RRI Leaders Tapped for Bay Area Environmental Award
Deborah Moskowitz and Chance Cutrano honored with 2021 Champions of Promise Aware for Fish in the Fields
Resource Renewal Institute (RRI) is thrilled to announce that our President, Deborah Moskowitz, and Director of Programs, Chance Cutrano, are recipients of a prestigious environmental award from Acterra, the respected Peninsula environmental organization that “brings people together to create local solutions for a healthy planet.”
Deb and Chance will be celebrated as Champions of Promise in Food Sustainability at Acterra’s March 26th “Promise to the Planet online gala.” They will both deliver brief speeches about RRI’s groundbreaking program, “Fish in the Fields (FIF)”, which is the focus of their award. The evening will feature two notable keynote speakers: Bill McKibben, climate-crisis activist, author, and co-founder of 350.org; and Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary of Natural Resources and member of Governor Newsom’s cabinet. Secretary Crowfoot has announced he will present his annual State of the State address at the event.
Fish in the Fields was launched in 2012 by RRI’s founder, environmental pioneer Huey D. Johnson. He believed that introducing the ancient practice of rice-fish co-cultivation to California’s half-million acres of rice cultivation would offer far-reaching environmental, economic and agricultural benefits – an alternative to overfishing ocean species, a valuable second crop for rice farmers requiring no additional land or water, and expanded wetlands to support the Pacific Flyway and wildlife habitat. Before long, RRI began partnering with aquatic ecologists, resulting in a breakthrough scientific discovery – adding fish to rice fields dramatically reduces its pernicious climate-changing methane emissions.
More about Fish in the Fields
Like so many of RRI’s innovative programs, FIF began as a small pilot project with enormous potential. Scaled across California’s rice fields and millions more acres across the globe, FIF would provide a sustainable new source of protein for the world’s increasing population while reducing dangerous greenhouse gases. It’s no wonder the program has been gaining interest and influence locally, nationally and internationally. For example:
Our growing list of collaborators includes scientists, rice growers, conservationists, California state agencies and environmentalists.
FIF has begun to collaborate with growers in Arkansas, the top rice producing state in the U.S.
RRI recently collaborated with PGS Consults and a team of graduate students at Universidad EAN in Bogotá, Columbia, who produced an in-depth report assessing the feasibility of expanding FIF to South America’s top rice producing regions.
We have been invited to discuss FIF at the largest impact gathering in the world, ChangeNOW, in Paris later this year.
FIF is the subject of an April, 2020, feature article in Wired Magazine, A Fishy Fix to a Methane-Spewing Crop. As well as a May, 2020, article in GreenBiz, Embedding agriculture in nature is beneficial for biodiversity and business.
