The young boy from New Jersey tromps through the rain forest for the first time. A feeling of calm comes over him as he stares at the lush canopy of green that is everywhere. Josh Knauer, 10, is on summer vacation, and he has just traveled across the country cooped up in the back of his family's Buick station wagon. In the age before DVD players, iPhones, and video games, some youngsters on a cross-country journey might have bickered with their siblings or pounded on the windows or screamed for no reason at all. But Knauer and his brother and sister were surprisingly well behaved. It's as if the destination made them wise beyond their years.
The state of Washington's Hoh Rain Forest of Olympic National Park doesn't disappoint the family—at least, not at first. Engulfed by nature, Knauer suddenly has a question for his parents: "Why weren't there trees driving in, just those stumps?"
They must have been cut down, his parents tell him. Not long afterwards, when the boy meets a park forester on the trail, he wants to know why they were cut down. The answer: loggers. What follows is a lesson in deforestation. The information doesn't satisfy the boy's curiosity, though. It upsets him. His distress follows him home to Bridgewater, N.J., back to his elementary school, and spills onto the pages of his essay, What I Did on My Summer Vacation.
His science teacher is surprised by the intensity of his student's words because the boy usually behaves like one of the class clowns. The passionate essay gives the teacher an idea; he'll try to channel some of Knauer's restless energy toward environmentalism. It works. Knauer helps organize bake sales and dance-a-thon fundraisers that are spent on the preservation of 10 acres in a Costa Rican rain forest.
His activism is just beginning. In high school, a notification is sent home to parents about a pesticide spraying taking place across the township:
If your child sees the helicopters, they should seek shelter. However, the spraying is perfectly safe.
The absurdity of the language doesn't go undetected by Knauer. If it's perfectly safe, why the concern? He researches the chemical being used—bacillus thuringiensis—and learns it can be particularly dangerous for young children. The discovery prompts him to lead a group of students to petition the school board to delay classes throughout the district on the morning of the spraying. When the petition is refused, Knauer organizes a protest that blocks the school buses. The image of student activists in the paths of buses makes national news. The school board, meanwhile, decides to form a new policy. Classes will be delayed on any mornings when pesticide sprayings will take place.
Knauer, though, doesn't feel entirely victorious. He is irked by some of the student protesters who had no clue about the facts. "They just liked the excitement of the protest," he says. "That annoyed me. I knew there were serious issues behind this. I needed to get people better informed."
Unlike many of his classmates, he is more concerned about the environment than the football team's standings. By not fitting into the usual school cliques, he ends up becoming friends with students from other schools in other parts of the country who, like him, travel to student environmental conferences. Knauer, who hasn't forgotten his childhood lesson on deforestation, is one of about 40 students across the nation who helps start the Student Environmental Action Coalition, which grows to an impressive 40,000 members.
He admits that his activism sometimes "got in the way of academics." Even without the best grades, he applies to Carnegie Mellon, hoping that his headline-grabbing activism, his talent for the French horn, and his heartfelt essay would make up for report cards that aren't all A's. He banks on an admission interview, too. "I am a good talker," he says with a laugh.
He must be. An acceptance letter follows. To make sure the university is the right fit for him, he visits the campus for a weekend in 1991. Staying in a dorm, he sees students communicating with each other on their computers. He is intrigued. They explain to him it's "email." This is the first time Knauer ever heard about the Internet. He knows at that moment that "this email thing" will let him stay in touch with all of his activist pals in the Student Environmental Action Coalition.
Sure enough, as soon as the incoming freshman settles in his dorm room, he doesn't waste any time in launching the EnviroLink Network, a sort of mailing list for student activists. And, once again, the student activist doesn't ace his classes. "Let's just say," he admits, "I didn't graduate [in 1995] with honors." He did do well in his self-defined humanities major—Environmental Ethics and Policy—but he avoided math classes whenever possible. Perhaps that's why he describes himself not as an engineering guy, but more of an idea guy, who embraces technology as a way to advance activism.
His EnviroLink Network idea certainly received more than a passing grade. It evolved from a simple mailing list of student activists into one of the world's most respected environmental Web sites—containing information and links to environmental and animal rights groups. By the late 1990s, the international media were unanimous in their praise:
"The Web is one element that's helping to recalibrate the meaning of green, with a host of expressive, informative, and visually stunning sites, rich in history, lore, commentary—and hard facts. Of these, The EnviroLink Network is the most beautiful."
—Newsweek
"A good entry point for Web newcomers with an interest in all things ecological is the appropriately named EnviroLink. It boasts one of the largest and best-arranged listings of environmental organizations on the Web."
—Time
"The EnviroLink site is one of the largest online resources."
