2007 TED prize given to EO Wilson

EO Wilson has just received the 2007 TED Prize, a prestigious award given annually at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. Also honored were former President Bill Clinton and the photographer James Nachtwey.

From the TED website:

For the past 20 years, members of the TED community have gathered together to share ideas and passions that are big enough to change the world.

In this spirit, we created... the TED Prize.

Each year we will honor a maximum of three individuals who have shown that they can, in some way, positively impact life on this planet.

We are looking for inventors and entrepreneurs, designers and artists, visionaries and mavericks, protectors and persuaders. Our goal is to honor and empower these people by connecting them to the formidable resources of the TED community. Our prize-winners may be very different, but they will have this in common: They will be doing something that has extraordinary potential. Something whose positive influence could spread, transcending borders. Something that can contribute to the future of life on earth.

Rather than simply receiving financial support, winners of the TED Prize will be granted something extraordinary: something which children dream about, but which adults assume is merely the stuff of fairy-tales.

They will be granted a WISH to change the world.

They may wish for anything. And we will seek to make their wish come true.

We will allow our winners several months in which to formulate their wish. We want them to think big, and we want them to fully understand the range of resources the TED Community may be able to offer them. We are willing to spend -- in hard cash -- $100,000 on each winner. And our goal is to convert this into received value that is an order of magnitude greater. How?

• By connecting our winners into the heart of the TED community
• By tapping into the enthusiastic support of our team of sponsors and partners
• By working with our winners to deliver something creative and big and bold and wonderful.

EO Wilson's wish:

"I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth's biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life."

More details here.

An interesting commentary on biodivcontext.

What do you think?