Harrison Ford Honored with E.O. Wilson Legacy Award for Conservation Leadership
CHICAGO – Actor Harrison Ford received the E.O. Wilson Legacy Award for transformative Conservation Leadership Wednesday evening at the Field Museum in Chicago, recognizing his decades of dedication to environmental advocacy.The award was presented during the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s annual Half-earth Day event.
ford, also vice chair of Conservation International, accepted the award after speaking about the need for a new, apolitical approach to preserving nature and addressing climate change. “I’d like to see a new politics of nature, a politics for life,” Ford said.”An approach that is apolitical, intensely focused on the preservation of nature and confronting the challenge of climate change.”
The actor’s commitment to biodiversity extends beyond his role at Conservation International, an organization dedicated to preserving biodiversity worldwide, which he stated helped him find his “real purpose.” In 2002, renowned biologist E.O.Wilson honored ford’s work by naming a new ant species Pheidole harrisonfordi after him.
The ceremony also recognized David willard, a long-time bird researcher and curator at the Field Museum, with the museum’s Parker/Gentry Award for his decades of work documenting and advocating for the preservation of bird biodiversity, notably along the Chicago lakefront and in reducing bird strikes on city buildings.
“Harrison’s life is a conviction,” said Paula Ehrlich, CEO and president of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity foundation. Lesley de Souza, a conservation biologist at Field, described Willard’s work as having “given him an exciting knowledge of the world’s birds, which he has shared in a humble, generous, and unmitigated fashion,” adding that he has prepared more bird specimens than any other person on earth.
The award ceremony followed an afternoon of panel discussions centered around conservation and environmental leadership, part of the Half-Earth Day event which began in 2017. The “half-Earth” principle, popularized by Wilson in his 2016 book, advocates for dedicating half of the Earth’s land and seas to nature, a goal the foundation actively supports through research and projects.
“For [Wilson], ‘Half-Earth’ was not just about solving the immense problem of extinction,” Ehrlich said. “It was also about finding an angle of repose. An angle of repose, where, having solved the problem, we could relax. An angle of repose between ourselves and nature.”
