Ms. Hamilton lives in Houston, where she worked as a Grant Officer focusing on environmental programs for the Houston Endowment, the largest foundation in Texas, from 1991 through 2009. She also served as a trustee for the Jacob W. and Terese Hershey Foundation, a Texas family foundation which supports land conservation, parks and open space, animal protection and human population initiatives. As well, she co-founded the Texas Environmental Grantmakers Group as an effort to explore and develop conservation funding opportunities and partnerships in the state. Prior to her philanthropy work, she worked as executive director of the Park People, a non-profit advocating for increased open space protection in the Houston area, and as executive director of the Houston Parks Board, a vehicle for enabling public support and participation in the City’s Parks and Recreation Department’s acquisitions and operations.
Region: Coastal Prairie
Ed Harte
Publisher of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times from the mid-1950s through 1987, and partner in the Harte-Hanks newspaper management for many years, Mr. Harte was active in habitat protection, drilling regulation, and institutional work. With regard to habitat protection, Mr. Harte made major contributions in two areas: gift of the 57,000-acre North Rosillos Mountains Preserve as an adjunct to the Big Bend National Park, and lobbying for the purchase and protection of Mustang Island State Park and Padre Island National Seashore. With respect to drilling, Mr. Harte convened a citizens’ group to set limits on offshore oil and gas drilling in Corpus Christi Bay, which became the first municipal regulations of drilling in the country, and a model for future state and federal standards. He also made major contributions to the management of a major American environmental group, the National Audubon Society, where he served on the board from 1964 to ’70 and 1972 to ’79, acting as chair from 1974 to ’79.
Martin Melosi
Dr. Melosi is an environmental historian whose research and writing have focused on urban sanitary infrastructure, including the services for drinking water, wastewater and solid waste. He worked as a professor at the University of Houston beginning in 1984. Previously, from 1975 through 1984, he taught at Texas A&M University. He has written widely (The Sanitary City, Energy Metropolis, Effluent America, and Coping with Abundance), edited professional journals and books, including the Environmental History Series at Texas A&M Press, worked as an expert witness in litigation, and served his colleagues as President and officer with the American Society for Environmental History.
Johnny French
Mr. French is a biologist who served for close to 25 years in the Corpus Christi office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service monitoring, reviewing and seeking to improve numerous projects requiring a federal permit or consultation. For example, some of the projects he worked on included oil and gas drilling on Padre Island, cleanup of the Ixtoc oil spill, dredging for the Intracoastal Waterway, navigation related to the Homeport proposal, chemical production and cleanup at ASARCO, Alcoa and Formosa Chemical, and protection plans for the ocelot, jaguarundi, bald eagle, whooping crane, Atwater prairie chicken, brown pelican and piping plover. Following retirement in 2001, he has continued to be involved, with much of his recent effort focused on maintaining public access to the Texas shore.
Mary Anne Piacentini
Ms Piacentini is a planner who has worked on protecting and developing open space for recreation, habitat and sustainable land use. From 1993 through 1998, she led the Friends of Hermann Park, which succeeded in restoring an historic, neartown park that includes 545 acres of land and major urban attractions, such as the Houston Zoo, Houston Museum of Natural Sciences, and Miller Outdoor Theatre. In 1999, she helped found, and later chaired, the Texas Land Trust Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to supporting, coordinating, and educating the three dozen land trusts in the state. From 1998 through the present day, Ms Piacentini has served as executive director of the Katy Prairie Conservancy, which has managed to protect 12,000 acres of grassland to the west of Houston, for rice production, cattle raising, wildlife habitat, and flood abatement.
Ellis Pickett
Mr. Pickett is a fifth-generation Texan living in Liberty, Texas. He has worked in the oil and medical industries, and is an avid surfer. Through his surfing hobby, he grew concerned about the condition of the Texas coast, and by 1999 became involved in starting and managing the Texas chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. He has focused on maintaining safe public access to the Texas coast and also worked on beach cleanups, water quality tests, erosion monitoring, and dune protection.
