In a quest for economic environmental justice, a lawyer went off the tracks: Soiled Justice
Fucking tragic.
Three years ago a court in Ecuador ruled that the oil giant Chevron bore responsibility for four decades of pollution that destroyed the homes and livelihoods of thousands of indigenous farmers. The company was on the hook for $19 billion—the largest court award ever for environmental damages. Unfortunately, the farmers’ struggle for justice didn’t end there. Chevron refuses to pay up, and in his new book Law of the Jungle, best-selling author Paul M. Barrett tells the story of Steven Donziger, the lawyer who pursued the case against the oil company. Donziger’s determination to hold the polluters accountable—by any means necessary—led a U.S. federal judge to conclude last spring that the case was marred by fraud and corruption.
The U.S. ruling doesn’t nullify the findings or fines set by the Ecuador court, but it could help shield Chevron from further legal challenges. I recently spoke to Barrett about what he thinks went wrong in this high-profile case that made both sides look bad—and left Ecuador’s indigenous communities in the muck (again).
usan Cosier: Who’s responsible for the oily mess in Ecuador?
Paul Barrett: Texaco, operating as a contractor in partnership with the government of Ecuador, worked in that country from the ’60s through the early 1990s. And it operated in a way that I think any clear-thinking person in or outside of the oil industry would describe as irresponsible today. [As the New York Times puts it, the lawsuit claims Texaco “spilled millions of gallons of toxic wastewater into waters of the Ecuadorean Amazon … and left unlined waste pits filled with toxic sludge, ruining the lives and culture of several indigenous groups.”]
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http://www.onearth.org/articles/2014/09/how-a-20-year-long-lawsuit-to-clean-up-the-rainforest-made-everyone-look-dirty