Brenda Jones, Glowing Rocks, Lake Superior

Great Lakes Forever and Anheuser-Busch are pleased to announce the winners of our 2008 Great Lakes Photo Contest. More than 85 amateur and professional photographers entered over 220 photographs in July. Six photos were selected for online voting in August. More than 550 people voted, selecting the winners in both the professional and amateur categories.

Congratulations to amateur photographer Brenda Jones and professional photographer Steven Huyser-Honig for their winning submissions! These Grand Prize winning photographs will be printed on educational beer coasters to be distributed to bars and restaurants throughout the Great Lakes region. View the winning photos at www.greatlakesforever.org .

For more information about the contest, please contact Brenna Wanous, 2008 Photo Contest Coordinator, at bwanous@biodiverse.org or 773-496-4020.

Clay Smith, Iowa DNR

In June 2008, the Biodiversity Project received a $430,000 grant from the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation to fund a two-year communications campaign in the 10 states bordering the Mississippi River. The campaign forms a unique alliance between the McKnight Foundation, the Biodiversity Project, and the Mississippi River Network – a coalition of 35 environmental organizations located throughout the Mississippi River region.

The grant supports the Biodiversity Project’s ongoing research and coordination in the Mississippi River region. The Biodiversity Project’s 2007 public opinion research revealed that an increase in residents’ personal connection with the River and its ecosystems could have a very significant impact on improving the River’s conditions.

The campaign is working with policy-makers, educators and scientists to inspire the agricultural community and engaged citizens to take action to restore the River’s health and vitality, insure that it continues to be an economic engine for the region and protect it from pollution and misuse.

The newly funded project includes developing, implementing and evaluating a comprehensive public communications campaign in the Mississippi River region to advocate for the River’s protection. The grant recognizes the Biodiversity Project’s expertise in working on national and regional environmental communications strategies.

For more information on the Mississippi River campaign and the coalition, please contact Executive Director Jennifer Browning at (773)496-4020 or jbrowning at biodiverse.org, or Project Coordinator Jessica Belle Smith at (773)496-4020 or jsmith at biodiverse.org.

Great Lakes Forever, the Biodiversity Project's Great Lakes campaign and Budweiser are teaming up again in 2008 for our second annual Great Lakes photo contest in an effort to raise awareness of the Great Lakes and engage people in their protection. Sponsored by Budweiser, the winning photo from each category will be printed on Budweiser beer coasters distributed throughout the Great Lakes Region.

Amateur and professional photographers are invited to enter their best Great Lakes photographs at www.greatlakesforever.org . Six finalists will be chosen from the pool of hundreds of submitted photographs. Grand prize winners will receive Trek bikes and get their photo on beer coasters, while a Budweiser cooler and grill will be awarded to first and second place winners.

Not only does this contest highlight the talented photographers in the Great Lakes area, it also works toward making residents aware of the problems the Great Lakes face, and engage them in protecting this vulnerable and valuable natural resource. Last year, the winning photos were printed on more than 120,000 beer coasters that were distributed to all eight Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces.

The photograph featured in the coaster above - Dave Poortvliet's Sunset and Dune Grass - was the winner for the amateur division. Derrick Burbul's Apostle Islands took the grand prize in the professional division.

The deadline for submission is August 8! Submit your photos today!

The Great Lakes are an integral part of our lives. For generations, people have enjoyed fishing for walleye on Lake Erie, swimming in the clear blue waters of Lake Michigan, and camping in the wilderness that surrounds Lake Superior.

But the Great Lakes are breaking down due to the cumulative impacts of invasive species, sewage contamination, the destruction of wetlands and other critical habitat, and other threats. The proof can be seen in closed beaches, fouled drinking water, fish consumption advisories, and shrinking populations of sport fish.

Comprehensive action is needed now to reverse the breakdown, because the longer we wait to restore the lakes, the problems get worse and more costly.

Luckily, there are solutions. The Great Lakes Regional Collaboration (GLRC) Strategy is a comprehensive plan to help restore the Great Lakes. The plan would modernize sewage treatment, clean-up polluted harbors, restore wetlands, and prevent unwanted, new species from invading the lakes. Each of these steps is essential if we are to restore the lakes and safeguard our Great Lakes way of life.

Support Great Lakes Restoration! Urge the presidential candidates to commit to the funding recommendations of the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration Strategy. Travel to the Healthy Lakes, Healthy Lives Web site and sign the petition.

New articles and discussion items are posted every week. Read more and join the discussion.

About the Town Hall: Residents of the Great Lakes are divided by great physical and political distances. Stretching from the remote Northwoods of Minnesota and Western Ontario through the heavily industrialized and irrigated lands of the eastern Midwest, and on to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes drainage basin spans two countries, two provinces and eight states. These distances make it difficult for the basin's 37 million residents to recognize and act on their shared concern for the Lakes.

