Ecuador had agreed last year to accept money in exchange for not drilling for oil in Yasuní National Park, an area of the Amazon rainforest that last year set a record for the most mammal, bird, amphibian and plant species in the world.

But a fundraiser was held last night that collected the $116 million necessary to temporarily halt exploitation of the area for oil.

Digital Journal explains:

An odd alliance of governments, film stars, Japanese businesses, Russian institutions, and soft drink companies have come forward to help protect the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador from exploitation by oil companies.

Yasuní National Park in Ecuador has become the planet’s latest success story, with a United Nations “crowdfunding” initiative held Thursday night to raise $116 million, an amount needed to put a temporary halt to exploitation by the oil industry of 722 square miles of the Ecuadorian Amazon known as the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil fields.

The Guardian has more:

Development of the oilfield, which was planned to take place immediately if the money had not been raised, would have inevitably led to ecological devastation and the eventual release of over 400m tonnes of CO2.

Ecuador agreed to halt plans to mine the oilfield if it could raise 50% of the $7.6bn revenue being lost by not mining the oil. While the world’s leading conservation groups pledged nothing, regional governments in France and Belgium offered millions of dollars – with $2m alone from the Belgian region of Wallonia. A New York investment banker donated her annual salary and Bo Derek, Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Norton and Al Gore all contributed.

Wangari Maathai receives the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo – the first black African woman to do so

Wangari Maathai’s compelling life story is inextricably linked with the social and political changes that so much of Africa has been through since the idea of throwing off European colonialism began to gain traction shortly after World War II.

Her unique insight was that the lives of Kenyans – and, by extension, of people in many other developing countries – would be made better if economic and social progress went hand in hand with environmental protection.

The Green Belt Movement, which she founded in 1977, has planted an estimated 45 million trees around Kenya.

The straightforward environmental benefits of that would have been important enough on their own in a country whose population has grown more than 10-fold over the last century, creating huge pressure on land and water.

But what made the movement more remarkable was that it was also conceived as a source of employment in rural areas, and a way to give new skills to women who regularly came second to men in terms of power, education, nutrition and much else.

Now, she has succumbed to a battle with cancer. But if cancer was new to her, battle was definitely not; it was a way of life.

Opposing a major government-backed development in Nairobi, she was labelled a “crazy woman”; it was suggested that she should behave like a good African woman and do as she was told.

Her former husband made similar comments when suing for divorce: she was strong-willed, and could not be controlled.

To read more of this BBC story, click here.

Yvon’s interest in climbing began with his membership in the Southern California Falconry Club at age 14. He began climbing cliff faces to see the falcon aeries. The only pitons available at the time were made of soft iron, placed once and left behind. Yvon decided to make his own chrome-molybdenum steel pitons and became a blacksmith making two an hour which he sold for $1.50 each. Word spread and his pitons and later camping equipment were in high demand. He partnered with an aeronautical engineer, Tom Frost in 1965 and in the 9 years they were together, they redesigned and improved almost every climbing tool, to make them stronger, lighter, simpler, and more functional. They would return from every trip to the mountains with new ideas for improving existing tools.

By 1970, Chouinard Equipment had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S. It had also become an environmental villain because its gear was damaging the rock. After an ascent of the degraded Nose route on El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, they decided to phase out of the piton business, their first environmental step on a long journey.

In 1972, they introduced an alternative, aluminum chocks that could be wedged by hand rather then hammered in and out of cracks. They were introduced in their first catalog that same year.

The catalog opened with an editorial from the owners on the environmental hazards of pitons. A 14-page essay by Sierra climber Doug Robinson on how to use chocks began with a powerful paragraph:

There is a word for it, and the word is clean. Climbing with only nuts and runners for protection is clean climbing. Clean because the rock is left unaltered by the passing climber. Clean because nothing is hammered into the rock and then hammered back out, leaving the rock scarred and the next climber’s experience less natural. Clean because the climber’s protection leaves little trace of his ascension. Clean is climbing the rock without changing it; a step closer to organic climbing for the natural man.

Within a few months chocks sold faster than they could be made.

