"The Great Law of Peace" is the constitution of the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations Confederacy of the Iroquois. When a chief of the Haudenosaunee takes on his tribal duties, he recites an oath promising to consider in all his future decisions and actions the well-being of the coming seven generations "whose unborn faces are yet beneath the ground. For they are watching us."

We've lost the wisdom of indigenous cultures -- can hardly look after our biospheres, ourselves. Fifty-odd years of nuclear madness has set into motion a terrible engine of perpetual destruction. Broad sweeps of land have been made inhabitable. No contaminated groundwater system can be restored. No cloud sewn with cancer can be called back. No clean-up technology can eliminate radionuclides or heavy metals from the earth. For the next few hundreds of centuries, sites housing toxic radioactive wastes will demand careful monitoring and maintenance. We've passed along to the next few thousand generations a mortgage demanding mega-billions.

And what will people be like in a mere 10,000 years, three short baby-steps along the course of plutonium's radioactive half-life? How shall we communicate with them? What set of signs shall we employ to guarantee their safeguard from the curse of our radioactive legacy? How can we mediate the surety that stored here is certain death? That here no trespass is forgiven? That all who enter here are lost? What shall the de facto final memorial to our lost civilization look like?

The recipients of the Nuclear-Free Future Award are people who refuse to gamble with the lives of the unborn. These are people who champion the vision of a sustainable art of living, people who believe in responsible ecological thinking and the enlightened utilization of safe technologies. Tonight we honor here in Salzburg four shining heroes of the dark Nuclear Age.

--Craig Reishus

Yvonne Margarula is the spokeswoman of the Mirrar Gundjehmi, a small Aboriginal clan in Northern Australia whose traditional land is being threatened by a uranium mining giant. The Mirrar Gundjehmi are struggling to retain their land at Jabaluka, a site lying within Kakadu National Park which UNESCO has declared "World Heritage". Seventy percent of the Australians are behind the Mirrar.

Through his unflagging, knowledgeable activism, this professor of biology has managed to change Argentinean pro or don't-know nuclear public opinion to (a knowing) con, fomenting thereby from the grassroots level government energy policy change. Dr. Montenegro's informed illuminations of the nuclear industry's dark and juggled figures have so turned the tide of Argentinean public opinion that, currently, it is indeed "heavy water" in which the pro-nuclear lobby must swim.

With his network of R&D partners and engineering and manufacturing companies in India and Switerland, Dr. Sharan builds decentralised power stations based on a biomass gasifier that runs an engine to provide energy. Designed for conditions in rural India (Bangalore), that same technology, slightly modified, has also been put into operation in Switzerland (Chatel-St-Denis). It's something which we don't witness often: technology transfer in reverse -- from South to North. Dr. Hari Sharan's slogan: "Renewables for Peace".

Throughout Canada this woman is honored as the "Grandmother of the Anti-Nuclear Movement". Maisie's kittenish, bespectacled smile belies her intense dedication to making the world a safer place for her children, grandchildren, and the coming generations.

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