The Economist 29 April 2014
The man leading the opposition against a proposed expansion of the port in Durban, South Africa’s largest, has won the 2014 Goldman Environmental Prize in San Francisco. Desmond D’Sa, a community leader, campaigns against toxic waste dumping in South Durban, a poor but highly industrialised area.
The South African government wants to expand the Durban port to cope with growing cargo traffic. The multi-billion-dollar project to deepen and widen berths at the container terminal will create the largest cargo port in the southern hemisphere, boosting the economy and creating a multitude of jobs, according to Transnet, the government-owned corporation behind the project.
Mr D’Sa and his South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, an association representing local communities, are sceptical. They believe they will gain only casual jobs, while bearing the brunt of the social and environmental costs.
The proposed expansion may displace 30,000 people and affect the lives of 300,000 more. To date, the government has not committed to plans to rehouse the displaced and compensate those otherwise affected. The impact on the area’s wildlife has not been fully assessed
Local communities have an unhappy history. The south Durban basin, which houses 70% of the region’s industry, including hundreds of oil and gas refineries, chemical companies and paper mills, was originally populated by indentured servants working in local sugar plantations. The apartheid government forcibly relocated additional residents there to create a pool of cheap labor for the emerging industrial economy. Mr D’Sa and his family were a part of this forced migration.
“(The expansion) will cause the biggest social upheaval since apartheid. We already suffered enough trauma under apartheid: we lost our lands, our houses, our communities. We don’t want to go through that again,” says Mr D’Sa, who has vowed to fight the plan at every step.
www.economist.com
Grassroots Activists Awarded Goldman Environmental Prize
Rosanne Skirble 29 April 2014
Nice video of South Durban and other Goldman awardee sites:
www.voanews.com/content/grassroots-activists-awarded-goldman-environmental-prize-/1901286.html
Our Heroes: Goldman Environmental Prize 25 years of celebrating the strength and courage of everyday leaders
Each year in April, near Earth Day, Bay Area environmental health and justice advocates converge on San Francisco’s Opera House and City Hall to celebrate the Goldman Environmental Prize. The anticipation starts days in advance with media and parties celebrating the year’s winners. The award includes $175,000 cash prize, and inclusion in a group that lists some of the most tenacious, hardest working, and strategic grassroots activists in the world.
Six individuals are awarded each year from six continents. Prizes are awarded to grassroots activists that have achieved “sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk.”
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the Goldman Prize.
This year we are excited to join in the celebration with Desmond D’Sa fromDurban, South Africa. Desmond’s work over the past two decades with the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) has been relentless in their efforts for clean air and a healthy community.
Desmond rallies the Community against the proposed port. Photo credit Southlands Sun, South Africa
Desmond, with SDCEA and local, regional and international partners, has won clean air agreements from large refinery neighbors, closed a local dump, was a point person for COP 17 protests and is now leading the charge against the Durban Port expansion. Desmond is full of stories of struggle and victory, and none is more shocking than when a pipe bomb was thrown and exploded at his home during intense campaigning against the refineries.
Desmond was active with Global Community Monitor in the international (anti-) Shell Coalition. As part of this coalition, Des visited County Mayo, Ireland to support Willie Corduff and the Rossport community in the struggle to keep Shell off their farm and community lands. Desmond also visited Richmond, CA in 2011 in support of the community living in the shadow of Chevron.
As a nominator, Global Community Monitor is proud to be associated with the prize winners and the communities they represent. GCM has led and participated in several nominations of Goldman Prize Winners. The Prize is a rare moment for everyday leaders to get the recognition that their sacrifice and persistence deserves.
GCM continues to celebrate Bucket Brigade Leaders Bobby Peek, Durban, South Africa (1998); Margie Richard, Norco, Louisiana (2004); Willie Corduff, County Mayo, Ireland (2007); Hilton Kelley, Port Arthur, Texas (2011) and Dimitry Lisitsyn, Russia (2011).
While the Prize is an amazing recognition, it does not stop the environmental crimes and problems in these communities around the world. Like Desmond, Bobby, Margie, Willie, Hilton and Dimitry, they go on to live another day and fight another fight.
