Brazilian Indigenous Leader, Texas Shrimper Among 2022 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners
HAVANA TIMES – The 2022 Goldman Environmental Prize recipients have been announced. In Brazil, Indigenous leader Alessandra Korap won for leading a campaign against the mining giant Anglo American, safeguarding 400,000 acres of Amazon rainforest.
Alessandra Korap: “It was a huge victory. We realize that we are like little ants. When the little ants join forces, we get stronger. And we got stronger, until we won the battle against Anglo American.”
Here in the United States, environmental activist and fourth-generation shrimper Diane Wilson received a Goldman Prize for winning a historic $50 million settlement in a case against Formosa Plastics for dumping toxic waste on Texas’s Gulf Coast. The 2019 civil settlement was the largest in the history of the Clean Water Act. This is Diane Wilson.
Diane Wilson: “Formosa makes a trillion pellets, or ‘nurdles,’ a day, and they lose a lot of the powder and the pellets through 10 stormwater outfalls. And so, Formosa was discharging this plastic everywhere. And they have been doing this for 27 years.”