Meet the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners

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This year marks the 32nd anniversary of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, which honors one grassroots activist from each of the six inhabited continents.

The 2021 prize winners are Sharon Lavigne from the United States, Gloria Majiga-Kamoto from Malawi, Thai Van Nguyen from Vietnam, Maida Bilal from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kimiko Hirata from Japan, and Liz Chicaje Churay from Peru.

The prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, also known as the “Green Nobel Prize” will be awarded today to six environmental activists, one from each of the world’s inhabited continents.

This year’s winners include a special education teacher whose activism stopped the construction of a billion-dollar plastics manufacturing plant along the Mississippi River; a woman whose efforts led to the creation of a national park in Peru the size of Yellowstone; a community leader whose organizing and 500-day blockade of heavy equipment stopped the construction of two dams in the Balkans; an activist who helped cancel 13 coal power plants in Japan and is the first female prize winner from Japan; a man who has dedicated his life to rescuing endangered pangolins from the illegal wildlife trade and ending poaching; and a woman who fought for a national ban on thin plastics manufacturing in Malawi.

“When it comes to the environment, the global community of grassroots activists, leaders, thinkers, and philanthropists is only growing and becoming more sophisticated, more united, more powerful,” Susie Gelman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a press release.

“These Prize winners have so much to teach us about the path forward and how to maintain the balance with nature that is key to our survival,” Gelman said. “They have not been silenced — despite great risks and personal hardship — and we must also not be silent, either. It takes all of us.”

This year’s ceremony will take place virtually today, June 15, at 4 p.m. PDT and will be hosted by Jane Fonda with musical guests Lenny Kravitz, Baaba Maal, and the Ndlovu Youth Choir. Sigourney Weaver and Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate will make special appearances.


Winner profiles: https://news.mongabay.com/2021/06/meet-the-2021-goldman-environmental-prize-winners/



Sharon Lavigne’s activism stopped the construction of a billion-dollar plastics manufacturing plant alongside the Mississippi River in Lousiana’s notorious “cancer alley.” Image courtesy of the Goldman Environmental Prize.