We are too grateful to be blessed with our natural resources in abundance. But are we really deserving? I certainly doubt that. Considering the current scenario all our natural resources are being exploited by us in a brutal way. We fail to realise that by practising such things we are digging our grave only. With such a progressive rate of exploitation of natural resources, there will come a point where we would not be left with any of it to use and that day will mark the end of this planet. There are certain activists who are doing their bit to make people aware and to preserve our natural resources.
One such activist is Alfred Brownell who devoted the last decade to preserve the rainforests and other natural resources of Liberia. While telling his story of persecution and escape, in his office at the Northeastern University’s School of Law, he was interrupted by silence. He sat there quiet and still despite the tears falling from his eyes but he struggled to manage his sobbing. A flashback of memories from five years ago, when his life was nearly taken from him and all the days since then he devoted to the repayment of his good fortune. Brownell was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s most prestigious honour for the half-dozen grassroots environmental activists who receive it annually.
Brownell formed Green Advocates International, Inc., a non-profit public interest environmental law organisation that has used legal means to protect the natural resources of Liberia against the plundering by agricultural, logging, and mining companies that have been seizing the forests and other public and private lands with the assistance of the Liberian government.
“It’s not just a struggle to protect remote towns and villages, or just to protect their sacred sites, or just to protect their land and their crops, their way of life, their culture, their religion,” Brownell says. “It’s also about protecting these important forests in West Africa, which are producing oxygen and absorbing carbon and, in essence, making an enormous contribution in the mitigation of climate change.”
Brownell also stopped the clear cutting of Liberia’s tropical rainforests by palm oil plantation developers. All of this was not at all easy for Brownell as he had to various traumatic events to achieve all this and also become successful in preserving forests. One such incident was; once while he was returning from an inspection of a Liberian forest that he was trying to save, his car was among those stopped by a mob of 150 men armed with machetes, guns, and other weapons. They made it clear they were intending to murder and cannibalise him.
As Brownell sat locked in his car, he was approached by a local chief who, Brownell believed, was taking money from the plunderers. In a shocking turn, the chief decided to spare him from his would-be killers. Now Brownell is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Northeastern University‘s School of Law. Here, I would like to conclude with a motivating message by Brownell.
“I am just the voice,” Brownell says. “My work is well known around the world, and when I had problems, my friends right here, they pulled me out. But no one knows who these other folks are—these tens of thousands of indigenous villagers. Nobody knows their name, nobody knows their faces. I hope this prize puts a name to their faces so that people will get to see who they are, and see their struggle.”
Priyanka Rawat