Given their track record, a fight they just might win.
hosted-p0.vresp.com/246070/3e519a7864/ARCHIVE
Top award for toxic dump campaigner
Mark Kinver Environment reporter, BBC News
28 April 2014
Mr D’Sa said he would not be prevented from standing up for the truth
An anti-toxic dump campaigner in South Africa has been recognised with a prestigious environmental award.
Desmond D’Sa’s efforts resulted in the closure of a chemicals dump in a residential area of Durban, winning him a Goldman Environmental Prize.
The awards are described as “the Nobel Prize for grassroots environmentalism”.
Mr D’Sa and five other winners will receive their awards on Monday at a presentation ceremony in San Francisco.
As a co-founder of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), he campaigned to raise awareness of the plight of communities living alongside the waste facility.
Among the schemes he oversaw were the “bucket brigade” and the “smell chart”. The bucket brigade consisted of local residents collecting samples of air in their communities, which where then sent off to the US where they were analysed.
“When we got the results back, we developed a flow chart of all the different smells and odours so then people could be better educated about the chemical odours and the impact they would have on health,” Mr D’Sa recalled.
With the data, Mr D’Sa and his team lobbied the government, which resulted in several health studies being done.
One of the studies showed that more than half of the 300,000-strong population had chronic asthma, he observed.
He added that the study also quantified cancer risk as 25-in-100,000 people, compared with the norm of 1-in-100,000.
“This was a conservative conclusion because the data was conservative yet it showed that the risk was very high and more needed to be done,” Mr D’Sa told BBC News.
Paying the price
In 2009, the facility’s operators applied to expand the site licence until 2021, but Mr D’Sa led a campaign to lobby officials, stating that the human cost was too high.
In 2011, the operators withdrew their application and the dump was closed.
“As a result, the trucks that carried all of the highly toxic waste through the communities are no longer there,” he said proudly.
www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27156185
Desmond D’Sa, Goldman Prize Winner, Works To Improve Durban, South Africa
Erica Gies (Huffington Post) 28 April 2014
This story originally appeared on Ensia.
April 28, 2014 — In 1971, when Desmond D’Sa was 15, South Africa’s apartheid government forcibly relocated his family from its 10-room suburban home to a two-bedroom inner city apartment. The young man was dismayed to find his new neighborhood in South Durban had no parks and sat amid large oil refineries, chemical tank farms and paper mills. Gang violence was rampant.
But D’Sa didn’t join a gang. Instead, he began to organize his new community, rallying his neighbors to build a sports field to give young people something positive to do among all the blight.
Now 57, D’Sa is still working on behalf of his community. For his indefatigable efforts, he’s been awarded this year’s $175,000 Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa. The award highlights his community’s 2011 victory in shutting down the Bulbul Drive landfill — one of the area’s largest for hazardous waste.
“He really stood out for his passionate activism and the way he’s organized his community to achieve a really important victory,” says David Gordon, executive director of the Goldman Prize, which was founded by the San Francisco philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman in 1990 to recognize grassroots environmental activism.
Long, Long Hours
South Durban is home to almost 70 percent of South Africa’s industry, including more than 300 oil and gas refineries, paper mills, agrochemical plants and hazardous waste landfills such as the Bulbul Drive dump.
For more than two decades, Wasteman Holdings, a South African waste management company, dumped toxic waste from shipyards, factory farms, medical facilities, and oil and chemical factories in the Bulbul Drive landfill, contaminating soil, water and air. The community spent nearly 15 years fighting it and turning an application for expansion in 2009 to a closure in 2011.
Still, the shutdown is just the first step. The landfill’s leachate — liquid that runs off the waste — is so toxic that other disposal sites won’t take it, so the government has instructed Wasteman to build an onsite plant, to pretreat it before shipping it elsewhere.
Those who know D’Sa say he won’t rest until the company follows through on this mandate.
“He’s willing to put in long, long hours to make things change in a positive direction,” says Thomas Robins, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan who has worked with D’Sa.
Providing Proof
D’Sa first realized the impact of local pollution when working at Sasol, one of the South Durban chemical plants, in the 1990s. “People were sick, but we didn’t cotton on to all these things,” he says. At the factory, he read the chemicals’ safety sheets and realized the danger to workers.
