Pierce Brosnan Receives Doctor of Environmental Advocacy Honorary Degree from Dickinson College

Pierce Brosnan is a legendary Irish-American actor, film producer, philanthropist, artist, two-time Golden Globe Award nominee and environmentalist who partnered with the NRDC to stop a proposed salt factory at Laguna San Ignacio on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. In doing so, they protected the last pristine breeding ground for the Pacific gray whale. In addition to receiving NRDC’s Forces for Nature Award, Brosnan’s environmental work was recognized with the 2007 Goldene Kamera award.

He, along with his wife, Keely Shaye, have been drawn into a passionate leadership role on numerous environmental issues, lending their voices and efforts to clean air and water campaigns, ocean and marine mammal protection, and defense of land and wildlife habitat. They have opposed environmentally destructive projects and activities around the world, including, for example, the world’s largest industrial salt works, proposed by Mitsubishi Corporation, at the World Heritage Site and gray whale breeding and calving lagoon at Laguna San Ignacio in Baja California; the Cabrillo Port Liquefied Natural Gas facility proposed off the coast of Malibu; the unregulated testing and training with high intensity military sonar by the U.S. Navy throughout the world’s oceans; and the continuing slaughter of whales for commercial purposes in violation of the International Whaling Commission’s moratorium. For the past 23 years, they have worked closely with the Natural Resources Defense Council to elevate the organization’s environmental advocacy, both in the United States and internationally.

Most recently, the two worked together on the documentary film Poisoning Paradise, which they co-produced. The film takes audiences on a journey to the seemingly idyllic world of Native Hawaiians, whose communities are surrounded by experimental test sites for genetically engineered seed corn and pesticides. To date, Poisoning Paradise has screened at over 30 prestigious film festivals across the United States and abroad and has won 124 awards—many for best documentary—and has been accepted into the 2018 International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, the Manchester Film Festival in England and the London International Filmmaker Festival, among others. The film screened in the market at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was sold for worldwide distribution with Gravitas Ventures, which will release Poisoning Paradise in June 2019.