Because it is the award’s 20th anniversary, they brought out the big guns. Al Gore gave an excellent keynote speech emphasizing individual responsibility.

Robert Redford lent some star power.

Tracy Chapman performed well at intermission.

But of course the main attention is supposed to be on the award recipients, one from each of the inhabited continents. This year’s winners (from left to right) included:

• ISLAND NATIONS: Yuyun Ismawati, who brought modern waste management systems to poor neighborhoods in Bali.
• EUROPE: Olga Speranskaya of Moscow, who created a network of organizations aimed at correcting the Soviet legacy of abandoned toxic chemicals.
• CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA: Hugo Jabin (3rd from left) and Wanze Eduards (second from right ) who waged a campaign against Chinese logging in Suriname.
• AFRICA: Marc Ona, who fought a Chinese mining development threatening Gabon’s rain forests.
• ASIA: Rizwana Hasan, who worked to reduce environmental damage from the ship breaking industry in Bangladesh.
• NORTH AMERICA: Maria Gunnoe, who stood up to mountaintop mining in West Virginia.

This is a worthy award that has done much good. Yet there is something a little odd in flying barefoot peasant activists in to mingle with Pacific Heights matrons, while workers from environmental activists battle each other to reach the City Hall hors d’oeuvres tables. (This year the Pacific Heights contingent seemed somewhat reduced in number.)

The award recipients truly accomplished great things. But, afterward, life outside city hall seemed unchanged.

.

It’s all too easy sometimes to get down on the Bay Area. But then you come upon information like this.

San Francisco recycles 69 percent of its total waste. Okay, for comparison, what percentage does Houston recycle?

a. 2.6 percent
b. 18.6 percent
c. 26.6 percent
d. 44.6 percent

And a bonus question:

25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as _____ to get recycling bins from the city.

Answers after the jump.

Houston: it’s not San Francisco. Not by a long shot!

Percentage of its total waste recycled by Houston:

a. 2.6 percent

And:

25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as ten years to get recycling bins from the city.

Be proud, San Franciscans!

.

via HuffingPost

.

One suggestion has been to require double hulls on cargo ships. This is a fine idea, but I don’t know if the Bay Area has the clout to bring about the retooling of the entire worldwide fleet of vessels.

Rep. George Miller (a rather sensible fellow for a politician) has said that requiring cargo ships to have escort boats, stockpiling cleanup equipment more broadly across the Bay Area or spending hundreds of millions of dollars to remove hazardous underwater rocks should also be considered.

Put me down at least in favor of the escort boat proposal. This is a really good idea, which would go far to eliminate the danger of spills in the bay. Now, I heard a representative of the shipping industry complain that this would be prohibitively expensive. Right, and the auto industry said we could never afford seat belts or shatterproof windshields either.

Think about it. These enormous vessels are carrying cargo like, for example, huge fleets of Priuses destined for dealerships all around the bay. You think there’s any money in that? They can afford a tug to guide them through the bay, for goodness sake. And this would help to provide employment for our local watermen.

The tug escort plan is one that really must be enacted. Right now. I only hope the lobbyists don’t get to Arnold before it can get done.

This photo is from a set posted to Flickr entitled “San Francisco Bay Debris – KQED QUEST.” The photos document voluntary Bay cleanup by a group of San Francisco sailors, who were moved to action when a seaplane crashed into a telephone poll that was floating in the bay — sixty-five years ago. According to a the site, “Ever since, a group of Sausalito sailors has toiled as San Francisco Bay’s unheralded trash collectors — removing everything from floating concrete to dead bodies.”