He also noticed what seemed like a high prevalence of asthma and childhood leukemia in his neighborhood. “In the state project where I lived, 10 out 12 families had a family member who had asthma,” he says. “I realized something was amiss here.”
When he went to the two large oil refineries in the neighborhood, Engen (PETRONAS) and SAPREF (Shell and BP) with his concerns, he says, “the response I got was that people were smoking cigarettes and that was causing the asthma and cancer.”
D’Sa didn’t accept the explanation and continued to call attention to pollution and health issues in the area. In 1995, he was protesting a ribbon-cutting ceremony by newly elected Nelson Mandela at the Engen refinery. Mandela stopped to talk to D’Sa and his fellow protesters. What they told him compelled the leader to assign a senior staff member to help the protestors negotiate a good neighbor agreement.
“He was the first president to listen to community groups, take heed and act on the information presented to him,” D’Sa says. “He put people first.”
Mandela also “made us understand that you have to have facts and figures because that’s what counts at the end of the day,” he says. So, D’Sa co-founded the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance in 1996 and set out to provide the proof — the facts and figures — about what was really going on with the air pollution and illnesses in the area.
Partnering with the California-based nonprofit Global Community Monitor, D’Sa’s alliance helped train local residents to take air samples. The samples showed levels of benzene, a confirmed carcinogen, at levels eight times higher than what is considered safe in United States, but still under the South African standard at the time.
Two landmark studies conducted in the early 2000s by Robins and colleagues at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal supplied more information about the medical threats D’Sa had perceived.
Despite the refineries’ turning off several sources of pollution during the study period, Robins’ team still found incidence of asthma in 52 percent of the children, including 11 percent who had moderate to severe asthma. Robins also looked at cancers, heart disease and kidney disease among the population but is still analyzing those data.
These studies and the community air samples attracted sustained press attention, prompting the South African parliament to hold a national hearing. D’Sa and fellow community organizer Bobby Peek, who won the Goldman Prize in 1998, testified. The outcome was a new law in 2004, signed by Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor, that established national air quality and emissions standards for South Africa.
Mandela’s Legacy
Amid the victories, D’Sa has paid a high price for his work. In 2011 his home was firebombed, sending him and his wife and daughter to the hospital.
“We face dangers all the time because we stand up for justice and truth and for people and species who can’t speak for themselves,” he says. “But that will not deter me from doing what’s right. I’m not going to be afraid.”
Today D’Sa is fighting a proposal to dramatically expand the port of Durban, also a neighbor to his beleaguered community. Already the largest port on the African continent, the expansion would displace thousands of South Durban residents and exacerbate waste, pollution and traffic in the neighborhood.
It’s a foreboding echo of history, says Global Community Monitor executive director Denny Larson, as corporate and other forces legally and forcibly evict people from land where they’ve been living for a long time. It would be the largest removal of residents — many subsistence fisherfolk — since apartheid.
South Africa’s current government isn’t following Mandela’s policy of people first, D’Sa says. “I want to ensure the legacy of Mandela continues to resonate across South Africa, particularly in South Durban,” he says. “I will continue to stand up for those principles.”
ensia.com/features/fight-against-blight/
What a South African activist sees as ‘the greatest threat since apartheid’
Tiffany Harness 30 April 2014
Desmond D’Sa’s journey to environmental activist began when he was a teenager in South Africa. The apartheid system of racial segregation was firmly in place, and his family was forced to move to an area where “there were no clean running rivers, no vegetable gardens and only red soil.”
Over the years, with so many of his relatives and neighbors suffering various ailments, he realized that corporate pollution was “killing us, the residents of south Durban, daily.” In the 1990s, he co-founded the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, which unites a diverse group of South Africans with an ultimate goal of “environmental justice for all.”
D’Sa is one of this year’s recipients of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. He and five other “environmental heroes” will be honored at a reception Wednesday in Washington, D.C. Here are lightly edited excerpts from my Q&A with him:
Q: What is environmental injustice, and what evidence of it do you see in today’s South Africa?
A: Environmental justice is about equity and justice as well as basic human rights while living in harmony with nature and other species. It is about those with power – the politicians as well as the corporations – abusing the poor.
