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Tulalip Resort: offers the best food and wine event in the Northwest

By Duane Pemberton, Communities Digital News

TULALIP, Wash, May 1, 2014 – The Taste of Tulalip is the ultimate “feast of the senses” that combines wine, food and fun in a relaxed setting that has helped define it as the defacto event of its kind in the Northwest.

The Tulalip Casino and Resort is a property on the Native American land of the Tulalip tribe, hence the casino part. Having the luxury of one of the areas top-ranking casinos helps provide revenue for the kind of budget required for the resort to put on a first-class event.

What makes the Tulalip Resort such a great venue for a wine and food event is really a combination of things going for it. A first-class staff such as Chef Perry Mascitti, Sommelier Tommy Thompson and its Food & Beverage Director, Lisa Severn. These three not only know how to throw a party, they do everything first-class.

Secondly, are accommodations which also present a very welcoming vibe and the rooms at Tulalip definitely fit the bill. Perhaps the nicest feature of the rooms is the three-tier shower system which hits all areas of the body, making you not want get out of it.

Assuming you pay for the full weekend pass, you’ll start things off with a multi-course reception dinner in the main convention hall. Everything from the quality of each course you consume to the attentiveness of each wait staff person, it’s a dinner you won’t soon forget. This past event, Carla Hall of ABC’s “The Chew” was on the center stage welcoming the guests and helping to get the “party started”.

Several hours later after you experience this food and wine assault on the senses, you’ll find a gorgeous, well-appointed room waiting for you to sink into.

The Grand Tasting is the event which most attend and it’s not just any “second-rate” tasting, you’ll find craft beers, imported wines from other countries such as Italy and France along with domestic favorites from California, Oregon and Washington State.

There are various mini-events which also take place during the Grand Tasting and those can be both a fun and educational to attend. There’s a cooking demo by a celebrity chef where you’ll get to try the food when done with the demo –winner of Top Chef, Kristen Kish, held the honors in 2013.

There is also a “Rock and Roll Cooking Challenge” across from the main grand tasting hall which has always proved to be a light-hearted, fun-filled event as well.

Additionally, there’s a Private Magnum tasting lounge where Tommy Thompson and crew open up extremely rare, extremely expensive wines from around the globe. Bourdeaux, Burgundy, Australia, Italy, Napa, Willamette Valley and Columbia Valley’s best are often represented in this exclusive tasting.

If you love wine, you owe it to yourself to get into this tasting in order to taste wines from the likes of Chateau Margaux, Screaming Eagle, Schafer, Quilceda Creek to name a few.

It’s the culmination of so many things which all seem to happen with flawless execution on the part of the staff and guests which helps guests feel very much a part of what’s going on.

Any more, being able to define an “ultimate food and wine” destination in most areas has become more difficult thanks to an availability of so many good ones to pick from. There’s no doubt that it should always be on your “must do” list of having an ultimate wine and food weekend in a relaxing, fun-filled place that you won’t soon forget.

For more details, visit: www.tasteoftulalip.com

Several hours later after you experience this food and wine assault on the senses, you’ll find a gorgeous, well-appointed room waiting for you to sink into.

There is also a “Rock and Roll Cooking Challenge” across from the main grand tasting hall which has always proved to be a light-hearted, fun-filled event as well.

If you love wine, you owe it to yourself to get into this tasting in order to taste wines from the likes of Chateau Margaux, Screaming Eagle, Schafer, Quilceda Creek to name a few.

It’s the culmination of so many things which all seem to happen with flawless execution on the part of the staff and guests which helps guests feel very much a part of what’s going on.

For more details, visit: www.tasteoftulalip.com
Read more at http://www.commdiginews.com/life/tulalip-resort-offers-the-best-food-and-wine-event-in-the-northwest-16594/#Hj9a4d3Mhk0hHD4x.99

Winona LaDuke: Keep USDA Out of Our Kitchens

By Tanya H. Lee, ICTMN

Native American author, educator, activist, mother and grandmother Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabekwe, is calling on tribes to relocalize food and energy production as a means of both reducing CO2 emissions and of asserting tribes’ inherent right to live in accordance with their own precepts of the sacredness of Mother Earth and responsibility to future generations.

