By Joe Berlinger •
August 24, 2009
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, director of Crude. For more information visit the Crude film website.
During the summer of 2005, a charismatic American environmental lawyer named Steven Donziger knocked on my Manhattan office door. He was running a $27 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and was looking for a filmmaker to tell his clients’ story.
Since I am not known as an environmental filmmaker — my last film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” was a warts-and-all portrait of a heavy metal band in crisis — I was a little surprised that Donziger had sought me out to me to make his pitch.
The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking: From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs he represented alleged that birth defects, leukemia, miscarriages and other ailments were plaguing the people of the region, and the Amazon itself — one of the few places on Earth to survive the last ice age — was gasping for breath under the strain of oil exploitation.
By Kay Sexton •
August 3, 2009
While there are many conservation issues that regularly top the policy bill, such as destruction of habitat, over-hunting, fisheries collapsing and so on, a new concern has recently emerged through scientific studies. Wildlife cancer.
By Katy Farber •
April 15, 2009
In the quest to learn why autism rates in this country are rising dramatically, we have to look at the environmental health of our communties and chemical load that is being placed on our children. I recently wrote over at Non-Toxic Kids about the new link between PVC flooring and autism. Cate Nelson also wrote about this issue for Eco-Child’s Play last week.
By Derek Markham •
February 14, 2009
Over £1 million have been spent already on defense in a case brought against a UK council by families of kids born with webbed hands, or without fingers altogether, even though toxicology experts say that the rate of abnormality in Corby runs 10 times as high as the national average.
The families seek a multi-million pound award for the birth defects, claimed to be caused by a mismanagement of toxic waste dumps from the steel industry in Corby. Mothers say that they were exposed during the 80s and 90s, and the lead solicitor says he has medical evidence that proves the defects are linked to the dumps.
“We have now got medical reports that rule out alternative explanations for what caused the limb deformities in these children.” - Des Collins
By Adam Williams •
December 24, 2008
St. Louis, Mo., rates as one of the dirtiest cities — in the bottom 10 percent — in the United States “in terms of air releases of recognized carcinogens,” according to scorecard.org.
It pains me to have to put more horrifying news about St. Louis out to the world. If anyone not from St. Louis, my home city, thinks anything of this historic, blues-music thrumming, Gateway Arch-boasting, Stan Musial-loving, Mississippi River-guarding city, it’s likely about the city’s position in the annual “most dangerous city” rankings.
By Orion Kubow •
November 11, 2008
Thousands of protesters near the East German town of Gorleben chained themselves to railroad tracks, setup barricades and blocked roads in order to stop a shipment of approximately 123 tonnes of nuclear waste to a nearby waste storage facility. Sources say the protesters managed to delay the arrival of the waste by 12 to 14 hours.
The German government dispatched nearly 16,000 police, including riot police, in order to clear train tracks and roads and remove an estimated 15,000 protesters. Police worked through the night dispersing protesters with truncheons and quelling flaming barricades with fire hoses. One of the most formidable barricades to be cleared was a road block 2 km away from Gorleben, in which protesters parked 37 tractors and constructed two large cement pyramids, chaining four protesters to each pyramid.
By Pem Charnley •
March 24, 2008
Greenpeace recently released their quarterly guide entitled The Guide to Greener Electronics.
What’s the guide all about? In Greenpeace’s words:
“The Greener Electronics Guide is our way of getting the electronics industry to face up to the problem of e-waste. We want manufacturers to get rid of harmful chemicals in their products. We want to see an end to the stories of unprotected child labourers scavenging mountains of cast-off gadgets created by society’s gizmo-loving ways.”
Nintendo came bottom of the league with no public policy on toxics elimination or recycling. And although the guide describes the behaviour of electronics giants regarding toxic waste, energy usage is not taken into account – something I want to discuss here.
Detroit tops the list of most miserable cities in the U.S., according to a new compilation by Forbes. The conclusions are based on traffic, Superfund-site data, crime, weather, income tax rates and unemployment. The list also includes Stockton, California; Flint, Michigan; New York City; and Philadelphia.
Photo courtesy of Gyre via Wikimedia Commons.