Today in South Africa I see the increase of injustices and inequality toward people and the environment and the way in which we all interact with the built environment as well. What is noticeable to me is the destruction of our social systems, ecosystems, flora and fauna as well as many other aspects of the world we live in. As a result of this inequality – together with Brazil, SA is the most unequal country in the world, where the gap between the richest and poorest is the greatest – the level of poverty is rising, and there is a general lack of access to basic needs such as water, energy, housing and proper sanitation.
Q: Your family was forced to move to south Durban when you were a teenager. Do you remember your first impressions of south Durban? How did your life change?
A: My first impression of south Durban was shocking. To see so many smoke chimneys and factories located alongside residential housing and kids playing in the plumes of the pollution. Our government accommodation was overcrowded walk-up apartments. In this urban jungle there were no clean running rivers, no vegetable gardens and only red soil. As the years went, there was rapid increase in industry and petrochemical expansion.
This made me realize we were deliberately placed to live alongside dirty industries and our lungs played the role of purifiers for pollution from these factories.
When I first came to Wentworth my life changed tremendously as we had to stay indoors because there were terrible odors and smells from the factories. As we could not plant crops we had to then buy and purchase these fruit and vegetables from the local markets. With the community, I noticed residents, neighbors, friends and family getting sick from the poor air quality they had to breathe.
Q: As a young adult, when did you first begin to notice that something in the area wasn’t quite right?
A: It started with my family members, where they were getting sick constantly with skin rashes, respiratory illnesses and heart ailments. Very soon I realized that many members of this community and south Durban were going to local hospitals and clinics all parts of the day and night for illnesses related to the environment we lived in. The regular visits of the government ambulances were also becoming more frequent and would come with nebulizers and oxygen gas cylinders to ensure that people, especially kids, were able to breathe properly.
With the increase in industry and the toxic emissions, the level of health concerns had escalated to an extent that the community realized they needed to take a stand and fight for their rights to an environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being, which in 1996 was guaranteed to us in our democratic Constitution. For me it was more than just a stand, it was to bring to the attention of all community members, government, and huge corporations that corporate polluting activities – condoned by government – are killing us, the residents of south Durban, daily.
Q: You co-founded the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance … how does it operate today?
A: Initially SDCEA was mainly tackling issues of air pollution and health impacts but further it realized that in order to achieve the bigger goal – of environmental justice for all – a holistic approach of all aspects concerning the environment and the people had to be considered. So SDCEA focuses on water and land issues, basic human rights, all types of pollution, pushing back on toxic industrial expansion and development and infrastructure projects that seek to destroy our community. We challenge policy and legislation, build education and awareness and community empowerment.
Q: At the beginning, were you scared to speak out?
A: Yes, I was scared – when I decided to eventually speak out and not compromise, I was then informed by many, including some members of my own family who did not approve, accept or support my stance. This reason came from the fact that I was going against major corporations who had a lot of political ties and power. I was swimming against the tide.
I was later informed that my work would affect everyone in our community, from employment opportunities or finance and funds for social projects. Many of the business moguls often offered me money and jobs in senior positions, vehicles – as a way to silence me in order to keep their reputation good and not reduce their emissions. I have been threatened physically, and have been attacked and my house petrol bombed. Yes I was scared, and still am. But fear is only showing me that I am human. We are all scared. It is living with fear and acting despite of this that is critical.
Q: How did you get over the fear? Who inspired you?
A: I stood firm and people started to join me in the actions, workshops and protests. I realized at some point in life that there is a strong sense of worth when one is true to one’s self, doing work that is righteous and truthful for the good of humanity.
There are a number of people throughout my life that has inspired me in different aspects. To name a few would be firstly my parents and siblings (all 12 of them), the SDCEA family from its inception over the years which are made up of people from different walks of life, different races, different sexes, different professions and levels of experience.
Q: Your home was firebombed …
A: My home was firebombed in 2007, just after midnight when I, my wife and one of my daughters were asleep in the house. The attack resulted in me and my daughter being rushed to hospital. I endured facial injuries and burns to my arms as well as respiratory difficulties.
The attack changed me in a way where I became stronger, more confident to speak the truth and not be afraid as I knew that I was doing the right thing.
Q: What are you focusing on now?
A: We face today the greatest threat since apartheid. Government wants to develop a dug-out port which will result in some of us losing our homes, we are losing our social fabric and our urban neighborhoods are changing from residential to peripheral industrial wastelands.
