Colleen Cowgill's blog

Last week, a local Arakan paper released startling photos of thousands of dead fish along the Coast of Kyauk Phyu Township in Burma. While it’s not definitive what caused such massive amounts of fish to die, the proximity of the dead fish to China’s oil and gas pipeline projects and claims by locals that Chinese companies are blasting coral reefs with dynamite — a technique used to create gravel for the construction of seaports and oil and gas pipelines and to ease access for large ships — suggests the two might are connected. Since the blasts began occurring in 2009, local residents have witnessed an increasing scarcity of fish, as well as mass deaths of other aquatic animals such as turtles and prawns.

Since late 2009, China has been constructing oil and gas pipelines, as well as seaports, in the Arakan state without consent or consultations from the local people. Daewoo international is also constructing a natural gas terminal and offshore gas platforms in the area. The projects began without transparent environmental and social impact assessments, and little information has been available on the potential impacts to the fragile ecosystem, including mangrove forests and coral reefs that are critical to the local fishing industry, a primary means of survival for many local communities. On top of this, local authorities have placed restrictions on fishing activities in the area, further threatening local livelihoods.

Dead fish in Arakan state

A few weeks ago, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposed new rules for energy companies involved in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, on federal and tribal lands. The new rules include new regulations on reporting, and require companies to obtain approval before drilling. In addition, the rules require that companies disclose the toxic chemicals they use in the process – but only after the drilling is complete. Obviously, communities who are concerned about the effect of toxic chemicals on their groundwater would much prefer to see this information before drilling starts.

Fracking is a natural gas drilling technique, popular in the United States and, increasingly, abroad, which relies on the injection of large volumes of chemical cocktails, along with water, into the earth. The injection causes fractures in deep layers of rock, which allows otherwise unattainable reserves of oil and natural gas to be extracted. Communities and environmental advocates are concerned about the public health and environmental impacts of fracking, which were examined in the documentaries Gasland and Split Estate and are increasingly making headlines.

The BLM’s proposed rule on disclosure has disappointed environmentalists. An earlier draft of the rules, leaked to the media, had proposed that companies disclose their use of chemicals 30 days before beginning a project. The proposed rules were softened after closed-door meetings at the White House with oil and gas industry lobbyists and individual corporations, including ExxonMobil, XTO Energy, Apace, and Samson Resources, who were concerned that the paperwork involved with prior disclosure would slow down the process and reveal their trade secrets.

The administration's change to the proposed rule is a concession to industry concerns for greater and faster output, in spite of communities’ concerns for the safety of their groundwater. The proposed rules are currently open for public comment.

Annie Leonard, blogging on the Huffington Post, recently asked her readers to view themselves as citizens first, not simply as consumers, and to push their governments to pass stronger regulations to protect human rights and the environment. Corporations, she argues, manufacture needs that don’t really exist, then blame consumer demand when their products are found to have been made using morally questionable practices. Obviously, consumers should choose sustainable products over those made using child labor, toxic chemicals, and other destructive actions, but the real changes won’t happen in the checkout line. The impact of a conscientous consumer, while not insignificant, is a fraction of the potential impact of a politically engaged citizen. Across-the-board changes to corporate practices will require us as citizens to demand sound regulations to curb corporate abuses of human rights and the environment.

"The problem with believing the best way to make change is by voting with our pocketbooks is that it defines us as consumers, not citizens. It implies that the most important choices are made in the supermarket aisles rather than in the halls of government and corporate towers."

So how does this citizen/consumer question tie into our work here at EarthRights? 

The cases we bring against corporations concern human rights abuses that have already occurred. In this sense, they are analogous to a consumer boycott: we learn about abuses that have already happened, and we take action to penalize the corporation for that abuse and bring justice to the affected community. Of course, we hope that the whole industry will take notice and adjust their practices, deterring all manner of abuses worldwide, but in the end we’re targetting one company at a time, over a single set of abuses, with cases that last decades and may or may not result in justice or meaningful change.

Last week I had the privilege of attending a showing of Waking the Green Tiger: A Green Movement Rises in China, a documentary film about the environmental movement in China, focusing on protests surrounding the building of a dam on the Tiger Leaping Gorge, on the Upper Yangtze River in southwestern China.

The film tells the story of the movement through the eyes of activists, locals, journalists, and the former director of China’s Environmental Protection Agency, Qu Geping. Gary Marcuse, the director and producer of the film, did an outstanding job capturing both the future potential and the history of environmentalism in China, including archival footage from the reign of Chairman Mao.

Chairman Mao came to power with dramatic ideas for propelling development, convinced that man must conquer nature. Archival footage shows crowds of Chinese citizens being mobilized to bang pots, wave red banners, and make other forms of ruckus to force sparrows to fly all day. Fields where the birds might find refuge were laced with poisons, a trap leading to an agonizing death. The effort, however, would backfire: without sparrows to eat them, small insects thrived and destroyed millions of acres of crops, contributing to a decade-long famine and the deaths of tens of millions of people.

It wasn’t until 2004, with the passage of a new environmental law that allowed citizens to take part in government decisions, that China’s environmental movement really took hold. It was in this context that protests against the Tiger Leaping Gorge dam, and other dams along the Nu and Yangtze rivers, took place.

Walk into your nearest Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s store and you may find that the purportedly environmentally and socially conscious chains are selling Chiquita bananas. Why is this surprising? Two concerns come to mind, one specific to Chiquita and the other a more general concern about large-scale banana production.

In 2007, Chiquita pled guilty to the charge of giving funds and other forms of assistance to paramilitary and rebel groups in Columbia from 1997-2004. One of the groups was recognized by the U.S. as a terrorist group in September 2001 -- three years before Chiquita stopped its payments. In that case, Chiquita agreed to pay a $25 million dollar, but they aren’t out of the woods yet: Columbian families represented by ERI and other counsel are still filing suit against the corporation for the deaths of relatives killed by Chiquita funded terrorists.

A second concern is the use of harmful pesticides on large banana plantations that stretch from Central to South America. In order to ensure that bananas reach the U.S. blemish free and perfect looking, large commercial growers spray their plantations with one of the highest pesticide loads compared to other tropical crops. The banana’s thick peel protects consumers from these pesticides, but they nonetheless pose serious risks to the workers and villagers where the crops are grown.

The 2012 Summer Olympics in London are fast approaching, and protests recently broke out in both London and India, calling for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to drop Dow Chemical Company as a sponsor. The growing opposition to Dow’s sponsorship comes from individuals and a host of organizations including Amnesty International, Action Aid, and the Indian Olympic Association, and stems from Dow’s links to one of the worst industrial catastrophes in history.

On December 3, 1984, a methyl isocyanate gas leak at an American-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India killed over 5,000 people and exposed thousands more to harmful chemicals with devastating long-term health impacts. While the company initially tried to deflect any responsibility for the accident, in 1989 Dow reached a settlement with the Indian Government to pay $470 million in compensation. Dow representatives have told the media that their hands are completely clean, because the settlement closed the Bhopal matter years before Dow had even acquired Union Carbide.

However, that settlement is just one piece of the puzzle, and when Dow purchased Union Carbide in 2001 they inherited a number of pending civil and criminal cases in both India and the United States, including Sahu v. Union Carbide, a case in which ERI is co-counsel. In 1994, a decade after the original spill, Union Carbide abandoned the plant in Bhopal, leaving behind a toxic mess of chemicals that continued to leak into the surrounding water supply. In the Sahu case, residents of Bhopal have filed suit against Union Carbide over the health and enivonmental impacts of this contamination.