'Moved and Inspired': Meet the 2019 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners

Six grassroots environmental activists will receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize today. Dubbed the Green Nobel Prize, the Goldman Prize honors environmental activists from each of the six continental regions: Europe, Asia, North America, Central America and South America, Africa and islands and island nations.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Prize founded in 1989 by U.S. philanthropists Rhoda and Richard Goldman. To date, 194 winners from 89 different nations have received this award.
This year's winners include an environmental and human rights lawyer who stopped the destruction of Liberia's tropical forests, a conservationist who helped create a large protected area in Mongolia and a biologist from North Macedonia who fought against hydropower plants planned inside a critical habitat of the rare Balkan lynx. The winners also include an indigenous leader from Chile who led a movement against two hydroelectric projects on a sacred river, a marine conservationist who campaigned to protect the Cook Islands' marine biodiversity, and an activist from the U.S. who rallied residents to stop the construction of a massive oil export terminal that could have threatened the health and safety of the local community.
"I am so moved and inspired by these six environmental trailblazers," Susie Gelman, president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. "Each of them has selflessly stood up to stop injustice, become a leader when leadership was critical, and vanquished powerful adversaries who would desecrate our planet. These are six ordinary, yet extraordinary, human beings who remind us that we all have a role in protecting the Earth."
The winners will be honored at the San Francisco Opera House in California, U.S., on April 29. Former U.S. vice president and environmental activist Al Gore will present the keynote address.
Here are the winners of the 2019 Goldman Environmental Prize:
Environmental lawyer Alfred Brownell stopped the clear-cutting of Liberia’s tropical forests by palm oil plantation… https://t.co/IyqtNE9ehM— Goldman Prize (@Goldman Prize)1556546703.0
Alfred Brownell, Liberia
Alfred Brownell, an environmental lawyer, has been a champion of Liberia's tropical forests, protecting them from being cleared for palm oil plantations.
In 2010, the Liberian government granted a 65-year lease of about 2,200 square kilometers (850 square miles) to Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL), a Southeast Asia-based agro-industrial company, to establish palm oil plantations in the country. But there were reports that the company was allegedly clearing community forests without consent or compensation, and damaging sacred sites and farms and polluting water sources.
Brownell worked with the local communities to file a complaint against GVL with the global certification body for palm oil, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The complaint worked: RSPO stopped GVL from expanding its plantations, halting the clearing of 94 percent of the forest leased to GVL.
The company went on to sign more agreements to develop plantations, but reportedly failed to deliver on the jobs and other benefits it had promised, resulting in violent clashes and arrests of community members. Brownell collated more legal evidence to demonstrate GVL's malpractices, and in 2018 the RSPO dismissed GVL's appeal against the initial stay on its palm oil expansion.
Currently a research associate professor in the School of Law at Northeastern University in Boston, Brownell was forced to flee to the U.S. with his family because of death threats. But he hopes to return to his country soon.
BREAKING NEWS: We are proud to announce that our #Mongolia Program Director, Bayarjargal (Bayara) Agvaantseren has… https://t.co/BK9937iV3v— Snow Leopard Trust (@Snow Leopard Trust)1556529218.0
Bayarjargal Agvaantseren, Mongolia
Bayarjargal Agvaantseren, currently the Mongolia director for the conservation NGO Snow Leopard Trust, became interested in snow leopards while translating for a scientist visiting the area. She went on to work on various conservation projects involving Mongolia's herder communities. In 2009, after learning about the widespread mining operations in the Tost Mountains in the South Gobi Desert, a key migration habitat for the snow leopard, she began working with the local Tost community to create the massive Tost Tosonbumba Nature Reserve.
Spread across 7,280 square kilometers (2,800 square miles), the nature reserve is the first formally protected area in Mongolia created specifically to protect the snow leopard. Agvaantseren's campaigning also pressured the government to cancel 37 active mining licenses granted in the reserve.
Ana Colovic Lesoska, North Macedonia
Only about 30 critically endangered Balkan lynxes (Lynx lynx balcanicus) are believed to live in North Macedonia today. And they're almost all found in Mavrovo National Park bordering Albania and Kosovo. In 2010, two large hydropower plants were proposed in Mavroro, their funding secured through the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank.
Ana Colovic Lesoska, the director and founder of the Eko-Svest Center for Environmental Research and Information, brought together North Macedonian NGOs and environmental law activists in a "Save Mavroro" campaign. Colovic Lesoska went door-to-door to inform locals about the impacts of the projects, organized public protests, launched a petition asking the government, EBRD and World Bank to stop the projects, and even filed a complaint with the EBRD alleging that it had approved funding for the hydropower projects without adequately assessing the impacts on the biodiversity of the area.
The World Bank ultimately withdrew its funding, a North Macedonian court scrapped the given environmental permit, and the EBRD canceled its loan.
