Alessandra Korap is one of six recipients of the 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize for grassroots activism.
When Alessandra Korap was born in the mid-1980s, her native village, nestled in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, was an oasis of seclusion. But as she grew up, the nearby town of Itaituba crept closer and closer, with its bustling streets and commercial activity.
It wasn’t just her village that felt the encroachment of non-indigenous outsiders. Two major federal highways paved the way for tens of thousands of settlers, illegal prospectors and loggers to the region’s vast Indigenous lands, which cover a forest area about the size of Belgium.
The influx posed a serious threat to the Munduruku people of Korap, 14,000 strong and scattered across the Tapajos River basin in the Brazilian states of Para and Mato Grosso.
Soon, illegal mining, hydroelectric dams, a major railroad, and river ports for soybean exports choked their land—land they still struggled to recognize.
Korap and other Munduruku women took on the responsibility of defending their people, overthrowing the traditional all-male leadership. They organized in their communities, organized demonstrations and presented evidence of environmental crime to Brazil’s Attorney General and the Federal Police.
And they strongly opposed illegal deals and incentives offered to the Munduruku by unscrupulous miners, loggers, corporations and politicians seeking access to their land.
Korap’s defense of her ancestral territory was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday. The award honors grassroots activists around the world who are committed to protecting the environment and promoting sustainability.
“This award is an opportunity to draw attention to the demarcation of the Sawre Muybu territory,” Korap told The Associated Press news agency. “It’s our top priority, along with expelling illegal miners.”
Sawre Muybu is an area of pristine rainforest along the Tapajos River covering 178,000 hectares (440,000 acres). Official recognition for the country, or demarcation, began in 2007 but was frozen during Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right presidency, which ended in January.
Still, the Munduruku people celebrated victory in 2021 when British mining company Anglo American stopped mining indigenous areas in Brazil, including Sawre Muybu.
Studies have shown that native controlled forests are the best preserved in the Brazilian Amazon.
Nearly half of Brazil’s climate pollution is the result of deforestation. The devastation is now so great that the eastern Amazon, not far from the Munduruku, is no longer a carbon sink – a net absorber of the gas.
Instead, it is now a source of carbon, according to a study published in 2021 in the magazine Nature.
However, Korap knows that land rights alone do not protect the land.
In neighboring Munduruku Indigenous Territory, illegal miners have destroyed and polluted hundreds of miles of waterways in search of gold, even though it was officially recognized in 2004.
Now Brazil’s new government has established the country’s first Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and, more recently, launched operations to evict miners.
But Korap remains skeptical about current president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
She sees his actions as contradictory, noting that while he advocates for forest protection, he also makes trade deals with other countries to sell more of the country’s main exports – beef and soybeans – which are the main drivers of deforestation in Brazil.
“When Lula travels abroad, he stays with rich people and not forest rangers. A ministry is useless if the government negotiates our country without acknowledging that we are here,” she said.
Other recipients of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize include:
- Tero Mustonen, a university professor and environmental activist from Finland, who spearheaded the purchase of peatlands damaged by state-sponsored industrial activities.
- Delima Silalahi, a Batak woman from North Sumatra, Indonesia, who organized indigenous communities across the country to defend their rights to traditional forests.
- Chilekwa Mumba, a Zambian community organizer who has fought for and received compensation for residents harmed by copper mining before the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
- Zafer Kizilkaya from Turkey, a marine conservationist and conservation photographer who established the first community-run marine protected area in the Mediterranean.
- Diane Wilson, an American shrimp boat captain who won a landmark case against petrochemical giant Formosa Plastics for dumping plastic waste on the Texas Gulf Coast in the United States.