Welcome back, everyone! I know it's been a while, so I can only hope some fruit tarts and a pot of Oolong will be worth the wait! That, and some fresh news, of course...
And what news it is. Reading back over it, I can hardly believe it myself. The dirt on Big Oil has been hitting the news more and more over the last year, but four days ago, in Ecuador, a worthy follow-up to the Gulf disaster, and accompanying legal action, attracted the eyes of the world. One of that country's courts, acting on behalf of a 30,000-strong mountain of complaints filed by affected local residents, has just ordered Chevron to pay an 8.6 billion dollar fine for its decades worth of damages to the Ecuadorean rainforest.
But first, some background. For those of you who don't know, this is actually not a new problem: it's a fight that's been going on for eighteen years now, and I've been involved with it peripherally for the last year or so. Here's the meat-and-potatos rundown of the situation: Chevron's been extracting oil in Ecuador, principally in the remote, heavilly-forested and primarily Indigenous-populated Oriente region, since 1964. Over that time, to make the understatement of the month, they have not been responsibly cleaning up the toxic mess that is the inevitable result of any extraction operation. In fact, in their normal practice, they hardly bother to clean them up at all. As far as I am aware, the bare minimum requirement for "safe" disposal of toxic oil waste is dumping it in a lined pit, but with regards to its Amazonian operations our friends at Chevron have consistantly chosen to do away with such expensive and time-consuming First-World best practices and just let Mother Nature take the full brunt of the disposal. That means, in this case, into unlined pits (plastic prices can be such a bitch!) or just straight into the Amazon River herself. Let's remember this is the Amazon we're talking about: you can well imagine what the agregate effects of decades of this behavior have been in a region that gets so much rain. Elevated cancer rates, ruined crops, virtually destroyed cultures and devastated wildlife are only some of the tragedies of "the Amazon's Chernobyl." But hey, who's ever going to complain about it but whiny tree-hugger environmentalists and a bunch of little red people with no political clout, right?
Well, as it turns out...yeah. Big-time yeah. And now, after eighteen years, it may finally be about to pay off, in compensation and in terms of setting a precedent for curbing the venal rapacity of such corporate entities with fanged consequences. Of course, Chevron isn't going to cough it up without spending at least that much fighting against the ruling first--they've pretty much said so. As I read their main argument, they're essentially trying to claim that because the government of Ecuador is of questionable legitimacy, its motivations must be based in fraud--can't trust those darn banana republics to be honest, dontcha know, not like decent, hard-working Americans like us!
That is why I, your humble host, am asking all of you my visitors today to lend your shoulder to the efforts of the Indigenous people of Ecuador and please sign this petition courtesy of the Rainforest Action Network. It's some good, concrete action to take, and this one really might make a difference: the more Chevron knows that the people back home who buy their gas care about this upcoming struggle and are on the side of the abused, the more they'll have to listen. If you buy Chevron gas, I urge you to consider another brand if that is at all a realistic option for you, then write the company and tell them why you switched. They're going to fight this hard, make no mistake, but I believe a victory here will send a crucial message to the world's big polluters. We can do this!
Love, peace, and a better world,
-Ran-Zhen Rui
