Nnimmo Bassey is an architect, director of the Nigeria-based ecological think-tank, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), and member of the steering committee of Oilwatch International, a network resisting the expansion of fossil fuel extraction in the Global South. He chaired Friends of the Earth International (2008-2012), was a co-recipient of the 2010 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” and received the Rafto Human Rights Prize in 2012. In 2024, he received the Wallenburg Medal from the University of Michigan.
Bassey has received honorary doctorate degrees from University of York (UK) in 2019 and from York University (Canada) in 2023.
Bassey’s books include To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and The Climate Crisis in Africa and Oil Politics: Echoes of Ecological War. His poetry collections include: We Thought It Was Oil But It Was Blood (1998), I Will Not Dance to Your Beat (2010), and I See the Invisible (2024).