She said during a recent presentation on climate change at Harvard University, “We essentially need tribal food and energy policies that reflect sustainability. Tribes [as sovereign nations] have jurisdiction over food from seed to table and we need to take it or else USDA will take it…. The last thing you want is USDA telling you how to cook your hominy, that you can’t use ashes in it …. I am the world-renowned, or reservation-wide renowned, beaver tamale queen. So who’s going to come to my house and [inspect the beaver]? I don’t want USDA in my food. I want us to exercise control over our food and not have them saying we can’t eat what we traditionally eat.”

LaDuke was talking about tribal food sovereignty.

Winona LaDuke of White Earth, Jackie Francke of First Nations Development Institute and Julie Garreau, executive director of the Cheyenne River Youth Project, at the first meeting of the NAFSA founding council. (Courtesy First Nations Development Institute)

Neither the United States Department of Agriculture nor the Food and Drug Administration is likely to turn up in your family’s kitchen, but federal policies have a lot to say about what food products are allowed to get into that kitchen in the first place. Antibiotics and growth hormones in the meat supply, vast harvests of corn, rice or wheat cultivated from the same genetic stock, genetically modified organisms—be they corn or soy or fish–and preservatives added to food during processing are primarily under the control of the USDA and FDA. As are the regulations about what foods can be served by tribes at day care centers, schools and senior centers, not to mention those on how food intended for commercial markets must be grown and processed.

Of particular concern right now is the 2011 federal Food Safety Modernization Act, which increases regulation and oversight of food production in an effort to prevent contamination. If the rules pertaining to the law are not changed in response to public comments, some of the federal government’s regulatory and inspection responsibilities will devolve to state governments, a direct threat to tribal sovereignty, according to First Nations Community Development Institute Senior Program Officer Raymond Foxworth, Navajo. “The [historic] loss of food system control in Indian Country is highly correlated with things like the loss of land, the loss of some aspects of culture related to agricultural processes, and … some pretty negative health statistics [including obesity, diabetes and lifespan]. It’s our belief that food sovereignty is one solution to combat some of these negative effects, be it the negative health statistics, the loss of culture or the loss of land.”

Harley Coriz, director of the Santo Domingo Senior Center, inside of the center’s new greenhouse. (Courtesy First Nations Development Institute)

The institute has been instrumental in establishing the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance under its Native American Food System Initiative. The alliance will be a national organization focused on networking, best practices and policy issues. The founding members of NAFSA “have been working on trying to pressure the FDA into initiating tribal consultations related to FSMA.”

The alliance, in the works for more than a decade, recently got start-up funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. FNCDI contracted with the Taos County Economic Development Corp. to coordinate its establishment. Directors Pati Martinson and Terrie Bad Hand convened a group of 16 people who have been working on food systems at the grassroots level to form a founding council. That group had its first face-to-face meeting in October.

Among the founding council members is Dana Eldridge, Navajo, formerly on the staff at Diné College and now an independent consultant and would-be farmer, who has done extensive work in analyzing food systems for the Navajo Nation. One of her main concerns is genetically modified organisms. GMOs, she says, threaten both the ownership of Native seeds and the spiritual aspects of food. “Corn is very sacred to us—it’s our most sacred plant. We pray with corn pollen–in our Creation story we’re made of corn—so what does it mean that this plant has been turned into something that actively harms people?”

