Last month Huffington Post asked their readers to vote on Game Changers in fields like business, entertainment, and environmental sustainability. After 3 million votes—let’s keep that momentum going on November 2, shall we?—the winners have been announced. Changing the environmental game is Ric O’Barry.
After working as a trainer and witnessing the conditions of captive dolphins on the 1960’s sitcom “Flipper,” O’Barry founded The Dolphin Project to free dolphins from captivity. Since then he has worked tirelessly to raise awareness of the plight of dolphins and other exploited aquatic life. He is most known for his Oscar-winning documentary “The Cove” which details the Japanese dolphin slaying in Taji national park.
Ric O'Barry
Another Game Changers worth mentioning in the context of environmentalism—they’re all worth mentioning in their respective fields—is Jeff Skoll the billionaire who once ran eBay and decided that entertainment can also be informative. In 2004 Skoll founded Participant Media to make informative entertainment and has funded such films as “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Syriana,” “The Soloist,” “The Cove,” and “Food, Inc.”
Skoll explains his system: “We find two or three key issues that come out of issues in film, find NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) working in that space, perhaps leaders in that space, and partner with them to build a campaign around issues in film. ‘The Soloist’ was about a schizophrenic, homeless man, so we took the issue of homelessness and created campaigns to raise food for the homeless. These campaigns for us are the key — the reason for the movie is the campaign.”
Jeff Skoll
I totally get why this guy won because people have soft spots for animals, but we’ve got so many other issues that affect HUMAN life. I think voting for a dolphin guy says a lot about where we stand as a nation in terms of green issues. Dolphins? Come on! The movie guy is alright by me because he is at least spreading the larger message to a large group of people.
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