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Climate campaigners could have a shot at winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Posted at 6:59 AM on 05 Oct 2007

Word around the campfire is that climate campaigners Al Gore and Sheila Watt-Cloutier may be on the short list of nominees with a shot at landing this year's Nobel Peace Prize. The prestigious award -- to be announced Oct. 12 -- has traditionally been awarded to human-rights activists and peace advocates (except for that whole Henry Kissinger thing). In 2004, the Peace Prize committee branched out somewhat to award environmental activist Wangari Maathai "for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace" through her Green Belt Movement that has planted millions of trees in Kenya, marking the first time the Peace Prize had been awarded to honor work in the environmental field. But will it be the last?

source: Reuters
see also, in Grist: An interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai

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Comments: (2 comments)

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Draft Gore

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/algore2008/

by sunflower at 11:38 AM on 05 Oct 2007

A rare, NOBEL choice: A banker named Muhammad

For me, there is something supremely ironic in the awarding of a Nobel Prize to a banker named Muhammad.

There are plenty of successful bankers in New York City alone. Has one of them ever been nominated for such a prize? Why is Mr. Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh, a banker described by many people worldwide as a "banker to the poor," selected for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize?

I suppose it is because nowhere else on the surface of the Earth can anyone find another banker who is not servicing the rich and powerful and, therefore, willing to say something like, "Everybody is busy buying, everybody is busy consuming, but they don't realize how much of the exhaustible resources that we are using up by this wasteful way of living, the lifestyle. So we need to look for a new kind of lifestyle, which will be consistent with the resources that we have in this world."

The successful bankers I have met in the course of time uniformly display a certain imperious reserve associated with excessive wealth and power as well as a willful religiosity that forbids them from speaking out loudly and clearly what is true for them about such things as the unsustainability of the huge scale and rapid growth rate of economic expansion on a tiny planet the size of Earth. Perhaps they will tell you what I have been told for many years, SILENCE IS GOLDEN.

by stevenearlsalmony at 10:51 AM on 10 Oct 2007

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