News on Blue Planet Prize

Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) (Costa Rica)

Remarks from the Award Recipients upon Notification of their Selection

Prof. Daly
I am both honored and humbled to accept the magnanimous Blue Planet Prize from the Asahi Glass Foundation. The making of such important products as glass and chemicals is already a great benefit to the world. Encouraging and supporting others in their efforts to protect and improve our Earth home, as the Asahi Glass Foundation does, is truly an example of generosity and service. When one is treated generously, then one is inspired to treat others the same way. Thank you for that inspiration, and for including me among a list of recipients whom I have long admired.

This recognition is not only an encouragement to me, but also to many friends and colleagues who have worked hard to protect and preserve our Earth from the destruction caused by excessive growth and careless waste. Among these I especially include my colleagues in the International Society for Ecological Economics. If I have done anything to deserve this Prize it is to have provided a generational connecting link between my best teachers and my best students. May this award strengthen that continuing chain into the future!

Prof. Janzen
We – all of us, including 2.6% of the world’s biodiversity – are delighted and honored to learn of the Blue Planet Prize for us and Costa Rica’s INBio. This honor really is for a cast of thousands of Homo sapiens – Costa Ricans and internationals – dancing with billions of other beasts, each doing their part to keep alive some portion of the nature that produced all of us. It is wonderful and wise that years ago the Asahi Glass Foundation had the foresight to offer this support to attempts to move away from the very human tendency to consume and alter our nest. Yes, we can restore some of what we have destroyed, and yes, we can help the world to become biologically literate. Without bioliteracy, nature is just a green threatening mass and there is little hope of its peaceful coexistence with all of us. We, INBio, and Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, are happy recipients of this recognition of decades of trying to open the doors of conserved wildlands to non-damaging partnerships with humanity. Only through direct understanding of the wild world can society welcome it into the family, village and nation.

INBio
To receive the prestigious Blue Planet Prize, given in recognition of our voluntary efforts to conserve Costa Rica’s rich biodiversity is a great honor, which we appreciate in all of its significance. We are humbled to be among many of the most outstanding authorities and leaders in the quest for solutions to the global environmental problems who have been previously recognized with this award, as well as to share it with Dr. D.H. Janzen, a world authority in tropical ecology and conservation with whom INBio has worked in a mutually beneficial association.

What our National Biodiversity Institute has been able to achieve through its institutional efforts has been largely determined by an enabling national environment; the endorsement of the Government of Costa Rica; the support of bilateral and multilateral development agencies; the collaboration of the scientific community and the profound commitment of INBio’s community with the cause of promoting a greater awareness of the value of biodiversity in our society.

The Blue Planet Prize becomes a new source of inspiration and motivation to continue our search for a harmonious relationship between humanity and our living world.