the suburb of Pinecrest, Florida, meet monthly to hear from experts — including some of Cortada’s colleagues at the University of Miami — and plan together for a climate-changed future. This year, Cortada is taking the work further with The Underwater, a project that will engage high school students, residents, and elected officials, and ultimately convene an “underwater summit” to plot out equitable ways to address Miami’s vulnerability to rising seas. “My hope is that these politicians aren’t going to be shamed into acting, but they’re going to be compelled by all this community support to want to be involved,” he says.
“I want to motivate you, to entice you, to make you curious enough so that you act.”
These projects are just the tip of the iceberg of Cortada’s work, which has also included interactive installments around mangrove reforestation, native wildflowers, and honoring Miamians lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. For him, art isn’t just about getting people to look at something. “It’s a very activist, engaged practice, where I want you to do something,” he says. “I want to motivate you, to entice you, to make you curious enough so that you act.”
Moñeka De Oro
When your home is a small island in the Pacific, climate change and a just transition aren’t future worries; they’re real today. That urgency fuels Moñeka De Oro’s advocacy for the people of the Northern Marianas, Guam, and neighboring nations, such as the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands. Her efforts include campaigns for sovereignty and self-determination, and demilitarization of U.S. territories like Guam and the Northern Marianas (which, like Puerto Rico, is a U.S. commonwealth). These islands all host large numbers of U.S. armed forces, military bases, and training sites. De Oro calls the military presence “a machine that takes and takes, and doesn’t give back a lot,” pointing to ecological damage and destruction of ancestral cultural sites. “There isn’t enough done to hold the military accountable for its role in perpetuating the climate crisis,” she says.
“It’s really important to ensure the next generation is equipped with the tools to be resilient.”
She joined the fledgling Micronesia Climate Change Alliance as a staff member in early 2020, working on community-based solutions for problems such as illegal dumping, among other projects. The group also assisted in launching a climate-focused youth coalition that has grown to more than 100 members and is organizing an island-wide competition to create art from trash.
With support from Guam Green Growth Initiative and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, De Oro is developing a climate literacy curriculum for K-12 students throughout the Mariana Islands; the goal is to begin teaching it in schools by 2025. “It’s really important to ensure the next generation is equipped with the tools to be resilient.”
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Credits
- FIX DIRECTOR
- Jess Stahl
- MANAGING EDITOR
- Jaime Buerger
- PROJECT EDITOR
- Kat McGowan
- EDITORS
- Chuck Squatriglia, Claire Elise Thompson
- RESEARCH
- Barbara Kean
- ART DIRECTOR
- Mia Torres
- CREATIVE ADVISER
- Mignon Khargie
- DEVELOPMENT
- Michael Weslander