Goldman Prize honors activists working to save land, animals

Lynn Henning, a small farmer, exposed the water pollution caused in her Michigan county by concentrated animal feeding operations. In Costa Rica, biologist Randall Arauz forced his government to enforce its laws to protect endangered shark species from slaughter just for their fins. They're just two winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize being presented today in San Francisco. The prize, the largest for grass-roots activists in the world, comes with a $150,000 check for each of six recipients, one for each inhabited continent. Henning and her husband farm 300 acres of corn and soybeans. But in the past decade, 12 large-scale CAFOs — concentrated animal feeding operations — have opened within 12 miles of their farm, 10 for cows and two for pigs. "There are 60 lagoons with over 400 million gallons of untreated waste in them," she says of the manure ponds the operations create to deal with the excrement of their animals. The stench is so overwhelming she can't hang her laundry when it's warm, and the ponds are emitting odor and gases. To force the operations to abide by local laws, she helped to found the Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan (nocafos.org). It hasn't made her popular. "I've had dead animals on my car, in my mailbox on my farm, we've had stuff put into the tank of our combine, I've been chased to the police department. It's divided the community."...more