Berean gets environmental award
BEREA - It was just before Kentucky Derby last year, and Craig Williams was introducing U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell at a news conference/celebration.
The liberal activist and the conservative Republican had teamed up to force the Pentagon to release money for a new plant that will destroy the chemical weapons stockpile at Richmond's Blue Grass Army Depot.
For his introduction, the gravel-voiced former New Yorker wrote his own Derby script, replacing the horses with key players in the chemical weapons fight. His call of the race had Pentagon officials tiring in the stretch and McConnell -- who sat grinning while laughter filled the room -- charging to victory.
McConnell allowed that he'd never had an introduction quite like that before.
That's because there's no one else quite like Craig Williams, a blustery former New Yorker with a fondness for casual dress and unprintable jokes. As director of the Berea-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, he has become an expert on chemical weapons and how things work on Capitol Hill.
Tonight, Williams will be in San Francisco to pick up the Goldman Environmental Prize -- which is given annually to one grass-roots environmentalist on each continent -- and the $125,000 check that goes with it.
"I'm very honored," said Williams, "and naturally pleased that the organization is getting recognition at this level."
During the prize ceremony at the San Francisco Opera House, video biographies of the six winners, narrated by Robert Redford, will be shown.
The winners will go to Washington this week for receptions and media events, including one co-hosted by McConnell. On Thursday they will have lunch with Sens. Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader.
Many Goldman Prize recipients have risked their lives to further their causes, battling companies or corrupt governments that seek to plunder the environment.
Past winners have sought justice for victims of environmental disasters at Love Canal and Bhopal, India, and fought oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The prize was founded in 1990 by San Francisco philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman.
"Craig is a deserving recipient of this prestigious award," McConnell said. "He is testament of how a concerned and dedicated citizen can make a difference to effect positive change in a community."
For Williams, 58, the award is a defining moment in a two-decade fight with the Pentagon over how best to destroy the 523 tons of nerve and blister agent at the depot near Richmond.
In 1984, Williams was a woodworker, building kitchen cabinets, when the Army came to Madison County to say that an incinerator would be built to destroy the stockpile. The only question was where, recalled Peter Hille, Williams' woodworking partner and now the director of a leadership program at Berea College.
Residents wanted the weapons gone, and many considered incineration a fast, safe solution. Williams disagreed.
"We were very much on different sides of the fence," Madison Judge-Executive Kent Clark said.
Williams astutely gathered support from local governments, so it would be clear the opposition wasn't coming solely from what Madison Countians like to call "those hippies from Berea."
Williams also began meeting with people at other chemical disposal sites. That led to creation of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, an international network of activists.
"Craig's the person who committed to eat, breathe, sleep, live this thing 24/7 for all these years," said Hille, chairman of the board of Williams' employer, the Kentucky Environmental Foundation.
Only five incinerators were built, and those are operated with a higher level of safety and scrutiny because of the group, Hille said. At the other four sites, weapons are being or will be chemically neutralized. Work on the Madison plant is expected to begin this fall.
"It's a dramatic victory," Hille said, "the kind of thing citizens almost never win."
Williams hasn't always made friends along the way. There have been threatening phone calls; Clark said with a chuckle that Williams "probably alienates as many people as he impresses."
But Clark is "100 percent confident" that without him, the Army would have prevailed.
"If Craig hadn't been around with his working group," he said, "we probably would have incineration today."