By Pratap Chatterjee
SAN FRANCISCO, Apr 27 1996 (IPS)

Edwin Bustillos has survived three attacks on his life in his efforts to protect the forests in the Sierra Madre mountains of northern Mexico.

Marina Silva’s colleague, Chico Mendes of Brazil’s Amazon forests, was not as lucky. He succumbed to an attempt on his life in 1988.

Bustillo and Silva were among this year’s six winners of the prestigious Goldman environmental awards, presented here this week. The other winners were Albena Simenova of Bulgaria, Mahesh Chandra Mehta of India, Bill Ballantine of New Zealand, and Amooti Ndyakira of Uganda.

Bustillos who still suffers from head and back injuries, has fought drug smugglers and illegal loggers who have damaged the forests of the Sierra mountains in his native state of Chihuahua. He continues to struggle to create a two-million-hectare reserve to protect the jaguars, gray wolves, and thick billed parrots who have lived there for centuries.

“The indigenous peoples of Mexico were able to sustain themselves from the forests until the loggers and the drug traffickers came. Now, we face another threat — the roads that are being built into our mountains for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that we fear will bring big mining companies who will also want to destroy the forest,” he told IPS.

Silva, who has left her home in the Amazon to become the first rubber tapper to have been elected to the Brazilian Senate, also fears the impact of free trade on her forests.

“Whether we like it or not, the cultures of the most primitive and the most modern have become linked by the forces of globalisation,” she said. “The mahagony of our forests has become tables in countries from Italy and the United States. The new patent law in Brazil has opened the biodiversity in our forests to foreign companies.”

Silva would like to see the Amazon converted into reserves that allow the sustainable harvesting of renewable products like rubber and nuts.

Mehta of India also has misgivings about the forces of globalisation. For the last decade, he has fought and won 40 court cases in India to prevent environmental pollution by Indian industries that have threatened the Taj Mahal monument in Agra, the Ganges river, and the mangrove forests of southern India.

“Today, liberalisation is bringing hazardous waste and obsolete technologies from the developed countries to India,” he said. We must stop this if we want to prevent more tragedies like the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal that killed thousands of people 11 years ago.”

Bill Ballantine, a marine biologist who created the first marine reserve in New Zealand, says that society needs to question the economic forces that are taking the exploitation of nature to every corner of the planet.

“We fish everywhere today, despite the fact that there is no social theory, no economic theory, and no scientific background for such massive exploitation. We need to learn that there are limits to our resources,” he says. His reserve permits no fishing or extraction of any kind.

Albena Simeonova of Bulgaria is more upbeat about the impact of free trade.

“With open borders, maybe we will be able to export our agriculture and dairy products like tomatoes, cheese, and meat,” she said. “For this, we will have to meet the health standards of other countries, so maybe our industries will get better.”

But she, too, opposes the import of certain technologies.

“It is a tragedy that my government is planning to build a second nuclear power plant in my country at this time — the 10th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union,” she says.

Simeonova says the key is environmental education, which is the primary focus of her work.

“The people who expect to get jobs at the planned Belene nuclear plant need to learn that even if they get higher salaries and better jobs, their health and the health of their children will suffer,” she says.

Amooti Ndyakira of Uganda argues that this education can and should to be led by the media. An investigative journalist with the “New Vision” newspaper in Kampala, he has led sting operations on wildlife smuggling rackets at Entebbe airport involving local government and game officials.

“Unfortunately today, in my country, where we now are having a presidential election campaign, none of the candidates talks seriously about environmental issues. This is where journalists can play a major role,” he claims.

A previous Goldman environmental award winner was Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed last November and was a critic of the pollution caused by oil companies in his country.

Each of the six winners has received a cash prize of 75,000 dollars. The winners were selected by a panel from 30 countries, from nominations made by such environmental groups as the Environmental Defence Fund, the International Rivers Network, and the Worldwatch Institute.

Excerpt: