UNITED STATES: This year’s winners of the most prestigious environmental prize in the world include grassroots campaigners who successfully battled British mining companies and a major plastic polluter.
The environmental campaigns led by the six 2023 Goldman Prize winners shed light on the difficulties some local activists face when battling the toxic concoction of corporate greed and systemic corruption causing the climate emergency, biodiversity collapse, and an increase in forced evictions.
Goldman Environmental Prize winners
The Goldman Environmental winners include Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation American fisherwoman who prevailed in a historic lawsuit against Formosa Plastics, one of the largest petrochemical firms in the world, for disposing of massive amounts of poisonous plastic waste along the Texas Gulf Coast.
Wilson, 74, gathered insider information from over 100 whistleblowers and self-trained as a private investigator and citizen scientist after state officials allowed the Taiwanese multinational to pollute without repercussion for over three decades.
“The system is completely flawed; while the firm wrecked our fishing community and the ecosystem, there was no enforcement by our industry-friendly lawmakers. I am just a high school graduate, but I feel a strong connection with the water. After 34 years of tenacity, we won, and it felt great,” Wilson, who is assisting in the oversight of the 2019 court order to monitor and clean up Texas wetlands and shoreline, stated.
The $50 million settlement is the highest payout ever made in a citizen-led lawsuit brought against an industrial polluter under the US Clean Water Act, and Formosa has since been required to pay extra multimillion-dollar fines for breaking the new “zero-discharge” regulation.
In another David v. Goliath legal triumph, the African winner contributed to changing UK law after the London Supreme Court ruled that British mining corporation Vedanta Resources may be tried in the UK court system, including on whether they owed a duty of care.
The 2021 legal precedent has already been used to hold the fossil fuel firm Shell Global accountable in the UK for pollution caused by its business in Nigeria. It has also been used to argue that British companies have a duty of care across the supply chain.
Indigenous and pastoral people are fighting unrestricted urban growth, industrial agriculture, and damaging industries like mining and fossil fuel projects all over the world.
Indigenous women from Indonesia and Brazil who faced strong corporations and pervasive misogyny in their communities to protect sizable portions of two of the greatest jungles in the world are among this year’s Goldman winners.
Alessandra Korap Munduruku organised community efforts in Brazil to prevent the British mining company Anglo American from encroaching on Indigenous lands in the Amazon by outing the firms readying to profit from the weakening of environmental and Indigenous rights protections under former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Anglo American formally agreed to withdraw 27 authorised research applications to mine within an Indigenous territory in May 2021, including 440,000 acres (178,000 hectares) of rainforest in Sawré Muybu grounds, which are home to Munduruku people.
“Just consider how challenging it is to be a female leader in the world of white people as opposed to our patriarchal societies. However, I was resolved to take action to defend our territory, rivers, and woods from invaders and persuaded the chiefs that women may lead in this ongoing struggle,” stated Korap, 33.
As Korap provided assistance with the planning of regional, governmental, and worldwide initiatives to expose the opaque mining transactions, other multinational corporations withdrew as well, and for the first time in many years, none of the 130 businesses covered by Ibram, the Brazilian Mining Association, reported having active mining applications in Indigenous areas.
In the midst of unprecedented levels of violence and criminal persecution, the bravery of environmental defenders like the winner, Delima Silalahi of North Sumatra, is enlightening and crucial to saving the planet from climatic catastrophe and environmental collapse.
In 2022, six Indigenous communities with a track record of forest stewardship received formal custody of 17,824 acres (7,200 hectares) of the over-exploited forest thanks to Silalahi’s initiative. The new stewards have started regenerating the biodiverse tropical forest to produce beneficial carbon sinks, a secure habitat for critically endangered tiger, orangutan, and rhino species, and a source of revenue through the sustainable cultivation of native benzoin styrax trees for frankincense harvesting.
The award, which is now in its 34th year, has acknowledged 219 environmental leaders from 95 different nations (121 men and 98 women). While many have gone on to assume top roles in government and nonprofit organisations and win the Nobel Prize, others have experienced backlash for their tenacious campaigning and ended up being arrested, imprisoned, or even killed.
Berta Cáceres, a Honduran indigenous activist who won the Goldman Prize in 2015 for organising a campaign to halt the construction of an unconstitutional hydroelectric dam, was murdered in 2016. The 2018 winner from Vietnam, Nguy Thi Khanh, a supporter of clean energy, is currently incarcerated for what are largely believed to be false tax charges.
Other Goldman Environmental winners this year include Tero Mustonen, a climate scientist and fisherman who assisted in converting dozens of severely degraded former industrial peat mining and forestry sites throughout Finland into carbon-absorbing, biodiverse wetlands and habitats, and Zafer Kizilkaya, whose inventive approach to marine conservation has helped make Turkey a role model for the Mediterranean.
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