The major infrastructure development of the dug-out port will be backed by the Infrastructure Development legislation which basically gives government the right to do as they please, for the “good of the nation” and elite corporate wealth. Sounds like apartheid to me. This is SDCEA’s focus over the near future. If we lose this battle of protecting our neighborhoods, we will have to start all over again, as we did in 1969.
Q: Such serious and important goals … but what makes you happy in your work?
A: I am an extremely passionate and committed individual who cares about people and the planet. I am a very religious person who prays and seeks spiritual guidance daily, I am active and choose to walk to work, which gives me my form of exercise, I am never bored in my work and it’s exciting every day since it’s brings new challenges which I thoroughly enjoy. Helping people gives me a sense of purpose.
I have and always will stay humble and true to my roots and beliefs and that no one can take away from me. I know through my actions and work that changes will happen, even if its starts off very little but I will eventually get to what we all want to see for the future which is a balanced relationship between man and nature.
Climate Reality Leader Desmond D’Sa Wins Goldman Environmental Prize
The Climate Reality Project 28 April 2014
Desmond D’Sa didn’t need a team of lab scientists to tell him that companies were dumping all kinds of toxic waste in his backyard and that was bad news. He could just smell it.
Living in South Durban in South Africa, next door to over 300 industrial facilities ranging from oil and gas refineries to chemical plants to paper mills, D’Sa had gotten to know what trouble smelled like. The area is home to nearly 70 percent of the nation’s industry and 300,000 people—predominantly from low-income and working-class backgrounds—who were relocated by the government to work in the plants during the apartheid era. This forced relocation isn’t the plants’ only legacy, as the chemicals they produce has led to such high rates of cancer and unusually high rates of asthma and bronchitis that the region has earned the name “Cancer Valley.”
D’Sa had arrived in Cancer Valley when he was only 15, just one of many sons in many families who were forcibly moved to the area for work. And he’d gotten to know just what the plants were doing to the local environment firsthand by working in several chemical factories. It was enough to inspire him to want to do something about it, and in 1996, he co-founded the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) to bring local residents together to fight back.
And they did. Back in 1990, a major waste management company named Wasteman had opened a toxic waste dumpsite for the hazardous leftovers of area industry without as much as consulting local residents. The result was huge trucks illegally rumbling through residential communities and spilling all kinds of toxic materials from solvents to paint thinners to pesticides, poisoning the air, leaching into the soil, and contaminating the groundwater.
D’Sa and SDCEA had run a campaign for many years to close down the facility for good, but without much success. After all, they were local activists taking on a national corporation not much inclined to listen when it didn’t have to.
That picture changed in 2010, when Wasteman’s lease came up for renewal and the company applied for an extension until 2021. D’Sa and SDCEA knew an opening when they saw it and quickly started organizing the diverse and historically disenfranchised residents of South Durban into a unified and powerful force. When public comment forums opened up, residents were there to speak up, armed with an understanding of their constitutional rights and stories of lives transformed by the plants. When drivers wanted to speed right by the plants, residents were there with huge demonstrations on major highways highlighting the illegal trucking and attracting media attention to their cause.
As reporters tuned into the unfolding protest, D’Sa knew he had a compelling story to tell, but he also knew residents had to understand and document exactly what was happening to them if they were going to really ignite public empathy and outrage. The trouble was, they didn’t have access to sophisticated scientific equipment to monitor the pollutants in the air they were breathing every day.
What they did have was their noses. D’Sa quickly transformed local residents into researchers by creating and sharing a Smells that Kill worksheet throughout the community. The sheet translated the presence of chemicals like sulfur dioxide into familiar smells like rotten eggs and pointed to the specific industries causing them and the impacts like nausea and headaches they created. Before long, residents knew what they were up against, and pretty soon, reporters and the general public did too.
Thanks to these efforts, public opposition to the landfill grew and Wasteman was forced to abandon its plans in August 2010. Then in November 2011, the facility officially closed and ceased all operations.
It was an important victory, both for D’Sa and the South Durban community, but one that came at a real cost. D’Sa’s home was firebombed during the campaign, leaving him suffering from burns and his family suffering from the trauma.
