EXPLORE WILD HOPE

The Santa Monica mountains near Los Angeles are home to a wide range of wildlife—including coyotes and mountain lions—all cut off from the rest of the world by the city’s massive freeways.

A lifelong advocate for wildlife, Beth Pratt has worked in environmental leadership roles for over thirty years.

Boyan Slat is the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit organization developing and scaling technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastic.

It’s estimated that up to 14 million tons of plastic end up in the world’s oceans every year—and 80% of it pours into the sea from polluted rivers. In Kingston, Jamaica, Alecia Beaufort and her team at Clean Harbors Jamaica have partnered with The Ocean Cleanup to stop the waste before it ever reaches the sea.

Boyan Slat’s team at The Ocean Cleanup has developed and deployed an open-ocean system that can haul in 7000 kilos of garbage in just a day and a half. Their current target is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The hope is that a fleet of these systems will remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.

After years spend researching local wildlife, like the iconic cougar P-22, biologists around Los Angeles pinpointed the vital location for a wildlife crossing to be built to restitch an entire ecosystem.

At the age of 18, Boyan Slat founded The Ocean Cleanup and set out to clean plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Ten years later, the team is installing catchment systems at the mouths of rivers to stop plastic pollution of the seas at their source.

Increasingly, wildlife migratory routes are blocked by human-made obstacles like highways, cities, and dams. Wildlife corridors seek to connect as much land and water as possible to give animals the freedom to roam and maintain healthy, genetically diverse populations. 

Brazil has over a million miles of roads, and Fernanda Abra has devoted herself to making them less dangerous to local wildlife and biodiversity.

Just like humans, wild animals often need to cross busy roads as they roam. But unlike us, they can’t rely on stoplights and crosswalks. That’s where wildlife crossings come in.