Nicanor Perlas

Member, Mikhail Gorbachev’s Commission on Globalization

He is also the co-founder and spokesperson of Karangalan which hosted a series of national conferences highlighting important global and national innovations and achievements by Filipinos in many disciplines and fields. Karangalan aims to stimulate the creation of a visionary Philippines. The 1st National Conference and Festival on “Mobilizing Excellence for Creating a Visionary Philippines” was January 21–23, 2005 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, in partnership with over 40 organizations and networks.

On June 17, 2009, Nicanor Perlas announced his intentions to become one of the candidates for the Philippine Presidential Elections in May 2010. He announced this during a press conference at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani in Quezon City. He was a Philippine presidential aspirant for the 2010 presidential elections but lost to Liberal Party's President Benigno S. Aquino III.

Perlas was the chief facilitator and co-founder of the ABS-CBN "Forum on the Filipino Future", held on December 16, 2004. He was Chairman, Adviser on Strategy and Integral Sustainable Development, and Member, Board of Directors, LifeBank, and Board of Trustees of Lifebank Foundation, both of which help close to 240,000 economically poor families through microfinance.

In 2003, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for his work as an environmental activist.

Creative Member, Club of Budapest, Recognized as “highly creative innovators for a social and ecological sustainable world and a culture of peace”. Agenda 21 is a program of action into the 21st century for bringing the Earth into a sustainable future. It was adopted by the participating governments of the world in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), otherwise known as the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 1992.

In the mid-1990s he was one of two technical writers of Philippine Agenda 21 or PA21, which is a creative response to the challenges of elite globalization. He was one of the official civil society delegates from the Philippines at the Earth Summit in Rio. It was out of this experience, among others, that he helped shape the process and substance of PA21. Having emerged from more than 26 regional and national consultations, PA21 was characterized by the former Philippine president as the most consultative policy document in post-martial law Philippines. PA21 is still officially the blueprint for sustainable development in the Philippines, although presently marginalized by the current controversial government of the Philippines.

In parallel with these efforts, Perlas pioneered the introduction of large scale commercial organic and biodynamic agriculture in many provinces in the Philippines. All these efforts were the fruition of early advocacies in sustainable agriculture when he was still an agricultural journalist and columnist at the Modern Agriculture and Industry-Asia, where he pioneered the first monthly articles on ecological agriculture in the Asian context. Together with colleagues at the International Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture or IASA, he coined the term sustainable agriculture in 1983, a term which has received wide use and currency until today.

Perlas pursued his undergraduate studies at the College of Agriculture in Xavier University - Ateneo de Cagayan. With the highest honors, he graduated Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, major in Agronomy and minor in Agricultural Economics in the said educational institution in 1972. He would then seek to pursue his master's studies at the University of the Philippines Los Baños, but would soon be forced to abandon his studies after being involved in the opposition of the Bataan nuclear power plant under the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos.

Perlas was the son of Jesus C. Perlas, Sr. and Anunciacion M. Pineda. He finished his elementary education at the Ateneo de Manila University in 1964 and finished his secondary education in the same school in 1968. While spending his high school years at the Ateneo, he was the Athlete of the Year and the recipient of the Silver Medal of the school's Math and Science Club in 1968.

Nicanor Jesús "Nick/Nicky" Pineda Perlas III (born January 10, 1950 in Manila, Philippines) is a Filipino activist and a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award in 2003.

As a technical writer and key formulator of Philippine Agenda 21, as well as co-chair for the Civil Society of the Philippine Council for Sustainable Development, Office of the President of the Philippines, Perlas was invited to attend several UN meetings including the UN General Assembly on Sustainable Development, UNGASS and the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, 6th Session, as Technical Adviser to the Philippine Delegation to the UN.