In recognition of D’Sa’s incredible bravery and achievements, he was selected as one of six grassroots activists around the world to receive the Goldman Environmental Prize. The prize is the most prestigious of its kind in the world and pays tribute to grassroots environmental activists’ “sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk.”
Here at Climate Reality, we’re very proud that this year Desmond D’Sa became not only a Goldman Prize winner, but also a Climate Reality Leader. D’Sa attended the Climate Reality Leadership Corps training in Johannesburg in March along with 700 other leaders, including fellow Goldman Prize winners Ikal Angelei and Jonathan Deal. Already, he’s taking the knowledge and skills he gained to mobilize his community to oppose the Port of Durban’s expansion plans. The port—the busiest in Africa—would displace thousands of people through the expansion and worsen a host of environmental problems in the area, from waste to pollution to traffic. The port also has the potential to exacerbate climate-change risks, such as sea-level rise and coastal storm surges, something D’sa hopes to prevent through opposition of the expansion project.
D’Sa’s extraordinary story is just one of countless ones we hear almost daily of Climate Reality Leaders inspiring their communities to step up and act. The planet needs more, though, and that’s why we’re training thousands more with events in Australia in June and Brazil in November. You can join D’Sa and Climate Reality Leaders around the world building support for climate solutions and helping create a healthy and sustainable future for us all. Visit www.climaterealitytraining.org to learn more and apply.
climaterealityproject.org
Local environmental activist wins award
Thrishni Subramoney 29 April 2014
Community environmental activist, Desmond D’sa says the international award he has received will help boost his fight against the port expansion plan in Durban.
D’sa’s been awarded the 2014 Goldman Prize for Africa.
He has spoken to Newswatch shortly after receiving the prize in San Francisco.
He says that the award will help draw international attention to local causes
“It didn’t hit home, but I think the last couple of days and weeks that I have been here in the US, it has really hit home what it will do for the community back home.
“It will give them a lift; it will give ordinary people that live where I come from. It will strengthen them and it will make them understand that as ordinary people we can reach great heights. We can achieve a lot, just through hard work. We may never have the resources, we may never have the PhDs but we can achieve a lot,” he said.
D’sa was selected for the award for his assistance in helping shutdown the Bul Bul landfill site in Chatsworth, and for his decades fighting against pollution in the South Durban Basin.
SA men awarded ‘green Nobel’ prize
Ally Mutnick 30 April 2014
Johannesburg – Activist Desmond D’Sa has been awarded the “green Nobel” – a top international environmental prize – for his work in eliminating toxic waste in Durban.
Along with six others, D’Sa was recognised at the Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony in San Francisco on Monday.
Friends and co-workers applauded his many achievements in fighting for environmental justice in industrial South Durban, an area known as “cancer valley” for its high rates of cancer and asthma.
D’Sa co-founded the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) in 1996 to fight environmental degradation.
He won the prize, which includes a $175 000 (R1.85 million) award, for his work in closing a 20-year-old hazardous waste landfill that was contaminating groundwater and releasing chemicals in the air to nearby communities.
Wasteman, the company operating the landfill, applied in 2009 to extend its lease on the landfill until 2021, according to the Goldman Prize website.
Developing smell charts to help residents identify the toxins in their air, D’Sa rallied the community and organised large public protests against the company and the pollution its landfill brings.
In 2010 Wasteman announced it would stop seeking an extension of its lease, and in 2011 the company closed the landfill permanently.
Fellow environmentalists say D’Sa’s life has been characterised by one fight after another against the industrial giants who threaten the community.
Recently, he helped secure harbour access for subsistence fishermen in South Durban. The harbour had been closed to subsistence fishers since the 9/11 attacks led to tightened security, but D’Sa and SDCEA navigated the courts to restore their rights. “He’s a tireless fighter for environmental justice,” said Vanessa Black, vice-chairwoman of the SDCEA board.
Currently D’Sa is leading the charge to stop a port development project in an area of Durban that SDCEA calls the last standing “green land”. The development would cause toxic pollution and environmental degradation near schools. The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation gives out the prize annually.
D’Sa’s friend Bobby Peek, a South African environmentalist who runs groundWork, a green justice agency in South Durban, also won the award. Peek was with D’Sa at the ceremony in the US.