Linda Garcia

2019 Goldman Environmental Prize, the most prestigious prize for grassroots environmental contributions.

Linda organized Fruit Valley residents to stop the construction of the Tesoro Savage oil export terminal in Vancouver, Washington, safeguarding residents from harmful air pollution and protecting the environment of the Columbia River Gorge. Her work halted the flow of 11 million gallons of crude oil per day from North Dakota to Washington.

Randall Hayes

Co-founder and former President, Rainforest Action Network; currently USA Director, World Future Council, a global forum composed of 50 respected individuals from around the world working to ensure that humanity acts now for a sustainable future; former President of the City of San Francisco Commission on the Environment; former Director of Sustainability in the office of Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown; a well-known environmental leader, he is one of the original set of inductees in the Environmental Hall of Fame.

Wes Jackson

Head and Founder along with Dana Jackson of the Land Institute

The Land Institute is a nonprofit organization working on the development of sustainable and natural systems agriculture; and a world leader on the environmental effects of agriculture on land.

Wes Jackson also proposed and advocates switching from annuals (plants that die after one year, such as grains), to perennials (plants that live many years) for our agricultural crops. Jackson is the author of several books and is recognized as a leader in the international sustainable agriculture movement. His Becoming Native to This Place, published in 1994, challenges readers to develop a relationship with their ecosystems, and further develops the idea of Natural Systems Agriculture to a greater degree than he previously did.

Rodrigue Mugaruka Katembo

2017 Goldman Environmental Prize, the most prestigious prize for grassroots environmental contributions.

Putting his life on the line, Rodrigue went undercover to document and release information about bribery and corruption in the quest to drill for oil in Virunga National Park, home to eastern gorillas and many other species of animals and plants. The result was public outrage that forced the oil company to withdraw from the project. He saved the national park and its gorillas and other wildlife.

Joanna Macy

Joanna Macy is Founder, Council of All Beings and adjunct professor to three graduate schools in the San Francisco Bay Area: the Starr King School for the Ministry, the University of Creation Spirituality, and the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Joanna Macy is an international spokesperson for peace, justice, and environmentalism. She is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology and wrote eight books, the best known of which is Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (1998). She is renowned for the Great Turning initiative, which deals with the transformation from, as she terms it, an industrial growth society to a sustainable civilization. Joanna Macy has created a theoretical framework for personal and social change, and a workshop methodology for its application. She travels giving lectures, workshops, and trainings internationally. Her work is recognized as part of the deep ecology tradition.

Douglas Osheroff

Nobel Prize in Physics, 1996 Awarded for co-discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3.

Professor of Physics Emeritus, Stanford University

Dr. Osheroff was selected to serve on the Space Shuttle Columbia investigation panel, serving much the same role as Richard Feynman did on the Space Shuttle Challenger panel. He serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government. He has a passion for saving rainforest and the Earth and is an enthusiastic donor to these causes.

Michelle Perault

Executive Board and past President, Sierra Club.

Richard Register

President and founder, Ecocity Builders, a non profit organization in Oakland, California, that provides advocacy, consulting, and education in sustainable city planning with a focus on access by proximity and pedestrian-oriented development. It also implements urban design projects, utilizing a large network of alliances with city governments, businesses, and NGOs. Ecocity Builders' approach is based the work of Mr. Register. He is an artist, peace activist, and urban theorist. He has led projects restoring and bringing creeks buried underground to the surface (“daylighting” creeks). The Codornices Creek project, 1994, removed the water channel from its cement culvert along the Albany/Oakland border, and created a mile-long park. Ecocity Builders helped plan and provided support for a variety of small to medium-sized depaving projects in Berkeley. Also in Berkeley, Ecocity Builders successfully co-authored and lobbied the Ecocity Amendment to the 2001 General Plan, the Solar Greenhouse Ordinance, and the Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance. Richard advises and consults on ecocities, and wrote several books on the topic, including EcoCities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature. He has been a key organizer of international ecocity conferences from Istanbul to Montreal since 1990.

