In Baltimore, 20-year-old Destiny Watford has become one of the youngest winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize in the award’s history for organizing to stop a trash incinerator from being built in Baltimore’s Curtis Bay neighborhood, which already has the worst air pollution in the city. She began the campaign when she was only 17 years old.

Destiny Watford: “I’ve always been a bit shy. But when I joined the group, I was really challenged to come out of that comfort zone. And I went up to this man’s door, and I told him about the incinerator. He just said, 'What you kids are doing is pointless; Curtis Bay is and always will be a dumping ground, and you're not going to change that.’ And it was a disheartening moment, but it also lit this sort of fire.”

Other 2016 winners of the prestigious environmental prize include a Slovak lawyer who shut down a toxic waste dump, a Cambodian activist who went undercover to expose illegal logging, a Puerto Rican who established a new nature reserve on the island, a Tanzanian man who developed a new way to grant land titles to indigenous communities rather than to individuals, and a Peruvian farmer who fought a gold and copper mine from taking her land.