Yesterday National Geographic announced its 2011 class of Emerging Explorers, 14 "visionary young trailblazers" who are breaking new boundaries in "discovery, adventure, and global problem-solving." Among those selected was Sasha Kramer, the Haiti-based ecologist I profiled for OnEarth’s winter issue.

In 2006, Kramer and a friend founded SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods), aimed at addressing the impoverished Caribbean country’s environmental and sanitation problems by recycling human waste to use as fertilizer. Having earned a PhD in ecology and worked as a human rights monitor, the New York native comes at the issue from a broad perspective; she talks about the dry toilets that she and her partner developed, for example, in the context of "liberation ecology."

SOIL is still working in Haiti, though Kramer told me yesterday that the organization’s funding for the coming year recently fell through. She and her colleagues are now "scrambling to ensure that they don’t have to shut down the toilets that are currently serving 15,000 people."

They also are hoping to secure cash for a pilot project to develop a sustainable business model for urban household toilets in the Port-au-Prince slum known as Cité Soleil. The plan would entail installing SOIL’s dry "EcoSan" toilets in homes, with residents paying a small monthly fee (about $3) to have the drums of waste collected regularly and treated at the organization’s compost site for eventual use as fertilizer.

Kramer, who says she was taken by surprise when notified of the honor in February (she was nominated by an anonymous supporter), will receive $10,000 from National Geographic to support her work. She hopes to use the money to underwrite SOIL’s ongoing exchange with other practitioners of EcoSan -- visiting projects in other countries, for example, and bringing others to Haiti for collaboration there. That is, "if it isn’t squandered keeping us afloat in the coming months."

Read our profile of Kramer and watch this New York Times video: