Goldman Environmental Prize Blog

From the conservation of endangered species to the establishment of marine protected areas, here are five stellar Goldman Prize winners working to protect our seas. 1. Jacqueline Evans Thanks to the leadership of Goldman Prize recipient Jacqueline Evans (Cook Islands, 2019), all 763,000 square miles of the Cook Islands’ ocean territory are sustainably managed and…

In the second installment of a two-part guest blog, Deputy Director of the Goldman Environmental Prize Lorrae Rominger writes about her trip to Eastern Europe in November 2019. Lorrae had the opportunity to meet with two Prize winners 20 years apart: 2016 Prize winner Zuzana Caputova, now the first female president of Slovakia (blog) and…

As international travel has been put on hold, we are grateful for this period as an opportunity for reflection. In the first installment of a two-part guest blog, Deputy Director of the Goldman Environmental Prize Lorrae Rominger writes about her trip to Eastern Europe in November 2019. Lorrae had the opportunity to meet with two…

Garth Owen-Smith, of Namibia, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa in 1993 with Dr. Margaret Jacobsohn for their pioneering work in community-based natural resource management, has died. He was 76. In the early 1980s, Owen-Smith and Jacobsohn, an anthropologist, began a lifelong effort to link wildlife conservation with the needs of the local…

The first Goldman Environmental Prize was awarded in April 1990, scheduled to coincide with Earth Day, which debuted in 1970. Kicked off by a full-page ad in the New York Times, Earth Day established itself as an important new rallying cry and national call to action. The 1970 ad shows the humble beginnings of this…

Dear Friends, During the global coronavirus pandemic, we are all learning to adjust, to care for our communities and ourselves, and to plan for an unknown future. In this context, we join much of the world in taking extraordinary measures to adapt, namely: We are postponing the announcement of the Goldman Environmental Prize until a later…

IMPORTANT UPDATE REGARDING THIS YEAR’S CEREMONY Dear Goldman Prize Community, As you know, the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has affected much of the world, and the United States is no exception. San Francisco and the Bay Area are on high alert, with many cases reported in the region. San Francisco Opera House and City Hall have been temporarily…

Australia’s raging fires. The Amazon up in smoke. A nearly year-round fire season in California. Current events have elevated global concern for our forests, one of the earth’s largest and most essential carbon sinks. Often called “green carbon,” forest ecosystems are critical to carbon sequestration across the world. In the United States, for example, forests…

By Jackie Krentzman Exposing Crisis at Love Canal In 1978, Lois Gibbs was a young mother with two young children living in Niagara Falls, New York, in a neighborhood called Love Canal. She began hearing reports of chemical waste being dumped nearby and discovered that her son’s elementary school was built on a toxic waste…

By Jackie Krentzman Recently, in September 2019, Facebook announced a ban on single-use plastic bottles on its campuses worldwide. The company received widespread praise for this step, and Von Hernandez, a 2003 recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize, hopes that it leads other corporations to follow suit and make a commitment to banning not only…