Goldman Environmental Prize

Forest and Bird, Volume 22, Issue 3, 1 August 1991, Page 5

Goldman Environmental Prize

N EW ZEALAND conservationist Cath Wallace was honoured earlier in the year with one of the second annual awards of the $US60,000 Goldman Environmental Prize. Cath won the prize for the Australasian/World At Large region. The prize is given to grassroots campaigners. Cath is well known and respected for her unceasing activism on behalf of a number of issues, although her work to protect Antarctica has given her the highest profile. She is co-founder and present convenor of the New Zealand arm of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, cochairperson of ECO and founder and editor of the now-defunct Mining Monitor. At present she is the Australasian councillor for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. As a lecturer in resource economics at Victoria University, Cath Wallace has been able successfully to combine activism and professionalism. There is a strong family tradition of involvement in conservation: her mother Charlotte is on Forest and Bird's Waikato branch committee. Two other Goldman award winners, Yoichi Kuroda and Sam LaBudde, share links with Forest and Bird. Yoichi is the coordinator of the Japan Tropical Forest Network (JATAN), which in 1990 became a member of the New Zealand Rainforests Coalition.

Yoichi is best known internationally for his report Timber from the South Seas: An Analysis of Japan's Tropical Timber Trade and its Environmental Impact. An indictment of the Japanese contribution to rainforest destruction, the report has had an enormous influence. His accomplishments are particularly impressive coming from a country where activism is frowned upon. Thanks in part to his efforts, forest conservation has become part of a rigorous national debate. Sam LaBudde of the Earth Island Institute put his life on the line to film dolphins being slaughtered in the tuna fishery off the west coast of the United States. It has been estimated that since 1960 about six million dolphins have been killed in the fishery. As a result of the publicity, the major tuna canning companies announced in 1990 they would stop buying tuna caught in association with dolphin slaughter. LaBudde came to New Zealand at the end of 1988 to warn New Zealanders about the effects of driftnetting. An article he wrote on the issue appeared in the May 1989 Forest & Bird. &