Children at the Akwesasne Freedom School in New York near the Canadian border work in the their gardens in a farm-to-school project led by Kanenhi:io Ionkwaiontonhake. Much of the food grown in the gardens goes directly to the school for meals. Two teachers even instruct the older kids in the pre-K through grade 8 school in how to can and store their food, according to Elvera Sargent, Mohawk, who has been at the school since 1995 and who is a member of the NAFSA founding council. (Courtesy Akwesasne Freedom School)

Eldridge says food sovereignty is also important because it is a way to begin to address the trauma colonization has inflicted on Native people. “What I’ve learned during this food research is you can’t produce food by yourself. You need people, you need family, you need community and relationships, so a lot of it is about rebuilding community and reconnecting with the land and I think that’s a very important healing process for our people.”

The Taos County Economic Development Corp. has found that one way to keep USDA and FDA out of your kitchen is to invite them in. When regulators amped up their enforcement of regulations in relation to Native commercial food enterprises in northern New Mexico, TCEDC built a 5,000-square-food commercial kitchen where people could process their crops and learn directly from USDA inspectors what the regulations were. Says Martinson, “The food center was our way of modeling and bringing forward local healthy food through helping those people become actual businesses and entrepreneurs.” In 2006, TCEDC added a mobile slaughtering unit. Housed in a tractor trailer truck, the MSU travels out to small ranches where USDA inspectors oversee the slaughter of livestock—”bison, beef, sheep, goats and the occasional yak,” says Bad Hand–intended for commercial sale. The meat is then brought back to the center for cutting and packaging, again under federal oversight.

There is an irony to all this federal oversight of food production in sovereign Native nations, says Martinson. Traditional Native food growing, harvesting and processing principles kept people healthy for millennia before USDA even existed. The food contamination that FSMA is intended to prevent is a consequence of the industrialization of food production. “All these scares that you hear about, e. coli or salmonella making people really sick, if you trace those back, they come from huge packing plants, from industry.

A young girl at Cochiti Youth Experience (at Cochiti Pueblo) working in the garden. (Courtesy First Nations Development Institute)

“One of the things that I think Native people recognize and have passed down culturally is that you need to have human beings within food production ecosystems for all of those reasons—safety, quality, a relationship with your food. The principles of safe food are indigenous and inherent in Native communities,” Martinson says.

The answer to “What’s for dinner?” has profound implications for the well-being of Native American tribes. Tribal food sovereignty could mean the difference between continuing to retain (or regain) language, land, religious precepts, traditional lifeways and physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health or losing them.

Will GMO Labels Alter Consumers’ Perception Of Specialty Foods?

Northwest News Network, source: OPB

In the food business, everything comes down to that moment when a shopper studies a label and decides whether to buy or move on. That’s why food producers have a big interest in Washington’s Initiative 522 on the ballot next month.

It would require foods with genetically engineered ingredients to have a label on the front of the package. Supporters say consumers have a right to know what’s in their food. But some companies worry the law could dramatically change how their products are seen.

Updating labels

Tubs of veggie dip go three-by-three through a labeling machine on the production floor at Litehouse Foods in Sandpoint, Idaho. They pop out the other side with “Country Ranch” stickers stamped on the lid.

None of the elements on that label are there by accident says Kathy Weisz, the head of graphic design for Litehouse.

“We’re trying to convey to the consumer what it might taste like,” she says. “Kind of the feel of that product.”

Litehouse markets to “foodie” shoppers. The side of the label says “made fresh.” The company uses raw ingredients, without preservatives — which is why the dressings are refrigerated.

Weisz says the label involves a constant dance between pictures of sliced tomatoes and sunflowers and the stuff on the label that has to be there legally — like nutrition content, and ingredients.

So, Weisz says it’s not that big of a deal to add one more thing to the label. “Label updates happen all the time.”

When was the last one?

“Today, yesterday … it’s always something,” says Weisz.

But the initiative before Washington voters would create a labeling rule that’s a little bit different from others. The label saying “genetically engineered” or “partially produced with genetic engineering” would have to go on the front of the package and it would be specific to one state.

