Goldman Environmental Prize Blog

mark! Lopez won the Prize in 2017 for successfully leading a campaign to persuade the state of California to provide comprehensive lead testing and cleanup of East Los Angeles homes contaminated by a battery smelter. However, mark!’s work as a community organizer and environmental activist began long before he won the Prize. Read his Q&A…

This is a guest blog by Program Officer Lindsey Freedman, who shares a collection of snapshots from her visit to Bhubaneswar, India, to meet 2017 Prize winner Prafulla Samantara. A lawyer by trade and leader in social justice, Samantara spearheaded a historic 12-year legal battle that affirmed the indigenous Dongria Kondh’s land rights and protected…

Get to know 2017 Prize winner Prafulla Samantara in our latest Q&A, in which he shares how he got involved in environmental issues in his local community and why he is committed to social justice.  Can you tell us about your childhood and how you came to be involved in social and environmental justice? I…

  Dear Friends, After a rigorous national search, I am thrilled to announce that Michael Sutton, a veteran environmental leader with more than 30 years of experience, will become the next executive director of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, beginning on January 1, 2018. Mike is a respected environmental conservation leader with extensive experience managing nonprofit…

In our latest Q&A, 2017 Prize winner Wendy Bowman shares about her work with the Hunter Environment Lobby in her fight against the expansion of coal mining at her farm, Rosedale, and within the larger community of Hunter Valley. Where you were born? How did you find your way to the farm? I was born…

This is a guest blog by Goldman Prize Program Officer Lindsey Freedman, who recounts her first meetings with 2017 Goldman Prize winner Uroš Macerl. Macerl is an organic farmer from Slovenia who successfully stopped a Lafarge cement kiln from co-incinerating toxic petcoke (a byproduct of oil refining) and hazardous industrial waste by rallying legal support…

In the Q&A below, we catch up with 2017 Goldman Prize winner Uroš Macerl, an organic farmer from Slovenia who successfully stopped a Lafarge cement kiln from co-incinerating petcoke with hazardous industrial waste by rallying legal support from fellow Eko Krog activists and leveraging his status as the only citizen allowed to challenge the plant’s…

For the past three years, the Goldman Environmental Foundation has provided support for Goldman Prize winners to participate in leadership opportunities through the foundation’s networking program. The program was designed to help support Prize winner initiatives by providing funding for Prize winners to attend conferences and events, participate on panels, present as keynote speakers, and…

The Mill Valley Film Festival returns to the Bay Area next month from October 5-15. The festival will be screening the latest installment of the Emmy Award-winning series, “The New Environmentalists: From Guatemala to The Congo,” which showcases the work of the 2017 Goldman Environmental Prize winners. Robert Redford narrates this annual tribute to six passionate environmental…

This is a guest blog from Program Officer Ryan Mack about his journey to meet 2017 Goldman Prize winner Rodrigo Tot in Eastern Guatemala. An indigenous leader in Guatemala’s Agua Caliente, Rodrigo Tot led his community to a landmark court decision that ordered the government to issue land titles to the Q’eqchi people and kept environmentally destructive nickel…