San Francisco, CA— Q’orianka Kilcher, the teenage Hollywood actress who starred opposite Colin Farrell in “The New World,” has been honored with the US’s premier environmental award for young people for her work to save the Amazon rainforest.
As the Youth Ambassador of environmental group Amazon Watch, Q’orianka, 17, has visited Ecuador and Peru to campaign against the devastation wrought by the oil industry in once pristine areas of tropical rainforest inhabited by various indigenous groups.
“Q’orianka Kilcher exhibits exactly the kind of courage and vision that fueled David Brower’s decades of environmental leadership,” says David Phillips, Executive Director of the environmental organization Earth Island Institute, which gives away the youth award every year. “Q’orianka is smart, impassioned and, above all, energetic. She isn’t waiting for environmental solutions to come down from those in power. She is taking action now to conserve, protect and restore the Earth.”
Each year, after a competitive application process, the Brower Youth Awards are given to six environmental leaders aged 13 to 22 from North America. The winners each receive a $3,000 cash prize, are honored at a formal awards ceremony in San Francisco, and participate in skills-building and mentoring workshops geared toward furthering their leadership development. Past winners have launched their own environmental organizations—such as the campus climate coalition Energy Action—or found prominent positions in some of the country’s largest environmental groups.
The 2007 Brower Youth Award winners will be honored at a ceremony at 7:30 PM on Wednesday, October 24 at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco.
Q’orianka Kilcher, of Santa Monica, CA, is an actress of Peruvian indigenous ancestry who has used her celebrity to draw attention to pressing human rights and environmental injustices. Of special concern to her are the practices of Occidental Petroleum, which was responsible for the daily dumping of 800,000 barrels of toxic wastewater into the Corrientes River basin in the Peruvian Amazon over a period of three decades. The Achuar are one of several Amazonian communities that depend on the river basin for all their water needs, including drinking, fishing, and bathing. On a trip to Peru to promote a recent film, Kilcher invited indigenous leaders to participate in a red carpet event, toured communities, conducted interviews with affected peoples for a documentary, collaborated with US-based campaigners Amazon Watch, and met with representatives of oil companies.
Complete biographies, photographs, and broadcast-quality videos of the honorees are available at broweryouthawards.org/media. User name: media; password: br0w3r. To arrange an interview with the award recipients, please contact Sharon Smith at: 415-200-7279 and sharonsmith@earthisland.org.
