Voter Suppression and Election Subversion Tactics and How to Counteract Them

I realize that not everyone will read this entire post; some will just skim it. If you’re not inclined to read (or even skim) the whole thing and you’re looking for a shortcut, I’d suggest that you follow and share posts from (and ideally support) at least a couple of the following groups, to try to protect and restore our democracy, protect voters and their votes, and protect the integrity of our elections: VoteRiders, Democracy Docket, DASS, DAGA, Protect Democracy, Democracy Defenders, Power the Polls, Common Cause, Election Protection (866-OUR-VOTE hotline: 866-687-8683), League of Women Voters, All Voting is Local, Fair Elections Center, NDRC, ACLU, Brennan Center for Justice, Verified Voting, and Democracy Forward. (Note: Some of those organizations are non-partisan, while others are partisan.) You also might want to scroll down to the last, brief section (“General Recommendations for Everyone”) and the links lists at the bottom of the post.

Many different types of voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement efforts are being pushed by the federal government and some states, and these efforts are eroding the ability to have truly “free and fair” elections. It’s entirely possible that the ramped-up voter suppression that occurred in the 2024 election prevented a substantial enough number of people from voting that it changed the outcome of some races. The following are many of the tactics that some states and the federal government have been using in recent years, or are still attempting to implement, in order to: dilute people’s votes (in certain areas); or to make it much harder for people to register to vote or to vote; or to challenge or reject people’s votes (to prevent some people’s ballots from being counted). They have quite an arsenal of dirty tricks. But each of the tactics described below is followed by one or more Remedies: ways to counteract that type of voter suppression effort to minimize its impact, and to try to make sure that you and all other eligible citizens can vote and that all legitimate votes are counted. Forewarned is forearmed, as the saying goes:

