Toronto, June 18: The Goldman Environmental Foundation has announced six recipients of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize among grassroots environmental activists from Malawi, Vietnam, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Japan, the United States and Peru. It has been announced in a virtual ceremony with featuring Jane Fonda as host, musical guests Lenny Kravitz, Baaba Maal, and the Ndlovu Youth Choir, with Sigourney Weaver and a special appearance from Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate.
This foremost award for grassroots environmental activists given annually from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions, since Earth Day took place in 1990 and was founded in 1989 in San Francisco by philanthropists and civic leaders Rhoda and Richard Goldman. As Richard Goldman once noted, “We’d like to leave the world a little better than we found it.” In 32 years, the Prize has had an immeasurable impact on the planet. To date, the Prize has honored 206 winners (including 92 women) from 92 nations, and has shined a light on many of the critical issues facing the Earth.
This year’s Goldman Environmental Prize winners are:
Gloria Majiga-Kamoto (Malawi, AFRICA): Concerned about the environmental harm caused by mounting plastic pollution in Malawi, Gloria Majiga-Kamoto fought the plastics industry and galvanized a grassroots movement in support of a national ban on thin plastics, a type of single-use plastic.
Thai Van Nguyen (Vietnam, ASIA): Thai Van Nguyen founded Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, which rescued 1,540 pangolins from the illegal wildlife trade between 2014 and 2020. Nguyen also established Vietnam’s first anti-poaching unit, which since 2018 has destroyed 9,701 animal traps, dismantled 775 illegal camps.
Maida Bilal (Bosnia and Herzegovina, EUROPE): Maida Bilal led a group of women from her village in a 503-day blockade of heavy equipment that resulted in the cancellation of permits for two proposed dams on the Kruščica River in December 2018.
Kimiko Hirata (Japan, ISLANDS AND ISLAND NATIONS): Over the past several years, Kimiko Hirata’s grassroots campaign led to the cancellation of 13 coal power plants (7GW or 7,030MW) in Japan.
Sharon Lavigne (United States, NORTH AMERICA): In September 2019, Sharon Lavigne, a special education teacher turned environmental justice advocate, successfully stopped the construction of a US$1.25 billion plastics manufacturing plant alongside the Mississippi River in St. James Parish, Louisiana.
Liz Chicaje Churay (Peru, SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA): In January of 2018, as a result of the efforts of Liz Chicaje Churay and her partners, the Peruvian government created Yaguas National Park. Comparable in size to Yellowstone National Park, the new park protects more than two million acres of Amazon rainforest.
Pics from the website of the Goldman Environmental Foundation https://www.goldmanprize.org/