Goldman Environmental Prize
Jacqueline Evans, Cook Islands
To make the marine park a reality, Evans traveled across the islands with a team of government, NGO and traditional leaders, meeting with communities, listening to their priorities and building trust. She also partnered with a local rugby star Kevin Iro to create the Marae Moana Establishment Trust, and worked with global experts to design and draft the legislation around the marine park. As the director of the Marae Moana Coordination Office, Evans is now working to create a national Marae Moana spatial plan to ensure that all of the Cooks' ocean territory is managed sustainably.
Alberto Curamil organized his indigenous community to stop the construction of two hydroelectric projects on the Ca… https://t.co/RJBtuDJvFZ— Goldman Prize (@Goldman Prize)1556548209.0
Alberto Curamil, Chile
Alberto Curamil, an indigenous leader of the Mapuche people in Chile's Araucanía region, has been leading the fight against hydropower projects that he says will destroy Araucanía's forests and rivers. To mount resistance against the projects, Curamil rallied not only the Mapuche people but also non-Mapuche members, including environmental organizations and academics.
He organized protests, road blockades and even launched a legal campaign alleging that the Chilean government had permitted the hydropower projects without the free, prior and informed consent of the local communities. In 2016, Chile canceled two of the planned hydropower projects, citing public opposition for one and lack of consent and adequate assessment of environmental impacts for the other.
In 2018, Curamil was arrested for allegedly being involved in a robbery, a charge that his community says is a result of his activism against the hydropower projects. Curamil is still in jail.
When Linda Garcia and the Fruit Valley Neighborhood Association launched a campaign to block an oil terminal at th… https://t.co/Ng8qM4iVhS— Sierra Magazine (@Sierra Magazine)1556552942.0
Linda Garcia, United States
Environmental activist Linda Garcia led a campaign that ultimately stopped North America's largest proposed oil terminal from being built.
A resident of Fruit Valley, a small neighborhood in Vancouver, Washington, Garcia first heard of the Tesoro Savage oil terminal project in 2013. This project, which was scheduled to be set up close to her neighborhood, planned to transport 11 million gallons (42 million liters) of oil per day, creating what would be North America's largest oil terminal. With Fruit Valley already suffering from bad air quality, Garcia was concerned that the oil project would further threaten the safety and well-being of her community.
She dug deep into the company's past records, campaigned and raised public support to oppose the project, and became a spokesperson. She also testified as a community witness at public hearings and city council meetings despite multiple death threats and suffering from an illness that required chemotherapy. The efforts of Garcia and other campaigners bore fruit in 2018, when permits for the Tesoro Savage project were denied and the company's lease was terminated.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Mongabay.
By Jeff Masters, Ph.D.
Earth had its second-warmest year on record in 2020, just 0.02 degrees Celsius (0.04°F) behind the record set in 2016, and 0.98 degrees Celsius (1.76°F) above the 20th-century average, NOAA reported January 14.
Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for 2020, the second-warmest year the globe has seen since record-keeping began in 1880, according to NOAA. Record-high annual temperatures over land and ocean surfaces were measured across parts of Europe, Asia, southern North America, South America, and across parts of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. No land or ocean areas were record cold for the year. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
Figure 2. Total ocean heat content (OHC) in the top 2000 meters from 1958-2020. Cheng et al., Upper Ocean Temperatures Hit Record High in 2020, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences
Figure 3. Departure of sea surface temperature from average in the benchmark Niño 3.4 region of the eastern tropical Pacific (5°N-5°S, 170°W-120°W). Sea surface temperature were approximately one degree Celsius below average over the past month, characteristic of moderate La Niña conditions. Tropical Tidbits
- NASA and NOAA: Last Decade Was the Hottest on Record - EcoWatch ›
- Earth Just Had Its Hottest September Ever Recorded, NOAA Says ... ›
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
In December of 1924, the heads of all the major lightbulb manufacturers across the world met in Geneva to concoct a sinister plan. Their talks outlined limits on how long all of their lightbulbs would last. The idea is that if their bulbs failed quickly customers would have to buy more of their product. In this video, we're going to unpack this idea of purposefully creating inferior products to drive sales, a symptom of late-stage capitalism that has since been coined planned obsolescence. And as we'll see, this obsolescence can have drastic consequences on our wallets, waste streams, and even our climate.
- Consumer Society No Longer Serves Our Needs - EcoWatch ›
- Electronic Waste: New EU Rules Target Throwaway Culture ... ›
Trending
At least 42 people are confirmed dead and more than 600 injured after a 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi early Friday morning.
- At Least 27 Dead as Landslides Strike Indonesia, Including Village ... ›
- 1,400 Dead, 70,000 Homeless After Earthquake and Tsunami in ... ›
Water Protectors Arrested in Minnesota After Chaining Themselves Inside Enbridge Line 3 Pipe
By Jessica Corbett
Water protectors were arrested Thursday after halting construction at a Minnesota worksite for Enbridge's Line 3 project by locking themselves together inside a pipe segment.
- Indigenous-Led Water Protectors Take Direct Action Against ... ›
- Indigenous and Climate Leaders Outraged Over Minnesota Permits ... ›
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker vetoed a sweeping climate bill on Thursday that would have put the commonwealth on a path to eliminating carbon emissions by 2050.