The woman who calculated how much plastic pollutes the oceans and 24 other creators of a better world
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TO Jenna Jambeck life changed as she was on her way to pick up her children from school. Suddenly you received a call, or rather “the phone call”, the one that all exponents of the world of science, academia, art or research hope to receive one day. From the MacArthur Foundation they announced that she had been selected among the 25 winners of this year’s scholarships. It is not the Nobel, but it is a unconstrained cash prize of $ 800,000 over five years which is awarded at the choice of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to “genius” people who deserve a grant for their work. You are only notified by telephone and the fellows who receive the award do not need to report to the foundation in any way how they will spend their money.
In fact, the Chicago foundation aims to honor and subsidize “genius” people who are able to lead us to “new understandings and inspirations” with their research and their “courage for discovery,” he said. Marlies Carruth, director of the grant program. The 2022 winners include a computer scientist, an ornithologist, a chemist, artists and those who, like Jenna Jameback, have dedicated their lives to fighting for the environment, starting with the problem of plastic.
Forty-eight year old professor of environmental engineering at the University of Georgia, Jenna Jameback was honored for her calculation of the amount of plastic created in the world since 1950 and ended up polluting our environments: his is for example the famous estimate of the 8 million tons of plastic that end up in the oceans every year.
In college, Jameback began to take an interest in waste cycle, wondering where all the consumed plastic ended up and how it was disposed of. From there she started a research path that led her to investigate the Ganges and Mississippi rivers, to document the polluting sources and to ask herself questions both on the quantity and on the possible solutions to the problem. For example, she has developed the Marine Debris Tracker mobile app which provides a platform for community members to help understand the types and quantities of debris present in their territory and the data collected helps search and disposal, as well as you and your team is responsible for the “Circularity Assessment Protocol”, an economic system for evaluating the management of plastic material, a method now applied also in some Asian cities suffocated by the waste problem.
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Among the fellows of the MacArthur Foundation there is also the “ornithologist poet” Joseph Drew Lanham, professor of forestry and environmental conservation at Clemson University. Naturalist and writer, Lanham fights for the rights of blacks and is the author of several books he has been awarded because with his actions “he creates a new model of conservation that combines the science of conservation with the personal, historical and cultural narratives of nature. “. He received the award for his work and for his books, but above all for the “new perspective with which he looks at things”, inclusive and open to the future, the same that led to winning the MacArthur scholarship too. Emily Wanga doctor who founded a network of clinics where, thanks to community health workers, people released from prison are treated.
In the same vein, the efforts of Reuben Jonathan Miller who has conducted years of ethnographic research into the lives of incarcerated people and who was a volunteer chaplain at Cook County Jail after his father and brother were incarcerated. Or again Jennifer Carlson sociologist who studies “the motivations, assumptions and social forces that guide gun possession and shape gun culture in the United States”, or the artist Paul Chan of New York, chemistry Danna Freedman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “which creates new molecular materials with unique properties directly relevant to quantum information technologies”, or Ikue Mori electronic music composer and performer who “transforms the use of percussion into improvisation and expands the boundaries of machine-based music” or the cellist Tomeka Reid which “expands the expressive possibilities of the cello in improvised music”.
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To all of them, and many others, the MacArthur Foundation has awarded an award for genius that will allow them to continue “exploring the limits of understanding” by supporting them financially. For a better future.
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