  1. Gerrymandering (or skewed/partisan redistricting) of voting districts, made worse in recent years by the Supreme Court’s continued evisceration of the Voting Rights Act protections. Gerrymandering has most commonly been done to dilute the vote of urban communities with a large proportion of Black voters or Democratic voters. Republicans currently have an advantage due to extreme gerrymanders in many Republican-led states; a few Democratic-majority states have recently instituted counter-gerrymanders to try to level the playing field, but the Republican gerrymanders still outweigh them.
    REMEDIES: For information on the fight to counteract gerrymandering and level the playing field, see the NDRC’s summary and Democracy Docket’s assessment. If your state has a fair maps/redistricting initiative, find and follow it. For more information about gerrymandering and efforts to create fair, independent redistricting commissions and fair maps, see Redistricting Action and Campaign Legal Center.
  2. Making it difficult to register to vote: e.g., states requiring that people register in person (rather than online or by mail), and/or states making very strict/prohibitive ID requirements (see the next item, below), or states requiring that people register to vote a month or more before an election, and not allowing registration up through Election Day even if someone only recently moved to the state or to a new voting district. They are also going after various voter registration organizations to try to prevent them from registering voters.
    REMEDY: If you’re registering to vote for the first time or you’ve moved to a new address, look up your state’s registration deadlines and voter ID requirements (via your state’s Secretary of State elections site or your County elections site/office) right away, and be sure to get the required ID (if any) and register/re-register in your new state or county before the state deadline.
  3. Prohibitive voter ID requirements: The majority of states (38) now have voter ID requirements, and some states’ requirements have gotten more strict in recent years. Some states now require or are attempting to require proof-of-citizenship documentation, and/or other difficult-or-expensive-to-obtain IDs or documentation—either to register to vote or to vote. These types of ID requirements serve as a “poll tax,” since almost all types of accepted ID and citizenship documentation, including passports and birth certificates, cost money to get. Such documents can also easily be lost due to a variety of circumstances, and getting a new ID when one moves takes time, as well as money and transportation. (Many people do not have a Department of Motor Vehicles in their county and have to travel a long distance to get to one.) VoteRiders’ research found that, in 2023, over 34.5 million Americans either didn’t have a driver’s license or state ID (so they wouldn’t be able to register and/or vote in the many states that have voter ID requirements), OR they had an ID that didn’t have their current name and/or address on it (which could cause difficulties voting in states with the strictest voter ID laws, such as Arizona). Furthermore, they found that “over half of Americans living in states that require photo ID to vote in person don’t even know their state’s laws and don’t realize they’ll need this type of identification to cast a ballot successfully. And 35% of citizens who live in states that don’t have a photo ID law either mistakenly think it’s required to vote in person or are unsure what their state’s voter law is.” If the proposed federal SAVE Act is passed, “millions of eligible US citizens would be unable to vote because 21 million Americans — 1 in 10 adult citizens — don’t have easy access to proof-of-citizenship documents. And some people who were not born in a hospital may not have a birth certificate at all. [Source: Is It Hard to Get an ID? Yes, It Can Be, by VoteRiders] Furthermore, if the SAVE Act is passed, people who have changed their names, including the many women who took their husband’s last name when they got married, could face added difficulties or might not be able to register or vote if the name on their birth certificate doesn’t match the name on their current ID; the bill doesn’t even make clear which particular documents would be accepted as proof of name change. If it’s passed, implementing the SAVE Act would cause massive, unnecessary confusion and voter disenfranchisement.
    REMEDIES: Look up the voter ID requirements for your state (for registering and for voting); the requirements may have changed within the last year or two. (At least 38 states have some type of ID requirements now.) You can also find current ID requirements on your state’s Secretary of State elections site (or from your County’s elections office). If you don’t have the ID that’s required by your state to register to vote or vote, and you need free assistance with getting ID, your birth certificate, or social security card so that you can get an ID, VoteRiders can assist with that, and they can even pay for those documents if you aren’t able to and they can arrange for transportation to the DMV if you need that. Please let others know about this valuable resource, and help others get the ID they need to vote. Secondly, please demand that your Senators and federal Representatives vote against the so-called SAVE Act, which would make it prohibitively difficult and expensive for many people to vote, as many people lack the documentation it would require—and it could disenfranchise many women voters and others who have changed their first or last name since birth.
  4. Attempting to curtail or eliminate mail-in or absentee voting: Some states make it difficult or almost impossible to vote via mail-in or absentee ballot. This risks disenfranchising many disabled and elderly voters (and others who may not have any transportation to their polling place), as well as overseas and military voters, and people who are traveling on Election Day or who cannot get enough time off from work to get to their polling place on Election Day. And in a couple of states, all voters have been voting by mail for many years (so there are no in-person polling places and there’s no way to set that system up quickly). Some states might require that they receive voters’ mail-in ballots by Election Day (not just receive ballots that were post-marked by Election Day), even though mail can be slow and the postal service is being underfunded due to a desire to privatize it. The federal government has been attempting to disallow mail-in voting, via the SAVE Act and other means; so far, most of these attempts have been successfully challenged in court, but some are still being litigated.
    REMEDIES: a) Check your state’s Secretary of State elections site before the upcoming election to find out whether mail-in or absentee ballots are currently allowed in your state, and if so, whether your state has certain requirements to be eligible to request and use such ballots. If you plan to use one, request your mail-in ballot well before your state’s deadline. Drop it off at an official drop-off location (secure indoor drop-offs are better than using outdoor drop boxes), if you can, or else have it postmarked at a local Post Office counter more than a week before the specified deadline. b) Follow and support the voter protection organizations mentioned at the top of this post, some of whom have been working to ensure that mail-in ballots are still allowed despite efforts to ban them, and in some states they’re trying to ensure that those states must count all ballots that are post-marked by Election Day even if they don’t arrive by Election Day (different states have different rules on that).
  5. Voter roll purges, including last-minute purges where people won’t realize they’ve been purged until they go to vote, at which time it is often too late (in many states) to re-register for that election. The federal government has been trying to compile a federal “master” list of all eligible voters by demanding to receive and review each state’s voter rolls (which is also a stipulation in the SAVE Act that the president has been trying to pass), and they could potentially decide to (or mistakenly) mark some eligible, citizen voters (who haven’t previously voted the way they wanted them to, perhaps) as “non-citizens” or “deceased” on their master list, to keep them from being able to vote on Election Day or to prevent their votes from being counted.
    REMEDIES: Please double-check to make sure you’re still registered to vote and all of your registration information is accurate and up to date. Ideally do that multiple times before each election, but do it at least once before your state’s voter registration deadline for the election (which is more than a month before the election in some states), so that you’d have time to re-register if needed. Tell everyone you know to do the same. If you find out on Election Day that you have been wrongly purged from the voting rolls (i.e., the system no longer indicates that you are Registered where you currently live), find out if registration is allowed through Election Day (and re-register if you can); if you can’t register for this election on Election Day, insist on getting a provisional ballot (and follow the instructions to make sure it can be counted), and then re-register to vote. Also notify your Secretary of State’s office and your County’s elections office of what happened, and report the problem to Election Protection or the ACLU or your state Democratic party (and potentially also to local news media, as well as posting about it on social media).
  6. “Mass voter challenges” (by groups or individuals) to a group of ballots (perhaps from certain areas or with certain types of names), potentially making false accusations that they are fraudulent votes. Mass challenges can throw the system into chaos and not give eligible voters adequate time to respond to any challenges and prove their eligibility.
    REMEDIES: Always track your ballot after submitting it, to verify that it was received and accepted/counted. You can find out here whether you can do so via your state or county’s elections website and/or via BallotTrax. (Other options are provided here.) Mass ballot challenges should be made illegal everywhere. Ask your state and federal representatives to put safeguards in place to prevent mass voter challenges that are done in bad faith. And support some of the voter protection groups listed in the first paragraph.
  7. Refusing to accept/approve ballots due to minor/subjective differences in a voter’s signature across documents, or minor omissions on the ballot or mail-in envelope, and not notifying voters that their ballot has been challenged or thrown out in time for them to “cure” it, or making it difficult for voters to “cure” their ballots (requiring they drive to a particular place to do so in person). This can be particularly tricky when someone votes via a “provisional” ballot.
    REMEDIES: If you are allowed to vote by mail in your state and you plan to do that, read all instructions on the ballot very carefully, sign where indicated and try to make sure that your signature is representative of your official/typical signature so it should closely match the signature they have on file and is not likely to be rejected. Drop it off at an official drop-off location (secure indoor drop-offs are better than using outdoor drop boxes), if you can, or else have it postmarked at a local Post Office counter more than a week before the deadline so it should arrive by Election Day. (If you’re mailing it in from another state or country, you’ll need to mail it even earlier.) Make sure that you use adequate postage, if postage is required (some states’ mail-in ballots require one or two stamps). Secondly, always track your ballot after submitting it, to verify that it was received and accepted/counted. Most states provide some way for voters to track their ballot and confirm that it was received and accepted. You can find out here whether you can do so via your state or county’s elections website and/or via BallotTrax. (Other options are provided here.) And if you voted by provisional ballot, be sure to follow all instructions you’re given for “curing” or finalizing your ballot so that it will count; this might require taking an accepted ID or other documentation to your county’s elections office.
  8. Misinformation and disinformation/fraud: Almost every election, some people receive mailers or see social media posts that purposely provide false polling place information or other election information. Ads or posts (sometimes including AI “deep fake” videos) can pop up that lie about (smear) candidates, often at the last minute when there’s no time for the lies to be rebutted or widely debunked.
    REMEDIES: a) Be wary of what you see (especially when the claims are right before an election or truly outrageous), and check with reliable, unbiased sources to get accurate information. If it’s a nation-wide disinformation or smear campaign, sites like Factcheck.org, Politifact.com, and Snopes.com might have already debunked it. b) If you know you’ve received or seen fraudulent information, please report it to those fact-checking sites (or other local or national media) as well as to your state Democratic party. And tell people you know (or post on social media) about the misinformation.
  9. Closing polling places (or changing polling locations): In some states, urban areas that have a lot of Black voters (and college campus areas) are often given the fewest polling places (and/or not enough voting machines or ballots or poll workers), leading to longer lines in those locations, which not everyone can wait in for hours (due to time/work or physical constraints). Sometimes polling locations are closed or changed at the last minute, causing confusion and disenfranchisement.
    REMEDIES: Always check and confirm the location of your polling place before each election, to make sure it hasn’t changed. You should receive that information in the mail from your County, but you can also contact your county’s elections office to find your polling place. If you discover a long, slow line at your polling location—or learn that the location has run out of ballots or the voting machines aren’t working)—please report that to your county’s elections office, as well your state Democratic party and/or Election Protection, right away. If the issues aren’t resolved quickly, you might also want to notify local news media.
  10. Bomb threats called into polling stations on Election Day, which so far have always been false alarms, but they often cause polling places to close at least temporarily (for a bomb sweep) or in some cases people might be told to go to another polling location, making it difficult for them to vote (some people can’t get more time off work to wait or come back to their polling place or go to a different one, or they might not have the transportation to go elsewhere). A rash of fake bomb threats happened in the last election (2024), particularly in Georgia in majority-Black districts, and the bomb scares almost certainly managed to disenfranchise some people from voting.
    REMEDIES: a) Vote early, if early voting is an option in your County—either in person or by mail. b) Election officials everywhere need to be ready for bomb threats (as well as electrical outages, severe storms, and other types of disruptions) to happen, and have plans in place to not allow them to disrupt voting for long or to scare voters away from the polls (e.g., perhaps temporary/back-up voting tents can readily be set up a safe distance outside of each polling location, in the event of a bomb scare?). Local law enforcement should also be on alert and have staff and/or bomb-sniffing dogs on hand to perform efficient bomb sweeps if needed. Contact your state representatives and/or county elections official(s) and Secretary of State’s office to make sure they have plans in place. c) If there’s a bomb threat (or other major disruption) at your polling place, contact local news media, your state Democratic party, your Secretary of State’s office, and/or Election Protection, the ACLU or other civil liberties law group. It’s possible that one of those groups might need to contact your local/regional FBI office or state police or elections judges.
  11. Other forms of voter intimidation (and election worker intimidation): e.g., campaigns or mailings meant to scare away brown-skinned citizens (or others) who might fear being mis-identified as “undocumented” and detained/disappeared/deported if they go to their polling place. Or trying to intimidate voters or election workers at their polling places by stationing “immigration enforcement agents” or “militia” members or other para-military groups, or large groups of armed law enforcement, particularly in areas with a lot of people of color or in urban areas that are Democratic strongholds. (Or sending gangs of partisan poll observers who are instructed to intimidate or harass election workers or disrupt voting.) That said, “federal law has barred armed agents from polling places for well over a century — except in the event of an armed enemy attack on the country — and that prohibition remains in effect to this day. A separate statute prohibits intimidating voters or election workers.” Local law enforcement should know this; they can and should prevent armed agents or troops from standing in or near polling places, and there are examples of them preventing it in the past. (Source: “Americans Can Vote Without Fear,” Brennan Center for Justice)
    REMEDIES: a) Vote early, if early voting is an option in your County—either in person or by mail. b) Know your rights (see the previous link). c) You could volunteer to be a poll worker, or to be a nonpartisan poll observer/monitor (see Election Protection) or a partisan one with your local or state Democratic party. d) If armed people are stationed at/in your polling place or anyone is harassing or intimidating voters or election workers, report this to local law enforcement (city police or county sheriff’s office or state police) or local media immediately, as well as your state Democratic party, your County elections official, your Secretary of State’s office, or Election Protection.
  12. Worst-case election subversion scenarios: The Executive branch of the federal government could try to seize voting machines or ballots under the pretense of “identifying voter fraud.” They might try to declare a “state of emergency” or “martial law” in order to do that; or even try to cancel elections, though that has never happened before (even during the Civil War) and it would not be legal so it would certainly be challenged. A foreign government, or foreign or domestic actors, could attempt to alter the election results by attempting to hack some of the voting machines or tallies. (Note: In 2025, Dominion Voting Systems was bought by a former GOP election official, and is now called Liberty Vote. And another major voting systems company, ES&S, is also financed by companies with GOP ties. Also, a few years back, Ivanka Trump got trademarks on voting machines made in China. None of this is proof of anything, but it is important to be aware of the facts.) And, if all else fails, certain county or state elections officials might try to refuse to certify election results or the U.S. House or Senate might try to refuse to seat the rightful winners of the election.
    REMEDIES: State Attorneys General, Secretaries of State, County elections officials, and all legal groups that defend voting rights and civil liberties need to be ready for all hypothetical but possible scenarios that could upend elections or try to disenfranchise voters, and they need to have plans in place to address any and all of the potential scenarios. Fortunately, some state AGs and Secretaries of State are discussing potential scenarios and getting prepared. And there are groups like the National Task Force on Election Crises. a) Find out whether your state Attorney General and Secretary of State are preparing for possible election subversion by election deniers or federal actors. Contact your state AG and SOS and county elections officials (as well as state and local representatives) to ask them to be prepared for worst-case scenarios and to proactively do everything they can to protect elections from partisan interference or subversion. Also contact your federal and state representatives to make sure they are doing everything they can to protect people’s votes. b) Sign up for Indivisible’s “Hands Off Our Vote” Midterm Election Protection Program. c) Find out what types of voting machines and equipment are used in your precinct, via Verified Voting. And learn about the various ways to make elections the most secure and verifiable (some of which are already in place in some jurisdictions), and advocate for those methods in your state and county. d) If any of the worst-case scenarios come to pass (or look like they might), be sure to follow various pro-democracy and voter protection groups (including those listed in the first paragraph, as well as Indivisible and MoveOne) to support legal efforts and figure out what role citizens might be able to play in protecting their votes and the election.

