Latest news with #Goldmanprize
The Guardian
21-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Indigenous river campaigner from Peru wins prestigious Goldman prize
An Indigenous campaigner and women's leader from the Peruvian Amazon has been awarded the prestigious Goldman prize for environmental activists, after leading a successful legal campaign that led to the river where her people, the Kukama, live being granted legal personhood. Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, 57, from the village of Shapajila on the Marañon River, led the Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana (HKK) women's association, supported by lawyers from Peru's Legal Defence Institute, in a campaign to protect the river. After three years, judges in Loreto, Peru's largest Amazon region, ruled in March 2024 that the Marañon had the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination, respecting an Indigenous worldview that regards a river as a living entity. It was a landmark ruling in Peru. The court in Iquitos, Loreto's capital city, found the Peruvian government had violated the river's inherent rights, and ordered it to take immediate action to prevent future oil spills into the waterway. The court also ruled that the government must mandate the creation of a protection plan for the entire river basin and recognise the Kukama community as its stewards. The government appealed against the decision, but the court upheld the ruling in October 2024. 'She is the 'mother of rivers', the Marañon is born in the Andes and flows downstream to become the Amazon River,' Canaquiri said. The Kukama believe the river is sacred and that their ancestors' spirits reside in its bed. for four decades, however, the Kukama have endured scores of oil spills which destroy fish stocks, damage the ecosystem and contaminate the water with heavy metals. The Peruvian state oil company Petroperú began building the the Northern Peruvian pipeline in 1970s, and the region around the Marañon River has accounted for 40% of the county's oil production since 2014 – with devastating effects. There have been more than 60 oil spills along the river since 1997, some of them catastrophic. 'My grandparents taught me that there is a giant boa that lives in the river, Puragua, the 'mother of the river','said Canaquiri. The spirit represents the health of the river and its personhood, according to the Kukama's cosmovision. In practical terms, the Kukama depend on the river for transport, agriculture, water and fish, which is their main protein source. As a result of the the oil drilling, however, they have become highly vulnerable to water contamination. Local people have suffered from fevers, diarrhoea, skin rashes and miscarriages after oil spills, and elevated levels of lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium were found in the blood of river community members in a 2021 study. Canaquiri, a mother of four with six grandchildren, remembers a blissful childhood with abundant fish and animals before the oil drilling began. 'There was plenty of food. We shared everything, worked on each other's farms and celebrated the festivals together,' she said. Despite the ruling, the river is not out of danger and Canaquiri and the HKK are asking the Peruvian government to implement the court's ruling. The fight continues. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion Peru's congress passed an anti-NGO law last month, which the country's president, Dina Boluarte, approved last week. The law prevents civil society organisations from taking legal action or even giving legal counsel in cases against the state over human rights abuses. Canaquiri says the law could cripple their legal battle. 'It is worrying because it means lawyers cannot take our cases to enforce our fundamental rights,' she said. 'It is not just for us, it is also for the country and the world. Who can live without breathing? If it wasn't for the Amazon, the forest, the rivers, we wouldn't have clean air to breathe. How would we get food to eat every day, our fruits, our vegetables, our animals, our fish?' She says she and the HKK are motivated by the future of their children and grandchildren,: 'The government needs to understand that it should not kill nature but protect it. Otherwise, what hope will our children, the next generation, have?
