Just announced yesterday are the winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize. The prize, now in its 20th year, is awarded annually to grassroots environmental heroes from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions and is the largest award of its kind with an individual cash prize of $150,000.
This year’s recipients include Maria Gunnoe, a born-and-bred West Virginian who faces death threats for her outspoken activism to stop the coal industry’s plunder of Appalachia via mountain top removal and valley fills. Another recipient, Marc Ona, a wheelchair-bound civil society leader from the West African country of Gabon, faces arrest, imprisonment and public character assaults for his unyielding campaign to stop a destructive mining concession in a protected national park.
Other recipients include a Russian scientist connecting NGOs across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus to identify and safely remove toxic chemical stockpiles; two Saramaka leaders, members of a Maroon community in Suriname founded by freed African slaves in the 1700s, whose legal struggle to protect their tribal land rights led to a binding decision for all indigenous and tribal peoples in the Americas; Bangladesh’s leading environmental attorney, whose legal advocacy led to tighter regulations on the environmentally-devastating and exploitative ship breaking industry; and an Indonesian woman developing community-based waste management systems to stem her island nation’s overwhelming waste infrastructure problems. See their photos and read more about the recipients at the Goldman Prize web site.
Comments