elmyrah

How did your experiences differ from the movie? Were you satisfied with the way you were portrayed?

Thanks for doing this!

It seems like every time I hear about an environmental issue, it's presented as hopeless, and apocalyptic. Small-scale farming, arable land, the atmosphere, water, fisheries, mineral resources, antibiotics, biodiversity, fuel sources, climate change, polar bears, natural disasters... Every time I listen to someone talk about these things, it all just feels so bleak and inevitable, and I throw back another Big Mac and Coke, because what difference does any of it make if we're all doomed anyway.

I watched one of your lectures on youtube, and I recognize that you probably don't have a lot to be optimistic about in sustainable development, but I was wondering if you can give me something - anything, really - to hold on to as an indicator that some sort of improvement is possible, and maybe we're not past the point of no return.

Was working on Pete and Pete as surreal and wonderful as it was for us watching it?

This sounds really terrific, thanks for putting the word out.

I've actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways of donating directly to projects in certain fields of research - typically pharmaceutical and relevant biotech, but there's no shortage of compelling and necessary research - I've just never known how to correctly go about it. Basically the options seem to be a) donate to some larger topical non-profit, where 80% of it probably goes to overhead and 'advocacy', or b) give directly to one of the few, probably-scammy projects that has a full page for donations on their geocities-looking website.

So basically this seems great.

Questions:

1) do the projects have to get their funding exclusively through GTS, or are they allowed to get supplemental grants, and stuff?

2) are you trying to keep the number of entries small, or are you excepting any project that makes it through the peer review stage?

3) this may reveal my utter lack of understanding of academic research in practice, but does the funding cover wages, or is that provided by the university/ whatever university the researches work at?

PS - people love t shirts. If you have a sponsorship option that gives out a cheap project t shirt for like, 70$, people will be all over that. I just noticed that most projects don't seem to have a donation incentive between 25 and 100 dollars, and often what's available seems to be regionally specific. If you want this to be successful on a larger-scale, t-shirts are the way to go!