“I mean we already do sell to Canada and Mexico and that’s difficult enough,” says Weisz. “But starting to treat a state like a country – I would think that most manufacturers are just going to do it across the board, rather than making certain labels going to certain states or whatever.”

Meaning that people in Idaho and Oregon would be seeing the same thing as consumers in Washington.

That worries Paul Kusche, the senior vice president of Litehouse. He says the supply of non-genetically engineered canola and soybean oil just isn’t large enough to overhaul the company’s entire product line. If Initiative 522 passes, consumers will see labels on most of Litehouse’s products.

“I don’t know what the reaction is,” Kusche says. “I really don’t.”

“Our right to know”

Research shows price, not labeling, is the most important factor for many shoppers. But companies like Litehouse cater to a particular crowd: the label readers — people who are willing to pay more for a product they perceive as healthier.

Andie Forstad, who lives outside of Spokane, helped gather signatures to put the labeling initiative on the ballot. To her, it’s about having information about her food – just like the calorie count on a box of cookies or whether her juice comes from concentrate.

“For transparency, for our right to know. So that we can make an informed decision,” says Forstad . “I know people still buy genetically engineered products, but for those who wish not to, we can make that choice.”

Forstad cut genetically engineered foods out of her diet eight years ago. But she says it’s hard. In fact, as we’re looking through her refrigerator, Forstad spies a bottle of raspberry syrup.

“Okay, so this one, most likely is genetically engineered,” she says. “And I just noticed it in our fridge, but it hasn’t been used! [I know] because it says sugar. Most sugars are sugar beet and sugar beet is genetically engineered. That shouldn’t be in our fridge.”

An unnecessary warning?

The problem, says Jim Cook, is that raspberry syrup may actually be identical to raspberry syrup considered GMO-free.

Cook is a retired plant pathologist from Washington State University. He’s thrown his support behind the effort to defeat the measure.

“Sugar. You take a bag of sugar, you look on the label, and it says zero protein. And of course it’s zero protein because it’s pure sugar.”

Cook says the original sugar beet plant was genetically engineered to produce a certain protein.

“But that’s the green plant,” he explains. “And that protein’s not in that sugar. Why would you put a label on sugar that says it’s genetically engineered? Because it’s not.”

Even if the initiative were written differently, Cook would still be concerned about what he considers a warning for food he says doesn’t need one.

“How do you process that information?” he says. “What do you think when you see ‘genetically engineered’ on the label? Are you going to buy it anyway?”

Supply and demand

Back at Litehouse Foods, Paul Kusche is already looking beyond the November election. Litehouse has started sourcing non-genetically engineered ingredients and has submitted 21 products for non-GMO certification.

Kusche says, the demand for foods that don’t come from genetically engineered sources is undeniable.

“Whether it happens tomorrow or whether it happens 10 years from now, we know it’s coming.”

And for now, at least he knows that if Washington does require Litehouse to label its products, they’ll have lots and lots of company on grocery store shelves.

Taste of Tulalip – The Culinary Festival of the Year

5th Anniversary Highlights Include Extraordinary Epicurean Events, Celebrity Chefs & Sommelier Superstars

Tulalip, Washington – Tulalip Resort Casino is gearing up for a weekend of revelry to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Taste of Tulalip, its coveted award-winning food and wine aficionado event. Scheduled for November 8 and 9, 2013, this year’s line-up of top talent, to be announced within the next month, will include many familiar names as well as some stars on the rise. Past culinary celeb appearances have included ABC TV’s “The Chew” host Carla Hall, Bravo’s Top Chef Master and author Marcus Samuelsson, wine legend Marc Mondavi, “Thirsty Girl” Leslie Sbrocco and others. Executive Chef Perry Mascitti and Sommelier Tommy Thompson are putting together a dazzling roster of food, wine and tradition show-stoppers that have been a year in the planning. Taste 2013 will feature honorary winemaker Bob Betz of Betz Family Winery. Taste of Tulalip tickets have just gone on sale at Ticketmaster, with Friday night Celebration dinner tickets soon to follow.

