Environmental award spotlights grassroots environmentalists.

Every April, six activists from around the globe are awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, the world's largest cash prize for grassroots environmentalists. "These six winners are among the most important people you have not heard of before," explains philanthropist and Prize founder Richard N. Goldman. "All of them have fought, often alone and at great personal risk, to protect the environment in their home countries."

Goldman's idea to launch an environmental prize emerged over breakfast one morning in 1988 as he was reading about the winners of several Nobel Prizes. He and his late wife Rhoda decided to offer a comparable award that recognized ordinary people for their grassroots contributions to the environment. They envisioned the Goldman Prize as a way to demonstrate the international nature of environmental problems, draw public attention to global issues of critical importance, and inspire others to emulate the examples set by Prize recipients.

Since 1990, 119 individuals from 70 countries have received the Goldman Prize, which includes a cash award of US$125,000 and a 10-day media and publicity tour of San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Winners from six regions are selected by an international jury based on confidential nominations submitted by a worldwide network of environmental organizations and individuals. In the past, several awardees, including 1991 recipient Wangari Maathai and 1996 winner Marina Silva, have gone on to assume important political positions in their countries.

Detailed information on all current and past winners is available at www.goldmanprize.org.

The 2007 Goldman Prize Recipients

AFRICA 

Hammerskjoeld Simwinga, Zambia

Transforming Communities Through Sustainable Development 

Simwinga, 45, is utilizing innovative sustainable development strategies to transform communities in Zambia's North Luangwa Valley, where rampant wildlife poaching in the 1980s decimated wild elephant populations and left villagers living in extreme poverty. As head of the North Luangwa Wildlife Conservation and Community Development Programme (NLWCCDP), he helps protect the biodiversity of the 6,200-square-kilometer North Luangwa National Park and improve village life through microlending, education, rural health programs, and women's empowerment.

In 1994, at a time when the local economies relied heavily on poaching income, Simwinga began working with the U.S.-funded North Luangwa Conservation Project (NLCP). He helped villagers form "wildlife clubs" that used small business loans to provide basic goods, services, and legal jobs as alternatives to working for poachers. With this assistance, villagers opened small general stores and grinding mills; the program also provided seed loans, transportation, and technical assistance to help farmers grow higher-yielding, protein-rich crops instead of eating wild animal meat. Simwinga tied the entire project to wildlife protection, thus supplanting an illicit economy based on poaching with a legal one.

As NLCP's successes became apparent in the mid-1990s, powerful government officials and others capitalizing on poaching saw their profits dwindle with the slowdown in the illicit ivory and meat trade. Government officials seized the NLCP offices in 1996 and the group was turned over to new management, dropping support for all village development programs. Undeterred, Simwinga worked tirelessly to keep his community project going, funding it partially through loan payments from villagers. For almost a year he worked alone with the communities, regularly walking 30 kilometers between villages. Slowly, he pulled together a substantial Zambian nongovernment organization, NLWCCDP, and attracted small funding to keep the work alive.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As a result of Simwinga's efforts, income has increased 100-fold among the villagers and family food stocks have doubled. Elephant poaching is now 98-percent controlled and bushmeat poaching is minimal. Wildlife has returned to the area, including elephants, hippos, Cape buffalos, and puku. The endangered black rhino has also been reintroduced in the park. Today, the development program reaches more than 35,000 people and serves as a model for similar efforts throughout Africa. The challenge is to manage the ever-growing demand for the project in neighboring regions and to bolster financial support from the international community.

ASIA 

Tsetsegee Munkhbayar, Mongolia

Protecting Water Sources

Born into a family of poor, semi-nomadic herdsmen, Munkhbayar, 40, is leading the effort to protect Mongolia's precious water resources from the dangers of unregulated mining. He heads the Onggi River Movement (ORM), a grassroots organization that he cofounded in 2001 to protect and restore the Onggi River. His work has led to the formation of the Mongolian Nature Protection Coalition, which brought together 11 Mongolian river movements and has significantly raised awareness at both the grassroots and legislative levels.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s ushered in a new era of free market development in Mongolia, attracting more than 30 companies to mine indiscriminately and illicitly along the tributaries of the Onggi. Miners used high-pressure water systems to extract gold and other minerals, affecting both the flow and quality of the water that rural people rely on for themselves and their herds. Concerned about these changes, Munkhbayar started attending village council meetings near his home, representing the voices of herders on issues such as land use, water access, and taxation. In 1996, the local people elected him to chair the local citizens' council, a rare occurrence for a non-elite Mongolian herdsman. As chairman, he engaged and confronted the provincial and senior government officials on community issues.