The Guardian
21-04-2025
- The Guardian
Grassroots activists who took on corruption and corporate power share 2025 Goldman prize
Grassroots activists who helped jail corrupt officials and obtain personhood rights for a sacred Amazonian river are among this year's winners of the world's most prestigious environmental prize. The community campaigns led by the seven 2025 Goldman prize winners underscore the courage and tenacity of local activists willing to confront the toxic mix of corporate power, regulatory failures and political corruption that is fuelling biodiversity collapse, water shortages, deadly air pollution and the climate emergency. This year's recipients include Semia Gharbi, a scientist and environmental educator from Tunisia, who took on an organised waste trafficking network that led to more than 40 arrests, including 26 Tunisian officials and 16 Italians with ties to the illegal trade. Gharbi, 57, headed a public campaign demanding accountability after an Italian company was found to have shipped hundreds of containers of household garbage to Tunisia to dump in its overfilled landfill sites, rather than the recyclable plastic it had declared it was shipping. Gharbi lobbied lawmakers, compiled dossiers for UN experts and helped organise media coverage in both countries. Eventually, 6,000 tonnes of illegally exported household waste was shipped back to Italy in February 2022, and the scandal spurred the EU to close some loopholes governing international waste shipping. Not far away in the Canary Islands, Carlos Mallo Molina helped lead another sophisticated effort to prevent the construction of a large recreational boat and ferry terminal on the island of Tenerife that threatened to damage Spain's most important marine reserve. The tourism gravy train can seem impossible to derail, but in 2018 Mallo swapped his career as a civil engineer to stop the sprawling Fonsalía port, which threatened the 170,000-acre biodiverse protected area that provides vital habitat for endangered sea turtles, whales, giant squid and blue sharks. As with Gharbi in Tunisia, education played a big role in the campaign's success and included developing a virtual scuba dive into the threatened marine areas and a children's book about a sea turtle searching for seagrass in the Canary Islands. After three years of pressure backed by international environmental groups, divers and residents, the government cancelled construction of the port, safeguarding the only whale heritage site in European territorial waters. 'It's been a tough year for both people and the planet,' said Jennifer Goldman Wallis, vice-president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation. 'There's so much that worries us, stresses us, outrages us, and keeps us divided … these environmental leaders and teachers – and the global environmental community that supports them – are the antidote.' For the past 36 years, the Goldman prize has honoured environmental defenders from each of the world's six inhabited continental regions, recognising their commitment and achievements in the face of seemingly insurmountable hurdles. To date, 233 winners from 98 nations have been awarded the prize. Many have gone on to hold positions in governments, as heads of state, nonprofit leaders, and as Nobel prize laureates. Three Goldman recipients have been killed, including the 2015 winner from Honduras, the Indigenous Lenca leader Berta Cáceres, whose death in 2016 was orchestrated by executives of an internationally financed dam company whose project she helped stall. Environmental and land rights defenders often persist in drawn-out efforts to secure clean water and air for their communities and future generations – despite facing threats including online harassment, bogus criminal charges, and sometimes physical violence. More than 2,100 land and environmental defenders were killed globally between 2012 and 2023, according to an observatory run by the charity Global Witness. Latin America remains the most dangerous place to defend the environment but a range of repressive tactics are increasingly being used to silence activists across Asia, the US, the UK and the EU. In the US, Laurene Allen was recognised for her extraordinary leadership, which culminated in a plastics plant being closed in 2024 after two decades of leaking toxic forever chemicals into the air, soil and water supplies in the small town of Merrimack, New Hampshire. The 62-year-old social worker turned water protector developed the town's local campaign into a statewide and national network to address Pfas contamination, helping persuade the Biden administration to establish the first federal drinking water standard for forever chemicals. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion Three of this year's Goldman recipients were involved in battles to save two rivers thousands of miles apart – in Peru and Albania – which both led to landmark victories. Besjana Guri and Olsi Nika not only helped stop construction of a hydroelectric dam on the 167-mile Vjosa River, but their decade-long campaign led to the Albanian government declaring it a wild river national park. Guri, 37, a social worker, and Nika, 39, a biologist and ecologist, garnered support from scientists, lawyers, EU parliamentarians and celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio, for the new national park – the first in Europe to protect a wild river. This historic designation protects the Vjosa and its three tributaries, which are among the last remaining free-flowing undammed rivers in Europe. In Peru, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari, 56, led the Indigenous Kukama women's association to a landmark court victory that granted the 1,000-mile Marañón River legal personhood, with the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination. The Marañón River and its tributaries are the life veins of Peru's tropical rainforests and support 75% of its tropical wetlands – but also flow through lands containing some of the South American country's biggest oil and gas fields. The court ordered the Peruvian government to stop violating the rivers' rights, and take immediate action to prevent future oil spills. The Kukama people, who believe their ancestors reside on the riverbed, were recognised by the court as stewards of the great Marañón. This year's oldest winner was Batmunkh Luvsandash from Mongolia, an 81-year-old former electrical engineer whose anti-mining activism has led to 200,000 acres of the East Gobi desert being protected from the world's insatiable appetite for metal minerals.
