Goldman Environmental Prize

Two Ecuadoreans who have waged a 14-year fight to bring a U.S. energy giant to account for what they allege is massive oil contamination in the Amazon are among the winners of an international environmental prize. Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and Luis Yanza each will receive $150,000 today from the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Prize for organizing half a dozen indigenous communities to pursue legal action against Texaco and then Chevron Corp. after the two companies merged in 2001.

Julia "Judy" Bonds, a West Virginia environmental activist who garnered national attention for her homespun opposition to mountaintop removal coal mining, has died, the environmental group Coal River Mountain Watch said. She was 58 and had cancer. Bonds, executive director of Coal River Mountain Watch , died Monday evening at a hospital in Charleston, W.Va. A descendant of generations of West Virginia coal miners, Bonds became known as a passionate and fearless opponent of mountaintop removal mining that she blamed for devastating the environment and the lives of coalfield residents.

Richard N. Goldman, a San Francisco philanthropist and civic leader who co-founded the Goldman Environmental Prize to recognize grass-roots environmental activism around the world, has died. He was 90. Goldman, a passionate supporter of environmental causes, the Jewish community and Israel, died Monday at his San Francisco home, according to his family. The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, created in 1951 by Goldman and his wife, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, has given away more than $680 million since its inception.

Richard N. Goldman, a San Francisco philanthropist and civic leader who co-founded the Goldman Environmental Prize to recognize grass-roots environmental activism around the world, has died. He was 90. Goldman, a passionate supporter of environmental causes, the Jewish community and Israel, died Monday at his San Francisco home, according to his family. The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, created in 1951 by Goldman and his wife, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, has given away more than $680 million since its inception.

Imprisoned "peasant ecologist" leader Rodolfo Montiel has won the prestigious $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize. Montiel, 44, led a band of peasants fighting to protect forests in Guerrero state. The prize was one of six the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Foundation awards annually.

Rhoda Haas Goldman, a prominent philanthropist who co-founded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize to encourage grass-roots activism, has died. She was 71. A great-grandniece of entrepreneur Levi Strauss, Goldman was a board member of Levi Strauss & Co. She died Feb. 17 of a heart attack in Honolulu where she was vacationing. Her home was in her native San Francisco.

Rhoda Haas Goldman, a prominent philanthropist who co-founded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize to encourage grass-roots activism, has died. She was 71. A great-grandniece of entrepreneur Levi Strauss, Goldman was a board member of Levi Strauss & Co. She died Saturday of a heart attack in Honolulu where she was vacationing. Her home was in her native San Francisco.

Six grass-roots heroes have been named Goldman Environmental Prize winners and will receive trophies and $60,000 in ceremonies today in San Francisco. The awards, founded five years ago by the Goldman Environmental Foundation, are the world's largest for environmental work.

Aurora Castillo, 81, a founder of the Mothers of East Los Angeles, is the first person from Los Angeles to win a prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for grass-roots activism. Along with five other winners, one from each of the world's continental regions, she will be honored today at a ceremony in San Francisco. Each winner will receive a no-strings-attached prize of $75,000.

Hippo teeth had cachet. The way hunters saw it, elephant tusks and meat also were fine take-home prizes in the forests of southeast Liberia. Back then, in the early '70s, whole villages would slaughter an elephant in the forest and drag the pieces home, recalled Alexander Peal, who was a district forest officer for the country at the time. That was his introduction to the so-called wildlife protection laws in his West African homeland; the regulations, he found, were too loose to enforce.

"Crude" sounds like the standard "this is an outrage" environmental degradation documentary, the latest in a line that includes "An Inconvenient Truth" and films about the death of the ocean, the evaporation of water, the murder of dolphins, even the disintegration of dirt. "Crude" fits that bill, but it is something considerably more interesting as well. The outrage in question is the subject of a class-action suit filed by 30,000 citizens of Ecuador against Chevron, the world's fifth-largest corporation, alleging that 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater were dumped into the Amazon between 1972 and 1990, fatally poisoning the land and water and sickening inhabitants.

The facts of Aguinda vs. Texaco Inc. haven't changed since the lawsuit was first filed in 1993, but the world has. Climate change and environmental stewardship have become international concerns. The dignity of native populations around the world has been recognized in a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the United Nations. And after 16 years of litigation in the United States and, now, Ecuador, the lawsuit against Chevron Corp. has become a cause celebre among human rights activists and environmentalists.

In Maria Gunnoe's 11-year war over the strip mining she says has ruined her homestead, there have been casualties: Family dogs have been poisoned and shot, and her truck's fuel tank has been stuffed with sand. Yet she keeps fighting to stop mountaintop removal mining. And for confronting the coal industry in Appalachia, she is the 2009 North American winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize.

The glorious Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, historic host to presidents and royals, was the improbable scene of a brawl this week. Squaring off beneath the cream-and-gilt ceilings and behind mahogany doors were oil behemoth Chevron Corp. and a pair of Ecuadorean environmental activists. It was not, however, a fair fight. Oil giant vs. environmentalists? In San Francisco? Chevron never had a chance. The occasion for the face-off was the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

A Roman Catholic priest in rural Honduras who is a harsh critic of deforestation and its effects on poor communities has been named one of the six winners of this year's Goldman Environmental Prize, awarded by the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Fund. Father Andres Tamayo, 48, will receive $125,000. He leads a grass-roots movement that has imposed an unofficial moratorium on logging in his province of Olancho, spurred by the damage to local farming.

Hippo teeth had cachet. The way hunters saw it, elephant tusks and meat also were fine take-home prizes in the forests of southeast Liberia. Back then, in the early '70s, whole villages would slaughter an elephant in the forest and drag the pieces home, recalled Alexander Peal, who was a district forest officer for the country at the time. That was his introduction to the so-called wildlife protection laws in his West African homeland; the regulations, he found, were too loose to enforce.

Imprisoned "peasant ecologist" leader Rodolfo Montiel has won the prestigious $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize. Montiel, 44, led a band of peasants fighting to protect forests in Guerrero state. The prize was one of six the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Foundation awards annually.