Working nonstop with ORM, Munkhbayar eventually convinced the government to increase and enforce mining regulations in the region and to stop damaging mining activities and begin environmental restoration. In May 2006, the Mongolian Parliament passed the Law on Minerals, which will regulate mining and protect precious waterways. In addition, 35 of the 37 mining operations working in the Onggi River Basin have ceased destructive operations. The river is now flowing higher and farther than it has at any time in the last two years.

Munkhbayar believes in empowering local citizens to protect and restore the river and holds workshops to educate herdsmen about their rights as citizens and about environmental issues. In just a few years, he and ORM have established local boards in all eight counties within the three Onggi River Basin provinces, recruited nearly 4,000 supporting members, and carried out information campaigns, press conferences, town hall meetings, and a 470-kilometer march along the river.

EUROPE

Willie Corduff, Ireland

Small Family Farms, Big Oil Interests

For nearly a decade, Corduff, 53, a lifetime resident of the small farming community of Rossport in Ireland's north County Mayo, has led the fight to oppose the construction of an illegally approved pipeline through his land. The proposed Shell Oil pipeline would carry toxic, unrefined gas from the Corrib gas field, discovered off the nearby coast in 1996, across the property of more than two dozen farmers and landowners to a refinery to be built in neighboring Bellanaboy. Because Shell owns all rights for the Corrib and nearby fields, the community of Rossport would receive no royalties and would have to pay full market price for the gas.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Despite objections by many Rossport citizens, who say the pipeline will jeopardize the delicate bog ecosystem and threaten both the safety of local residents and the farmers' way of life, the government granted Shell permission to construct the pipeline in violation of federal laws requiring local participation and review. Under pressure from the government, most of the landowners agreed to let Shell run the pipeline, but Corduff and six neighbors, who among them own more than 50 percent of the land needed to build the line, denied the company access. They began a grassroots campaign to rally the support of Rossport residents in challenging the project.

In June 2005, after refusing Shell access to their land, Corduff and four other men--known as the "Rossport Five"--were arrested and spent 94 days in jail. Protests ensued throughout western Ireland, and the incarceration garnered international attention, turning the local protest into a national issue focused on the democratic rights of communities. Since then, the "Shell to Sea" campaign has continued, with hundreds of people joining in the protests and forming blockades at the Shell refinery site. Campaigners have demanded that the gas be processed at an offshore terminal, thereby eliminating the need for the pipeline and preventing environmental harm to the region. Shell has refused to consider this alternative, saying it would cost millions of dollars more than its current pipeline plan.

Pipeline construction has been halted temporarily, and in August 2006 Shell agreed to reroute the line. But the changes are said to be minor, and the new route is yet to be publicized. In October 2006, Shell broke ground on the refinery in Bellanaboy, making it clear that the project will continue despite daily protests at the construction site, where state-supplied police now guard the gates.

ISLANDS & ISLAND NATIONS

Orri Vigfusson, Iceland

Multinational Challenge, Innovative Solution

An entrepreneur and lifelong outdoorsman, Vigfusson, 64, first became aware of declining salmon stocks in the 1970s while fishing along the rivers of his native northern Iceland. Speaking with others who lived or fished along local rivers, he learned the extent of Iceland's shrinking river salmon populations. In the early 1990s, he founded the Iceland-based North Atlantic Salmon Fund (NASF), an innovative, multinational initiative to buy out the fishing rights of commercial salmon fishers whose over-fishing was causing the decline. Since then, NASF has raised US$35 million to buy netting rights across the North Atlantic, essentially paying fishers not to catch salmon in the region.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Vigfusson represents a new breed of environmental leader who uses business skills and negotiation to protect precious natural resources. Early on, he reached out to stakeholders across Iceland, Europe, and North America, meeting with residents of river communities and local anglers. He began discussions with commercial salmon fishers, talking openly with them about the over-fishing problem from both an environmental and economic point of view, including how their own livelihoods were being affected.

After raising significant grassroots support, Vigfusson approached governments, introducing his idea of the buyout agreements. He has since brokered multimillion-dollar buyouts or moratorium agreements with several national governments and with commercial salmon fishers in England, the Faroe Islands, France, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Wales. A large share of NASF's funds is spent on helping fishers find viable economic alternatives, such as snow crab and lumpfish caviar harvesting.

Through his work, Vigfusson has succeeded in preventing the seemingly inevitable decimation of wild North Atlantic salmon populations. According to NASF estimates, commercial open-sea fishing in the Atlantic has dropped by more than 75 percent in the last 15 years, and river anglers in several countries in areas where nets have been closed have reported substantial increases in salmon catches. NASF estimates that more than 5 million North Atlantic salmon have been saved to date.

