As a teenage mother and rights advocate, Liz Chicaje would travel by boat and foot across Peru’s Amazon rainforest with her young daughter campaigning to protect the ancestral lands of the Bora Aboriginal people from illegal logging and mining.
To preserve the forest that the Bora and other Aborigines depend on for hunting and fishing in Peru’s northeastern region of Loreto, Chicaje spearheaded the creation of a national park on 809,370 hectares.
On Tuesday, Chicaje’s activism and leadership earned her a prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize — known as the “Green Nobel” — which honors grassroots activism, along with five other winners.
“We live off the forest. It’s our wealth. If it wasn’t for the forests, we wouldn’t have the food and pure air that we breathe,” Chicaje, 38, said via videoconferencing.
“We all have to continue to advance in the protection of the environment and reforest areas,” she said.
Chicaje and other Aboriginal leaders worked with government officials, environmentalists and scientists, using satellite imagery to map areas that would be placed under protection.
Chicaje convinced other Aboriginal communities to endorse the park, and in January 2018, the Peruvian government declared the creation of the Yaguas National Park.
With deforestation rates rising in parts of Peru’s Amazon, the national park is seen by environmentalists as vital in safeguarding ecosystems and carbon-storing peatlands and rainforest.
Announced in San Francisco, during an online ceremony, the Goldman Environmental Prize provides each of the six winners with financial support to magnify their environmental activism and continue local campaigns.
Among this year’s other prize winners are Gloria Majiga-Kamoto, a Malawian anti-plastics campaigner; environmentalist Maida Bilal from Bosnia-Herzegovina; and American Sharon Lavigne, a campaigner against toxic waste and pollution.
They also include Thai Van Nguyen, a Vietnamese wildlife conservationist, and Japanese environmentalist Kimiko Hirata.
Hirata’s work has focused on eliminating Japan’s old and inefficient coal-fired power plants — a major contributor to carbon and other emissions that fuel global warming.
Her campaign has paid off. By 2019, the Japanese government had canceled 13 planned coal plants across the country, the Goldman Prize committee said.
“We can’t just shout: ‘Do not build more coal plants.’ We have to show a solution for the people who are involved in the coal business,” Hirata said.
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