Awards, Apr 20, 2000

The following awards have been presented for work in philanthropy and volunteerism:

Education. The New York Theological Seminary has received the 2000 Arthur Vining Davis Foundations Award for Excellence, which recognizes overall excellence and significant improvement in an educational institution. NYTS is the second winner of the honor, which was first awarded last year and which carries a $150,000 prize. The efforts of the seminary’s president, M. William Howard Jr., who will step down in May to become pastor of Bethany Baptist Church (Newark, N.J.), were noted as particularly impressive in maintaining a high-quality program that is strong both financially and administratively. The award is unsolicited, and only former grantees of the Foundations are eligible.

Environment. The Goldman Environmental Foundation (Washington) has awarded seven individuals in six regions its Goldman Environmental Prize for grassroots leadership on environmental concerns. Each regional prize carries a $125,000 award.

— Africa. Alexander Peal, a Liberian activist who successfully campaigned for the creation of the country’s only national park, and, after spending several years in exile in the United States, has returned to restart the conservation movement he began in the mid-1970’s to protect the forests of his country.

— Asia. Oral Ataniyazova, an obstetrician who founded a clinic and a movement to raise awareness and stem the effects of the heavy use of pesticides and defoliants in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region of Uzbekistan that has the world’s highest rate of anemia and the highest rate of infant and maternal deaths in the former Soviet Union.

— Europe. Vera Mischenko, who led a public-interest law movement in Russia that won the first successful lawsuit for public ecological interests in the Russian Supreme Court, which stopped the building of a rail line that would have run through national parks and wildlife preserves.

— Island Nations. Nat Quansah, an ethnobotanist from Madagascar who opened a clinic that specializes in using local plants for medicinal purposes and called for conservation of the island’s rich ecological diversity. A drug made from local rosy periwinkle has helped raise the recovery rate for childhood leukemia to 80 percent.

— North America. Rodolfo Montiel Flores, who has been imprisoned since May 1999 for leading farmers in a protest against the destructive practices of a U.S. logging company.

— South and Central America. Oscar Rivas and Elias Diaz Pena, two Paraguayans who have fought since 1986 to stop harmful development projects such as a plan to alter the region’s waterways to facilitate exports, and have appealed to the World Bank for more-effective resettlement and environmental plans for the area surrounding the Yacyreta Dam on the Rio Parana.