The two-day gathering, with a focus on food, wine and tradition, begins with a Friday night wine and passed hors d’oeuvres reception, followed by the aptly named Celebration Dinner. The multi-course repast will focus on Native American and traditional recipe inspired dishes, paired with a global offering of rare, top wines. It is priced at $175. Tickets are limited and this event is always a sell-out.

On Saturday “All Access” pass holders ($295) will enjoy early entrance to the unforgettable Grand Taste; a VIP seminar featuring a celebrity cooking demo, table talk and Q & A session on the Viking Kitchen Stage; a private Magnum Party where they’ll be treated to a high level wine and indigenous food pairings; and a special bonus this year – two in-depth Reserve Tasting forums.

The weekend’s highlight is always the Grand Taste, spanning four hours and featuring lavish food stations as well as over 100 wines from Washington State, California and Oregon, and craft beer. It is priced at $95 and includes a Rock –n- Roll Cooking Challenge done “Iron Chef” style with celebrity judges looking for the best from both regional and Tulalip chefs, and sommelier teams. Special guest Emilio Lopez of El Salvador (a sixth generation specialty coffee producer), will be appearing at the Dillanos Coffee Roasters espresso bar, where guests will be able to sample a special TOT 5th Anniversary Blend.

All of the weekend’s wine offerings will be available in limited quantities for purchase in the Taste of Tulalip retail wine shop. There will also be book and bottle signings for those looking to personalize their purchases.

For tickets, go to www.tasteoftulalip.com or www.ticketmaster.com

Choice of Monsanto betrays World Food Prize purpose, say global leaders

By Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé, Huffington Post

“This statement is supported by 81 Councillors of the World Future Council, a network of global luminaries who “form a voice for the rights of future generations,” and/or Laureates of the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel. Supporters’ names appear below.”

In honoring the seed biotechnology industry, this year’s World Food Prize – to many, the most prestigious prize in food and agriculture — betrays the award’s own mandate to emphasize ”the importance of a nutritious and sustainable food supply for all people.”

The 2013 World Food Prize has gone to three chemical company executives, including Monsanto executive vice president and chief technology officer,Robert Fraley, responsible for development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Yet, GMO seeds have not been designed to meet the Prize’s mandate and function in ways that actually impede progress toward the stated goals of the World Food Prize.

Almost twenty years after commercialization of the first GMO seeds, by far the most widely used are not engineered to enhance nutrient content, but to produce a specific pesticide or to resist a proprietary herbicide, or a combination of these traits. Even in reducing weeds, the technology is failing, for it has led to herbicide-resistant “super weeds” now appearing on nearly half of American farms.

GMO seeds undermine sustainability in other ways as well.

While profitable to the few companies producing them, GMO seeds reinforce a model of farming that undermines sustainability of cash-poor farmers, who make up most of the world’s hungry. GMO seeds continue farmers’ dependency on purchased seed and chemical inputs. The most dramatic impact of such dependency is in India, where 270,000 farmers, many trapped in debt for buying seeds and chemicals, committed suicide between 1995 and 2012.

GMOs also threaten sustainability because they continue agriculture’s dependence on diminishing and damaging fossil fuels and mined minerals, as well as a wasteful use of water.

This award not only communicates a false connection between GMOs and solutions to hunger and agricultural degradation, but it also diverts attention from truly “nutritious and sustainable” agroecological approaches already proving effective, especially in the face of extreme weather. The Rodale Institute, for example, found in its 30-year study, that organic methods used 45 percent less energy and produced 40 percent less greenhouse gases and outperformed chemical farming during drought years by as much as 31 percent.

