Precious metals and fossil fuels power our society, but at a high price.
Extractive industries destabilize local communities, endanger human health, and irreversibly scar natural landscapes. From rare metals to oil to natural gas, the backstory behind these resources is significantly more complicated and destructive than the consumer price tag.
Goldman Prize Winners awarded for Drilling & Mining
Alannah Acaq Hurley
Acting on behalf of 15 tribal nations, Yup’ik leader Alannah Acaq Hurley led a campaign that stopped the proposed Pebble Mine megaproject in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region. As the executive director for the United Tribes of Bristol Bay (UTBB), Alannah and a broad-based coalition yielded a historic EPA veto of the copper and gold mining project in January 2023. The victory safeguards Bristol Bay and its greater watershed—encompassing 25 million acres of wilderness, rivers, and wetlands and home to the largest wild salmon runs in the world—from the construction of what would have been North America’s largest open-pit mine. Alannah and UTBB continue to work to protect the bay from encroaching development.
Yuvelis Morales Blanco
As a young adult, Yuvelis Morales Blanco helped mobilize her community in Puerto Wilches against two key drilling projects, successfully preventing the introduction of commercial fracking into Colombia. In 2022, with fracking raised as a national issue, the country’s largest petroleum company, Ecopetrol, suspended its contracts for the pilot fracking projects. In August 2024—with the projects still suspended—the Colombian Constitutional Court, in response to a lawsuit by a local organization, confirmed that the projects had violated the right of the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches to free, prior, and informed consent.
Batmunkh Luvsandash
Determined to protect his homeland from mining, Batmunkh Luvsandash’s activism resulted in the creation of a 66,000-acre protected area in Dornogovi province in April 2022, abutting tens of thousands of acres already protected by Batmunkh and allies. Home to Argali sheep, 75% of the world’s population of endangered Asiatic wild ass, and a wide variety of endemic plants, the protected area forms an important bulwark against Mongolia’s mining boom.
Alessandra Korap Munduruku
Alessandra Korap Munduruku organized community efforts to cancel mining applications by British mining company Anglo American in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. In May 2021, the company agreed to publicly announce that it had withdrawn 27 research applications to mine inside Indigenous territories, including the Sawré Muybu Indigenous Territory, which contains more than 400,000 acres of rainforest. The decision protects a critically threatened area of the Amazon—the world’s largest rainforest and a globally significant carbon sink—from further mining and deforestation.
Alexandra Narvaez & Alex Lucitante
Alex Lucitante and Alexandra Narvaez spearheaded an Indigenous movement to protect their people’s ancestral territory from gold mining. Their leadership resulted in a historic legal victory in October 2018, when Ecuador’s courts canceled 52 illegal gold mining concessions, which were illegally granted without the consent of their Cofán community. The community’s legal success protects 79,000 acres of pristine, biodiverse rainforest in the headwaters of Ecuador’s Aguarico River, which is sacred to the Cofán.
Francia Márquez
A formidable leader of the Afro-Colombian community, Francia Márquez organized the women of La Toma and stopped illegal gold mining on their ancestral land. She exerted steady pressure on the Colombian government and spearheaded a 10-day, 350-mile march of 80 women to the nation’s capital, resulting in the removal of all illegal miners and equipment from her community.
Partners in Drilling & Mining
The Goldman Prize is honored to partner with a variety of environmental organizations around the world, each of them united in the goal of protecting our planet. From our nominating partners to global organizations to grassroots NGOs led by Prize winners, they are all essential parts of the environmental community.
