Environmental award spotlights grassroots environmentalists.

Every April, six activists from around the globe are awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, the world's largest cash prize for grassroots environmentalists. "These six winners are among the most important people you have not heard of before," explains philanthropist and Prize founder Richard N. Goldman. "All of them have fought, often alone and at great personal risk, to protect the environment in their home countries."

Goldman's idea to launch an environmental prize emerged over breakfast one morning in 1988 as he was reading about the winners of several Nobel Prizes. He and his late wife Rhoda decided to offer a comparable award that recognized ordinary people for their grassroots contributions to the environment. They envisioned the Goldman Prize as a way to demonstrate the international nature of environmental problems, draw public attention to global issues of critical importance, and inspire others to emulate the examples set by Prize recipients.

Since 1990, 113 individuals from 67 countries have received the Goldman Prize, which includes a cash award of $125,000 and a 10-day media and publicity tour of San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Winners from six regions are selected by an international jury based on confidential nominations submitted by a worldwide network of environmental organizations and individuals. In the past, several awardees, including 1991 recipient Wangari Maathai and 1996 winner Marina Silva, have gone on to assume important political positions in their countries.

Detailed information on all current and past winners is available at www.goldmanprize.org.

The 2006 Goldman Prize Recipients

AFRICA

Silas Kpanan Ayoung Siakor

Monroyia, Liberia

A Voice for the Forst and Its People

Silas Siakor, 36, spent many years collecting evidence of illegal logging practices, falsified logging records, and associated human rights abuses in his native country of Liberia. Drawing on this documentation, he was able to reveal that former President Charles Taylor was using the profits of unchecked, rampant logging to fund a brutal 14-year civil war that left 150,000 people dead. Siakor passed the evidence to the United Nations Security Council, which subsequently banned Liberian timber exports as part of wider trade sanctions that remain in place today.

Under Taylor's corrupt regime, the government had granted Liberia's largest logging concession to a favored timber company, essentially giving it license to plunder the country's biologically rich forests and commit egregious human rights abuses. To document this activity, Siakor hired observers at three key ports, collecting information on 80 percent of the country's timber exports. The observers found that not only did actual exports greatly exceed official estimates, but timber company workers were directly involved in unloading arms shipments.

Since Taylor's ousting in 2003, Siakor has worked with Liberia's new leadership to create sustainable timber policies and give local forest communities a voice through the first Forest People's Congress, which he organized. As director of the Sustainable Development Institute in Monrovia, his work has led the interim government to protect 1.5 million hectares of forest.

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Siakor has urged the UN to maintain timber sanctions until the corrupt logging companies that operated under Taylor's regime are removed, Liberia's forestry sector is reformed, and a workable forest management plan is in place. Demonstrating the power of the sanctions and Siakor's evidence, current President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has canceled all forestry concessions and vowed that new agreements not be issued until reforms...