Econotes : Honors Due for Six Ecoheroes

Six environmental heroes will receive $60,000 Goldman Environmental Prizes at a ceremony today in San Francisco. The awards were established three years ago by San Francisco philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman to recognize voices in the wilderness for “outstanding grass-roots environmental initiatives.” This year’s winners:

* Colleen McCrory, 42, of New Denver, British Columbia, whose campaigns for two decades against rain forest clear-cutting have united 1 million Canadians with a goal of preserving 12% of Canada as wilderness.

* Jeton Anjain, 59, a senator in the Marshall Islands Parliament, who organized the 1985 evacuation of Rongelap Atoll because of continued high radiation levels after 1954 U.S. hydrogen bomb testing and who lobbied Congress for clean-up assistance.

* Medha Patkar, 37, of India, a social worker and spokeswoman for a people’s movement to stop the Narmada Valley Development Project, which would displace more than 1 million villagers and submerge thousands of acres of agricultural land and forest.

* Christine Jean, 35, of France, an ecologist who has unified a movement to save the River Loire from plans to dam it and alter the ecology of the fertile Loire Valley.

* Carlos Alberto Ricardo, 42, of Brazil, whose 20 years of Amazon rain forest work included helping forge an unusual alliance in 1989 between indigenous Indians and rubber tappers.

* Wadja Mathieu Egnankou, 31, an African scientist who has been a lone crusader for preservation of Ivory Coast mangrove forests.