Ina May Wins The Right Livelihood Award

“… for her whole-life’s work teaching and advocating safe, woman-centred childbirth methods that best promote the physical and mental health of mother and child.“

Ina May Gaskin is the wife of the first Right Livelihood Award Laureate Stephen Gaskin , who received the Prize with his organisation PLENTY International in 1980.

The world's 'alternative' Nobel Prize: an award fit for the 21st century

How a rejection by the Nobel Committee spurred Jakob von Uexkull to create the Right Livelihood Award celebrating the solutions helping to ensure a healthy planet and people

On the 5th of December this year, guests filed into the grand old Swedish Parliament for the 32nd Right Livelihood Award (RLA) ceremony. Jakob von Uexkull (pictured below), the Award's founder, gave the opening speech and presented the awards to the four Laureates: all four are from different continents and their work spans the gamut of what can be described as practical activism - promoting human rights in Chad, solar energy in China to natural childbirth and sustainable farming.  Whereas the ceremony for the Nobel Prizes, another Swedish award taking place just days later, had scores of publicity, the RLA ceremony was newspaper feature material rather than headline news.

For founder Jakob, who spoke to the Ecologist the day after the ceremony, the fact that the award exists is a dream fulfilled in itself. ‘I'd grown up in a family where we'd always discuss questions on the situation of the world. I always learned to be interested not just in the questions, but also in the answers. I also learned to think outside the box, and not be afraid to do something unusual,' he says.

'Unusual' is something that runs in Jakob's family. Having been born in Sweden, he lived there until age 11 when his father, a journalist who fled Nazi Germany, took the family back to Hamburg. His maternal grandfather in Sweden was a revolutionary architect and his paternal grandfather was one of the originators of biosemiotics, a radical challenge to conventional biology.

'I wasn't quite sure where I could make an impact, but I was interested in so many things. My question was always, "why do we live with problems we can solve?"'

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