Environmental Prize Highlights Inspiring Grassroots Leaders—and Global Fight Against Fossil Fuels
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Sharon Lavigne, of Rise St. James. 2021 Goldman environmental prize winner for north america. Photo courtesy of Goldman environmental Prize.
There’s been some cause for cautious optimism this summer for those hoping the world doesn’t keep drilling its way to climate oblivion.
The Keystone XL pipeline officially died. A Dutch court ordered the oil giant Shell to slash its emissions by 2045. Dissatisfied shareholders elected three climate-concerned members to ExxonMobil’s board of directors. And the International Energy Agency—a body not known for its radicalism—called on investors to stop funding new oil, gas and coal projects.
Amid this series of promising if limited victories, the Goldman Environmental Prizes were announced, an annual celebration of the people who make such developments possible, sometimes putting their lives on the line in the process. Since 1990, the awards have lifted up the work of inspiring grassroots activists around the world taking on some of the world’s biggest polluters and environmental problems. This year, they also reflect the growing global fight against fossil fuel interests and infrastructure, particularly plastics.
Three victories over fossil fuels
Half of this year’s prize winners—three of six—won battles against industrial plants or products backed by fossil fuel producers. The vital role grassroots campaigns play in these fights is further underlined, for those needing more convincing, by the recent failure of politicians to reach an agreement to phase out coal at the Group of 7 meeting and the uncertain political fate of Biden’s climate-focused infrastructure bill, let alone regulation to slow or stop fossil fuel development. That such campaigns have often won with largely volunteer labor performed by local individuals on the ground is a testament to their power and potential in the push for climate sanity. Here’s a look at each of those three efforts.
Gloria Majiga-Kamoto fought stern resistance from the plastics industry—which major oil companies are hoping will sustain their profits—to win a national ban on thin plastics, a type of single-use plastic, in Malawi. Majiga-Kamoto, a program officer for the Centre for Environmental Policy and Advocacy, worked on her own time to build a grassroots movement of farmers and others affected by ubiquitous plastic pollution in the East African country. Through marches, public debates and legal efforts, the campaign helped win not only the ban, but a legal ruling upholding it, and government enforcement of its provisions.
After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster led Japan to transition from nuclear power, politicians short-sightedly turned to coal—the dirtiest form of energy—as a replacement. Kimiko Hirata organized a grassroots campaign that has helped block the construction of 13 coal-fired power plants proposed under the plan. Hirata’s organization, Kiko Network, helped mobilize citizens within Japan and built international relationships to create external pressure. She also spearheaded a push that led more than 10 Japanese coal plant developers to end financing for new projects.
Sharon Lavigne led a coalition that helped stop the construction of a $1.25 billion plastics manufacturing plant on the banks of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, a section of the state infamously known as “Cancer Alley” for its high rates of petrochemical pollution. Lavigne, the daughter of civil rights activists, founded the grassroots nonprofit RISE St. James. The organization built relationships with other local, state and national groups, and organized door-to-door visits, letters to the editor and town halls, successfully mobilizing the largely Black and low-income community against the plan.
Collectively, these campaigns show the power of bringing public attention to—and building community power against—the real and present harms of fossil fuel extraction and use. Japan suffers more than 1,000 premature deaths annually from coal pollution. Plastic waste in Malawi can block drainage systems, leading to flooding and creating breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitos. And cancer rates are 50 times the national average in Cancer Alley due to under-regulated toxic emissions. Climate change and pollution can feel abstract, but their impacts are not.
The fight, of course, goes on. Lavigne, for instance, is now fighting to stop Formosa Plastics from building a $9.4 billion chemical plant in Louisiana, which would be one of the largest industrial projects in the state’s history. In Malawi, where, as Majiga-Kamoto put it in the prize announcement video, “we’re still drowning in plastics,” the activist aims to use her prize money to mount a new campaign to force companies to pay the full price of the cost of plastic pollution.
Systemic change begins with individuals
We highlight the Goldman Prize winners each year at Inside Philanthropy because they showcase the diverse range of grassroots movements around the globe, something that few environmental philanthropy programs do. This year, as has been the case before, nearly all the awardees are women. Many are operating courageously in notoriously difficult, even deadly conditions. Two past winners, the Indigenous leaders Isidro Baldenegro López of Mexico and Berta Cáceres of Honduras, were murdered for their activism.
The prizes also offer a hopeful note about the power of individuals. The environmental movement has rightfully shifted its emphasis away from the focus—pushed by oil companies—on personal responsibility and carbon footprints toward prioritizing policy and systemic change. Yet the prizes are a complementary and inspiring reminder that individuals working in community are the basis for the movements that drive those shifts. And elite experts are not always in the lead.
Lavigne was a special education teacher before becoming a full-time environmental justice activist. Hirata quit a job at a publishing house in the 1990s to join the environmental movement after reading Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance.” Another prize winner, Maida Bilal, who led a group of women from her village in Bosnia and Herzegovina in a 503-day blockade that led to the cancelation of two proposed dams of their local river, was a part-time financial administrator with no previous experience in environmental activism.
As Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate said in the prize video: “Everyone can do something. And as the Goldman Prize makes clear, a single person can make extraordinary change. So many people are finding a way to make a difference. What will you do?”
