Goldman Awards Inspire and Support Grassroots Environmentalism

Posted by Bill Pieper

April 17, 2008

On April 14, I had the pleasure of attending the nineteenth annual Goldman Environmental Prize awards in San Francisco. An invitation-only crowd from around the world filled Davies Hall Opera House for the event, featuring KPIX TV’s Kate Kelley as mistress of ceremonies and a narrative describing each winner by actor Robert Redford. Afterward the honorees and audience adjourned for a gala reception in the city hall rotunda directly across the street.

The awards, each consisting of $150,000 in cash plus an Oscar-like statuette of an Ouroboros (a serpent biting its tail that is recognized in many cultures as a symbol of nature’s power of renewal), were presented by Richard N. Goldman, co-founder with his late wife Rhoda H. Goldman, of the Goldman Family Foundation. In all, the 2008 awards went to seven recipients from six regions spanning the globe.

Part of the genius of this award, which in environmental circles has come to mean much what the Nobel Prize does elsewhere, is that it recognizes solely grassroots efforts to the exclusion of government agencies, academic institutions or other foundations. An additional key aspect is that it does not pit all the regions against each other for a single prize. Rather, the prizes are co-equal and they go to carefully vetted winners, one for each of the six predetermined regions.

This year’s award for Europe was won by Ignace Schops of Genk, Belgium for his indispensable role in creating Hoge Kempen, Belgium’s first-ever national park in the northeastern Limberg province of that densely populated country. Dedicated in 2006, Hoge Kempen represents formidable public salesmanship to gain community support, political support and financial support (2/3 of the 90-million-euro total cost came from private matching funds). Schops, in English, spoke very movingly of the sacred trust national parks embody and in the process put eloquent spin on a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.

The award for North America went to Jesus Leon Santos, a Mixtec Indian leader from Oaxaca, Mexico, who has organized Mixtec campesinos to reforest and thus re-water more than 1,000 hectacres of formerly eroded and depleted agricultural land that now harbors highly productive food crops and a myriad of wildlife. In addition, Santos’ group CEDICAM has undertaken a seed bank to preserve and propagate traditional varieties of Mexican maize and to lobby the Mexican government to carve out exception zones protecting native corn from the degradation of the genome and the economic harm caused by US-subsidized GMO corn being dumped there below cost under NAFTA. Speaking entirely in Spanish, Santos pledged that the award would be used solely to further CEDICAM’s work.

The Asia award went to retired Siberian scientist Marina Rikhvanova for her extraordinary work in organizing local communities to protect Lake Baikal, a virtual Galapagos of unique species and the largest body of fresh water on the planet (it contains, in fact, 1/6 of all earth’s fresh water). At great personal danger to themselves and their families, Rikhanova and her allies forced Vladimir Putin and the Russian oil cartel to reroute a major trans-Siberian pipeline away from the Baikal drainage and to halt construction of a nuclear fuel processing plant within that drainage. She too, speaking in Russian, pledged that the award would go exclusively toward her work and her organization.

Following a brief intermission spiced by the sounds of a Taiko drum ensemble on stage, two exceptional environmental stewards from Ecuador’s Amazon Basin came forward to share the award for South and Central America. Luis Yanza, a leader of the indigenous community, and lawyer Pablo Fajardo Mendoza have tirelessly waged a legal battle for the cleanup of an area the size of Rhode Island that was turned into a toxic wasteland due to oil extraction by PetroEquador, Texaco and Chevron. The Equadorian interests have apparently settled their share and paid a multi-million-dollar fine. Texaco, and later Chevron, which purchased Texaco in 2001, have steadfastly resisted accepting blame, and the morning following the award ran full-page ads in the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times denouncing Yanza and Fajardo as opportunistic money-grubbers. At home, the two local heroes and their families have also faced death threats, but their speeches accepting the award were truly thrilling.

The award for Africa went to musician and community activist Feliciano dos Santos from Mozambique. Polio-afflicted as a youth and left with a pronounced limp, dos Santos has dedicated his life to village-level public health projects in the areas of clean drinking water and sanitary waste disposal. Composted sludge from the latter is also used to safely fertilize local crops. All manner of water-born diseases have been mitigated through these efforts, paid for in large part by concerts throughout Africa and Europe by dos Santos’ band Massuko. As part of his acceptance, he both spoke and sang in Portuguese, accompanying himself on the guitar.

The final award, for a vast region known as islands and island nations, went to Puerto Rico’s Rosa Hilda Ramos, who organized her fellow citizens to save and restore the 1,200 acre Las Cucharillas Marsh in Catano, across the bay from San Juan. In addition to protecting this vital wetlands ecosystem, she galvanized local support to require the cleanup of air quality in the San Juan basin, principally stemming from the Puerto Rico Electric Authority’s generating plants. Prior to her efforts, San Juan had some of the dirtiest air within the US EPA’s jurisdiction, with high rates of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. Now, having formed a mutually beneficial partnership with the Bacardi Corporation, Ramos is expanding on her past successes. Speaking in both Spanish and English, she described receiving the award as the happiest moment in her life except her marriage and the births of her children.

And frankly, this writer’s feet have barely touched the ground since being exposed to these grand displays of service to our planet. My good fortune in being able to attend came through knowing landscape and nature photographer Sidney Hollister, whose work has been featured in the Goldman Foundation’s annual reports and also adorns the foundation offices at the Presidio of San Francisco. It seems fair to note as well that I was so moved during the ceremony I cried twice, although the precise points at which that occurred I’ll leave for readers to guess.

As for Saving the Sierra and the remarkable things our organization has achieved in the short period of its existence, the idea that in a few years Catherine and jesikah might be up on the Davies Hall stage receiving a Goldman Prize does not strike me as far fetched.