Heroes and Zeros

Founder, Sustainable South Bronx

"If you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it is bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you?" -- Speech at TED conference, February 2006

With unemployment an increasingly urgent problem - and global warming a growing concern as well - Carter is increasingly looking pretty darn brilliant. (She is, in fact, a past recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award.)

The nonprofit organization she founded several years ago, Sustainable South Bronx, works to solve both problems simultaneously. It started one of the nation's first urban green-collar job training and placement programs in a place with off-the-chart unemployment.

The nonprofit has trained Bronx residents how to restore former waste sites, install ecologically friendly "green" roofs and create urban farms on formerly toxic land.

This year she launched an economic consulting firm to help other blighted communities around the country. Carter's goal: To encourage a "whole new class of people who see the environment as not just for rich people," she says. --L.O.

NEXT: Zero: Alan Greenspan