UW grad student from Uganda gets $100,000 Bullitt Environmental Prize



less Elephants need defenders, advocates who can stave off conflicts with humans. With its $100,000 Bullitt Environmental Prize, the Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation is hoping UW graduate student Carol Bogezi plays that role in Uganda. Elephants need defenders, advocates who can stave off conflicts with humans. With its $100,000 Bullitt Environmental Prize, the Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation is hoping UW graduate student Carol Bogezi ... more Photo: Brad Wilson, Getty Images Photo: Brad Wilson, Getty Images Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close UW grad student from Uganda gets $100,000 Bullitt Environmental Prize 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

She hails from Uganda, but Carol Bogezi is focusing her University of Washington doctoral work on human-animal conflicts in the Pacific Northwest, such as wolves repopulating the Cascades and Kettle Range.

Bogezi is hoping to apply that knowledge in her East Africa homeland, with such objectives in mind as securing elephant corridors as tribes repopulate parts of northern Uganda ravaged by civil war.

"This was an opportunity to work with another species, and watch another system," Bogezi said on Monday. "A lot of environmental ideas have started here . . . There are dimensions I want to take back."

She will have resources to pursue research. Bogezi is winner of the 2016 Bullitt Environmental Prize, and with it a two-year, $100,000 stipend.

The prize, a work of the Bullitt Foundation, is designed more to spur future achievement than reward past work. Its recipients are recognized for overcoming obstacles and demonstrating potential to become effective defenders and advocates of the environment.

"We are going to have a very different environmental movement in 20 years," Denis Hayes, president of the Bullitt Foundation, said on Monday.

Hayes is, frankly, wondering if lessons learned from wolves and men, from subdivisions encroaching on cougar habitat, can be applied in a land of elephants and crocodiles and powerful, feared cat carnivores.

Bogezi talks about what she calls "blank slates of space," villages that were "re-wilded" during 20 years of civil war, with more vegetation and wildlife reestablished, "people coming back from war" and "everyone trying to grab as much land as possible."

Bogezi has already overcome obstacles to be here, under a Beinecke Africa Conservation Scholarship sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society.