Climate Honorees Find Hope in Small-Scale Solutions and Community Resilience

While the organization has over $11 million committed to 75 solar projects just this year, Honnold says that it is “literally a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket in terms of the global transition of renewables.”

But he said what gives him hope is the power of “dreaming small,” and he continues to draw inspiration from communities that need better access to energy. “These are people that know the solutions to their problems, and all they really need is the opportunity to execute their vision,” he added.

Marine biologist and National Geographic Explorer Erika Woolsey, another honoree, said she draws her hope from the reef-building coral. To her, the anemone look-alikes lift much of the weight in rebuilding seabeds and coastlines wrecked by massive storms and bleaching events.

Woolsey said that years ago, as she co-founded The Hydrous, a nonprofit devoted to helping people appreciate the marine environment by creating 3D models of them, one of her previous study sites at the Great Barrier Reef was wiped out by a cyclone. In her recent return, Woolsey witnessed the marine site grow anew, populated with corals and fish.

“This was in a well-protected region, and when an ecosystem has time and space, it can persevere,” Woolsey said. “This gives me tremendous hope in the work I do.”

Labor organizer and human rights strategist Saket Soni, meanwhile, celebrated recovery workers and responders—those who help rebuild communities and restore homes after natural disasters like fires and hurricanes—whom he called the country’s “white blood cells” and “indispensable workers of the climate era.”

Witnessing the sordid living and job conditions of these workers was once evidence of what Soni called the U.S.’s “false promise of hope,” but a mentor reminded him that it was his job to make that hope real.

Soni said his nonprofit Resilience Force, which works with third-party contractors to ensure recovery workers get better pay and safety standards, has made a new, “highly skilled, dignified profession” out of the job.

He also touted how the years-long reconstruction and adaptation jobs these workers do are irreplaceable, not even by automation or artificial intelligence. “We’re making resilience work a way to build not just homes,” Soni said, “but to build hope.”

Soni then directed his toast to the dinner attendees: “Standing here with all of you, I can see that we’re not alone. You are building hope—out of 3D-printed homes in Texas, innovative reconstruction after the Los Angeles fires, greenhouses in India … To truly rebuild, it will take all of us in this room and outside of it.”