She was up there, way above Al Gore and Prince Charles and St Francis of Assisi. Kenya's Wangari Maathai, the Nobel prize-winning environmental minister credited with planting 30 million trees across Kenya, was close. Wildlife film presenter, David Attenborough, was even closer, writes Lorna Siggins.
However, when Pennsylvanian writer and scientist Rachel Carson was named the greatest "eco-hero" of all time on the British Environmental Protection Agency's website almost a year ago, it may have prompted more than one "Who?" among a rising generation. For although her biographer, Linda Lear, has immortalised her in print and on the web, and although no self-respecting environmentalist would profess not to know the title of her most famous work, few events were planned to mark the centenary of her birth last May.
Confined to a hospital bed in Dublin at the time, maritime historian, trade unionist and diver Des Branigan was exercised enough to contact this newspaper by fax. What science writer wouldn't give their own protoplasm to make it to the top of the New York Timesbestseller list for 31 consecutive weeks, and remain there for 86 in all, he asked - as well as being translated into 28 languages, selling well over a million copies of a book, inspiring an Academy Award-winning documentary and attracting several prestigious prizes.
Branigan wasn't referring to Carson's classic Silent Spring- her 1962 piece of scholarship which sparked off a debate in the US over the widespread use of pesticides. His enthusiasm is for The Sea Around Us, which appeared a year earlier. "The last great frontier of Earth" was how she introduced her guide to a "realm so vast" that "with all our efforts we have explored only a small fraction". And that still holds today.
In the book, she charts the "grey beginnings", from the birth of the moon and the creation of tides on a new planet more than 2 billion years ago. Her voyage extends across and around and underneath continents, and she writes with passion of the lives of those mineral wealth creators, the tiny diatoms; of the lure of sub-sea canyons; of the many and varied lives of marine animals; and of man's destruction of oceanic islands, and the looming threat, back then, of more pollution.
It is a work that has inspired generations of scientists and explorers - not least the Titanic wreck-diver and writer, Dr Robert Ballard. He has described her as the "poet laureate" of the sea. "I felt as if I were a student of hers, taken under the spell of Neptune by her poetic vision," Ballard wrote in a commemorative, illustrated edition of The Sea Around Uswhich was published again by Oxford University Press in 2003.
In 1963, Carson was interviewed for a CBS television documentary in the US, and her observations have even more resonance now than then. "We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe," she said. "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature.
"But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. The rains have become an instrument to bring down from the atmosphere the deadly products of atomic explosions. Water, which is probably our most important natural resource, is now used and re-used with incredible recklessness.
"Now, I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."
ONE WONDERS WHATCarson would think now of those who attempt to tame the elements off the Irish Atlantic coastline on some of the wildest and windiest weeks of the year. Allan Mulrooney is part of that community which spends half its life in ultraflex neoprene and other protective "skins", manoeuvring breaks, tides and rip currents off Strandhill beach under Knocknarea mountain in Co Sligo.
Mulrooney and his colleagues are aware that there is a slightly superficial image attached to their pursuit which belies the preparation, training, investment in safety, marine tourism benefits - and development of a social conscience. He and Sligo colleagues established SIRF, the Strandhill Indonesian Relief Fund, after an earthquake devastated the main Indonesian island of Java last year. The quake claimed over 5,700 lives and left countless more homeless just two years after the extensive tsunami devastation in south-east Asia.
Irish surfers have "taken so much from their travels to Indonesia - perfect waves, great food, cheap beer", he and his colleagues point out. "We felt this was the opportunity to give something back." Reluctant to throw coins into a bottomless bucket, SIRF has focused its efforts on education and has linked up with a non-governmental organisation in the region.
Over the past two years, it has engaged in sponsored paddles on boards and kayaks across Sligo Bay and many other activities as part of a programme to rebuild schools destroyed by the elements. Some five schools have now been rebuilt within a 20 kilometre radius in Java, and the target is to raise funds for five more.
"We've had tremendous support from surfers all around the island, but the wider Strandhill population has also been terrific, and there's a definite sense of connection now with communities which have no water, no electricity, no basic services," Mulrooney says. For further details on SIRF's calendar, on sale in and around Strandhill and Sligo, and on SIRF's other activities, see www.sirf.org.