Saving Our Planet

"I can still feel that leap of enthusiasm, and real joy, at the prospect of finally getting out to the beach, and running around," says Sylvia Earle, recalling her move to coastal Florida at age 13. "Probably the most important thing, to me, aside from just the freedom of it and the power of it, was the kind of creatures that you could see along the beach, that you can't find anywhere else." That child's fascination with the crabs she found scurrying in the sand, was the beginning of a remarkable career in marine science. Today, Sylvia Earle is the best-known woman marine scientist on the planet. Among other accomplishments, she has walked untethered on the sea floor at a lower depth than any other human being. When Sylvia Earle first began her career, she met resistance. Some people could not accept a woman traveling with men on long scientific expeditions, but her remarkable accomplishments have won her a position in the oceanographic community that transcends boundaries. Botanist, biologist, conservationist, entrepreneur, Sylvia Earle has followed whales in the open sea, fought with sharks, and lived for weeks at a time on the floor of the sea, in the Tektite undersea station. She has challenged and overcome every obstacle that stood in the path of her burning curiosity about the magical world beneath the waves. Today, Dr. Earle is Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society. To date, she has led over 70 expeditions, logging more than 6500 hours underwater. In this two-part podcast, recorded at the Auberge du Soleil in California's Napa Valley during the 2014 International Achievement Summit, Dr. Earle warns her listeners that mankind's fate is inextricably bound up with the fate of the global ecosystem, particularly the world's oceans.

"I can still feel that leap of enthusiasm, and real joy, at the prospect of finally getting out to the beach, and running around," says Sylvia Earle, recalling her move to coastal Florida at age 13. "Probably the most important thing, to me, aside from just the freedom of it and the power of it, was the kind of creatures that you could see along the beach, that you can't find anywhere else." That child's fascination with the crabs she found scurrying in the sand, was the beginning of a remarkable career in marine science. Today, Sylvia Earle is the best-known woman marine scientist on the planet. Among other accomplishments, she has walked untethered on the sea floor at a lower depth than any other human being. When Sylvia Earle first began her career, she met resistance. Some people could not accept a woman traveling with men on long scientific expeditions, but her remarkable accomplishments have won her a position in the oceanographic community that transcends boundaries. Botanist, biologist, conservationist, entrepreneur, Sylvia Earle has followed whales in the open sea, fought with sharks, and lived for weeks at a time on the floor of the sea, in the Tektite undersea station. She has challenged and overcome every obstacle that stood in the path of her burning curiosity about the magical world beneath the waves. Today, Dr. Earle is Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society. To date, she has led over 70 expeditions, logging more than 6500 hours underwater. In this two-part podcast, recorded at the Auberge du Soleil in California's Napa Valley during the 2014 International Achievement Summit, Dr. Earle warns her listeners that mankind's fate is inextricably bound up with the fate of the global ecosystem, particularly the world's oceans.

When the rest of the world was just waking up to the possibility of cell phones and the Internet, Tony Fadell was already creating the technology behind the smartphone. Author of more than 300 patents, he sold a microprocessor startup to Apple just as he was leaving college. He spent the next decade pioneering mobile technology for the leading electronics companies, but none would fully commit to marketing the devices he created. When investors passed on Fadell's idea for a pocket-sized digital music player, Steve Jobs recruited him to design just such a product for Apple. Fadell led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone, rising to Senior Vice President of the iPod division. Not satisfied with revolutionizing the way we communicate, navigate and listen to music, Fadell founded Nest Labs to bring smart technology to the most common household devices. The Nest Thermostat conserves energy by learning the habits of its users and can be managed remotely by smartphone. Nest Protect is an intelligent smoke and carbon monoxide detector that distinguishes between levels of threat and provides relaxed voice alerts instead of piercing alarms. Future products may address areas such as water conservation and home security. Last January, Nest was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion. In this podcast, recorded at the 2014 International Achievement Summit in San Francisco, he is joined onstage by journalist and Academy of Achievement delegate Samantha Barry. In their conversation, Tony Fadell, still recovering from a sporting injury, describes his career as an inventor, an Apple computer executive, and as the Founder and CEO of Nest.

