How did Right Livelihood Award begin?
It about breaking silences. I was always wondering, why do we live with problems we can solve? Why are there solutions, but they’re not taken seriously? I was always interested in the question of, solutions and how do you get taken seriously. Now, if you grow up in Sweden, you realize that, suddenly in October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced, then there are these people who get taken seriously, not just in their own areas. Suddenly, if you win a Nobel Prize, you can pronounce on anything, and you get taken seriously and you’re listened to.
And these awards were created in a very different age, when the belief in progress and technology were still sort of unlimited. There was no problem with a so-called third world. There was no ecological problem. And so, there was a gap. And strangely enough, only one gap was filled in these hundred years. The Nobel Committee created one new award not started by Alfred Nobel himself, namely the one for economics. And I said, well, that’s a bit strange. There are very important other gaps here.
So I proposed to the Nobel Foundation an award for environmental work and for human development, and I offered to provide some money to start this from the sale of my business. Obviously I’m not as wealthy as Alfred Nobel, so it wouldn’t have funded the award in the long term. But it was to try to get them to take this seriously. And I received a polite reply back saying that they had decided not to introduce any more Nobel awards. And so, I then felt, obliged to try it myself. So I went back to Sweden, where I hadn’t lived since I was a child, and I sent out an announcement. I found through my network two very good recipients.
The first year, I was told that it was debated in the Swedish media whether this was a KGB plot or a CIA plot to discredit the Nobel Prizes. This was still in the Cold War. But one member of the Swedish parliament believed so much in this that in five years of work, she managed to convince enough colleagues from all the political parties to invite us to present these awards in the Swedish parliament, which has now happened, happening for over twenty years. So that, in brief, is the story.
It’s grown, the award, into other areas, because it’s a very open and democratic award. Nobel Prizes, only a certain very small group of people can nominate for a Nobel Prize. And with our award, anybody can nominate anybody, except, of course, themselves or their own organization. So we get nominations from all over the world. We knew that the environment remains, a very important issue. But we also realize that even in the areas where there are Nobel Prizes, like economics even, like medicine, like physics, only a certain group of people get these. Nobody from another medical tradition but modern Western medicine would ever get a Nobel Prize for medicine. No physics prize, no Nobel physics prize has ever gone to a solar energy physicist.
So we honored the most successful photovoltaic—solar photovoltaics researcher in the world, an Australian, Martin Green, a few years ago. And we’ve honored economists like Professor Herman Daly, who is now at University of Maryland, the pioneer of ethical ecological steady-state economics, because although he would deserve it in any objective world, he is very unlikely ever to get a Nobel Prize in economics. We have had a few other pioneers: Manfred Max-Neef from Chile, Leopold Kohr from Austria, highly recognized economics, but they were teaching the wrong kind of economics.
We gave an award to Wangari Maathai, the initiator of the Green Belt reforestation movement in Kenya, twenty years before she won the Nobel. That was kind of interesting, that we gave the award to her in ’84, which was the first year we had an all-women panel of recipients, and then exactly twenty years later, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
awarded Munir, the great Indonesian human rights activist, who later died. He was poisoned when he was taking a plane out of Indonesia.
That was one of these great tragedies, that we have had other cases where we have not been able to save people, but other cases where we have saved them. I mean, in Nigeria, Ken Saro-Wiwa was still executed, but his closest collaborator told us that he felt that if we hadn’t given the award to their organization, they would have killed him, too. In another case from Guatemala, a human rights activist whose sister had been murdered in a political assassination told us that the chief of police actually told her when she came back from the award presentation that “Now you’re untouchable,” as he put it. “Now you’re so well known internationally that they won’t dare to kill you.” And fortunately, she’s still in good health.
Helen Mack, her sister Myrna Mack, who died September 11, 1990 at the hands of Guatemalan security forces, an anthropologist.
How the title Right Livelihood Award came
I was looking around, and I felt that it should symbolize the whole life, in a way. it’s a Buddhist term. I’m not a Buddhist, but I liked this idea of saying that, it isn’t just what you do, it’s how you live your life. And interestingly enough, it also challenges people to think. The name is too judgmental: “You’re saying that there are wrong livelihoods.” And so, of course there are wrong livelihoods. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in the mess you’re in.
And another aspect, of course, is being that because it’s very difficult to translate “right livelihood” into many languages, the award has become known—in the German-speaking world, for example, it’s entirely known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. And I think that helps the recipients. It’s not an anti-Nobel Prize, you know, but it is certainly a prize which ties in with what Alfred Nobel wanted to do. His award was very progressive in those days, to have an international award in a very nationalistic age. And he said, “I wanted to honor those who have brought the greatest benefit upon humanity.” And in a very different world today, I think that’s what we are trying to do. And that’s why it’s sort of interesting that even the family of Alfred Nobel sympathized with us. A senior member of Alfred Nobel’s family in Sweden is actually on our advisory council, because they are so outraged about the Nobel Foundation introducing the economics prize. because they think it was totally inappropriate. If you have an economics prize, then why not have a prize for ecology, for architecture, etc.? And I think they’re also quite unhappy with the choices. But their main reason is, of course, that they object to this prize being presented as a Nobel Prize when it has nothing to do with Alfred Nobel. It was established by Swedish national banks. Probably the Nobel Foundation felt that they couldn’t refuse it. The official name is sort of slightly different, but if you then get the book, the publication every year called Nobel Lectures, there are the—the economics lecture is also in there, so they’re playing a sort of double game.
why not choose somebody like Herman Daly, whose name is now being voted again and again as the kind of economic order is sort of being seen as increasingly bankrupt? He told us many of these things ten, twenty years ago. He wrote a book with a theologian, James Cobb, called For the Common Good, but especially his book on steady-state economics is highly up-to-date.
A stamp collector since I was nine, but I was a stamp dealer. So it was actually my business, which—when I sold that, which enabled me then to provide the initial funding for the award for the first five years. I funded it from the sale of my stamp business.
My father was a pacifist. And so, when I was nine years old, one day he offered me to exchange all of my toy guns, my water pistols, for a stamp collection. And I decided to accept the offer.
Interview with Jakob von Uexkull, the founder of the Right Livelihood Award.
– from democracynow. 8 Dec 2008.