Last night, four Indigenous and community leaders from Ecuador arrived in very steamy New Orleans to share their experiences with the long-term impacts of oil pollution with communities dealing with the tragic BP oil spill that continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico.
As the Chevron in Ecuador blog reports:
Four very different people arrived last night in New Orleans on a late flight from Quito, Ecuador. One is a quiet but fierce 71-year-old grandmother with 27 grandchildren. Another is a gentle, soft-spoken man who is a leader of his Indigenous tribe from the Amazon. Another is a serious and sober man who has won worldwide acclaim for his unique work. And the last is another Indigenous man from the Amazon, who is more sharp-tongued than his traveling companion, but shares his good humor and dignified demeanor.
The four Indigenous and community leaders from Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest are on the front-lines of the nearly two-decade struggle to demand oil giant Chevron clean up the massive contaminate the company left behind in their lands. I’ve written profiles of two of them here before; Cofan leader Emergildo Criollo was in the U.S. in early March to help deliver 350,000 letters of support for cleanup in Ecuador to new Chevron CEO John Watson and campesina activist Mariana Jimenez was in Houston just a few weeks ago to speak out at Chevron’s 2010 shareholder meeting.
Continue reading
Much as Big Oil would like us to believe they are all operating within the law and to the benefit of the people, time and time again we are made aware of the enormous sacrifices made by communities around the globe in order to feed the world's obssession with oil and its products. This might be acceptable if there were no serious calamities to speak about, but instead, like broken records the same tune is dished out to our increasingly benumbed aural orifices on the quality of technology utilised by the industry. Unfortunately, there is no quality about these industries' technologies, and the short road for the fast buck is the only road to be travelled, the profits speak for themselves. I will reiterate, management and shareholders must be held accountable for the travesties that have occurred in their search for greater profits. There can be no profits when people are denied their homes, the health of their families and the destruction of their vital environments. It is time for the message to get through, that ecoterrorism as practised by Big Oil is driving the planet to extinction, and full compensation to the people affected and full regeneration of the environments decapitated is essential. To label management and shareholders as just bloody-minded and greedy is too generous, these people are daily murdering people by their actions for a fistfull of dollars, and should be facing court for their deadly, daily malevolence...........beeden
No comments:
Post a Comment