The Big Bang theory proposes that the universe we know emerged from a uniformly hot and impenetrable mass of protons, electrons and radiation. But until recently, we knew very little of the first stages of the 13 billion year process in which our cosmos took shape. In 1974, a young astrophysicist, John Mather of Columbia University's Goddard Center for Space Studies, devised a proposal for a satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), to measure the microwave background radiation in space. From temperature variations in the radiation emanating from different points in the universe, he hoped to trace the paths of the infant galaxies from their starting point. Mather persuaded NASA to undertake the mission, and was hired by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to guide the project. For the next decade and a half, Mather led a team of over 1,000 scientists and engineers, designing and building the exquisitely calibrated instruments such an experiment required. In 1989, COBE was launched into space. By 1992, Mather had found what he was looking for: cool trails etched in the otherwise uniform background, precisely the 'blackbody' patterns predicted by the Big Bang theory. Mather's discovery has been hailed as 'the missing link in cosmology.' The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences praised Mather for elevating cosmology to a precision science, and honored his achievement with the Nobel Prize. Adam Riess was a doctoral candidate in astrophysics at Harvard when he devised a more accurate method for measuring the position of the exploding 'white dwarf' stars known as Type 1a supernovae. In 1998, he joined the High-Z Supernova Search Team, an international effort monitoring Type 1a supernovae to measure the expansion rate of the universe. Physicists long believed that the expansion of the universe was gradually slowing. Riess and his colleagues determined that the stars are, in fact, moving outward at an ever more rapid rate. The expansion of the universe is not slowing, but accelerating. This momentous discovery has spurred a massive surge of research in the 'dark energy' that propels this expansion. In honoring 41-year-old Adam Riess with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Swedish Academy noted that the field of cosmology had been 'shaken at its foundation' by his discoveries. In this podcast, John Mather and Adam Riess, discuss the past and future of the universe and the theory of dark energy. It was recorded at the Top of the Hay in the Hay-Adams Hotel, during the 2012 International Achievement Summit in Washington D.C.

The Big Bang theory proposes that the universe we know emerged from a uniformly hot and impenetrable mass of protons, electrons and radiation. But until recently, we knew very little of the first stages of the 13 billion year process in which our cosmos took shape. In 1974, a young astrophysicist, John Mather of Columbia University's Goddard Center for Space Studies, devised a proposal for a satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), to measure the microwave background radiation in space. From temperature variations in the radiation emanating from different points in the universe, he hoped to trace the paths of the infant galaxies from their starting point. Mather persuaded NASA to undertake the mission, and was hired by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to guide the project. For the next decade and a half, Mather led a team of over 1,000 scientists and engineers, designing and building the exquisitely calibrated instruments such an experiment required. In 1989, COBE was launched into space. By 1992, Mather had found what he was looking for: cool trails etched in the otherwise uniform background, precisely the 'blackbody' patterns predicted by the Big Bang theory. Mather's discovery has been hailed as 'the missing link in cosmology.' The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences praised Mather for elevating cosmology to a precision science, and honored his achievement with the Nobel Prize. Adam Riess was a doctoral candidate in astrophysics at Harvard when he devised a more accurate method for measuring the position of the exploding 'white dwarf' stars known as Type 1a supernovae. In 1998, he joined the High-Z Supernova Search Team, an international effort monitoring Type 1a supernovae to measure the expansion rate of the universe. Physicists long believed that the expansion of the universe was gradually slowing. Riess and his colleagues determined that the stars are, in fact, moving outward at an ever more rapid rate. The expansion of the universe is not slowing, but accelerating. This momentous discovery has spurred a massive surge of research in the 'dark energy' that propels this expansion. In honoring 41-year-old Adam Riess with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Swedish Academy noted that the field of cosmology had been 'shaken at its foundation' by his discoveries. In this podcast, John Mather and Adam Riess, discuss the past and future of the universe and the theory of dark energy. It was recorded at the Top of the Hay in the Hay-Adams Hotel, during the 2012 International Achievement Summit in Washington D.C.

Joel Sartore is a photographer, speaker, author, teacher, and a 20-year contributor to National Geographic magazine. His assignments have taken him to every continent and to the world's most beautiful and challenging environments, from the High Arctic to the Antarctic. In his own words, he is on a mission to document endangered species and landscapes in order to show 'a world worth saving.' His first assignments for National Geographic not only introduced him to nature photography but also allowed him to see firsthand the impact of human activity on the environment. In his words, 'It is folly to think that we can destroy one species and ecosystem after another and not affect humanity. When we save species, we're actually saving ourselves.' He has written several books including RARE: Portraits of America's Endangered Species, Photographing Your Family, and Nebraska: Under a Big Red Sky. In addition to the work he has done for National Geographic, Sartore has contributed to Audubon Magazine, Geo, Time, Life, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and numerous book projects. He and his work have been the subjects of several national broadcasts including National Geographic's Explorer, the NBC Nightly News, NPR's Weekend Edition and an hour-long PBS documentary, At Close Range. He is also a regular contributor to the CBS Sunday Morning Show with Charles Osgood. His most recent book is Let's Be Reasonable, a collection of essays from the CBS Sunday Morning show. Joel Sartore shares his story, and his photographs, in this podcast, recorded at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. during the 2012 International Achievement Summit.