At the time climbing clothing was usually drab grey with little color and active sportswear had not been born. On a winter climbing trip to Scotland in 1970, Chouinard bought a regulation team rugby shirt to wear rock climbing. Overbuilt to withstand the rigors of rugby, it had a collar that would keep the hardware slings from cutting into the neck. It was blue, with two red and one yellow center stripe across the chest. Back in the States, Chouinard wore it around his climbing friends, who asked where they could get one.

They ordered a few shirts from Umbro, in England which quickly sold out. They couldn’t keep them in stock, and soon began ordering shirts from New Zealand and Argentina as well. Other companies followed suit and they soon realized that they had introduced a minor fashion craze to the United States. They began to see clothing as a way to help support the marginally profitable hardware business, and by 1972 we were selling polyurethane rain cagoules and bivouac sacks from Scotland, boiled-wool gloves and mittens from Austria, and hand-knit reversible “schizo” hats from Boulder.

The new clothing business was named Patagonia to reflect “romantic visions of glaciers tumbling into fjords, jagged windswept peaks, gauchos and condors.”

They introduced insulated and waterproof clothing with Capilene® and Synchilla®, sales soared and have had an active R+D program ever since introducing a palette of colors. They made the INC 500′s fastest growing companies list.

In 1991, with the recession, their business took a dramatic nosedive and their loan was called forcing them to lay off 20% of their staff. They have kept growth – and borrowing – to a modest scale ever since.

Part of the Patagonia culture was allowing team members to dress however they wished, even barefooted. Peple ran or surfed at lunch or played vollyball in the sandpit at the back of the building. The company sponsored ski and climbing trips.

There are no private offices that sometimes creates distractions but helps keep communication open. Their cafeteria is a gathering place for employees and serves mostly vegetarian food. They opened a child care center, one of only 150 in the country at the time. (Today there are more than 3000). This atmosphere helps keep the business more family than corporate. Flexible hours and job sharing were introduced.

In 1986, Patagonia committed to donate 10% of profits each year to these groups. We later upped the ante to 1% of sales, or 10% of profits, whichever was greater. They have kept to that commitment every year since.

In 1988, they initiated their first national environmental campaign on behalf of an alternative master plan to deurbanize the Yosemite Valley. Each year since, they have undertaken a major education campaign on an environmental issue. They took an early position against globalization of trade where it means compromise of environmental and labor standards. They have argued for dam removal where silting, marginally useful dams compromise fish life. They have supported wild lands projects that seek to preserve ecosystems whole and create corridors for wildlife to roam. They hold, every eighteen months, a “Tools for Activists” conference to teach marketing and publicity skills to some of the groups we work with.

They also, early on, began initial steps to reduce their own role as a corporate polluter and have been using recycled-content paper for their catalogs since the mid-eighties. They worked with Malden Mills to develop recycled polyester for use in their Synchilla fleece.

Their distribution center in Reno, opened in 1996 and achieved a 60% reduction in energy use through solar-tracking skylights and radiant heating; they used recycled content for everything from rebar to carpet to the partitions between urinals. They retrofitted lighting systems in existing stores, and build-outs for new stores became increasingly environmentally friendly. They assessed the dyes they used and eliminated colors from the line that required the use of toxic metals and sulfides. Most importantly, since the early nineties, they have made environmental responsibility a key element of everyone’s job.

They commissioned an independent research company to assess the environmental impact of four major fibers. They discovered the worst of all fibers was cotton that used 25% of all toxic pesticides used in agriculture harming the environment with strong ties to the damage of workers health. In 1994, they made the decision to go 100% organic and had 18 months to make the switch for 66 products and only 4 months to line up the fabric. They succeeded and today every Patagonia product made of cotton is organic with increasing use of hemp and recycled polyester.

“We still pursue climbing and surfing, activities that entail risk, require soul, and invite reflection. We favor informal travels with friends – doing what we love to do – to the camera-covered event. We can’t bring ourselves to knowingly make a mediocre product. And we cannot avert our eyes from the harm done, by all of us, to our one and only home. ”

At the end of his talk, Yvon shared two new ideas he is implementing. When a customer comes into a Patagonia store and asks a sales rep for a product, they will from this point on ask “Do you really need this?” And, they are developing a label that will tell buyers what a product is made of, where a product is made, how it is made, by whom it is made and under what conditions and insure it is non-toxic from material to manufacturing.

