A local environmental activist earned a prestigious international award for her work in blocking a proposed oil terminal at the Port of Vancouver.
Linda Garcia was one of six people globally to receive the 2019 Goldman Environmental Prize. The other recipients hailed from across the globe, from Liberia to the Cook Islands.
“I will accept this award, fully cognizant of the fact that I could never have achieved this without the help of many,” Garcia, 51, said in a media release on Monday.
As secretary of the Fruit Valley Neighborhood Association, Garcia was on the front lines of the opposition against a proposed $110 million Tesoro Savage oil terminal that, if built, would have become the largest oil rail terminal in North America.
From a commerce standpoint, the project would have meant jobs and money for Clark County. But from a neighborhood perspective, it could have meant new sources of noxious air contaminants, as well as the potential for disastrous spills.
Garcia first heard about the proposal back in 2013. “They don’t live here, we do,” she told The Columbian at the time. “This is a beautiful community. The last thing we want is for it to be spoiled.”
Garcia continued to organize a campaign against the oil terminal amid a personal battle with cancer, during which her visibility made her a target for harassment and threats of violence, she said.
The fight over the proposal continued for about four years. In November 2017, the Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council unanimously struck down the application to build a crude-by-rail oil terminal at the port. A few months later, Washington Governor Jay Inslee denied the necessary project permits. It was over.
“People do have more power than they think. The power of the people beat the power of money in this fight. I don’t think they [Tesoro] realized what they were up against,” Garcia said in Monday’s media release.
These days, Garcia is still involved in local politics — she’s running the campaign of a congressional candidate for Washington’s 3rd Legislative District, Democrat Peter Khalil.
“She is intimately familiar with the powerful interests working to keep the status quo,” Khalil said in the media release. “We all owe her a debt of gratitude.”
The Goldman Environmental Prize was established in 1989 by San Francisco philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman. Each year, the prize goes to ordinary people who have taken extraordinary action to protect the environment. An international jury selects the winners from an anonymous pool of nominations.
Aside from Garcia, the prize went to:
• Alfred Brownell, from Liberia, who campaigned to protect 513,500 acres of tropical forests from clear-cutting by palm oil plantation developers.
• Bayara Agvaantseren, from Mongolia, who saved snow leopard habitat by helping to form a 1.8 million-acre natural reserve in the South Gobi Desert.
• Ana Colovic Lesoska, from North Macedonia, who helped preserve the habitat of the nearly-extinct Balkan lynx by leading a campaign to cut off international funding for two hydropower plants.
• Jacqueline Evans, from the Cook Islands, who organized to enact legislation to manage and conserve all of the country’s ocean territory and designate marine protected areas.
• Alberto Curamil, from Chile, who worked to halt construction of two hydroelectric projects on the sacred Cautin River.
The group will be awarded their prize at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House during a ceremony led by the keynote speaker, former vice president and environmental activist Al Gore.
