Global Environmentalist and Executive Director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Dr. Nnimmo Bassey has received the 2024 Wallenberg Medal from the University of Michigan.
Dr Bassey, the 30th recipient of the award, becomes the first Nigerian and 5th African to be so honoured after South African’s Helen Suzman and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rwandan Paul Rusesabagina, and Congolese Denis Mukwege. Dr Bassey also delivered the 29th Wallenberg Lecture, “We Are Relatives,” centering on love, humility, dignity, and respect in his vision of a livable future for all beings.
Speaking at the award and lecture, the Chair of the Wallenberg Medal, Dr. Sioban Harlow, noting that both Raoul Wallenberg and Nnimmo Bassey are trained architects, commended Bassey for dedicating his life to “resisting the loyal extraction activities that destroy the environment and cause untold harm to the health aid livelihoods of local peoples”.
‘Together, We Can’
She also commended him for becoming a leading environmental and climate activist, first in the Delta, and subsequently working across the Africa continent.
Harlow described Bassey as a creative and effective organiser, with a gift of envisioning alternatives and implementing at scale in defence of Mother Earth, her peoples, and all living beings.
Dr Laurie McCauley, the provost of the University of Michigan before presenting the award to Dr Bassey, said: “Through your works and your words. you have reminded us again and again of the importance of sustainability and environmental justice.
“You have shown us the necessity of not only seeing but doing of acting, to address the climate crisis, the challenge of our time”.
According to her, Dr Bassey has through his leadership of the Health of Mothe Earth Foundation and on the steering committee of Oil Watch International, as well as his books and works of poetry, shown that “together, we can make a better world come alive”.
The Lecture
While presenting his lecture, Dr. Bassey commended Wallenberg, describing himself as the son of the earth, who reminds him of the consciousness that requires an organic relationship with what he called “our model, the earth.”
According to Bassey, “every living being is a child of the earth, and each has a role to play in this large family we belong to.”
The recipient said that other bodies play a critical role in maintaining the ecosystem that makes the earth and planet and that “the elimination of one species threatens the existence of others.”
“It reminds us that we are all interconnected and our destines are bound together.
“Compassion towards our communities and other beings bring out the spirit of sacrifice for which Raoul Wallenberg stands for, indeed it brings out the best in us and shows clearly that love is a greater force than hate” he said.
Bassey declared that to to have an ecologically just world: “We have to work to ensure that every being exists in harmony with Mother Earth”.
He spoke on the reason for the Health of Mother Earth Foundation and concluded his lecture by reading his poem , “I see the Invisible”.
About the Wallenberg Medal
The Wallenberg Medal is awarded by the University of Michigan to outstanding humanitarians whose actions on behalf of the defenceless and oppressed reflect the heroic commitment and sacrifice of the late Swedish diplomat
Both the Award and Lecture honour the legacy of Raoul Wallenberg, who graduated from the U-M College of Architecture in 1935 and saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews near the end of World War II.
In 1944, at the request of Jewish organizations and the American War Refugee Board, the Swedish Foreign Ministry sent Wallenberg on a rescue mission to Budapest.
Over six months, Wallenberg issued thousands of protective passports and placed many thousands of Jews in safe houses throughout the besieged city. He confronted Hungarian and German forces to secure the release of Jews, whom he claimed were under Swedish protection and saved more than 80,000 lives.
Previous award recipients include the 14th Dalai Lama, Romanian American Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, American politician and civil rights activist John Robert Lewis, and Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, among others.
About Nnimmo Bassey
Bassey is an architect, director of the Nigeria-based ecological think-tank Health of Mother Earth Foundation(HOMEF) and member of the steering committee of Oilwatch International, a network resisting the expansion of fossil fuel extraction in the Global South.
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He chaired Friends of the Earth International (2008-2012), was a co-recipient of the 2010 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” and received the Rafto Human Rights Prize in 2012.
He received honorary doctorate degrees from the University of York (U.K.) in 2019 and York University (Canada) in 2023. Bassey’s books include “To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction” and “The Climate Crisis in Africa and Oil Politics: Echoes of Ecological War.
”His poetry collections include “We Thought It Was Oil But It Was Blood.
“I Will Not Dance to Your Beat” and “I See the Invisible. ”