President Obama’s State of the Union address this week called for new emphasis on transformative technologies and infrastructure investment, including energy efficiency and renewable energy measures.

I think that the president, in calling on Americans to muster their resilience, ingenuity and propensity for hard work, sounded the correct tone for rousing the nation from the malaise of the last several years.

If we’re lucky, the president’s speech allows us to resume a national conversation — largely held in abeyance during the fury of the 2010 election year — that recognizes green business as an appropriate vehicle for economic renewal.

To inform the conversation, I suggest that Americans consider a second green paradigm from an unusual source, the Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne and — although his work in the field is unknown to most Americans — a distinguished sustainability expert. In the new book and film, “Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World,” Prince Charles and his collaborators, Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, link the emerging green economy to a return to traditional values.

While “Harmony” encourages the use of modern science, advanced technologies, and financial modeling to improve and decision-making, its authors make the case for a return to a worldview shaped by the requirements of Nature. This paradigm is at once deeply traditional and on the leading edge of 21st century thought.

On the one hand, it is rooted in — as “Harmony” details — the beliefs of the venerable Western, Asian and indigenous cultures, which placed reverence for the natural world at the center of their religious, social and economic systems. On the other hand, it asks us to replace the aging and increasingly ineffective industrial systems of the last two centuries in favor of sustainable technologies and practices aimed at restoring the balance between modern societies and the natural world.

What might “Harmony’s” world look like?

• Global acceptance and use of energy efficient and green practices to build and renovate property and infrastructure. As “Harmony” points out, this objective can be achieved in diverse ways. Indigenous and historic construction methods are frequently highly sustainable and energy efficient or can be combined with modern, sustainable technologies to good effect.

• New emphasis on the establishment or strengthening of self-sufficient communities, designed to encourage walkability, livability and interconnectedness. Prince Charles’s Poundbury is a pioneering example of such a community. In the U.S., new urbanist principles have been used successfully to guide the design of localities and neighborhoods similar to Poundbury. The responsible property investment movement, in which I have participated for some years, champions investment in livable, walkable and green communities, as does Prince Charles’s Foundation for the Built Environment.

• Increased use of sustainable farming methods and the integration of urban agriculture at the local and neighborhood levels. A return to fresh, community-grown foods promotes health, provides new connections with nature, and creates jobs. The use of energy efficient greenhouses makes it possible to source local produce year-round in diverse climates.

• Lifelong ecological education and training. An appreciation of nature and of local and global ecosystems can be incorporated in primary, secondary, university and adult education, as well as in professional training. Eco-oriented education can enrich lifelong learning for children, adults and elders, and provide preparation for entry into such 21st century professions as energy auditing, environmental engineering, or industrial design based on bio-mimicry.

• The expansion of global investment aimed at reversing climate change. Investment in this sector might range from public-private programs to develop next generation, sustainable technologies in the areas of energy efficiency, construction, agriculture and carbon sequestration, to international efforts that offer financing to developing nations and indigenous peoples to preserve the Amazon rainforest and other ecologically important sites.

As America looks to both traditional values and innovation to inform its future, Prince Charles’s worldview is fresh and compelling.

Image White House photo by Pete Souza via WhiteHouse.gov

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Leanne Tobias is founder and managing principal of Malachite LLC, an advisory firm that specializes in the development, leasing, management, financing and certification of sustainable or green real estate on a global basis.

At the same SVN gathering an Innovation Award was presented to Tevis Howard, the founder of KOMAZA, a nonprofit social enterprise committed to reducing rural poverty in Africa by connecting poor farmers with high-value markets via sustainable forestry. Working in areas affected by desertification, the project has measurable positive environmental impacts.

The couple are also running trainings, offering consultancy, and selling their copyrighted plans for commercial and domestic aquaponics systems online. For $99, interested individuals or families can instantly download their low energy 64 or 128 square foot Micro Aquaponics System Plans and Operating Manual with a LIfetime Satisfaction Guarantee. This system can be built for under $700 worth of materials.