Environmental Prizes for Grass-Roots Efforts Given

A West Virginia nurse who has been arrested repeatedly for protesting the building of a toxic waste incinerator near an elementary school is this year’s North American winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize for grass-roots heroism.

Terri Swearingen, 40, of Chester, West Va., will join winners from five other continents at a ceremony today in San Francisco’s Herbst Theater. Each will receive a “no strings attached” award of $75,000 from the Goldman Environmental Foundation.

“They have demonstrated their commitment to protecting the Earth for the benefit of future generations without regard to personal risk,” said Richard N. Goldman, chairman of Goldman Insurance who, with his wife, the late Rhoda Goldman, established the award in 1989.

Swearingen’s concern that the nation’s largest toxic waste incinerator was planned for East Liverpool, Ohio, 1,100 feet from an elementary school, grew into full-time activism. Although the plant was eventually built, she co-founded the Tri-State Environmental Council and their peaceful protests have prevented other such incinerators from being constructed across the nation. “No child in the United States should have to go to school next door to where toxic waste is being burned,” Swearingen said.

Other Goldman winners:

* Juan Pablo Orrego, of Santiago, Chile, has led the fight against construction of a mammoth dam on the Bio Bio, one of the world’s last major free-flowing rivers, and helped make the river’s fate the defining environmental issue in post-Pinochet Chile.

* Russian Alexander Nikitin, a former naval officer, assisted a Norwegian environmental group in exposing the potential for nuclear catastrophe in northwestern Russia, where the nation’s crumbling submarine fleet is based. Imprisoned in 1996 on charges of treason, Nikitin has been released, but is forbidden to leave St. Petersburg.

* Loir Botor Dingit, of East Kalimantan, Indonesia, is chief of the Bentian Tribal Council. Representing his community of rattan farmers, he has successfully galvanized national attention to the rights of Kalimantan’s indigenous peoples, convincing government ministers to support the forest farmers against the incursion of large logging interests.

* Nick Carter, a British activist in Zambia, spent years exposing wildlife crimes in Asia, Africa and Europe, then focused on Africa’s wildlife laws. Working with Zambia’s minister of tourism, he took the lead in creating the world’s first multinational enforcement body to fight illegal wildlife trade.

* From Western Samoa, American biology professor Paul Allan Cox led efforts to stop logging in a lowland rain forest when villagers thought they had to sell logs to pay for a new school. Cox and Samoan High Chief Fuiono Senio worked together to raise the money elsewhere, build the school and establish a rain forest preserve.