For additional information on voter suppression, redistricting, voting rights, and election integrity, see the Brennan Center’s helpful information.

General Recommendations for Everyone

  1. Please encourage and help others you know to register and to vote—and to make sure ahead of time that they have the required type of ID (requirements may have become more strict in the past year or two)—especially young or first-time voters, college students, or people who have moved to a new state which might have different requirements than where they lived before. (See the links under Remedies in items #2 and #3 above, or find your state’s Secretary of State elections site to get information on registering and voting in your state.) In a few states, people must register more than a month before an election to be able to vote in it; in many states, the deadline is a few weeks before the election, while in a few states you can still register up through Election Day. If you know someone who hasn’t voted before or who might be nervous about it, offer to go with them to the polling place or to help them fill out and send in their mail-in ballot according to the instructions. Also encourage people to Vote Early (ideally in person, or secondarily by mail), if that’s an option where they live.
  2. Check your registration status with your state or county elections office (approximately a month before each election, but ideally more often, including both before and after your state’s voter registration deadline), and remind others to do so as well. Also put the Election Protection hotline (866-OUR-VOTE, which is 866-687-8683) in your phone’s Contacts list, and spread the word about that hotline to others (some state Democratic parties also have their own voter protection hotlines). You could also share this post or copy some of the information within it to share with your friends and family or your online communities.
  3. Volunteer for: voter registration drives (with your local or state Democratic party, or the Voter Participation Center or other groups), or volunteer to be a poll worker, a nonpartisan or partisan (party-representing) poll observer/monitor (with Election Protection, or with your state or local Democratic Party), or volunteer to provide voter ID assistance through VoteRiders, or provide ballot curing assistance to help people fix their rejected ballots with VoPro Pros. You can find lots of other great volunteer opportunities or events here: Mobilize.
  4. All races on your ballot are important, but some of the most important for protecting elections and democracy (though they are sometimes overlooked or overshadowed by national races) are: each state’s Secretary of State and Attorney General, judges/judicial races, Governor, and various other state and local-level races and ballot measures. Make sure you research all candidates and measures (Ballotpedia.org can help you see what’s on your ballot, as well as the official voting guide(s) you should get from your County and/or State); and consider donating to or volunteering for some of your state- or local-level candidates.
  5. After you’ve voted, track your ballot, and tell friends how they can track their ballot in your/their state (see #7 above, Remedies).

Key voting/election information websites:

In addition to those groups and the groups I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post, I also recommend checking out, following, and supporting some of these organizations: Oath, and State + Local Election Alliance; Environmental Voter Project, Lead Locally, Climate Cabinet, Climate Hawks Vote, GiveGreen, League of Conservation Voters, NRDC Action Fund, Chispa; Voter Participation Center, Voters of Tomorrow, Campus Vote Project, YDA, CDA, Headcount; VoteVets, Common Defense, Voto Latino, Black Voters Matter, Native Vote; DLCC, States Win, States Project, Swing Left; YALLvote, Groundwork Project, VoteFwd, Rural Freedom Network; Indivisible, DemCast, and MoveOn.