Further evidence from around the world is showing how ecological methods dramatically enhance productivity, improve nutritional content of crops, and benefit soil health, all without leaving farmers dependent on ever-more expensive inputs. The United Nations, through its Office of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has documented ecological agriculture’s potential in hungry regions to double food production in one decade. Chaired by former World Food Prize awardee Dr. Hans Herren, the 2008International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report, developed by 400 experts and endorsed by 59 governments, calls for redirection of agricultural development toward such sustainable practices. Agroecology and food sovereignty are emerging solutions shaped and chosen by scientists and citizens worldwide.

Note that the World Food Prize mandate is also to recognize contributors to food “for all people,” but GMO seeds make this goal harder to reach. Most GM crops are used for feed for livestock, processed food, or fuel — products not accessible to hungry people. Moreover, the planet already produces more than enough food for all, and 40 percent more per person than in 1970; yet today 870 million people, still suffer from extreme, long-term undernourishment because they lack power to access adequate food. Developed and controlled by a handful of companies, genetically engineered seeds further the concentration of power and the extreme inequality at the root of this crisis of food inaccessibility. Monsanto, for example, controls 90 percent of the U.S. soybean crop and 80 percent of the country’s corn and cotton crops.

The choice of the 2013 World Food Prize is an affront to the growing international consensus on safe, ecological farming practices that have been scientifically proven to promote nutrition and sustainability. Many governments have rejected GMOs, and as many as two million citizens in 52 countries recently marched in opposition to GMOs and Monsanto. In living democracies, discounting this knowledge and these many voices is not acceptable.

The 81 signatories below are Councillors of the World Future Council and/or
Laureates of the Right Livelihood Award:29 COUNCILLORS OF THE WORLD FUTURE COUNCIL (An asterisk indicates the signer is also a Right Livelihood Award Laureate but listed only once.)

*Vandana Shiva, Founder, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology
*Frances Moore Lappé, Co-founder, Small Planet Institute
*Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians
*Dipal Barua, Founder and Chairman of the Bright Green Energy Foundation
*Hans-Peter Dürr, Nuclear physicist and philosopher
*Sulak Sivaraksa, Co-founder, International Network of Engaged Buddhists
*Ibrahim Abouleish, Founder of SEKEM
*Chico Whitaker, Co-founder, World Social Forum
*Manfred Max-Neef, Prof Dr. h.c. (mult.) Manfred Max-Neef, Director, Economics Institute, Universidad Austral de Chile
*Alyn Ware, Founder and international coordinator of the Network Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (PNND)
David Krieger, President, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Rama Mani, Vice Chair, Academic Council on the United Nations System
Alexander Likhotal, President, Green Cross International
Thais Corral, Co-founder, Women’s Environment and Development Organization
Pauline Tangiora, Maori elder, Rongomaiwahine Tribe
Anna Oposa, Co-Founder, Save Philippine Seas
Scilla Elworthy, Founder, Oxford Research Group, Founder, Peace Direct
Katiana Orluc, Director of Development/Strategic Affairs, Thyssen-Bornemisza, Art Contemporary (TBA21)
Riane Eisler, President, Centre for Partnership Studies
Ashok Khosla, Chairman, Centre for Development Alternatives
Hafsat Abiola, Founder and President of the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND)
Rafia Ghubash, President, Arab Network for Women, Science and Technology
Daryl Hannah, Actress and advocate for a sustainable world
Vithal Rajan, Founder, Trustee of Agriculture Man Ecology [AME], Foundation of India
Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director, The Oakland Institute
Herbert Girardet, Honorary Councillor, World Future Council
Ana María Cetto, Research professor of the Institute of Physics and lecturer at the Faculty of Sciences, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Nicholas Dunlop, Secretary-General, Climate Parliament
Motoyuki Suzuki, Chairman, Central Environmental Council of Japan