—The New York Times
"Connects resources and HTML links to facilitate the healing for which our planet yearns. ...Strongly recommended."
—Wired
"An excellent example of the global community ethic. .... Pleasing to the eye and contains a bounty of useful information ... [and] an extensive library. Attention to detail on EnviroLink is particularly noteworthy, right down to the icons. .... A delightfully earthy experience! Verdict: Outstanding."
—i-net (Australia)
Another entrepreneurial venture follows on the heels of EnviroLink. In 1998, Knauer founds Green Marketplace, a mail-order Web site for socially and environmentally responsible products, services, and information. Friends and associates tell him it's foolish to start a mail-order company when he doesn't have business experience. Stubbornly, he ignores their advice. Good thing he does. The company takes off, with items such as 100% recycled post-consumer chlorine-free toilet paper. Four years later, he is bought out by Gaiam, a publicly traded company, with a consumer Web site that "invites you to live consciously, in harmony with the environment, the planet, and the people who share your home."
Just six months after the sale, he stumbles upon MAYA, a technology research lab spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. The "good talker" makes a successful pitch to MAYA executives: Let's market, to companies and organizations of all sizes, the intellectual property created by MAYA—high-powered data-collection and visualization software that provides open access to public data, enabling users to make the most well-informed decisions.
The first client is the Allegheny County Department of Human Services in western Pennsylvania. MAYA provides the department with an accessible data base of human services programs, called HumanServices.net. It enables, for example, case workers to go online and quickly find comprehensive information on everything from drug counselors to bus routes.
IT World Magazine names HumanServices.net the best IT project in 2006.
MAYA incubates Knauer's company, Rhiza Labs, until it opens in April 2008 with Knauer as CEO. Naturally, most of the clients are environmental.
It's because of Rhiza that nearly three decades after Knauer's boyhood trip to Olympic National Park, he has traveled to another lush rain forest. This time around, it's in Rondonia, Brazil. The 36-year-old green entrepreneur isn't there on vacation. He is trying to help the Surui tribe deal with loggers who want to clear their land. There is not going to be an easy solution.
Logging revenue is quite an enticement for the indigenous tribe as they struggle for survival. The tribe's population exceeded 5,000 just 40 years ago. Then they came into contact with the outside world. Just two years later, only 290 remained, because, in large part, they had no immunity from diseases coming from the outside world. Today, the tribe's numbers have rebounded to about 1,300, but the members face a complex set of problems as they grapple with preserving their way of life. From the perspective of loggers, the tribe is living within a pot of gold. The trees in the 600,000 acres of rain forest are often up to 12 feet in diameter. Harvesting just one tree can fill a truck.
"Every truck the loggers pull out has a $20,000–40,000 value on the market," says Knauer.
For a tribe facing extinction and dealing with a high infant mortality rate and overall health problems, the temptation to succumb to logging isn't lost on the tribe's leader. Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui has both an Amazonian headdress with beautiful feathers and a college degree.
The chief has put his education to use to find a way to financially support his tribe without destroying the rain forest. His solution is the carbon market, which helps control carbon emissions in order to slow climate change. The market allows companies to pay for the right to pollute beyond a certain limit. For instance, a car company could voluntarily register and pay money to emit carbon beyond a set amount. That money would go into a fund. The Surui tribe, in turn, could register on the carbon market and be paid up to tens of millions of dollars in carbon offsets. It's as if the car company would be buying stock in the preservation of the Surui tribe's rain forest to "offset" its own carbon emissions. If unharvested, the tribe's 600,000 acres could offset 10 years worth of emissions from a city the size of Chicago.
To make the carbon market solution a reality, the tribe members need to collect and document carbon data for scientists. It's with that backdrop that Knauer is in Brazil. Funded by the Moore Foundation and working with Google Earth Outreach and the Amazon Conservation Team, he is training the Surui tribe—considered by most historians as one of the fiercest rain forest tribes—to use Rhiza technology.
Tribe members are, at this moment, in the Brazilian rain forest armed with what is essentially a smartphone that has GPS tracking, a camera, and Web capabilities. Data from their tracking will enable scientists to establish Google Earth maps of the rain forest and verify its carbon offset. "Chief Almir talks about the fact that he believes his tribe will protect their land with laptops instead of bows and arrows," says Knauer, noting the nonviolent paradox.
The rain forest documentation is expected to be completed later this year, which should prevent from happening what years ago so saddened a 10-year-old boy from New Jersey.
Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund in Washington, D.C., wouldn't expect any other end result. Having worked with Knauer on several green projects, she says, "He is a visionary. He is not the technical guy, but the big translator of technology. He is driven by an incredible desire to see the world be a healthier and more sustainable place."
Cristina Rouvalis is an award-winning reporter. She is a regular contributor to this magazine.