I also recommend donating to (or volunteering for) at least one of the following state Democratic Parties (in addition to your own state’s), which are currently considered swing states or “purple” states: Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Alaska, Texas, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, South Carolina, Virginia, and even Florida and Missouri.

Here is a listing of our past posts related to voting, elections, and democracy (in the United States):

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July 31, 2026
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Books and Films, 2026

BOOKS

Some recently published books that you might want to check out, read, and/or share with others:

Your Guide to Climate Action: How to move beyond your footprint and make a BIG impact, by Ryan Hagen

Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home, by Katharine K. Wilkinson

Positively Uncivilized (essays), by Rena Priest

Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, by Kate Marvel

Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All, by Jeremy Lent

Still No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air, by Mark Z. Jacobson

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, by Rebecca Solnit

Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life, by Ferris Jabr

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet, by Jason Dove Mark

Immemorial, by Lauren Markham

This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy, by Ben Wikler

On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer

Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy, by Amy Westervelt (available Sept. 2026)

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, by Gil Duran

The Fate of the World: A History and Future of the Climate Crisis, by Bill McGuire (available in UK now; available in US January 2027)

Please buy books from your local independent bookstore, or from Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, or a used bookstore (rather than from Amazon)—or request/borrow the book from your library—for the authors, local bookstores (and local economies), the environment, and democracy.

FILMS & VIDEOS

I will add more books, films, and videos to this list as the year goes on and I learn about others that seem important and compelling.

Do you have favorite books or authors or films to recommend? If so, please mention them in the Comments.

Related posts:

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June 26, 2026
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Goldman Prize Winners, 2026

The Goldman Environmental Prize is the world’s largest and most prestigious annual award for grassroots environmentalists. Some people refer to it as the “green Nobel.” Goldman Prize winners are models of courage, and their stories are powerful and truly inspiring. “The Prize recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk. Each winner receives a financial award. The Goldman Prize views ‘grassroots’ leaders as those involved in local efforts, where positive change is created through community or citizen participation in the issues that affect them. Through recognizing these individual leaders, the Prize seeks to inspire other ordinary people to take extraordinary actions to protect the natural world.” Over the 37 years that the Prize has been awarded, there have been more than 230 recipients of the prize, from 98 countries.

This year’s prize recipients (representing each of the six inhabited continental regions of the world) are:

  • Alannah Acaq Hurley—USA: “Acting on behalf of 15 tribal nations, Yup’ik leader Alannah Acaq Hurley led a campaign that stopped the proposed Pebble Mine megaproject in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region. As the executive director for the United Tribes of Bristol Bay (UTBB), Alannah and a broad-based coalition yielded a historic EPA veto of the copper and gold mining project in January 2023. The victory safeguards Bristol Bay and its greater watershed—encompassing 25 million acres of wilderness, rivers, and wetlands and home to the largest wild salmon runs in the world—from the construction of what would have been North America’s largest open-pit mine. Alannah and UTBB continue to work to protect the bay from encroaching development.”
    (Support/follow: United Tribes of Bristol Bay)
  • Sarah Finch—England: “Sarah Finch and the Weald Action Group led a tireless campaign against oil drilling in southeastern England for over a decade, persevering through five years of escalating court battles against one oil development in Surrey until the coalition secured a Supreme Court ruling, in June 2024, that finally forced its shutdown. The resulting ‘Finch ruling’ states that authorities must consider the downstream impacts that fossil fuels will have on the global climate before granting permission to extract them. This legal precedent has already stopped subsequent fossil fuel extraction projects and other industrial development across the UK and could inform EU policy going forward.”
    (Support/follow: Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, and Weald Action Group)
  • Yuvelis Morales Blanco—Colombia: “As a young adult, Yuvelis Morales Blanco helped mobilize her community in Puerto Wilches against two key drilling projects, successfully preventing the introduction of commercial fracking into Colombia. In 2022, with fracking raised as a national issue, the country’s largest petroleum company, Ecopetrol, suspended its contracts for the pilot fracking projects. In August 2024—with the projects still suspended—the Colombian Constitutional Court, in response to a lawsuit by a local organization, confirmed that the projects had violated the right of the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches to free, prior, and informed consent.”
    (Support/follow: Colombia Free of Fracking Alliance/Alianza Colombia Libre de Fracking)
  • Borim Kim—South Korea: “Activist Borim Kim and her organization, Youth 4 Climate Action, won the first successful youth-led climate litigation in Asia. In August 2024, the South Korean Constitutional Court found the government’s climate policy to be in violation of the constitutional rights of future generations, mandating the creation of legally binding emissions reduction targets from 2031-2049 to meet the country’s pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The historic decision is a watershed moment for the climate change movement in Asia. If implemented, it has the potential to avoid more than 1,500 million tons of carbon emissions—equivalent to the annual emissions of approximately 500 coal-fired power plants—over the next 25 years.”
    (Support/follow: Youth 4 Climate Action, and Borim Kim)
  • Iroro Tanshi—Nigeria: “After rediscovering the endangered short-tailed roundleaf bat in Nigeria, Iroro Tanshi identified human-induced wildfires as the main threat to the species and launched a successful, community-led campaign to protect its refuge, the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. Between early 2022 and May 2025, she and her community fire brigades prevented any serious wildfires from occurring in and around the sanctuary by patrolling thousands of farms and effectively responding to more than 70 fire outbreaks, safeguarding communities, forests, and the bat’s fragile habitat.”
    (Support/follow: Small Mammal Conservation Organization, and Tropical Fire Alliance)
  • Theonila Roka Matbob—Papua New Guinea: “Theonila Roka Matbob led a successful campaign that compelled Rio Tinto, the world’s second-largest mining company, to sign a landmark memorandum of understanding in November 2024 to address environmental and social devastation caused by its long-dormant Panguna mine. Despite having abandoned the site 35 years earlier after a social uprising against the mine, the company formally acknowledged the wide range of harms the mine has caused and has begun a collaborative remediation process that aims to address urgent risks and establish a long-term remedy mechanism.”
    (Sign this petition calling for a clean-up. And support/follow: Human Rights Law Centre)

Click on each recipient’s name to read a longer profile—or watch a brief video—about their remarkable efforts and achievements.

Posts on Goldman Prize winners from previous years:

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April 20, 2026
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The Prejudice to Violence Pipeline

“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”
– Dr. Paul Farmer

“I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I’ve written there is a thread of this: man’s…palpable need to dislike someone other than oneself.”
– Rod Serling

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity.”
– James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time

“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
– attributed to Hannah Arendt (unverified)

“Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
– Voltaire  (a rough translation from the French)

 

Biases that people form against other people can revolve around all kinds of identities, real or perceived, including: nationality, skin color (“race”), ethnicity, religious affiliation, gender/gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, political affiliation, class, region, urban/rural location, or other group affiliation.