John Robbins

Author, Diet for a New America; founder, EarthSave

John Robbins popularized the links between nutrition, environmentalism, and animal rights, through diet. He spelled these ideas out in his 1987 book, Diet for a New America, an exposé on connections between diet, physical health, animal cruelty, and environmentalism. In 1988, he founded EarthSave, an international, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting healthy, environmentally sound food choices He is on the advisory board of Naked Food Magazine, for which he is also a regular contributor of articles advocating a plant-based diet.

Nonhle Mbuthuma

Winner of the 2024 Goldman Prize

Nonhle Mbuthuma fights for land and environmental rights in South Africa. In 2007, Nonhle founded the Amadiba Crisis Committee to unite the Amadiba Tribal Authority region to work together in opposition to destructive mining projects. She is now the most visible leader of the campaign against destructive mining by the Australian Corporation Mineral Commodities Mineral Ltd. 

Mark Dubois

Mark Dubois is co-founder of Friends of the River and International Rivers. Mark gained national attention when he chained himself to a rock beside the rising reservoir behind New Melones Dam in May 1979 to force the Army Corps of Engineers to stop the filling or kill him. He was at least temporarily successful, as they stopped filling the dam and he came out of hiding.

Sinegugu Zukulu

Winner of the 2024 Goldman Prize

Program Manager for Sustaining the Wild Coast, South Africa. Sinegugu Zukulu fights environmental crimes by big mining and construction companies through litigating, documenting, and raising awareness.

Prafulla Samantara

2017 Goldman Environmental Prize Asia, the most prestigious prize for grassroots environmental contributions.

Prafulla led a 12-year legal battle that affirmed the indigenous Dongria Kondh’s land rights and protected the Niyamgiri Hills from a massive open-pit aluminum ore mine.

In Memoriam

We celebrate the thoughtful contributions of our late advisory board members, who are listed below.

Phil Berry

Phil Berry was Executive Board and past President, Sierra Club

David Brower

David Brower was the most prominent American environmental leader in U. S. history, second only to John Muir. He served as the founder and first Executive Director of the Sierra Club Foundation from 1952 to 1969. He founded the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, Earth Island Institute, North Cascades Conservation Council, and Fate of the Earth Conferences.

Friends of the Earth campaigned against the Alaska pipeline, the supersonic transport airplane, the use of the defoliant Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, and efforts to sell and lease public lands in the West and develop land adjacent to the National Parks. Mr. Brower saved many natural areas from destruction, including helping stop two dams that would have flooded portions of the Grand Canyon. He was a leader in the fight that stopped the construction of the Echo Park Dam in Utah's Dinosaur National Monument. He began Sierra Club Books' Exhibit Format book series, which consisted of coffee table books, with the book, This is the American Earth in 1960, followed by the highly successful In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, with color photographs by Eliot Porter, in 1962. He also started publication of The Environmental Handbook in the wake of Earth Day under the auspices of Friends of the Earth. A monument, Spaceship Earth, was erected in his honor at Kennesaw State University. The monument is meant to serve as a reminder to future generations about the precious nature of the planet.

David Brower saved many natural areas from destruction, including helping stop two dams that would have flooded portions of the Grand Canyon.

Bill Devall

Professor at Humbolt State University in California
Author of Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered
Founding member of the North Coast Environmental Center, a non-profit to promote understanding of the relations between people and the biosphere, and to conserve, protect, and celebrate terrestrial, aquatic, and marine ecosystems of northern California and southern Oregon.

Bill Devall was an originator of the concept of deep ecology.

Dona Spring

Green Party member on the City Council of Berkeley, California.

Donna Spring worked with David Seaborg to get the Berkeley City Council to pass an ordinance prohibiting the use of rainforest and redwood wood in Berkeley city projects and those for which Berkeley contracts with private companies.