Congratulations to all of this year’s “Green Nobel Prize” winners
Recipients of 2022's Goldman Environmental Prize include an indigenous man and woman from the remote Ecuadorian Amazon
Three indigenous A'i Kofan men stood crouched on the beach behind a pile of rocks, looking over the shoulder of a French-Canadian biologist operating a drone. They stared intently at the controls to see what images the drone, somewhere over the forest a little further upriver, was capturing. The back of the biologist’s bright green t-shirt said it all: “Fighting for our territories and cultures.”
Around them stood another dozen or so A'i Kofan, most wearing life-jackets, green tunics, kerchiefs and rubber boots, several holding spears, one of them taking photos. Their two boats were grounded and moored. Mostly they were silent, the atmosphere tense. The idea, for now at least, was to keep out-of-sight, out of earshot. Not far upriver gold-miners had recently started operating, but before busting in on them to see what was going on the A'i Kofan wanted to know how many there were and whether they might be armed.
Hence the drone. And why not? Rather than turn up blind, so to speak, it made much more sense to break the journey on a beach downriver, send the drone to scout ahead, and then go in. Much less chance of any unpleasant surprises that way.
“Yeah, listo, the digger’s operating,” one of the A'i Kofan men said, referring to a Hyundai excavator that we would encounter soon enough. “There aren’t many of them. Just a small group.”
This was part of a reconnaissance mission or patrol by the “guardia indigena” from an A'i Kofan community, Sinangoe, in the remote Ecuadorian Amazon, which I’ve reported on previously for The Guardian and Substack. The discovery made by the guardia that day was deeply alarming: a patch of forest on one riverbank totally cleared within the last two weeks, possibly marking the beginning of what they feared could be a new gold rush. The concession where those miners were operating was just one of dozens that the government had recently and illegally established upriver from their community in ancestral A’i Kofan territory.
“In two months they’ve made major advances,” Sinangoe’s president Mario Criollo told me back in Sinangoe after we had returned. “Maybe in four years they’d clear the entire riverbank. We don’t want it to get to that. That’s why we’re monitoring what’s happening.”
There did seem to be some encouraging news, though, although it was by no means conclusive. No evidence of the miners using mercury - potentially catastrophic for Sinangoe and other communities and villages downriver - had been found.
“We understand what [mercury] is, what it can cause, what harm it can do,” A’i Kofan man Alex Lucitante, from the indigenous-run Ceibo Alliance, told me at the time. “It’s very toxic. That’s what concerns us the most. That’s mainly why we’re rising up and fighting.”
That patrol was made four years ago. This week, Lucitante and one member of Sinangoe’s guardia, Alexandra Narvaez, apparently the first female to join, were announced as two of 2022’s winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes dubbed the “Green Nobel Prize.” They won precisely because of their role in trying to stop gold-miners from operating in A’i Kofan territory, as the guardia were doing on the occasion I travelled with them, which ultimately led to a precedent-setting ruling by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court last November.
It’s striking - although not at all surprising - how many of this year’s Goldman winners have been fighting extractive industries: both an American, Nalleli Cobo, and a Nigerian, Chima Williams, against oil, an Australian against coal, and the indigenous Ecuadorians against gold.
“Alex Lucitante and Alexandra Narvaez spearheaded an Indigenous movement to protect their people’s ancestral territory from gold mining,” the Goldman Prize website states. “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.”
Making patrols and flying drones are just two of the strategies that the A’i Kofan have adopted to defend their territory, in addition to placing camera traps to photograph illegal incursions and using GIS mapping software to document threats.
“The patrols and evidence-gathering led to a meticulous archive of images, footage, and maps that would become critical evidence in the Cofán legal challenge of the mining concessions,” Goldman reports.
In a statement circulated by the NGO Amazon Frontlines, which has been supporting both Sinangoe and Ceibo, Narvaez stated that “we showed the miners, the government and the whole world that our decisions and our forests and rivers must be respected.”
“This prize is not mine alone,” she said, “it’s for all Indigenous peoples risking their lives to create a better world.”
Congratulations to you both, Alex and Alexandra, and to all of 2022’s other winners too!