Rather than allowing ourselves to embrace an Us vs. Them mindset, in which we perceive other people or groups of people as abstract, generalized Others—caricatures that we can readily vilify or scapegoat or cast as “enemies”—we should always try to “put ourselves in other people’s shoes” and notice that there are more similarities between people than differences. We must try to see each person as a multi-faceted individual and not just as one identity; and we must understand that everyone’s life has value and each person has as much of a right to life and liberty as we have.

As soon as a person allows himself or herself to generalize about an entire group of people and to believe that They (the Others) are inherently inferior or lesser than one’s “in group” in some way: e.g., stupid, primitive, dirty, untrustworthy, devious, scary/dangerous/violent/criminal, bad, or evil—or the group one identifies with is inherently better than (i.e., superior to) another group of people, simply because of the place or the identity that they were born into or have chosen—that person has stepped onto a slippery slope that can lead to discrimination, hate speech, dehumanization, exploitation, violence, and potentially to atrocities. Wrong-headed, misguided thoughts often lead to wrong-headed speech or “rhetoric” (which can spread those thoughts to others), which can all too easily lead to wrong-headed actions—at an individual level and at a societal level.

The slippery slope (or pipeline or staircase—choose your metaphor) can gradually take a person from:

  • basic bias, generalization, prejudice and “othering,” to…
  • scapegoating (collective blame), bigotry (e.g., racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, xenophobia, etc.), and using slurs and hate speech, to
  • discrimination, bullying, and harassment of individuals in that group, to
  • dehumanization or objectification, demonization/vilification, and hatred, to
  • humiliation, domination, exploitation, detention/enslavement, indiscriminate prosecution or persecution, cruelty, brutality, sexual violence, or other violence/hate crimes inflicted on individuals in that group, to
  • collective punishment and harm aimed at everyone perceived to be in that group, to
  • comfort with (and then celebration of or potentially even participation in) the murder of people who belong to that group, to
  • comfort with (and then celebration/promotion of or even participation in) mass murder, “ethnic cleansing,” war, and genocide.

Of course, not everyone continues to the end of this pipeline or exhibits all of these behaviors; most people draw a line somewhere along the way, but in the meantime, their othering or hatred could have spread to others who might end up going further.

Sadly, sometimes all it takes to get onto this pipeline is: a lack of self-knowledge of one’s own biases (we all have biases) and an inability to put those biases in check. Biases often stem from feelings of: fear, insecurity, self-pity, resentment, grievance, personal failure, inferiority, social isolation, or a lack of belonging. Then, when you add in repeated exposure to some hate speech or propaganda (scapegoating/misplaced blame, lies, disinformation)—which could come from one’s family members or peers, one’s religious leaders, social media, hate groups, weaponized bots, mass media, or one’s own government—that combination of factors can make some people go beyond their basic prejudice and bigotry, become radicalized, and turn against their fellow humans, deciding that those humans are “the enemy” or that their lives are worth less (or worthless and expendable)—or taking it a step further, that they should be exterminated.

These are some of the steps that were outlined above, laid out in a little more detail:

  1. Not liking or respecting most or all of Them (the Others/Outsiders, who have been deemed a disfavored group).
  2. Looking down on Them (or being scared of Them) and feeling that They, as a whole group, are inferior from one’s own group.
  3. Deciding that they should be second-class citizens, it’s OK to discriminate against them, and that they do not deserve equal protection under the law or all of the rights (civil rights, constitutional rights, voting rights, immigration/refugee rights) that are granted to the In group.
  4. Feeling or declaring that they are sub-human in some way: e.g., “animals” or “vermin” or “impure” or “poisoning our blood,” or just objects/“bodies” or property, or evil “invaders” (aiming to “replace” the In group) or “the enemy,“ and that therefore they do not deserve basic human rights.
  5. Feeling that they are expendable, that it’s acceptable if some of them suffer, are exploited, are kept in inhumane conditions, are harmed by violence, or die from neglect or abuse or deportation back to an unsafe country, and if they’re sick or injured or wounded or vulnerable, we should let them suffer or die.
  6. Feeling that they deserve to die, and that someone should kill some of Them.
  7. Feeling that the State should kill some of Them, and supporting those killings.
  8. Feeling that the State should kill (exterminate) most or all of Them.
  9. Being willing to kill Them oneself (whether one is acting independently, as part of an organized group, or as part of their country’s military).

It’s never OK to collectively blame (scapegoat) or to collectively target, punish, or harm, let alone kill, people for the actions of their country’s or their group’s so-called leaders, or for the extreme or violent actions of a few individuals within a group, a protest, or a country. Many—and in some cases, most—people strongly disagree with their government’s or their current leaders’ actions. And individuals who commit acts of terrorism or violence rarely represent the wishes or beliefs of the majority of the larger groups they might be identified with. Even if the majority of a group does happen to agree with the offenders, consider that there are always some in the group who don’t, and it should be widely understood they do not deserve be targeted or punished just because they happen to share the same general “look” or identity (which is often an immutable identity or a group/country that someone was born into) as the offending individuals or leaders.

In Nazi Germany, the disfavored groups of inferior Others included many groups, not solely the groups they considered “non-Aryan.” The long list of people who were persecuted by the Nazis (and killed in large numbers during the Holocaust) included: Jews, Romani, as well as many Polish people, Slavs, and Ukrainians; people with physical or mental disabilities, blacks, gay men, political dissidents, pacifists and draft resisters, civilians engaged in non-violent resistance, Germans who had lived abroad for an extended time, Catholics, non-Europeans, and “social deviants,” which was a broad category that included alcoholics, drug addicts, vagrants, prostitutes, and common criminals (e.g., thieves).

The American Far Right has a white supremacist and Christian Nationalist cult-like bent (which is now well-represented within the current Administration, Congress, and government agencies). Among the many groups that have been targeted or scapegoated by the the Right are: trans people (who make up less than 1% of the population), Muslims, Jews, immigrants and refugees (primarily those who are brown- or black-skinned and/or who immigrated from poor countries—while a century ago, the disfavored immigrant groups included Jews, Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants, most of whom were also poor when they arrived), Black people, Latinos and other people of color, women, women of color, gay people, men who are deemed not “masculine” enough, progressive and moderate Catholics (including the last two Popes), homeless people and poor people; anyone who supports or defends diversity, equity, or inclusion; any journalist, media outlet, comedian, elected official, or other person who has criticized or spoken out against Dear Leader (including many members of his own political party); and now apparently all Democrats or anyone who is considered a liberal (all broadly branded as “leftist radicals” or “extremists” or “terrorists” or “enemies of the state”). DT and his Administration have identified and are going after many “enemies.” If you added up all the groups of people they’ve vilified, it would constitute the vast majority of the U.S. population.

Unfortunately, deep strains of supremacy and hyper-nationalism exist in the U.S. Feelings of superiority over other groups of people (though they may often stem from an attempt to quash deeper feelings of insecurity or even inferiority) can be very dangerous, especially when they spread widely or are amplified and acted on by leaders or people in power.