The Great Lakes Town Hall is designed to bridge those distances. Like the town meetings on which it is modeled, the Great Lakes Town Hall provides a "space" where residents from all across the Great Lakes basin - and all walks of life within the basin - can come together to identify common concerns, set the political agenda, share and develop collective solutions, and demand - as a public - that the Lakes are clean, abundant, and natural for generations to come.

Biodiversity Project is delighted to have Rebecca Dill on board as our new office manager. A recent transplant from Charlottesville VA, Rebecca is excited to be helping put together the new Chicago office and learning the ins and outs of a non-profit organization. With her father naming a health food store after her at age 7 to majoring in geology, living a sustainable, environmentally conscious life has always been important part of her life. Rebecca spends her free time biking and running around to explore her new city, reading and cooking with all the new ingredients you can't find in the foot hills of the Blue Ridge.

On February 11, 2008, family and friends gathered in warmth on a below-zero day to remember Cindy Coffin and honor her life. Only a few weeks earlier, she had entered hospice care, after what her husband, Erik Ness, described as "an inspired battle" against breast cancer. This sudden turn of events was a shock to all who knew her after signs of hope last year, and it seems hard to believe that at the young age of 43, Cindy has slipped away.

Cindy played an important role in building the Biodiversity Project from the spark of an idea into an organization that has carried the mission of helping people connect to importance of protecting the web of life. In August of 1995, I started working on this yet un-named project for the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity - the funder's association that launched it. One of my first priorities was to get some help, and I asked Cindy, who had worked with me at the Sierra Club when we were developing Ecoregion plans, if she was interested in an "associate-of-all-trades" type of position. I was fortunate that she said, "Yes."

She and I were complementary opposites in a lot of ways. I was good at dreaming up grand schemes, but she was good at finding ways to distill the essence of that inspiration into two clear pages that made sense. I was comfortable in front of a crowd; she was brilliant at seamlessly executing the countless details of bringing that crowd together, keeping them on time, focused on the topic, and even well-fed. I could imagine the outcome of a project; she could deliver it on time, well-designed, on budget, and if we had needed, probably elegantly gift-wrapped!

When Cindy and Erik took their "around the world" honeymoon trip in 1996, I asked Marian Farrior to join the staff to fill in during the months Cindy was gone. When Cindy came back, I wasn't willing to part with either one, and the three of us became an even stronger team. Steering Committee member, Beth Millemann, whose warm humor always brightened up the tedium of budgets and board business, dubbed the three of us "the Bio-babes," -- something I had forgotten until it appeared in Cindy's obituary, where it put a smile on my face.

When I look back, we worked some miracles together during the project's formative years:

• Organizing a "tour" of workshops across the country spreading the "gospel" of values-based communications for biodiversity, reaching more than five-hundred organizations.
• Publishing the "Road Map" on education and communication strategies for biodiversity and seeing its recommendations take root in major institutions and organizations.
• Organizing a stellar gathering of national leaders to engage their response to the Road Map.
• Transitioning the project into a full-fledged nonprofit organization.
• Launching the Green Media Toolshed, and laying the groundwork for national collaboration among capacity building organizations.
• Helping to coalesce a national dialogue on sprawl and smart growth, and so much more.

The work we did on biodiversity and sprawl was perhaps closest to Cindy's heart, and she was the driving force behind so much of this important work. Perhaps more than any project over the years, the communications kit on sprawl was an expression of Cindy's best work. From the core concepts, to the smallest details, it was high quality, which is what we always knew Cindy would deliver.

Sometimes, Marian and I would be stewing on a problem, and she would just say, "This needs Cindy's brain," and of course, she was right. Cindy had a clarity of thinking, amazing analytical skills, attention to detail, an ability to cut through murkiness to the sharp edge of an idea. She made all our work more precise, clearer, simpler.

All that, and she was a lovely person. Rhonda Kranz, who Cindy recruited for our board, and who served as Chair during some of the really tough years, observed that Cindy "Wasn't concerned about whether people were well-known. She just brought them together. I think of her as a quiet spoken and gentle force that could move walls."

People and organizations change and grow and move on, and eventually, each of us in the original "bio-babes" trio moved on to other pursuits. The organization has evolved with new staff and leaders. But, today's organization was built on the strong shoulders of women with a dream and a cause. As I consider her contributions to our work, and the grit, grace, and courage she demonstrated during her years of facing cancer, I would offer that of those strong shoulders, the most petite, but perhaps the strongest, belonged to Cindy Coffin, whose gentle force helped make amazing things happen, for life, nature and you, and for those she knew and loved.