52 ADDITIONAL RIGHT LIVELIHOOD AWARD LAUREATES

Alice Tepper Marlin, President & Founder, Social Accountability International, USA (RLA 1990)
Alla Yaroshinskaya, Russia (RLA 1992)
Andras Biro, Hungarian Foundation for Self-Reliance, Hungary (RLA 1995)
Angie Zelter, Trident Ploughshares, United Kingdom (RLA 2001)
Annelies Allain, International Baby Food Action Network, Malaysia (RLA 1998)
Anwar Fazal, Director, Right Livelihood College, Malaysia (RLA 1982)
Augusto Juncal, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST), Brazil (RLA 1991)
Bianca Jagger, Founder and Chair, Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, Nicaragua/UK (RLA 2004)
Birsel Lemke, Turkey (RLA 2000)
Daniel Ellsberg, USA (RLA 2006)
David Suzuki, Canada (RLA 2009)
Erik Dammann, Future in Our Hands, Norway (RLA 1982)
Bishop Erwin Kräutler, Brazil (RLA 2010)
Evaristo Nugkuag Ikanan, Instituto para el Buen Vivir, Peru (RLA 1986)
Felicia Langer, Israel/Germany (RLA 1990)
Fernando Funes-Aguilar, Grupo de Agricultura Orgánica, Cuba (RLA 1999)
Fernando Rendón, Co-Founder and Director, International Poetry Festival of Medellín, Colombia (RLA 2006)
GRAIN, International (RLA 2011)
Hanumappa Sudarshan, Karuna Trust & VGKK, India (RLA 1994)
Helen Mack Chang, Fundación Myrna Mack, Guatemala (RLA 1992)
Helena Norberg-Hodge, Founder and Director, International Society for Ecology & Culture, UK (RLA 1986)
Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism Solutions, USA (RLA 1983)
Ina May Gaskin, USA (RLA 2011)
Irene Fernandez, Tenaganita, Malaysia (RLA 2005)
Janos Vargha, Hungary (RLA 1985)
Prof. Dr. Johan Galtung, Norway (RLA 1987)
Juan Pablo Orrego, President, Ecosistemas, Chile (RLA 1998)
Katarina Kruhonja, Center for Peace, Nonviolence and Human Rights-Osijek, Croatia (RLA 1998)
Martín von Hildebrand, Founder and Director, Fundación GAIA Amazonas, Colombia (RLA 1999)
Melaku Worede, Ethiopia (RLA 1989)
Prof. Michael Succow, Founder, Michael Succow Foundation for Nature Conservation, Germany, (RLA 1997)
Mike Cooley, UK (RLA 1981)
SM Mohamed Idris, Sahabat Alam Malaysia-Sarawak, Malaysia (RLA 1988)
Monika Hauser, Founder, Medica Mondiale, Germany (RLA 2008)
Nicanor Perlas, Center for Alternative Development Initiatives, Philippines (RLA 2003)
Nnimmo Bassey, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, Nigeria (RLA 2010)
Pat Mooney, ETC Group, Canada (RLA 1985)
Raúl A. Montenegro, President, Fundación para la defensa del ambiente, Argentina (RLA 2004)
Ruchama Marton, Founder and President, Physicians for Human Rights, Israel (RLA 2010)
Shrikrishna Upadhyay, Executive Chairman, Support Activities for Poor Producers of Nepal, Nepal (RLA 2010)
Sima Samar, Chairperson, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, Afghanistan (RLA 2012)
Stephen Gaskin, PLENTY International, USA (RLA 1980)
Suciwati, widow of Munir, Indonesia (RLA 2000)
Swami Agnivesh, India (RLA 2004)
Tapio Mattlar, Kylätoiminta / The Finnish Village Action Movement, Finland (RLA 1992)
Tony Clarke, Executive Director, Polaris Institute, Canada (RLA 2005)
Uri Avnery, Founder, Gush Shalom, Israel (RLA 2001)
Wes Jackson, Founder and President, The Land Institute, USA (RLA 2000)
Zafrullah Chowdhury, Gonoshasthaya Kendra, Bangladesh (RLA 1992)
Percy and Louise Schmeiser (RLA 2007)
Jacqueline Moudeina (2011)