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March 31, 2026
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Excerpts of wisdom from The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

The Serviceberry book coverIn Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, The Serviceberry, she uses beautifully simple language to make some profound points and state some deep truths and observations, about: modern-day greed, hoarding, exploitation, and purely transactional interactions vs. reciprocity, giving, sharing, connection, “enoughness,” sufficiency, ecological economics, and gift economies.

Something that I have found, in my own life, is that giving and sharing make me feel really good—and I mean good as in happy and not just as in virtuous. I’ve also found that giving is somewhat addictive, in a good way. The more you do it, the more you want to do it. And giving anonymously often feels the best, even when you don’t know who the recipients of your gifts will be or how the gifts will affect their lives. It just feels satisfying and right.

Throughout the book, there is some repetition of the main themes (where Kimmerer uses different words to convey similar ideas), which I think can be helpful in allowing some of the concepts to really sink in. It’s a fairly short book; but if you don’t read the whole thing, I’ve pulled together a few excerpts that I think are among its many highlights, presenting some of Kimmerer’s best distillations of her primary points.

(Note: The page numbers listed below are from the hardcover version of the book. They might differ in the paperback version.)

“Whatever your currency of reciprocity—be it money, time, energy, political action, art, science, education, planting, community action, restoration, acts of care, large and small—all are needed in these urgent times.”  (p. 109)
[Note: Some specific examples of reciprocity and gift economies are listed at the end of this post.]

“Recognizing ‘enoughness’ [or ‘sufficiency’] is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more. Data tell the story that there are ‘enough’ food calories on the planet for all 6 billion of us to be nourished. And yet people are starving… “ (p. 12)

“Climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss are the consequences of unrestrained taking by humans.” (p.12)

“Why…have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We’ve surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love.” (p. 25)

“In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away.” (p. 32)

“Well-known examples of gift economies include the potlatches of Pacific Northwest peoples, in which gifts circulate in the group, solidifying bonds…. This ritualized redistribution of wealth was banned by colonial governments, under the influence of missionaries in the 1800s. Potlatches were seen as contrary to ‘the civilized values of accumulation’ and undermined the notions of individual property and advancement essential assimilation to the colonial agenda.” (p.35-36)

“Rebecca Solnit, in her stunning book A Paradise Built in Hell, describes how gift economies seem to arise spontaneously in times of disaster. When human survival is threatened, compassionate acts overrule market economies.” (p. 43)

“Let’s remember that the ‘System’ is led by individuals, by a relatively small number of people, who have names, with more money than God and certainly less compassion. They sit in boardrooms deciding to exploit fossil fuels for short-term gain while the world burns. They know the science, they know the consequences, but they proceed with ecocidal business as usual and do it anyway. …They’re all thieves, stealing our future…” (p. 71)

“I lament my own immersion in an economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into dollars, converts gifts to commodities in a currency that enables us to purchase things we don’t really need while destroying what we do. The Serviceberries show us another model…one where wealth and security come from the quality of our relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.” (p. 72)

“Thriving is possible only if you have nurtured strong bonds with your community.” (p. 73)

“In ecological economics, the focus is on creating an economy that provides for a just and sustainable future in which both human life and nonhuman life can flourish.” (p. 74)

“…Natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this avoidance is achieved by shifting one’s needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting, ‘If there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.’ This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each species avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote.” (p. 76-77)

“…scientific evidence is mounting that mutualism and cooperation…play a major role in evolution and enhance ecological well-being, especially in changing environments.” (p. 77)

“It is manufactured scarcity that I cannot accept. In order for capitalist market economics to function, there must be scarcity, and the system is designed to create scarcity where it does not actually exist.” (p. 79)

“It was previously unthinkable that one would pay for a drink of water; but as careless economic expansion pollutes fresh water, we now incentivize privatization of springs and aquifers. Sweet water, a free gift of the Earth, is pirated by faceless corporations who encase it in plastic containers to sell. And now many can’t afford what was previously free.” (p. 80)

“The Indigenous philosophy of the gift economy…has no tolerance for creating artificial scarcity through hoarding. In fact, the ‘monster’ in Potawatomi culture is Windigo, who suffers from the illness of taking too much and sharing too little. It is a cannibal, whose hunger is never sated, eating through the world.” (p. 81)

“An economy based on the impossibility of ever expanding growth leads us into nightmare scenarios. …It is an engine of extinction.” (p. 85)

“…the grinding system…leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized.” (p. 90)

“An investment in community always comes back to you in some way.” (p. 88)

“…the infinitely renewable resource of kindness…multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use.” (p. 91)

 “This transition from exploitation to reciprocity, from the individual good to the common good has been seen as a parallel to the transition that colonizing human societies must undergo, from hoarding to circulation, from independent to interdependent…if we are to thrive into the future.” (p. 100)

“The…economy of extractive capitalism, of abusing the gifts of Mother Earth, is a crime against Nature. I believe that theft is punishable by law, and we need to elect leaders who believe in the rule of law.” (p. 102)

“I’ve begun to think that berry-picking is the medicine we need to create a legion of land protectors.” (p. 104)

Kimmerer provides some specific examples of gift economies in action:

  • “…I routinely ask students if and how they participate in gifting networks. I learn about active circles of freecycling, repair cafes, donated mugs in the coffee shop replacing disposables, clothing swaps, the Buy Nothing movement, and campus free stores, where dorm room necessities are passed among generations of students…” (p. 45)
  • “They quickly cite access to open-source software and the existence of Wikipedia…where knowledge is freely shared on digital platforms in an information commons.” (p. 46)
  • “…I take a field trip to go foraging for videos on gift economies and find them everywhere. I learn about mutual-aid societies, alternative local currencies, money-free work exchanges, cooperative farms, peer-to-peer lending…” (p. 47)

Elsewhere in the book, she also mentions shared garden produce, front-yard giveaway piles, free food pantries, Little Free Libraries, public libraries, lending libraries, local Master Gardener programs and offerings, and as shown in an excerpt above, indigenous peoples’ potlatches.

Another example that sprung to my mind when I was reading this book was: “time banks” or “skill share” programs and other forms of bartering.

I hope this inspires you to think about these and other examples of gift economies in action and forms of reciprocity that you see around you or that you could create around you. We should all encourage and support these types of efforts in our own neighborhoods and communities.

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January 29, 2026
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Cascadia: Regional Organizations and Resources in the Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest (PNW) region is typically defined to include Oregon and Washington, and British Columbia (Canada) and the northernmost section of California are often included, as well. Some people also include other states that are in the wider northwestern section of the country, such as Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska.

The Pacific Northwest “bioregion” (an area defined by natural boundaries, such as watersheds, topography, geography, climate, or ecosystems, rather than by arbitrary state borders) also can be interpreted in different ways. To some, it includes parts of Northwestern California (from Humboldt County north), Western Oregon and Western Washington, to Western British Columbia—west of the Cascade mountains; this bioregion is characterized by a lot of rain between fall and spring, and it includes some temperate rainforests. But others draw the lines differently and include Idaho and other areas in the bioregion. This region is sometimes called Cascadia. Bioregionalism is a philosophy that encourages people to organize themselves within and live sustainably within their bioregions. (Here’s a recent article from Resilience.org on “Bioregioning.”)

