Previously Pristine

The reason that a lot of these issues aren't well suited to the major media is because they unfold over long periods of time -- and while the dramatic information is often staggering, daily news is based on the new and on the changing in time of a course of events.

Okay -- so this morning I came across a really big story -- a really little story about a really big story.

Report Says Chevron Owes Billions for Ecuadorean Pollution

It's a Reuters article in the Times business section. And in a lawsuit that began in the early 1990s, there has just been a bit of amazing "independent expert" testimony. (I put that phrase in quotes not to cast doubt on it -- simply to say that I am not making the claim. I don't know enough to -- and Chevron is claiming bias. I tend to believe that it is the report is both independent and expert -- for what it's worth.)

"An independent environmental expert told a court in Ecuador that the oil company Chevron should pay $7 billion to $16 billion in compensation for environmental damage in the country."

According to a 2005 column in the Times:

"The company is accused of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste, over a period of 20 years, into the soil and water of a previously pristine section of the Amazon rain forest.

According to a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of some 30,000 impoverished residents of the rain forest, this massive, long-term pollution has ruined portions of the jungle, contaminated drinking water, sickened livestock, driven off wildlife and threatened the very survival of the indigenous tribes, which have been plagued with serious illnesses, including a variety of cancers."

From the ChevronToxico activist website

It's kind of hard to get a lot of information on the situation -- I read about 5 articles this morning -- primarily from the Times and spanning the last 28 years. I read parts of a 20 page piece from the above mentioned website -- while it was pretty well written, it's very hard to decipher what you read on activist websites -- just as it is hard to read company websites. When people write with an agenda it is difficult to determine the truth of the matter.

Trick photography and tampering aside, the beauty of photography is that it simply offers observations. (Of course, that statement is extremely loaded... and I could and have gone off on that subject for hours -- but let's just say for the sake of argument it's true enough for now.)


Sara Dalton The New York Times

On the Chevron website there is a press release from last November -- a court in California dismissed claims against the company that the toxic waste had caused cancer -- the dismisal was based on the statute of limitations.

Who flaunts that?

Five years ago the Times ran an article about the suit which started this way:

"When René Arévalo draws water from his well, it is brown and gummy, requiring him to run it through a makeshift filtering system outside his wood-plank home in the jungle outside this town.

Like thousands of other people here, he suspects the water was fouled by the waste an American oil company dumped across miles of Amazonia in its 20 years of operations. After all, he and his five children live across from a separation plant once operated by a Texaco affiliate, their house built on a mound of dirt that covered a pit where wastewater was dumped.

"If you dig here just a meter deep, you hit oil," Mr. Arévalo said, moments after probing into the dirt outside his house to show visitors the gooey slime. "The water is contaminated, very contaminated. But we drink it. What else can we do?"

Now, about 30,000 people affected by the waste are hoping that a lawsuit, accusing ChevronTexaco of dumping 18.5 billion gallons of waste into open, unlined pits, will lead to a full-scale cleanup. This week, the California-based company, an energy giant created in 2001 when Chevron merged with Texaco, went on trial here in a case that, if successful for the plaintiffs, could establish a new way for American companies to be held accountable for environmental degradation in foreign countries."

Or the opposite -- on has to suppose...

When I was much younger -- maybe 15 years ago -- I told a therapist that I was beginning to get a little obsessed with having to prove things. She said that was fine -- as long as I didn't make a career out of it... I said... ummm... I am a documentary photographer.

Keep Your Mouth Shut

I started out today reading about -- trying to figure out how to write about -- a rather discouraging court case.

Appeals Court Overturns EPA on Mercury Emissions By Sandy Bauers, The Philadelphia Inquirer Feb. 8--A federal appeals court ruled today that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wrongly exempted power plants from curtailing mercury emissions, which means the agency must now develop new rules to fight mercury pollution.

According to the article, the EPA was set to impose some regulations, the exemptions within the new law were too great to allow. It seems that energy producing plants were exempt from the legislation. For one thing, when coal is refined, mercury is released as a vapor.

Mercury becomes airborne when coal is burned. Once it falls into waterways, it becomes methylmercury, which is more toxic and works its way through the food chain into fish. It can cause nervous-system damage in a developing fetus and young children.

...

"Ironically, with their aggressive litigation posture, the environmental community and their state allies have again caused uncertainty and delay in regulating mercury," said Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council. The EPA "essentially must return to the drawing board in developing a new mercury rule," he said.

In college I wrote about the propaganda art of the Soviet Union -- how it communicated strength and power. Dictatorships need to communicate this way to keep order among the masses.



Keep your mouth shut!
N. Vatolina, N. Denisov, 1941

Strength and power and fear.
A few months ago I was tired of listening to myself talk. I think today I'm tired of listening to everyone else talk. The language of propaganda seems to attempt to elicit emotion -- but seems today to me to be more an imposer of powerlessness...

This from George Bush Sr. -- on my birthday in 1988:

Vice President Bush, campaigning in the Northwest, has been urging greater domestic oil production and arguing that it can be achieved without endangering the environment.

For the end of this post I wanted to find a quote where George Bush Jr. said something nice about the environment, but I couldn't find one.

Percentage of Fault Allocated

I couldn't even look at this at a normal hour today -- I'm at a bit of a loss, feeling like I've stumbled into some sort of gap in the project and also my own history that I'm not sure how to handle...

