Trudie Styler may be best known as the wife of music legend Sting, but she is also an actress, filmmaker, organic farmer, Unicef ambassador and environmental trailblazer. She and her husband—who have a house in Malibu—cofounded the Rainforest Foundation in 1989, and they have been instrumental in bringing attention to saving the world’s rainforests while restoring health, livelihood and dignity to their indigenous peoples. “I am driven by injustice; I always have been,” says Styler. “I was raised to stand up for fairness.”
Styler appears in director Joe Berlinger’s recent documentary Crude, which touches on her effort to
bring clean water to areas of the Amazon affected by years of pollution allegedly at the hands of a large oil company. “It’s being talked about as one of the worst environmental disasters ever,” she says.
The oil company has been accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste directly into the rivers and ground. The company pulled out of the region in the early ’90s, but Crude contends the remaining
contaminants have caused untold health problems and left a legacy of destruction. “My job as a humanitarian and environmentalist is to go down and see what I can do,” she says. “Unicef knows I am a woman of my word and a woman of action.” Styler’s plan is to bring clean, safe drinking water to more than 30,000 people in a 65-square-mile radius.
Partnering with Unicef Ecuador and a local Amazon defense league (Frente de la Defensa de la Amazonia), the Rainforest Fund (a sister organization to the Rainforest Foundation) provides rainwater-collection tanks for families, hospitals and schools affected by the oil-production damage. The tanks collect the water and filter it so that it can be used for drinking and other household uses.
Styler’s unwavering dedication to eco-justice has made her a shining example of how we can change the planet—one person at a time. Visit unicef.org
