Upon leaving behind a high-stress real estate job, Adam Hall found himself at a Central California ranch, where he poured his efforts into recreating biodiversity and establishing preservation programs for the land. Out of that work grew the Earthkeeper Alliance and Hall’s first book, The Earthkeeper: Undeveloping the Future. The alliance “un-develops” land by selecting wild spaces slated for development and scaling back the development to achieve a less overbearing environmental impact.

“The more each of us connects with our own environment and nature as a whole, we will be fine,” Hall says of the future of the planet. “We have a lot of challenges in front of us, but it is very much in our hands.”

Scott Sergeant combines his lifelong passion for the outdoors with his professional career at international investment bank Houlihan Lokey. Sergeant has built a career working with companies that are focused on bettering the environment by helping them raise capital, find proper investors, plan expansions or cutbacks and much more. Today, the environmental services industry is a booming $200-billion-a-year industry. Sergeant works with companies that focus on sustainability, safety, environmental compliance, energy efficiency and more.

“As a finance guy, I’m not personally changing the world the way these companies are,” Sergeant says, “but I get to be exposed to these companies on a regular basis to really help them do what they want to accomplish.”

Here in the dead of winter, heating a home can be a major cost to homeowners and a major drain on utilities companies. Roy Johnson, CEO of EcoFactor, is aiming to change the way we heat (and cool) our homes. EcoFactor’s communicating thermostat uses cloud-based software to analyze a home’s energy usage patterns, thereby making heating and cooling a more energy-efficient (and, in turn, cost-saving) endeavor. When starting off with EcoFactor, the consumer doesn’t need to do anything different. After answering a few quick questions, a digital heating/cooling schedule is built and the user can decide how efficient to operate. EcoFactor’s software takes care of the rest.

“Energy efficiency is by far the most cost-effective way of reducing greenhouse gas and energy consumption overall,” Johnson explains. “If we can all reduce our usage of electricity and gas, it makes a huge difference. It’s much cheaper to deploy a solution like ours than it is to build another power plant or another solar array or another wind farm.”