In November 2006, after years of NASF campaigning and negotiating, Ireland announced it would buy out all of the country's salmon drift-netting licenses, as well as establish multimillion-dollar funds to address the economic losses to salmon fishers and rural communities. This represents one of the final steps in Vigfusson's vision of securing a complete halt to salmon fishing at sea in the North Atlantic. He is now focused on the remaining interceptory coastal nets in Scotland and Norway, the last countries to operate major mixed-stock fisheries that prevent many returning salmon from reaching their native rivers. The governments in both countries have been slow to act and are reluctant to work with civil society groups.

NORTH AMERICA

Sophia Rabliauskas, Canada

Rightful Stewards of the Land

Rabliauskas, 47, is the leader of the 1,200 members of the Ojib-way indigenous people, who make up the Poplar River First Nation in Manitoba's boreal region. For the past eight years, she has worked with her people to secure interim protection of their 810 million hectares of undisturbed forestland, an area home to abundant wildlife that also plays a vital role in mitigating climate change by storing large amounts of carbon. For thousands of years, Poplar River has carried out its traditional mandate to protect the region and its resources, but today the area is under threat from industrial clearcut logging and hydropower development. Because Canadian First Nations territory is legally public land, government agencies have the authority to grant longterm leases to industry without consulting the native groups who live there.

In 2004, Rabliauskas and several other community members, under the direction of their elders, led Poplar River in developing a comprehensive land protection and management plan for their territory--a precedent-setting accomplishment among boreal First Nations. Their efforts resulted in a full-scale blueprint of how they intend to document, protect, and sustainably manage the territory's forests, wildlife, and other natural resources. Core components of the plan include: respecting traditional knowledge; benefiting from environmental analysis; developing economic opportunities while protecting traditional hunting, trapping, and fishing activities; and creating sustainable tourism opportunities.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In 2003, a year before the plan's completion, Rabliauskas helped secure five more years of "interim protected status" for Poplar River, which prohibits any logging, hydro, gas, or mining development within the 810 million hectares. The group's current efforts are focused on securing permanent protection of their land from the Manitoba government and getting a UNESCO World Heritage listing for a larger region of First Nations boreal forest. The government has announced its intention to grant permanent protection to Poplar River's land but has not done so to date.

SOUTH & CENTRAL AMERICA

Julio Cusurichi Palacios, Peru

A Voice for the Voiceless

Cusurichi, 36, a Shipibo indigenous leader of the Peruvian Amazon, has been instrumental in bringing international attention to the existence of so-called "indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation" in Madre de Dios, one of the most inaccessible regions of the Amazon. These indigenous peoples--estimated at between a few hundred and a few thousand individuals--choose to live deep in the forest without contact with the outside world and do not use rivers for transport. They are extremely vulnerable to outside contact, and entire groups have died out after being exposed to influenza and other diseases new to them.

In 2002, Cusurichi led an effort that resulted in the creation of a 7,688-square-kilometer territorial reserve for these remote peoples. He currently serves as an advisor with the Federation of Natives of the Madre de Dios River and its Tributaries (FENAMAD), working to stop intrusion into their territory. He has pressed on despite facing violent threats to his life and false public attacks on his character from the illegal mining and logging entities that oppose his work.

Madre de Dios has seen a dramatic increase in the illegal logging of big-leaf mahogany, a valuable timber species, as a result of Peru's failure to enforce domestic and international regulations on this activity. Abundant stands are now found only in the most remote areas, mainly those where isolated indigenous groups live. Runins with loggers, though still infrequent, are often brief and violent, ending in bloodshed as these groups defend their lands with bows and arrows, and the loggers defend themselves with firearms.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Having won the fight to create the territorial reserve, Cusurichi now works to protect the indigenous groups by documenting illegal logging and calling for stricter law enforcement. He helped the Peruvian government establish monitoring posts along the region's main rivers to curb the entrance of illegal loggers and to document the number of mahogany logs leaving. When the government abandoned the posts, he worked with FENAMAD to train indigenous villagers to take over and brokered a deal for the government to pay them. The villages also organized a monitoring network to protect the reserve.

Cusurichi, together with FENAMAD and groups including the U.S-based Natural Resources Defense Council, has engaged in an ongoing legal and political struggle, including filing a lawsuit against the U.S. government and three U.S. timber importers. The suit charges that by importing big-leaf mahogany from Peru, the United States is violating both the U.S. Endangered Species Act and international law. The case is currently being heard, and if successful could cut off the main market for the timber, end the threat of illegal logging in the reserve, and ensure the longterm protection of the region and its inhabitants.

For more information about issues raised in this story, visit www.worldwatch.org/ww/goldman.