I took note of the six recipients of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday. Aura Bogado at Grist has interviewed Destiny Watford, the only American who received one of the prizes this year, which are divvied up with geographical and other diversities in mind. Here’s the introduction to that interview:
Destiny Watford was a 17-year-old student at a south Baltimore high school when she asked a roomful of students if they suffered from asthma. To her dismay, every single hand went up.
That was three years ago, when Watford was in the middle of a fight to stop Energy Answers International from building a solid-waste incinerator in the Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay. Her mother, along with many friends and family members, had asthma, and her neighbor died from lung cancer. The culprits seemed obvious to Watford: the medical-waste incinerator, coal pier, and slew of chemical plants surrounding Curtis Bay that foul the air. A proposed solid-waste incinerator, the biggest of its kind in the United States, was poised to move in a short walk from her high school.
Watford, along with other young people from Curtis Bay, decided to fight, largely by pressuring public officials. Last month, they scored a victory when state regulators pulled the incinerator project’s permit. For her efforts, the Goldman Environmental Foundation named the 20-year-old Watford one of six winners of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday.
The award is fitting for Watford, who works with Free Your Voice, a human rights committee of United Workers. In 2015, the Goldman was presented to six people, including Berta Cáceres, an activist for indigenous rights who was killed in Honduras last month. It’s a prize for people who bring attention to the consequences that environmental inequities bear on their communities.
Watson, for instance, drew a connection between Baltimore’s environment and riots following the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed, 25-year-old black man who died in police custody after getting arrested for no good reason. Residents rioted while officials fumbled to bring charges against the officers responsible for Gray’s death; Maryland’s governor declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew and deployed the National Guard on Baltimore. Watford wondered why reporters weren’t asking what she called deeper questions about the environment in which the riots were taking place.
When I interviewed Watford, I asked her how she felt about winning. Her response was about winning the fight against the incinerator, not about winning the Goldman and its $175,000 award. A 20-year-old who’s more excited about stopping a waste incinerator than about winning a pile of money?
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—With A Whimper And A Whine:
When Hillary Clinton spoke of a "vast right wing conspiracy" in 1998 as she lashed out at the attacks against then president Bill Clinton, many (especially on the right) thought her paranoid, and the right still mocks her to this day regarding her choice of phrase. But in the decade or so since Clinton made that statement, various researchers have revealed the size and scope of the network of conservative groups and individuals who indeed so operate in concert to advance the conservative agenda.
On the communications size, the network of radio, TV, and blogs create a right-wing noise machine, which, in the past, has proven astonishingly successful at creating scandal out of the benign or making fiction seem like fact (i.e., Obama is a Muslim, or he's unpatriotic because he didn't wear a flagpin).
The April 15th "tea protests" revealed more about this right-wing noise machine than they did about some purported coast-to-coast anti-liberal revolution.
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin discusses background & landscape for the NY primaries, and why Republicans will never come up with an ACA alternative. Gop intrigue in the USVI! How Kris Kobach works his voter suppression magic and what Scalia’s death may cost that effort.
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