Carroll Shaddock
Mr. Shaddock was a corporate attorney in Houston who volunteered his time for many years in working to improve the beauty and order of the urban environment, chiefly through planting street trees and controlling billboards. With his interest in city trees, he helped form the non-profit, Trees For Houston, in 1983. In the years since, the group has planted, irrigated, and monitored over 600,000 trees throughout the city, lending shade, oxygen and beauty to Houston. The trees include close to 30 species, including canopy trees such as Bur Oaks, Live Oaks, Overcup Oaks, Monterey Oaks, Mexican Sycamores for open areas, as well as understory trees, such as Mexican Plums, Texas Mountain Laurels, Wax Myrtles, and others for restricted areas under power lines. Concerned over billboards’ garishness and traffic hazard, Mr. Shaddock also founded a Houston organization known as Billboards Limited, which succeeded in banning all new billboards in the city in 1980, and eventually evolved into Scenic Houston, part of a strong national network of like-minded groups under the umbrella of Scenic America. Scenic Houston has remained active in seeking to speed removal and control relocation and enlargement of the remaining off-premise signs.
Evangeline Whorton
Mrs. Whorton was an artist who volunteered her time to work on historic conservation, archeological research, billboard control, wetland restoration, and other efforts, much of it focused on the Galveston area.
For example, during the 1970s, a number of the historic Strand buildings were faced with demolition. To recognize their value and preserve their future, she served on the board of the Galveston Historical Foundation, where she helped document more than 300 19th century buildings in Galveston, and also promoted their history and beauty through the “Dickens on the Strand” festival.
In the mid ’70s, she also participated in an archeological excavation on Galveston Island’s Eckert Bayou which found 16th century remains, possibly related to the Cabeza de Vaca expedition. The Eckert Bayou archeological site and wetland area was faced at this time with harm by the Lafitte’s Cove residential development.
Understanding the fragility of much of the built and natural heritage of the Island, Mrs. Whorton founded Scenic Galveston in 1992. In the years since, Scenic Galveston and Mrs. Whorton were involved in protection and restoration of 2500 acres of intertidal salt marsh and coastal prairie at the northwestern approach to the Island, as well as the control of unsightly billboards and lights in the same area.
LaVerne Williams
Mr. Williams is a Houston-based registered architect whose practice has focused on green building for residential structures. He has worked since the 1970s to find better siting, design and materials for reduced energy use, lowered water consumption, more renewable resources, closer sourcing, less toxic exposure, and reduced up-front cost and long-term maintenance in architecture. He sees this as a personal conviction and a professional obligation, strengthened by growing concerns over climate change (it is estimated that the building industry is responsible for over 50% of the nation’s greenhouse gases).
Lucie Wray Todd
Ms. Todd was a community volunteer, philanthropist and rancher who had had a long interest in environmental protection. In the 1960s, she was involved with a Houston non-profit, Citizens Who Care, which spawned a number of regional environmental efforts, including the Citizens Environmental Coalition. During the 1980s, Ms Todd was part of a successful 35-year effort to defeat a dam on the Colorado River, known as Columbus Bend or Shaws Bend, that had been proposed by the Lower Colorado River Authority and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In the 1990s she worked with the Houston and National Audubon Societies to bring environmental education to tens of thousands of Houston school children, through a program known as Audubon Adventures. To help broaden financial support for similar environmental efforts, she helped organize two foundations, the Wray Charitable Trust and the Magnolia Charitable Trust, both of which focused their grantmaking on environmental work in Texas, protecting habitat and wildlife, as well as guarding public health. To create more of a linkage among other grantmakers with similar interests, she was an early supporter of the Texas Environmental Grantmakers Group. She was also interested in promoting the possibilities of improved land management in the land and cattle business that she directed, by investing in organic and grassfed beef production, crossfencing, supplemental water, intensive grazing, native prairie planting, cowbird control, hunting cooperative participation, and vegetation and wildlife monitoring.