Bioregional Hero Awards 2002

At its 10th Anniversary Celebration on August 29, EcoCity Cleveland announced its annual Bioregional Hero Awards. The awards recognize outstanding individuals and organizations who have improved the long-term quality of life in Northeast Ohio by balancing environmental integrity, social justice and economic prosperity.

Here are the 2002 award categories and winners:

• Smart growth—A person or project that has supported the rebuilding of existing urban areas, mixed-use development, well-designed public spaces, and links to transit. Winner: Tom Bier, director of the Housing Policy Research Program at the Cleveland State University College of Urban Affairs—For systematically tracking the outmigration of home buyers in Northeast Ohio and tirelessly advocating for the maintenance and redevelopment of older cities and towns.
• Conservation—A person or organization that has made an outstanding contribution to the conservation of open space, natural areas, and historic resources in Northeast Ohio. Winner: Cleveland Restoration Society—For effective programs to preserve Cleveland neighborhoods, First Suburbs, and the rural landscape of Northeast Ohio, as well as for bringing national attention to the region's preservation issues by hosting this year's National Preservation Conference, the premier preservation educational gathering in the nation.
• Community activist—A person or group of people who —as volunteers—have organized effectively and improved quality of life in the region. Winner: West Creek Preservation Committee—For creating an exciting vision of a greenway corridor for West Creek, mobilizing citizens, raising funds, building political support, and successfully realizing their vision - all as volunteers working for the greater public good.
• Public official/agency—An elected official or staff of a public agency who has provided significant leadership to create a more sustainable region. Winner: Cuyahoga County Planning Commission—For projects related to brownfield redevelopment, countywide greenspace, the Cuyahoga Valley corridor, retail development, technology infrastructure, and transportation that have brought progressive planning ideas to Cuyahoga County.
• Ecological messenger—A person who has employed words or other art forms to inspire new ways of thinking about ecological design and environmental quality in our bioregion. Winner: Carolyn Platt and Gary Meszaros—For raising awareness of the bioregion through beautiful words and photographs in many articles and the books, Birds of the Lake Erie Region and Creatures of Change: An Album of Ohio Animals.
• Organizational breakthrough—An organization that has come on strong in the past year to be a strong advocate for ecological design, smart growth, or transportation alternatives. Winner: Cleveland Public Art—For partnering with many other organizations to reclaim city streets as great civic spaces through projects such as the redesign of the Detroit-Superior Bridge, for incorporating art into transportation through the Rack Attack project, and for the spiders.
• Sustainable transportation—A project that helps to create a transportation system that offers real choices between cars, transit, bicycles and walking, and that helps to reduce energy use and air pollution. Winner: Rack & Roll program of Greater Cleveland RTA—For making the important inter-modal link between buses and bikes.
• Green building—A person or project that has promoted green building, energy conservation and healthy housing in Greater Cleveland. Winner: Schmidt Copeland Parker Stevens—For pioneering green building techniques and designing high-performance buildings before green building became trendy.
• Visionary—A person or program that has helped us rethink our relationship to the region. Winner: Ted and Molly Bartlett of Silver Creek Farm—For imagining and helping to create a more sustainable food system in Ohio by building relationships between organic farms and consumers in the city.

For the award itself, each year we choose an original piece of work by a local artist that showcases the beauty of the bioregion. This year we selected an original painting by Erin Brown — a fun depiction of an ideal green city. Erin is a living example of EcoCity values: she doesn't own a car and takes transit everywhere. In our journal, we run her series of drawings, called Bus Story, which depict her adventures riding the bus.

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