Environmental Justice Symposium at Berea College Nov. 2 to feature recent Goldman Environmental Prize winners Craig Williams and Margie Richards and Appalachian activist/singer Jennifer Osha

Osha, Richards and Williams, who lives in Berea, will describe their ongoing battles to protect the poor and minorities from chemical pollution, mountaintop removal coal mining, and other threats to human and environmental well-being in their presentation.

Questions, answers, and dialogue will follow their stories during the second half of the program.

The symposium, co-sponsored by African and African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Sustainability and Environmental Studies and the Convocations program, is free and open to the public.

Osha, through her non-profit organization Aurora Lights, focuses is on the social and environmental impacts of and social action against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. A singer, songwriter and musician, Osha produced “Moving Mountains: Voices of Appalachia Rise Up Against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining” in 2004, a compilation CD of performances and interviews with citizens affected by mountain top removal. Osha also has taught environmental science and global issues at Salem International University. She holds a B.A. in Writing from the University of Virginia and a Master of Forestry degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Richards is the 2004 North American recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize and the first African American to receive the award. A retired schoolteacher from Louisiana, Richards fought a Shell refinery and chemical plant that had been slowly poisoning all of the community for years. The battle ended successfully with the company buying out the home of anyone in that community that wanted to move.

Williams received a Goldman Environmental Prize in 2006. He is a decorated Vietnam War veteran who successfully convinced the Pentagon to stop plans to incinerate stockpiles of chemical weapons stored in multiple locations around the United States. Williams started his campaign in 1985 after he found out that one of the weapons stockpiles to be burned was in his own community, at the Kentucky Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County. In response, he developed a nationwide grassroots coalition called the Chemical Weapons Working Group, based in Berea, to demand safe disposal solutions as well as openness within the Pentagon’s program.

Founded in 1990 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman, the $125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize is the world’s largest prize, honoring grassroots environmentalists from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions each year.