April 16, 2003
Seven Environmental Activists Honored With 'Green Nobels'
OneWorld US

Seven environmental activists from around the world are being honored this week as winners of the 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of their grassroots work to organize communities and countries to protect their ecosystems from environmental degradation.

Jim Lobe,OneWorld US

Washington, DC, Apr 14 ()neWorld) - Seven environmental activists from around the world are being honored this week as winners of the 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of their grassroots work to organize communities and countries to protect their ecosystems from environmental degradation, particularly against commercial interests.

This year's winners include an Appalachian woman who is defending her community against the practice of mountaintop-removal coal mining, two Aboriginal elders from Australia who have successfully blocked construction of a nuclear-waste dump, and a Filipino man who started the world's first national campaign to ban the construction of waste incinerators.

"In the current political climate, it is more important than ever to recognize people who are working to protect the health of their water, air and community resources," said Richard Goldman, the founder of the Prize, whose late wife, Rhoda Goldman, was a descendant of Levi Strauss, the founder of the California-based clothing company. "This year's winners have looked beyond themselves, often risking freedom or safety, to inspire their communities to fight for environmental protections."

Other winners include a Nigerian man who led the fight against the logging of his country's last intact rainforest; a community organizer in Peru working to reduce pollution from fishmeal factories; and a Spanish professor who has campaigned against a huge dam project designed to divert billions of gallons of water from the Ebro river, Spain's second-largest, to the Mediterranean coast.

The Goldman Prize, which has been called the "Nobel Prize for the Environment," will be presented at ceremonies in San Francisco Monday. Recipients will then be honored again in Washington, D.C., where they will meet with media, policy-makers, and other environmental activists Wednesday.

The prize is awarded to individuals who have faced daunting odds in carrying their environmental activism, and who have inspired ordinary people to mobilize behind them. The cash award of $125,000 to each activist comes with no strings attached, but is designed to free up more of the activists' time to devote to their environmental work. The winners are selected by an international jury of activists.

The prize is given each year to environmentalists from six geographic areas: Africa, Asia, Europe, Island nations, North America, and Central and South America.

This year's North American winner is Julia Bonds, a former Pizza Hut waitress who became a full-time leader of the campaign to stop mountaintop-removal mining, a practice that destroys the landscape, fouls the air, and pollutes streams and rivers in her native West Virginia. Sometimes called "strip mining on steroids," mountaintop mining has forced entire communities to abandon their homes as a result of the air and water pollution.

Australian Aboriginal elders Eileen Kampakuta Brown and Eileen Wani Wingfield, both in their 70s, have survived half a century of government-sanctioned nuclear contamination in the South Australian desert--from nuclear weapons tests carried out by Britain in the 1950s, to one of the world's largest uranium mines. The Australian government now wants to use the area as a nuclear waste dump for radioactive waste produced by a nuclear reactor in Sydney.

The two elders, who are worried that the site could contaminate the desert's groundwater system, have been fighting the idea since 1995 and have mobilized much of the desert community, which already suffers much higher-than-normal rates of asthma, birth defects and cancer that they attribute to the nuclear tests.

Von Hernandez, a native of Manila and veteran Greenpeace campaigner, has led the opposition to waste incineration, a practice first introduced in the West that has been found to release cancer-causing dioxins into the air. In 1999 his efforts culminated in unprecedented legislation banning waste incineration in the Philippines, although the battle is not yet over; the industry is applying pressure to overturn the ban.

In Nigeria, Odigha Odigha has led the campaign against industrial logging in the country's last remaining rainforests, home to 2,500 forest communities comprising 1.5 million people, as well as the greatest primate diversity on Earth, in Cross River State. Most of the forests were decimated by logging during the 1980s and remain threatened by logging companies, particularly Hong Kong-based Western Metal Products Company.

Working with forest communities and Nigeria's civil society, Odigha, who had to remain underground during the last military dictatorship, won a moratorium on logging in all of Cross River State, forced Nigeria's first Environmental Impact Assessment, and helped create the state's first Forestry Commission. He has also established education programs for forest communities to reduce their reliance on bushmeat and expand their economic opportunities.

In Peru community organizer Maria Elena Farro spearheaded a campaign to clean up Peru's fishmeal industry, which spews untreated industrial waste into streams causing cholera outbreaks and skin diseases in Peru's coastal cities. She directs Natura, a leading environmental group in Peru that has formed partnerships with local governments and progressive fishmeal companies to introduce new technologies to reduce toxic waste. Early opposition to her efforts from fishmeal interests resulted in a 13-month jail stay for Farro and her husband due to false accusations that they were members of the Shining Path insurgency, but she redoubled her efforts in 1994 after her release.

Pedro Arrojo-Agudo of the University of Zaragoza is being recognized as the main architect of the campaign to stop Spain's National Hydrological Plan from damming and re-routing the Ebro, one of Spain's last free-flowing rivers, which, according to activists, would destroy the Ebro's delta, one of Europe's most critical remaining wetlands for migrating birds, and force the displacement of tens of thousands of people who live, farm, and fish there.

Last year, he rallied some 400,000 people at a protest march in Barcelona and has focused his campaign on persuading the European Union (news - web sites), which is expected to provide $17 billion for the project, to block the plan. In so doing, has helped create an entirely new conservation movement in Europe, known as "New Water Culture."

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