For 21 Years, the Best of All Days
San Francisco -- That, of course, is the day the Goldman Environmental Prizes are awarded. Today, in Washington D.C., this year's Goldman Prize recipients will have lunch with the Sierra Club and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but in San Francisco we got a preview at Monday night's awards ceremony. What a group! This year's theme, implicitly, had to do with food and with the conflict between industrial food systems and subsistence, small-scale, and local food producers -- whether it was the Sierra Club's own Water Sentinel from Michigan, Lynn Henning, who has been standing up for her family farm against the huge factory feedlots invading her community, or Cuba's Humberto Ríos Labrada, who has pioneered relying on traditional farm practices based on seed diversity and organic techniques instead of the petroleum-based monocultures that were first brought to Cuba by U.S. sugar companies and then perpetuated by the Soviets.
Many of this year's prize recipients have also had enormously impressive campaign victories. Poland's Malgorzata Górska got a highway relocated that would have destroyed one of her country's last true wilderness areas. Costa Rica's Randall Arauz convinced his country to stand up against multinational fishing fleets that were destroying shark populations by catching sharks and taking just their fins -- a practice echoing the hunting of bison for their tongues that almost led to the extinction of America's great native grazer. And Cambodia's Sereivathana Tuy educated and trained farmers so that they no longer needed to kill elephants to protect their crops. For the past three years, none of the Cambodia's remaining 400 wild elephants has been killed.
Stories like these -- of victories against almost unimaginable odds -- are what keep me going the other 364 days of the year. Thank you, Goldman Environmental Prize.
Many of this year's prize recipients have also had enormously impressive campaign victories. Poland's Malgorzata Górska got a highway relocated that would have destroyed one of her country's last true wilderness areas. Costa Rica's Randall Arauz convinced his country to stand up against multinational fishing fleets that were destroying shark populations by catching sharks and taking just their fins -- a practice echoing the hunting of bison for their tongues that almost led to the extinction of America's great native grazer. And Cambodia's Sereivathana Tuy educated and trained farmers so that they no longer needed to kill elephants to protect their crops. For the past three years, none of the Cambodia's remaining 400 wild elephants has been killed.
Stories like these -- of victories against almost unimaginable odds -- are what keep me going the other 364 days of the year. Thank you, Goldman Environmental Prize.
