THE DOING MAKES THE DIFFERENCE
In March 2024, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari and Asociación de Mujeres Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana won a landmark rights of nature court decision to protect the Marañón River in Peru. For the first time in the country’s history, a river was granted legal personhood—with the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination.
Laurene Allen protected thousands of New England families affected by PFAS-contaminated drinking water. Her campaign pressured an industrial giant—responsible for leaking toxic forever chemicals into community drinking water sources—to close in May 2024, marking an end to more than 20 years of rampant air, soil, and water pollution.
Carlos Mallo Molina helped lead a global campaign to stop the construction of Fonsalía Port, which was officially canceled by the Canary Islands government in October 2021. The massive recreational boat and ferry terminal threatened a 170,000-acre marine protected area on the island of Tenerife, home to sea turtles, whales, and sharks. Carlos is now realizing his vision for a world-class marine conservation and education center.
Besjana Guri and Olsi Nika’s campaign to protect the Vjosa River from a hydropower dam boom resulted in its historic designation as the Vjosa Wild River National Park by the Albanian government in March 2023. This precedent-setting action safeguards the Vjosa River throughout Albania, as well as its free-flowing tributaries.
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. The protected area, in the heart of the Eastern Gobi Desert, forms an important bulwark against Mongolia’s mining boom.
Semia Gharbi led a campaign that challenged a corrupt waste trafficking scheme between Italy and Tunisia, resulting in the return of 6,000 tons of illegally exported household waste back to Italy, its country of origin, in February 2022. The EU has now tightened its rules for waste shipments abroad.
In September 2022, Indigenous activists Nonhle Mbuthuma and Sinegugu Zukulu stopped destructive seismic testing for oil and gas off South Africa’s Eastern Cape, in an area known as the Wild Coast.
Teresa Vicente led a historic, grassroots campaign to save the Mar Menor ecosystem—Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon—from collapse, resulting in the passage of a new law in September 2022 granting the lagoon unique legal rights.
Murrawah Maroochy Johnson blocked development of the Waratah coal mine, which would have accelerated climate change in Queensland, destroyed the nearly 20,000-acre Bimblebox Nature Refuge, added 1.58 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere over its lifetime, and threatened Indigenous rights and culture.
Marcel Gomes coordinated a complex, international campaign that directly linked beef from JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, to illegal deforestation in Brazil’s most threatened ecosystems, leading six major European supermarket chains to indefinitely halt the sale of JBS products in 2021.
