The San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Foundation has announced the recipients of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Prizes, an annual award that honors grassroots environmental activists from the world's six inhabited continental regions.

This year's six honorees include Gloria Majiga-Kamoto (Malawi), who fought the plastics industry and galvanized a grassroots movement in support of a national ban on thin plastics in Malawi; Thai Van Nguyen (Vietnam), who founded Save Vietnam's Wildlife, which rescued more than fifteen hundred pangolins from the illegal wildlife trade between 2014 and 2020, and established the country's first anti-poaching unit; and Maida Bilal (Bosnia and Herzegovina), who led a group of women from her village in a 503-day blockade of heavy equipment that resulted in the cancellation of permits for two proposed dams on the Kruščica River.

The other winners are Kimiko Hirata (Japan), whose grassroots campaign to reverse Japan's shift back to coal following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster has led to the cancellation of thirteen coal power plants; Sharon Lavigne (United States), a special education teacher turned environmental justice advocate who stopped the construction of a plastics manufacturing plant on the Mississippi River in St. James Parish, Louisiana, by mobilizing grassroots opposition, educating community members, and organizing peaceful protests; and Liz Chicaje Churay (Peru), whose efforts led to the Peruvian government's creation of Yaguas National Park, which protects more than two million acres of Amazon rainforest in the northeastern region of Loreto.

In addition to a monetary award, the prize provides recipients with capacity-building support designed to deepen their work, boost the visibility of their projects, and enhance their networking opportunities with other environmental and civil society leaders.

"When it comes to the environment, the global community of grassroots activists, leaders, thinkers, and philanthropists is only growing and becoming more sophisticated, more united, more powerful," said Goldman Environmental Foundation vice president Susie Gelman. "These prize winners have so much to teach us about the path forward and how to maintain the balance with nature that is key to our survival. These phenomenal environmental champions remind us what can be accomplished when we fight back and refuse to accept powerlessness and environmental degradation. They have not been silenced — despite great risks and personal hardship — and we must also not be silent, either. It takes all of us."