Anyway, I started looking through the NY Times cross referencing Brooklyn and lung disease. The thing is, I'm not really versed in computer assisted reporting, and the kind of project about Brooklyn I'm contemplating... well... I'm not sure I'm up for it.

February 26, 2007 The violinist and composer Leroy Jenkins, one of the pre-eminent musicians of 1970s free jazz, who worked on and around the lines between jazz and classical music, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 74 and lived in Brooklyn.

Larry Fink, 2005

Leroy Jenkins playing with the reunited Revolutionary Ensemble.

The cause was complications of lung cancer, said his wife, Linda Harris.

link

*

Donald M. Halperin, a former New York state senator who represented shorefront neighborhoods of Brooklyn for 23 years and then served briefly as Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's housing commissioner, died on Monday in Brooklyn. He was 60.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Brenda Halperin.
link

*

COMPANY NEWS; CIGARETTE MAKER FOUND PARTLY RESPONSIBLE IN MAN'S DEATH
Published: December 19, 2003
link
A New York jury said yesterday that Brown & Williamson, the maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes, was partly responsible for a Brooklyn man's death from lung cancer. A six-person jury at New York Supreme Court in Brooklyn said the man, Harry Frankson, who smoked cigarettes for more than 40 years, was 50 percent at fault for his illness, while British American Tobacco, which has operated in the United States as Brown & Williamson, and other defendants held the rest of the blame. The case was brought by Gladys Frankson, Mr. Frankson's widow. The jury will reconvene on Jan. 7 to determine punitive damages. It awarded the plaintiff $350,000 in damages, which will be reduced by half because of the percentage of fault allocated to the plaintiff. The company said it expected the case to be reversed eventually.

I've talked a lot over these last few months about responsibility --
I think that cigarette companies do have a responsibility for selling -- making money on -- administering toxins. Tobacco is one of the only ingestible carcinogens still for sale in this country --
People also have a responsibility - that of choice and free will...

The Brooklyn spill happened, was not cleaned up and was not revealed. If the worse case scenario were true in, and lung disease skyrocketed in Green Point -- is still skyrocketing -- what does that mean? And to smokers? Would the oil companies then owe a percentage of the fault of death? Would cigarette companies be off the hook?

I still just can't quite get my mind around it --
the biggest oil spill in the country --
unnoticed
unattended to...
Could you examine the birds of Brooklyn? Are there any birds left in Brooklyn?

Out the kitchen window in the apartment where my father grew up you could see the tomato plants in the back few feet of yard...
food grown of toxic soil...
permeated
ingested.

Untitled

A few days ago I wrote about a man suing a defense company for endangering his life and the lives of his colleagues (many of whom are dead) from exposure to toxic waste. Today I cam across a somewhat similar article -- only the workers were scuba divers, and the accused is the Norwegian government.

OSLO, Norway (AP) -- A group of deep sea divers sued the government Monday, saying that working at extreme depths in the early years of Norway's offshore oil boom ruined their health and violated their human rights.

The so-called pioneer divers were sent to extreme, sometimes experimental depths while working on offshore oil installations in the 1970s and 1980s, according to a government commission that studied the case.

It's dark and quiet and lacking of sleep on the couch in my living room this early morning. I'm thinking about responsibility... how responsible are we to each other -- how responsible are we to ourselves... are we responsible for what we do to each other? Gown ups -- employers -- lovers -- cohabitants of earth...

The divers have often been called the forgotten victims of an industry that has made Norway a major oil exporter and one of the world's richest countries.

In his opening remarks, attorney Marius Reikeraas said some of the divers were sent to depths of 1,300 feet as recently as 2002. The safe limit is now set at 590 feet.

Is responsibility really addressed by punitive damages? By shame? When the Exxon case comes to the supreme court the question will be whether or not the court should clear all damages awarded against the company. Does this help or hurt anyone? I think it may simply all live in the realm of the dollar -- the realm through which nothing of real value is addressed.

These are lives. This is the earth. We are pushing ourselves to extremes intolerable to human life.

Maybe these cases are what we need to cripple the industry -- like the smoking industry -- come to think of it, has the smoking industry been crippled at all? Maybe it's a "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." The profits are the spoils and the cause of the danger and the use of people and the land -- so all that we can do is take away profits.

Still, it seems like there must be some other way to deal with ourselves and the land and the place we find ourselves in.

At the risk of sounding entirely heartless and cruel, wouldn't experienced divers know that what they were doing was entirely unsafe? Why did they do it, then? Was it money or excitement? Are we really children to our paternal bosses? Are we really incapable of extricating ourselves from anything we find ourselves in -- a situation by which we are endangered? Not to say that a family crippled by the loss of a father in a job which found oil should not be supported by the company/government which benefited -- certainly they should be. But it feels like something else is being requested -- some implication of blame it really seems to me like we all share...

What are the tools of manipulation? Lies, Bribes, Bullying... Information is withheld. Riches are offered -- be them monetary, physical or psychic...

Months ago I went on a Buddhist retreat based around the prayers and principles of loving kindness meditation. My 5-year-old son says the prayer every night. There are monks in the mountains of Tibet doing the same -- praying for the peace of the world.

May all beings everywhere be safe. May all beings everywhere be happy. May all beings everywhere be healthy. May all beings everywhere live in ease.