Environmental Heroes Make Change in Own Backyards
New America Media, News Report, Mary Ambrose, Posted: Apr 14, 2008
Editor’s Note: Environmental heroes come in all shapes and sizes as this year’s winners of the Goldman Prize show. New America Media managing editor Mary Ambrose met three of the winners from three continents.
SAN FRANCISCO -- A grandmother, a herpetologist and a musician who sings about toilets are among the diverse and wildly charming winners of the world’s biggest environmental prize this year.
The winners of Goldman awards (worth $150,000) have been called “environmental heroes.” They’ve taken on the government, challenged oil corporations, horned in on trials without a lawyer and disarmed bureaucrats of all stripes and sizes.
Soft-spoken Ignace Schops was quietly living in Belgium, working as a herpetologist (studying lizards and snakes) when he noticed that species were becoming extinct. Then, he says, something happened. “I drank beer with my friends and we decided we should make nature sexy. That was our goal.”
In 2000 they began to campaign for Belgium’s first national park. In a country where the biggest nature reserve is 39 hectares, the park Schops and his pals eventually created is 6,000 hectares. That kind of land grab for a new park is unheard of in continental Europe, and Schops says that’s why it’s an important signal to the rest of the world. He is adamant that “rich and densely populated areas have to take responsibility. Why should Brazil do things for the rainforest that even we can’t?”
It’s also an augury of transformation. In the province where the park opened, coalmines were closing. People were unemployed. Schops and his friends persuaded regional and local governments that some of the money poured into the area for the unemployed be invested in the community, in the park. They persuaded six municipalities to co-operate. As the coalmines closed and the park opened Schops says, “we went from 'Not In My Backyard' to 'Please, In My Backyard'.” Current projections are that the park will help local businesses earn close to $20 million annually.
Feliciano dos Santos’ idea was much simpler but no less dramatic. It has helped with one of the plagues of Africa: water borne diseases and sanitation. The United Nations has called 2008 the “Year of Sanitation” to highlight the problems which Santos’ idea addresses with elegant efficacy.
Santos introduced the EcoSan toilet in his native Mozambique. It’s simple to build because, unlike a traditional latrine, which requires a pit almost ten meters deep, the Eco San requires only a shallow pit, one meter deep. After use, dirt and ash is thrown in the EcoSan. This helps create the compost but has the added advantage of forcing people to remember to wash their hands after using it.
“When people use a traditional latrine they don’t see dirt on their hands, so they don’t wash them” says Santos, and promoting this basic hygiene Santos points out, has helped people “avoid 40 percent of causes of infection, right there.”
After about eight months the EcoSan is full and is easily moved. After eight more months there is compost easily available to put on the crops, replacing the costly chemical fertilizers farmers were using. Now some farmers are selling the compost and generating a small income. And since using EcoSan enhances water retention in the soil, it helps the crops thrive. He has put about 400 EcoSans into use.
Even this simple solution takes some marketing and Santos – a successful musician – understands that. “The first thing you to do in a community is talk to the leader of that community,” Santo smiles and continues, “and the first place you have to build one, is his house!” In his ongoing effort to make hygiene important and EcoSan even more widely used, Santos, who plays around the world, sings about it in his performances.
“When you get a report at your new job, you put it in your drawer and don’t read it,” he explains. “Music reaches people.”
Rosa Hilda Ramos knows how to reach people. A charming grandmother from Puerto Rico, Ramos found some lovely wetlands near her new house was deeply polluted, and probably responsible for the skyrocketing local cancer rates. She was furious. “I wanted to take a shoe and knock some heads off!”
Instead, she researched the subject, worked with her neighbors, and without “even a checking account” she admits, they took the polluter to court to reduce the emission of lethal toxins. That case was the first time that the Environmental Protection Agency negotiated with citizens in Puerto Rico. It was the first time that the victims of environmental damage won the chance to intervene in a federal criminal case in a U.S. court, without even the use of a lawyer.
She did not stop there. She and her group (Communities United Against Contamination) went on to re-claim the damaged land and establish the only tropical estuary in the U.S. National Estuary Program. It’s an important buffer zone against tropical storms.
When asked how she was so successful where many are defeated, Ramos warns that “offending or shouting or protesting all the time is not very productive.” She uses the charm offensive: “I invite them to my home.” This helps them understand that, “I am a simple housewife, but I do have rights, and I do know what I’m talking about and I have solutions.” She explained that it was cheaper to protect the wetlands than to build flood protection and she told them she would help. But she knew she had to take her community with her, in order to influence the politicians.
Having urged local school children to learn about the biodiversity of the wetlands, when the legislation on whether to preserve the wetlands up for the vote Ramos said they “invaded the legislature with little children dressed as butterflies and dragonflies: they were irresistible. No one was arrested.”
These stalwart soldiers working to clean up the planet acknowledge that community help is essential to success. Two winners who challenged the pollution Chevron created in the Ecuadorian Amazon were successful, in part because they worked as a pair. But someone has to take the first step. And as Schops quietly said, “If we don’t do it, who else? If we don’t do it now, when? If we don’t do it together, who will? ”
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