2008 Goldman Environmental Prizes (cont.)

Commenting on my Goldman Environmental Prize post from yesterday, Vanessa pointed to a new (for me) site called Huddler.com, which bills itself as "the next generation of online product review and research" (think Consumer Reports meets Facebook or MySpace). The user-generated reviews, research, and collaborative wikis on the site are organized into silos called Huddles. Believing that "the sites with the best content are generally narrow in their focus," each Huddle is specific to a relatively small set of interests. In fact, there are only two at this point, one of which is the GreenHome Huddle.

Anyhow, a couple of the Huddlers managed to score tickets to the Goldman Prize ceremony last night and later posted video clips of the winners' acceptance speeches. Here's a clip of Ignace Schops, who led the effort to establish Belgium’s first and only national park, accepting the "Europe" prize. (Schops' was the only acceptance speech in English.)

And here's Pablo Fajardo Mendoza accepting the prize (in Spanish) for Central and South America. (You can find the other clips on the Huddler site.)

Finally, some additional information from the Huddler site about Yanza and Pablo Fajardo and their class-action lawsuit:

Fighting for justice after what has been called one of the most catastrophic environmental disasters in history, Luis Yanza and Pablo Fajardo are leading an unprecedented community-driven legal battle against a global oil giant. According to the plaintiffs, beginning in 1964 and through 1990, Texaco dumped nearly 17 million gallons of crude oil and 20 billion gallons of drilling wastewater directly into the Ecuadorian Amazon. Allegedly suffering from the health effects of the pollution, the region's inhabitants are demanding a complete cleanup in potentially the largest environmental lawsuit ever filed in the world. Yanza co-founded the Amazon Defense Front to organize 30,000 inhabitants of the northern Ecuadorian Amazon in a class-action lawsuit against Texaco, which was acquired by Chevron in 2001. The lead lawyer, Pablo Fajardo, a resident of one of the affected communities, has become the public voice of the plaintiffs.

-- Mitch Nauffts