I was browsing a fund raising newsletter I get from GrantStation today when I came across an interesting prize, the Alcan Prize for Sustainability. The winner of this prize gets $1 million to award "sustainability." Here's the GrantStation blurb:

The Alcan Prize for Sustainability is currently accepting applications for the 2007 Prize. The Prize awards US$1 million to the organization with the most comprehensive approach to addressing, achieving, and further advancing economic, environmental, and/or social sustainability. Nonprofits, NGOs, and civil societies from across the globe are invited and encouraged to apply. In addition, the nine organizations selected for the short list are awarded US$15,000 for capacity building. The annual deadline for the Prize is March 31.

Now this in itself interested me, so I went over to the Alcan web site to learn about last year's winner, the Barefoot College in India. These people are building rooftop rain water harvesting systems and putting in solar lighting, and, even more important, they are the poor themselves doing it.

Between 1972 and 1979 an attempt was made to provide quality services to the rural poor but this failed because urban professionals were not prepared to work for long periods with job insecurity, low salaries and primitive living conditions. This led to a fundamental shift in mindset towards developing the capacity and competence of the rural poor to provide the same technical services. This was when the ‘barefoot approach’ was born. Since then ‘barefoot’ professionals have been recruited from the villages as teachers, solar and water engineers, health workers, drillers and communicators. This has contributed to the building up of their confidence and self esteem.

And that is not even the most amazing part of this discovery. At the bottom of the page about the Alcan Prize is this little statement: "The Alcan Prize for Sustainability programme is climate neutral and offsets CO2 emissions generated from management and travel activities relating to the Prize with contributions to Climate Care."

Well, so I had to go over to Climate Care to see what it's about. What an amazing idea. You can calculate the greenhouse gases that your regular life and travel activities generate, and then you can donate enough to Climate Care and its environmentally friendly projects to offset the damage you're doing.

I first heard about this issue in England last fall. Tanya, daughter of my good friend James, was saying that she and her husband had been planning a trip to Nepal, but they were reconsidering because of the greenhouse gases the airplane flights would contribute to the planet's overall total and to global warming. I was aghast at the idea of NOT traveling just because it was contributing to global warming. What if we all stayed home? We might help the planet some, I reasoned, but then all that would be offset by the decline in intercultural understanding and peace and harmony that travel encourages. We NEED to travel now, more than ever, has been my clarion call since 9/11. We need to stand head to head and face to face with the peoples of the world, to see how we are alike and how we are different, to learn true multi-cultural vision.

Hey, I'm not a cultural ambassadorial scholar for nothing!

But this is a fascinating idea. Voluntarily contribute to clean-green projects after calculating just how much my reg'lr ol' life spews greenhouse gases into the air. What a concept. I didn't do the calculation yet, and I blanche at what the total must be after 10 months of travel around the world, taking trains, planes and belching buses.

But I think I need to think this out some more.