S1 / E2 The Largest Environmental Disaster You've Never Heard Of

The Marianne Williamson Podcast

Marianne Williamson

News, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2020

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Referred to as the "Amazon Chernobyl," it's the largest environmental disaster that you've probably never heard of… Billions of gallons of toxic waste dumped into the Amazon by American oil company Texaco (now Chevron), leaving indigenous Ecuadorians living in a sea of pollution.

Attorney & environmental activist Steven Donziger took on the behemoth, winning a multi-BILLION dollar settlement for the indigenous Ecuadorians.

Then the unthinkable happened. Refusing to accept responsibility, Chevron has chosen to go on a years-long attack against Donziger rather than cleaning up the environmental mess it created. Seeking to destroy him personally and professionally, as well as intimidate any other human rights or environmental activists who would come to his defense, Chevron has used legal maneuvering to go so far as to strip Donziger of his passport, freeze his assets, and have him placed under house arrest where he's been for more than a year.

Marianne sits down with Steven for a wide-ranging conversation about the disaster in Ecuador, his ordeal and how a corporation can easily twist the judicial system to serve its own needs at the expense of the people. His trial is coming up within days and in a very real sense it pertains to us all.

Associate Director of Amazon watch, Paul Paz Y Miño, also joins the show to explain the background of the disaster and Steven's case.

Visit MakeChevronCleanup.com to learn more about the case, and please consider contributing to Mr. Donziger's legal fund at DonzigerDefense.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everybody. Our conversation today involves a legal case between a human rights environmental
0:20.9	activist lawyer named Stephen Danterger and the oil giant Chevron. It's a story that
0:26.6	began early in the 1960s when then, Texaco created what has been called an Amazon Chernobyl. What
0:34.1	they did was that they dumped 16 billion gallons of wastewater into rivers and pits. They had had
0:40.0	an agreement with the Ecuadoran government that allowed them to drill for oil and they applied
0:45.2	none of the protections, the environmental protections that were made legal in the United States.
0:49.8	What this has done is created the largest environmental oil disaster anywhere in the world and
0:56.6	yet you might not have heard about it because it has been under reported and somehow the story has
1:01.8	been suppressed. It has been suppressed because when Stephen Danterger and other environmental lawyers came
1:07.6	to the aid and to the defense of the indigenous tribes in Ecuador who have suffered as they have
1:13.4	suffered because of this horrible environmental disaster, what ultimately happened was that
1:18.6	Chevron came against them and Chevron is now doing everything they can and have been doing
1:26.4	so to destroy the career of this man in order to have a chilling effect on the environmental movement,
1:32.9	on any journalists, any activists or any lawyers who in any way will try to defend the people of
1:39.5	Latin America or anywhere else for that matter who have been harmed by the activities of these oil
1:44.6	companies. The story is important. My first guest today is Paul Paz Emino who is the Associate Director of
1:51.3	Amazon Watch. These were his words. It should be nothing short of terrifying for any activists
1:57.2	challenging corporate power and the oil industry in the United States. Chevron has made it clear there
2:03.5	is no amount of money that's too much to spend on this case. They will stop at nothing. They will stop
2:10.1	at nothing not to clean up the disaster but instead to demonize and destroy anyone who tries to
2:18.3	hold them accountable. Hi my first guest today is Paul Paz Emino and he's the Associate Director of
2:24.3	Amazon Watch and I have invited Paul to give us a kind of thumbnail sketch what has happened here.
	...

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