This listing includes some organizations that cover the whole PNW region, as well as organizations that are focused on specific issues within the states of Oregon, Washington, or the province of British Columbia (BC). (Each section below begins with groups that address issues across the PNW region or even across the West, followed by groups in specific states.) For now, the listing has a disproportionate representation of groups in Oregon (as it’s the state I’m currently most familiar with), but over time, I’ll be adding more groups based in Washington and in BC. While there are also countless local organizations in the region, for the most part this listing doesn’t include local or city/town-based initiatives; it does include a few multi-county regional groups.

Note: This is not a comprehensive listing, and I am not personally familiar with all of the groups listed here. If there are additional organizations you’d like to recommend, please mention them in the Comments.

The organizations listed here are organized into the following categories:

  • General Environmental
  • Climate and Energy
  • Land Conservation and Stewardship
  • Animal Protection
  • Societal Wellbeing and Social Justice
  • Media and Information Resources

This post is a work in progress. More organizations will be added to the listing over time.

General Environmental

Oregon:

Washington:

British Columbia:

Climate and Energy

Oregon:

Washington:

British Columbia:

Land Conservation and Stewardship

Oregon:

Washington:

British Columbia:

Animal Protection
(wildlife + farmed and domesticated animals)

Oregon:

Washington:

British Columbia:

Societal Wellbeing and Social Justice

Oregon:

Washington:

Media and Information Resources

Oregon:

Washington:

British Columbia:

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October 31, 2025
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Books and Films, 2025

BOOKS

Recently published books that you might want to check out, read, and/or share with others:

The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters, by Christine Webb

How Can I Help? Saving Nature with Your Yard, by Douglas Tallamy
(also see his previous books and Homegrown National Park)

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, by Bill McKibben

Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope, by Catherine Coleman Flowers

Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, by Chuck Collins

Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back, by Chris Berdik

Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis, edited by Kelly Hayes

Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, by David Enrich

Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, by Anne Applebaum — now available in paperback

Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How It Spreads, and What to Do About It, by Matthew Facciani

The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, by Osita Nwanevu

There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, by Brian Goldstone

Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, by Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds, by John Fugelsang

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, by Cory Doctorow

Please buy books from your local independent bookstore, or from Bookshop.org, or Barnes and Noble (and not from Amazon)—for the authors, local bookstores (and local economies), the environment, and democracy.


FILMS

Documentary films that you might want to watch or mention to others:

 

I will add more books and films to this list as the year goes on and I learn about others that seem important and compelling.

Do you have favorite books or authors or films to recommend? Please mention them in the Comments.

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July 30, 2025
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Goldman Prize Winners, 2025

The Goldman Environmental Prize is the world’s largest and most prestigious annual award for grassroots environmentalists. Some people refer to it as the “green Nobel.” Goldman Prize winners are models of courage, and their stories are powerful and truly inspiring. “The Prize recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk. Each winner receives a financial award. The Goldman Prize views ‘grassroots’ leaders as those involved in local efforts, where positive change is created through community or citizen participation in the issues that affect them. Through recognizing these individual leaders, the Prize seeks to inspire other ordinary people to take extraordinary actions to protect the natural world.” Over the 36 years that the Prize has been awarded, there have been more than 230 recipients of the prize.

This year’s prize recipients (representing each of the six inhabited continental regions of the world) are:

  • Laurene Allen—USA: “When one of the largest environmental crises in New England’s history was exposed in her own community, Laurene Allen stepped up to protect thousands of families affected by contaminated drinking water. Laurene’s campaign pressured the Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics plant—responsible for leaking toxic forever chemicals into community drinking water sources—to announce its closure in August 2023. The plant’s closure in May 2024 marked an end to more than 20 years of rampant air, soil, and water pollution.” (Support/follow: National PFAS Contamination Coalition; Laurene Allen on Bluesky; Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water)
  • Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari—Peru: “In March 2024, Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari and Asociación de Mujeres Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana—a Kukama women’s association for which she serves as president—won a landmark rights of nature court decision to protect the Marañón River in Peru. For the first time in the country’s history, a river was granted legal personhood—with the right to be free-flowing and free of contamination. After finding the Peruvian government in violation of the river’s inherent rights, the court ordered the government to take immediate action to prevent future oil spills into the river, mandated the creation of a basin-wide protection plan, and recognized the Kukama as stewards of the river.” (Support/follow: Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana on Facebook; International Rivers; Instituo de Defense Legal)
  • Carlos Mallo Molina—Canary Islands: “Carlos Mallo Molina helped lead a sophisticated, global campaign to prevent the construction of Fonsalía Port, a massive recreational boat and ferry terminal that threatened a biodiverse 170,000-acre marine protected area in the Canary Islands. Proposed to be built on the island of Tenerife, the port would have destroyed vital habitat for endangered sea turtles, whales, and sharks. In October 2021, because of the campaign, the Canary Islands government officially canceled the port project. In lieu of the port, Carlos is now realizing his vision for a world-class marine conservation and education center—the first of its kind in the Canary Islands.” (Support/follow: Innoceana; Carlos Mallo Molina on LinkedIn)
  • Semia Gharbi—Tunisia: “Semia Gharbi helped spearhead a campaign that challenged a corrupt waste trafficking scheme between Italy and Tunisia, resulting in the return of 6,000 tons of illegally exported household waste back to Italy, its country of origin, in February 2022. More than 40 corrupt government officials and others involved in waste trafficking in both countries were arrested in the scandal. Her efforts spurred policy shifts within the EU, which has now tightened its procedures and regulations for waste shipments abroad.” (Support/follow: Association for Environmental Education for Future Generations; International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN); GAIA)
  • Besjana Guri and Olsi Nika—Albania: “Besjana Guri and Olsi Nika’s campaign to protect the Vjosa River from a hydropower dam development boom resulted in its historic designation as the Vjosa Wild River National Park by the Albanian government in March 2023. This precedent-setting action safeguards not only the entirety of the Vjosa’s 167 miles—which flow freely across Albania—but also its free-flowing tributaries, totaling 250 miles of undisturbed river corridors. The Vjosa ecosystem is a significant bastion of freshwater biodiversity that provides critical habitat for several endangered species. The new national park is both Albania and Europe’s first to protect a wild river.” (Support/follow: EcoAlbania and their YouTube channel)
  • Batmunkh Luvsandash—Mongolia: “Determined to protect his homeland from mining, Batmunkh Luvsandash’s activism resulted in the creation of a 66,000-acre protected area in Dornogovi province in April 2022, abutting tens of thousands of acres already protected by Batmunkh and allies. Home to Argali sheep, 75% of the world’s population of endangered Asiatic wild ass, and a wide variety of endemic plants, the protected area forms an important bulwark against Mongolia’s mining boom.” (Support/follow: The Nature Conservancy’s work in Mongolia)

Click on each recipient’s name to read a longer profile—or watch a brief video—about their remarkable efforts and achievements.

