“It's a huge grant for us,” said Scott Pankratz, executive director of Ecology Project International, which has environmental education programs in Montana, Costa Rica, Mexico and the Galapagos Islands. “We're very excited.”
The British Broadcasting Corp. created its Wildlife Fund from the proceeds of the network's Saving Planet Earth series, which profiled Ecology Project in a segment last year about its efforts to preserve giant tortoises in the Galapagos.
The BBC fund is a grant-giving charity that distributes a percentage of the company's profits to help support projects protecting the world's endangered wildlife.
Alastair Fothergill, executive producer of Saving Planet Earth, was the scheduled keynote speaker at an International Wildlife Film Festival's dinner reception last week in Missoula.
The Galapagos, an Ecuadorian archipelago in the remote Pacific, are where Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution based on the unspoiled biological microcosm he found there in the 19th century. But the fragile ecosystem is threatened by the islands' rapidly growing human population and tourism industry.
Ecology Project puts students from the islands and from other countries, including the United States, into the field to work with scientists studying the giant tortoises that live in the Galapagos.
The group has created similar partnerships between high school and college students and researchers studying native habitat and biodiversity of the greater Yellowstone National Park, the leatherback sea turtles off Costa Rica and the Baja California ecosystem of Mexico.
Ecology Project also may start a program with Native American tribes in the Klamath River basin in California and Oregon.
Pankratz founded Ecology Project in 2001, a year after receiving a master's degree in environmental studies at the University of Montana.
Since then, his group's annual budget has grown to $1.7 million and the number of students has jumped to 1,000 a year.
About 60 percent of the participants are local residents in the countries where the research is being conducted, while the rest come from the United States, including Missoula and other western Montana communities.
“I've always had an entrepreneurial streak, but I never planned to run a nonprofit,” Pankratz said.
“I thought about being a wildlife biologist or a teacher, and I decided on environmental education.”
Worldwide, a number of organizations, government agencies and universities have programs that pair volunteers with scientists in the field, but Ecology Project is the only group that partners students with researchers on international projects “that engage the lay public in science education,” Pankratz said.
Ecology Project's overall goal is to encourage young people to spread the word about the environmental and economic value of preserving the world's natural systems, Pankratz said.
“We're not trying to create a bunch of scientists,” he said. “We just want to create an actively involved citizenry. If these ecosystems crash, we'll all be affected.”
More information is available at www.ecologyproject.org.
Reporter John Cramer can be reached at 523-5259 or at john.cramer@missoulian.com.
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