The six “Nobel prizes for the environment” honouring environmental activists from around the world dedicated to protecting the planet were awarded in San Francisco.
On 18 April, the six winning environmental activists of the Goldman environmental prize 2016 were honoured in Los Angeles, California; the official ceremony will take place in Washington, the United States capital, on Wednesday 20 April. The award, also known as the "Nobel prize for the environment", is the highest honour that since 1990 has recognised environmental activists from around the world dedicated to protecting nature.
It is not always easy to understand what drives these people to devote themselves body and soul to this struggle; sometimes it is an ideal, sometimes it is simply the need to protect one's family, the territory where one grew up, one's own habitat.
Yet it is an extremely dangerous choice. Consider Berta Càceres, the Honduran activist who for years fought to defend the rights of her community and protect her country's ancestral lands, winner of the Goldman environmental prize 2015, who was shot and killed last 4 March.
The 2016 winners come from completely different backgrounds and have entirely different profiles, yet they share an ardent desire for positive change, in the name of a fairer social and environmental development. Let's find out who they are.
The profile of Máxima Acuña, a Peruvian farmer, is not that of the typical activist — she can neither read nor write and has never joined any organisation. Yet she is the true winner of the Goldman environmental prize 2016. The woman defended her land by opposing the expansion project of the largest gold mine in Latin America, which would have devastated the lake used to irrigate the fields.
He fights for the rights of indigenous communities in Tanzania and for the protection of the environment. He leads an organisation that enables land and fields to be assigned to indigenous communities rather than to individuals, in northern Tanzania, guaranteeing the environmental protection of over 80,000 hectares of land for future generations. He looks to the past to secure a future for his people, who for centuries have been accustomed to living sustainably and coexisting with wildlife, until their ancestral lands were taken from them.
The Puerto Rican naturalist helped create an important nature reserve where leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea), an endangered species, nest. Rivera Herrera also successfully opposed, through a sixteen-year battle, the construction of a mega-resort that was to be built within the protected area.
Ouch has dedicated his life to protecting forests in Cambodia, one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental activists, working undercover to document illegal deforestation and exposing the corruption that links government and multinationals.
The young American from Baltimore led residents in a revolt against plans to build the largest incinerator in Maryland, just over a kilometre from her high school. According to some environmental impact studies, the incinerator — designed with the promise of bringing clean energy to the state — would pollute far more than the existing coal-fired plants. As a teenager, Destiny founded Free Your Voice, a student organisation dedicated to community rights and social justice, circulating petitions and informing the community about the risks of the new facility.
Slovak lawyer Zuzana successfully led the campaign to close a toxic waste landfill that was poisoning the land, air and water in her community, which has long based part of its economy on viticulture, setting a precedent for public participation in post-communist Slovakia.
