Marilyn Bardet, a Benicia resident known for her roles in various area environmental issues, has been named the recipient of the 13th annual Anthony Grassroots Prize from the Rose Foundation for Communities and the Environment, Executive Director Tom Little said.

The $1,000 Anthony Grassroots Prize is an annual Earth Day award that recognizes civilian-organized environmental stewardship, Little said.

The Rose Foundation accepts donations and seeks grants to award money to community-based organizations, youth leadership and environmental justice programs, he said.

“Last year, the Valero (Benicia) refinery proposed adding a massive crude oil rail terminal to their facility,” said Marion Gee, the foundation’s communications coordinator.

When the refinery proposed bringing 100 rail tanker cars of crude oil daily into Benicia, Bardet formed a new group, Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community, Gee said.

Bardet’s organization joined with neighboring cities and such organizations as the Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based international environmental advocacy organization with California offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Gee said those organizations nominated Bardet for the prize, citing her efforts to stop crude deliveries by rail in Benicia and in other Bay Area cities.

“The Anthony Prize might as well be the Nobel Prize for us small groups working in the trenches,” Bardet said.

“Pulling grassroots activists out of the woodwork and showcasing the amazing things they are getting done in their local communities is a noble, important thing Rose Foundation is doing.

Bardet said people can’t continue “pretending we can go on extracting and burning fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow.” She called it “a dead end with horrific long-range consequences.”

“The most profound challenge we all now face is the accelerating rate of climate change,” she said.

Bardet said her award “honors all the good work being done by so many communities helping (to) bring about the necessary transition to a post-carbon, resilient, sustainable and just economy and culture.”

Juliette Anthony, who founded the Anthony prize, said it also acknowledges Bardet’s “20 years of advocacy” and “her many past achievements. With the threat of hundreds of oil tanker cars headed to Benicia every day loaded with dirty, explosive Bakken crude, we need her now more than ever.”

“It takes a special kind of person to stand up to big oil on behalf of the community,” Anthony added.

She said the foundation recognized that Bardet’s opposition to the Valero Crude-by-Rail Project isn’t the only time she and the Valero Benicia Refinery have been on the opposite sides of an issue.

In 1999, Bardet and a group of other Benicia residents formed the Good Neighbor Steering Committee, after the former Exxon refinery in Benicia was sold to Valero.

In 2008, that committee negotiated a settlement through which the refinery agreed to provide $14 million for environmental projects and establish a community advisory panel for the refinery. The steering committee continues to monitoring refinery activity.

The Valero-Good Neighbor Steering Committee fund is handled like a contract among the refinery, the steering committee, the city of Benicia and Benicia Unified School District. Money can be spent only according to that agreement’s specifications.

Bardet also has campaigned to stop Koch Industries’ proposal for a petroleum coke storage and shipping terminal at the Port of Benicia, Rose Foundation officials noted, and Gee said Bardet “continues to support community efforts to shape a post-carbon Benicia.”

Bardet said she will give the $1,000 prize money to Benicia Community Gardens, another grassroots nonprofit with which she is affiliated.

She is the chairperson of the community gardens, which has sites at Heritage Presbyterian Church and on a vacant lot in the city’s downtown business district, a community supported agriculture (CSA) program and the city’s first community orchard.