Posts on Goldman Prize winners from previous years:

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April 21, 2025
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Extreme Greed and Wealth Disparity: Facts, Stats, Orgs, and Resources

“Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the nation rots.”
— Chuck Palahniuk

“Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer

“If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers, we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats, we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.”
— Lester B. Pearson

 “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

“He could end world hunger. Instead, he chooses to starve children.”
— A hand-made sign at a recent protest


Shocking Facts and Stats

  • In 2024, total billionaire wealth increased by $2 trillion (source), and some billionaires are on track to become trillionaires in coming years.  Over the last decade+, there has been a growing concentration of wealth at the very top, particularly among the top 1% (source).
  • Note: A billion is 1,000 times more than a million (i.e., it takes 1,000 millions to make a billion). And a trillion is 1,000 billions…
  • In 2023, the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio for S&P 500 companies was 268-to-1, meaning CEOs earned 268 times more than the average worker, a significant increase from the 1960s when the ratio was around 21-to-1. It would take more than five career lifetimes for workers to earn what CEOs receive in just one year. (source)
  • Billionaires often make the equivalent of many millions of dollars per hour in earnings (including stock investments).
  • While millionaires and billionaires’ wealth has skyrocketed in recent decades, and the cost of living (including housing cost) has gone up, the U.S. federal minimum wage has stayed at $7.25 per hour since 2009; that is now a poverty wage. A full-time minimum wage worker makes only about $15,000 per year, which was the federal poverty line in 2024. If that person has even one other person/child to support, they are living well below the poverty line and cannot meet their basic needs on that wage. (Some states have passed higher minimum wages. In California, the minimum wage is currently $16.50/hour, as of 2025. That is still not an adequate, living wage in California. Per MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a single California adult with no one else in their household would need an average $18.66 per hour to meet their basic needs.)
  • In 2022, the living wage (the wage needed to meet basic budgetary needs, such as housing, food, childcare, and transportation, plus taxes) for one worker in a family of two full-time working adults and two children ranged between $18.75 and $40.16 per hour, for the lowest and highest cost U.S. counties, respectively. (source)
  • Billionaires contribute a million times more carbon (a greenhouse gas that causes global heating AKA climate change) to the atmosphere than the average person. 125 of the world’s richest billionaires invest so much money in polluting industries that they are responsible for emitting an average of 3 million tons of carbon a year. (source)
  • The use of private jets by ultra-wealthy people (even for very short trips) has increased substantially. And studies show that private jets emit 5-14 times more carbon dioxide per passenger than commercial airplanes. Some private aircraft models emit more carbon per hour than an average person produces in a year. (source)
  • While most ultra-wealthy people feel that their wealth is entirely or mostly “self-made,” in reality about 60 percent of billionaire wealth comes from one of three sources: inheritance, cronyism and corruption, or monopoly power (source). [I would guess that much of the rest of their wealth comes from legal but immoral exploitation of workers— via low, non-living wages and unsafe working conditions—and/or rampant extraction of natural resources, illegal tax evasion and/or insider trading, plus the investments and compounding interest that wealth affords, of course (AKA “it takes money to make money”). And for a smaller set, their wealth could come primarily from their celebrity/fame, good looks, talent, or smarts. But nobody “earns” billions or millions of dollars through only their “hard work” or their intellect. This is one reason why extreme wealth is often seen as obscene wealth.]
  • In 1975, 90% of Americans shared two-thirds of all income. As of 2023, the 90% got just 45% of all income, while the richest 10% hoard the rest. The wealthiest have extracted $79 trillion from working people since 1975. In 2023 alone, workers in the bottom 90% lost $3.9 trillion to the top 10%—that amount would have gone into the paychecks of working people if income disparity was at the more reasonable level it was at after WWII. (source)
  • Since the 1980s, due to regressive economic/financial/taxation/regulatory policies combined with sheer greed on the part of corporations and individuals, there has been a “reverse Robin Hood” upward redistribution of wealth: trillions of dollars taken from the least wealthy (the many) by the most wealthy (the few). This has turned much of the “middle class” into the “working poor” and caused much higher levels of homelessness, while the rich have become richer.
  • Wealth disparity (AKA the wealth gap, economic or income inequality, or the unequal distribution of wealth) in the U.S. is now even worse than it was in 1928, right before the 1929 stock market crash and then bank runs, which triggered the Great Depression. (source)  [Current conditions and federal policies in 2025 are setting us up for another economic crash. We should be preparing for that.]
  • You can find more statistics, graphics, and reports on income and wealth inequality at Inequality.org.

We will also be publishing a companion post in the next few months: Generosity vs Greed: How the Super-Wealthy Could Be Super-Heroes.

Organizations 

Economic Policy / Political Groups:

Poverty Alleviation/Aid/Assistance:

Housing and Homelessness:

Labor Rights:

Affordable/Universal Healthcare:

Fair Finance and Consumer Protection:

Responsible Wealth / Shared Prosperity / Genuine Philanthropy:

  • The Giving Pledge
  • Lever for Change
  • Patriotic Millionaires
  • Millionaires for Humanity  [NEW]
  • Resource Generation
  • Bolder Giving
  • Yield Giving
  • Also read about: Trust-based philanthropy, No-Strings philanthropy, Open Call philanthropy, Community (AKA “community-led” or “community-based”) philanthropy, and Direct philanthropy or direct cash/direct giving approaches (a few direct giving orgs are listed in the Poverty Alleviation section, above).
  • We will be publishing a companion post within the next year: Generosity vs Greed: How the Super-Wealthy Could Be Super-Heroes. Also, we offer strategic advising services to individuals, foundations, or philanthropic organizations who would like guidance in identifying important groups and programs to fund.

New Economics & Ecological Economics:

Universal Basic Income (UBI):

Related Media/Articles/Resources

Books  

Some people to follow online: Robert Reich, Rev. Dr. William Barber, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Chuck Collins, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Bernie Sanders; Kate Raworth, Gabriel Zucman, Nick Hanauer, Jason Hickel, Wendell Potter, Rutger Bregman, Joseph Stiglitz, Claudia Sahm, Kathryn Ann Edwards, Ai-jen Poo, Mike Elk, Liz Shuler, Katie Porter, Matthias Schmelzer, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Abigail Disney, Melinda French Gates, and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Related Posts:

Excerpts of wisdom from The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World  [Added January 2026]

Green Business, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Ethical Finance Resources

Fossil-Fuel Divestment and Future-Friendly Investments

NOTE: We’ll be publishing a companion post within the next year: Generosity vs Greed: How the Super-Wealthy Could Be Super-Heroes. And we offer strategic advising services to individuals, foundations, or philanthropic organizations who would like guidance in identifying important groups and programs to fund.

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March 21, 2025
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