Joel Sartore is a photographer, speaker, author, teacher, and a 20-year contributor to National Geographic magazine. His assignments have taken him to every continent and to the world's most beautiful and challenging environments, from the High Arctic to the Antarctic. In his own words, he is on a mission to document endangered species and landscapes in order to show 'a world worth saving.' His first assignments for National Geographic not only introduced him to nature photography but also allowed him to see firsthand the impact of human activity on the environment. In his words, 'It is folly to think that we can destroy one species and ecosystem after another and not affect humanity. When we save species, we're actually saving ourselves.' He has written several books including RARE: Portraits of America's Endangered Species, Photographing Your Family, and Nebraska: Under a Big Red Sky. In addition to the work he has done for National Geographic, Sartore has contributed to Audubon Magazine, Geo, Time, Life, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and numerous book projects. He and his work have been the subjects of several national broadcasts including National Geographic's Explorer, the NBC Nightly News, NPR's Weekend Edition and an hour-long PBS documentary, At Close Range. He is also a regular contributor to the CBS Sunday Morning Show with Charles Osgood. His most recent book is Let's Be Reasonable, a collection of essays from the CBS Sunday Morning show. Joel Sartore shares his story, and his photographs, in this podcast, recorded at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. during the 2012 International Achievement Summit.

The paleoanthropologist Lee Rogers Berger has supervised archeological expeditions across South Africa, in Zimbabwe, and on the islands of the Micronesian archipelago. In 1997, he received the first National Geographic Society Prize for Research and Exploration for his studies of human evolution. He is best known for his 2008 discovery of Australopithecus sediba, a previously unknown species of hominid. His nine-year-old son Matthew found the first fragments of sediba in a cave outside Johannesburg. The site eventually yielded the two million-year-old remains of a young boy, an infant and two adults, all specimens of the species of Australopithecus sediba, perhaps an intermediate stage between ape-like hominids and the more human Homo habilis. Berger studied anthropology, archaeology and geology at Georgia Southern University, while working as a news cameraman on the side. On one occasion, he threw down his camera and jumped into the Savannah River to save a drowning woman, an act that won him awards from the National Press Photographers Association and the Boy Scouts of America. He undertook doctoral studies in palaeoanthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where he has lived ever since. Berger is the author of several books, including In the Footsteps of Eve and The Official Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind. Dr. Berger presents his discoveries in this podcast, recorded at the National Geographic Society in Washington D.C. during the 2012 International Achievement Summit.

As a girl in England, Jane Goodall dreamed of traveling to Africa to study animals in the wild. In the summer of 1960, her dream brought her to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, to observe the wild chimpanzees at Gombe Stream. Other scientists did not believe that a 26-year-old woman could survive alone in the bush, but Jane Goodall did more than survive. Her work revolutionized the field of primatology. Over the years, she found chimpanzees engaging in activities that were once thought definitively human, such as tool-making, cooperative hunting and even warfare. Her work, the longest continuous field study of any living creature, has forced us to redefine our understanding of what it means to be human, and provided a vital insight into the evolution of our own species. Today, Jane Goodall travels the world, campaigning for the humane treatment of all animals, and empowering young people in their own efforts to preserve the environment for all living things. In this two-part podcast, recorded at South Africa's Singita Sabi Sands Game Reserve during the 2009 International Achievement Summit, Dame Jane Goodall gives an engrossing account of her lifelong study of chimpanzees in the wild.

Richard Leakey won fame as a paleoanthropologist while still in his early twenties, with sensational discoveries of the fossil remains of our most ancient ancestors, but his subsequent career as an author, conservationist, government official and political activist of unyielding courage has been even more extraordinary. For nearly 30 years, he directed the National Museum of Kenya, creating a world-class center for the study of human origins. As Director of Kenya's National Wildlife Service, he led a successful campaign against poaching of the endangered African elephant. After surviving a plane crash that cost him both his legs, he founded an opposition party to combat the corruption of the country's one-party government. Subjected to constant harassment, death threats and even beatings by the regime's supporters, he won election to parliament, where he forced reform of Kenya's constitution. As a government official, he continued his campaign against corruption in the civil service and secured a resumption of international aid. Now retired from politics, he remains a passionate and effective advocate for the environment, for the rights of the disabled, and for the cause of democracy in his beloved Kenya.