| Man waged war with Army over weapons disposal Kentucky resident one of six in world to win S.F.-based 'Green Nobel' prizes |
Worried about the risk, Williams, a Vietnam veteran, pulled out his typewriter and started writing. He is still writing. Today his son is 23. The weapons — nerve and mustard gas — have not moved, but the U.S. Army has agreed to a safer, water-based process to destroy the stockpiles there and at three other sites across the country. For his efforts, Williams today is one of six winners of the 2006 Goldman Environmental Prize, a $125,000 award that is the highest honor of its kind for grass-roots environmentalists andis often called the "Green Nobel." Winners represent each of the six major continents. The award was founded in 1990 by San Francisco philanthropist Richard Goldman and his late wife, Rhoda Goldman, heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune. This year, all six Goldman winners have fought not just to protect the environment but to force their governments to protect the voiceless, rather than pander to special interests. "This is all about accountability, transparency and oversight of our own government," Williams said. Williams, 58, has spent 23 years fighting the Army's plans to burn the roughly 24,000 tons of obsolete chemical weapons agents stockpiled in eight sites around the U.S. The Army has long insisted incineration is the safest method, but Williams had no faith in the military's ability to burn weapons without mishaps that could threaten downwind communities. The communities are all rural — "if the proposal was, 'We're going to burn these things eight miles outside of San Francisco,'" he quipped, "this debate would've been over 15 years ago." The Army is slowly changing, thanks to efforts by Williams' group, the Chemical Weapons Working Group. One site's stockpile is gone, and three others are being nullified via a safer process. "In these environmental polls most people respond that (the environment) is very important to them, but not a lot of people act on it," Williams said. "What it's going to take globally is for more and more people to act on what they know to be true." Other winners: -Anne Kajir of Papau New Guinea will never forget the woman who grabbed her, when she was a law student working as a paralegal in indigenous communities, and insisted Kajir come to the edge of a forest that had been illegally logged. It looked like a volcanic landscape. "She said, 'I've lost a sacred place. Can you stop the logging?' ... I said I'd try, and I'm still trying," said Kajir, 32. "This woman is always with me." Under Papau New Guinea's constitution, 97 percent of the country is owned collectively by indigenous populations and managed in trust by the government. But government, Kajir said, is violating that trust and fosters rampant illegal logging. Kajir has spent nine years fighting that in the courts. "It's not about going against development," she said. "It's about how can you give the maximum benefit to the landowners." -Olya Melen had to do something. The Ukrainian attorney, now 26, had argued one of her first-ever cases against a government plan to cut a canal through the heart of the Danube delta, a riverway every bit as important as the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The local judge had been sympathetic. From her bench, she agreed the canal was awful. But her ruling favored the government on every point. Afterward, Melen encountered the judge, who was near to tears at the water cooler. "She said, 'I'm sorry. I was forced to do that.'" The subsequent legal fight — and the Orange Revolution |
||||||||||||||
that brought Viktor Yuschenko to power — have eased the corruption.
But the pressure for the canal, needed to ease shipping routes, hasn't gone
away.
"It was so easy for them to call the judge, to push the people,
to start criminal prosecution against those who were against the canal,"
she said. "To me, it was disgusting." -Tarcisio Feitosa da Silva, 35, lives in a region in Brazil's northern
Amazon basin, called Para, that for 30 years has been "totally abandoned"
by government. "The state is not there," he said through a translator. "There
is law, and the law is carried out by the strongest." And the strongest are
the loggers. But Feitosa is pushing back, working with social groups, indigenous
farmers and rubber tappers to block the illegal logging and preserve the
land. They've had small victories — 6,000 mahogany logs seized by the government
and auctioned for $1.5 million. Or 93,000 acres of forest — all of Oregon,
essentially — protected from large-scale logging. But the mahogany was one season in 20-year's worth of illegal logging.
And the forest preserve exists only on paper. "The problem is the government has to control the illegal occupation
of these lands," he said. "The problem is political." -Yu Xiaogang, 55, knows the cost of China's thirst for hydropower.
He's watched displaced villagers pick through garbage dumps for scraps to
sell. He figures the 13 dams once proposed for the Nu River would have displaced
50,000 more people. Yu won the Goldman prize for forcing China's regional and national
governments to address that societal cost. The plan got cut to four dams.
China's thirst for energy is only growing. At least now, villagers
have some say in how it gets quenched, Yu said. "The decision must be transparent.
The information must be disclosed. And the process must be participatory."
-Silas Kpanan'Ayoung Siakor of Liberia has spent his life trying
to save his country's forests. But Siakor, 36, has no patience for Western
conservationists who want to create off-limits preserves. "The reality is how do we survive, how do we put bread on our table,
how do we ensure our source of livelihood is protected," he said. "It is
not about the trees." But the trees are disappearing. And Siakor has put his life on
the line trying to help local communities stop the government-sponsored logging.
More than any winner this year, Siakor is drinking the sweet draught
of success. Liberia's notorious leader, Charles Taylor, was arrested last
month in exile. The big logging interests are on the run. "When you see the level of abuse people (underwent), ... I simply
cannot believe we were so successful," Siakor said. But he cannot stop just
yet. "When you talk to the villagers and they take you to the mass grave.
And they tell you 250 people lie in that grave. And they tell you the militia
belongs to the timber company. ... When every single family is fighting to
survive, you look at yourself and say I could be in their shoes," he said.
"Who, after seeing that, would say, 'Y'know, there's not that much
I can do?'" More information about the Goldman prize and its winners is available
on the Web at http://www.goldmanprize.org.