from the Chancellery
How
do you judge the worth of a proposal to preserve the language of a
remote group in South Asia against another to explore the range and
habits of a rare mammal? These are the kinds of decisions I have had to
make recently as I participated on the awards panel of the Rolex Awards
for Enterprise.
Every two years Rolex presents up to 10 awards to exceptional men and
women who demonstrate enterprise by breaking new ground in diverse
fields – exploration, cultural heritage, environmental sustainability,
science, medicine and technology.
This year an international panel met in Geneva for three days to choose
the laureates and associate laureates for 2006.
The awards were launched in 1976, the 50th anniversary of the invention of
the Rolex Oyster and are unique – anyone, anywhere can apply if they believe
they can demonstrate enterprise in an area of human endeavour.
Each of the five laureates gets US$100,000 to devote to the winning
project and a gold Rolex watch while up to five associate laureates get
lesser but nevertheless substantial support.
That a ten member international panel chose the laureates from among about
1700 applications from around the world was itself extraordinary – eminent
people from diverse and distinguished backgrounds. Among them were Erling
Kagge from Norway, a publisher and one of the world's great explorers; Mark
Shuttleworth from South Africa, a technology entrepreneur and philanthropist
who travelled to space on Soyuz TM-34 in 2002; Bill Reilly from the US,
Chair of the World Wildlife Fund, trustee of National Geographic and former
head of the US Environmental Protection Agency; and Professor Sir Magdi
Habib Yacou from the UK, an Egyptian-born heart surgeon and researcher,
founder of an international agency that cares for children from war ravaged
countries and a member of the Royal Society.
When the panel arrives in Geneva it must make the final decisions among
proposals that are all not only interesting and worthy but also
extraordinarily diverse. Projects were proposed on every continent; every
field of human endeavour was represented; and those who applied were
explorers, subsistence farmers, scientists, environmental activists,
teachers, musicians, linguists and people who had had a good idea of benefit
to the community.
As someone who has spent her professional life on groups making judgments
about applications, I am used to tight criteria and making choices among
people or projects that are often very similar. This was not like that at
all. The panel was driven to discuss whether a project from someone who is a
leader among subsistence farmers in a very poor country and wants to
reintroduce traditional farming techniques was demonstrating more or less
enterprise than one from someone who is seeking support to explore a poorly
mapped, remote and dangerous area of the globe.
The experience was terrific. My fellow panel members were enormously
interesting people with whom to spend three days and the Rolex people
treated us very well indeed. I was inspired by the extraordinary stories we
read, although the applications forced me to confront the fact that we are
destroying the planet and our shared heritage.