Susan R .Eaton submitted a winning essay to Coca-Cola, one of the corporate sponsors of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics Torch Relay:

Bite-size action steps empower individuals to protect the environment

April 22, 1990, marked the 20th anniversary of Earth Day — it also marked the eureka moment that catapulted me into action to save the planet. Morphing overnight into a grass roots environmentalist, I took tentative first-steps, distributing posters around Calgary.

Nineteen years later — impassioned by many environmental successes — I’m a volunteer director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, recipient of the 2008 Emerald Award for a community-based conservation program that has inspired 65,000 school children to protect southern Alberta’s grizzly bears and endangered species.

Leveraging my science and communications background, I translate environmental issues into bite-size action steps, empowering people to protect Canada’s wild spaces and the amazing animals who call them home.

As a director of the Calgary Rainforest Action Group, I volunteered during the 1990s to preserve British Columbia’s endangered rainforests: I raised money to build three canopy research platforms in Carmanah Valley, enabling scientists to catalog the biodiversity of these old growth rainforests. I achieved societal change by delivering educational presentations, organizing letter-writing campaigns and fundraisers, collaborating with stakeholder and First Nations groups, and by attracting international media exposure.

Today, BC’s Carmanah Valley, Clayoquot Sound and Great Bear Rainforest are protected, ensuring that spirit bears — elusive white ghosts of the rainforest — continue to fish for spawning salmon, every autumn, as they have for millennia…






The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics Torch Relay crosses Southern Alberta (Days 78-84).
View Susan R. Eaton at the 2:42-mark of the video!