February 26, 2013
A Fierce Green Fire is a feature-length documentary film that explores the last 50 years of the environmental movement. The title of the film was inspired by the book by the same name, written by Philip Shabecoff. Narrators of the film include long-time friend of the Prize, Robert Redford, as well as Ashley Judd, Meryl Streep, Van Jones and Isabel Allende.
The work of 1990 Goldman Prize recipient Lois Gibbs is featured prominently in the film, while several other Prize recipients are spotlighted, including Wangari Maathai (1991) and Julia ‘Judy’ Bonds (2003).
Lois Gibbs won the Goldman Prize in 1990 for her work to expose and clean-up ‘the love canal,’ a 21,000-ton toxic waste site buried beneath her neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York.
Wangari Maathai (d. 2011) founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, an organization with tree planting at the heart of its operations, to curtail the effects of deforestation in Kenya. Maathai was awarded the Goldman Prize in 1991 and later went on to win the 2004 Nobel Prize.
Judy Bonds (d. 2011) was awarded the Prize in 2003 for her leadership efforts against mountain top removal coal mining in Appalachia.
To learn more about the work of these Goldman Prize winners and all of the activists featured in the film, be sure to catch A Fierce Green Fire- playing now in a theater near you!
