SANTA CRUZ — To celebrate its 10th anniversary at UC Santa Cruz, the Right Livelihood Center hosted an international conference on the UCSC campus this week featuring student delegates, faculty and speakers from across the globe fighting for social and environmental causes in their respective regions.
“The conference has been better than we imagined,” said UCSC Right Livelihood Center Coordinator David Shaw. “We have celebrated our anniversary and inaugurated our new role as global secretariat and we have launched a new international student network with students from five continents and we’ve facilitated strong relationships between faculty and Right Livelihood laureates to create new research projects. There’s also been a lot of learning happening here.”
In addition to the center’s 10-year anniversary, the conference also celebrated the center’s new leadership role as the global secretariat of the Right Livelihood College — a part of the greater Right Livelihood Award Foundation.
“When we had our conference here in 2018, we got the coordinators, the faculty, at the nine campuses worldwide connected and we’ve been meeting ever since that last conference,” said Shaw. “But the students had not been connected until now.”
The Right Livelihood Award Foundation began in 1980 with the founding of the Right Livelihood Award or as it is sometimes called, the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” The award was created after the Nobel Foundation rejected a proposal to create new Nobel Prize award categories for changemakers and pioneers in the fields of social and environmental justice. Since the 1980s, the Right Livelihood Award has been given to nearly 200 activists from 76 countries.
The Right Livelihood International Conference, held from Tuesday through Saturday featured events and discussions with Right Livelihood laureates such as Chilean activist Juan Pablo Orrego, who received the award in 1998 for his work protecting the Biobío River in southern Chile and Kenyan environmental champion Phyllis Omido who is known as the “Erin Brockovich of East Africa.” Omido received her Right Livelihood Award in 2023 for her work to raise awareness and stop the lead poisoning that was being caused in her home village by a battery smelting plant. Through years of struggle, Omido helped to close 17 toxic sites in Kenya.
Before the talk featuring Orrego and Omido titled “Resource Extraction and the Future of the Green Economy,” moderated by UCSC Professor Fernando Leiva, the Sentinel spoke with Cambodian environmental activist Ly Chandaravuth.
Chandaravuth is an environmental activist with Mother Nature Cambodia, which received a Right Livelihood award in 2023 and is a youth-led environmental rights organization. Chandaravuth, who has been arrested for his activism, uses media in various forms to help protect Cambodia’s natural resources and stand up for human rights.
“Our work is to raise awareness about environmental destruction and to empower people to speak up about the environment and inspire young people to join together to protect our environment,” said Chandaravuth. “We do that by investigating and documenting environmental destruction and then we post it on social media to gain support. When enough people support a particular cause, then we influence change. Whether they like it or not, the government has to listen to the people.”
Chandaravuth also hosted a politically-focused radio show in Cambodia and he and his colleagues have organized protests, signature-gathering campaigns and group trips to areas in Cambodia that are experiencing environmental destruction. Chandaravuth was inspired to become an activist after studying the violent history of Cambodia and seeing the environmental exploitation happening there.
“Our history is very sad and our people have been through a lot,” said Chandaravuth. “I want to be part of the positive change and to make my country a better place to live. I want people there to live in dignity.”
The moderated discussion between Orrego and Omido on Thursday evening focused on the harms of “extractivism,” or the large-scale extraction of raw materials from developing countries for export. Leiva, the moderator, asked the two speakers about environmental injustices and how it initially motivated their work as activists.
“It still doesn’t make sense to me that a community that doesn’t have even one car, should be the one that bears the brunt of lead poisoning from batteries,” said Omido. “For me, justice means access to information and the right to participate in processes. This is what a just transition looks like for me. The fact that a community can host a smelter that is extracting lead for export without anyone giving their consent or any information given to the people to help them make a decision as to whether they want this in their community or not. The fact that even after they discovered that this smelter, brought to the community with the promise of jobs, was actually poisoning the children and causing mothers to miscarry. These are things that I cannot come to terms with.”
Orrego added that he is always surprised by the amount of injustice in the world and that there is no reason for poverty to exist. Nearing the end of the moderated conversation, he told the crowd that he never planned on becoming an activist exactly, but it happened because he followed a calling to help protect the rights of people and the planet.
“Open yourself to be called,” said Orrego. “Let magic enter your life. It’s not all rational and all planned.”
