In my view, COP26 (and those before and ahead), is a synergy fest of mostly male (photo below of the leaders attending) corruption, greed and circuitous chatter between gov’ts, industry and NGOs to con the masses into thinking emissions are being reduced while the patriarchy gives industry more public money to produce more oil and gas and pollution under guise of “clean” tech like frac’ing, carbon capture, hydrogen, etc.
The American Petroleum Institute gloats about the new $24Billion(US) stolen by politicians to give to the oil and gas industry via “the law” (this time, the infrastructure bill, more below).
Nothing will improve until the patriarchy (aptly visualized in the COP26 leadership photo) is replaced with equal representation. Then, perhaps, there will be fair work towards accessible justice, women’s right to our own bodies and futures (which must include not being raped repeatedly with police, judges and politicians enabling the rapists while punishing and or re-victimizing those of us raped), birth control, education, and family planning to bring the massive reductions needed in human population and consumption. Nothing else will save humanity and the millions of other species being decimated in our growing lust for more, not even the billionaire penises ejaculating their egos, greed and pollution in space.
Synergy is evil, controlled by oil and gas companies and their friendly judges, lawyers, PR & propaganda firms, NGOs and complicit regulators and politicians. Synergy, i.e. COP26, makes sure the rich are allowed to keep raping us and the environment to rake in ever more billions in profits.
Synergy feeds greed and ego with much yak to con communities into allowing frac’ing (the magic “bridge” to “clean” the environment pimped by NGOs for industry); more frac’ing (carbon sequestration will contaminate and harm more than frac’ing has or will); yet more frac’ing (hydrogen will need more frac’d methane and will increase oil and gas pollution); and even more frac’ing (to feed LNG – if we give the rich hundreds of billions of public dollars to pay for it).
Communities need to create small energy locally, that communities control and distribute but the rich will never allow that to happen because there would be no mega profits raped out for a tiny few.
PS It’s not $10/day daycare, it’s taxpayer-funded bribery to feed greed for more baby making, which is the last thing humanity needs, but which makes corporations (especially the richest in the world, the catholic church), more money (which is the last thing the rich need).
***
TESTIMONY OF THE TREE
For a hundred years I breathe and live, the flower of beauty and the bread of kindness. I am your friendly shade in the noonday heat of summer, and I stand pencilled against the winter twilight, a silhouette for dreams. At dawning in the spring I am filled with song, the host to a thousand birds, and I decorate the autumn with pageantry and colour.
Then comes the woodsman with his axe.
And still I serve.
I am the timber that builds your boat; the rafters of your cathedrals; the choirstalls of your church enriched by the magic of the carver’s fingers. I am the beam that holds your house; the door of your homestead, and the lintel too. I am the handle of your hoe; the wood of your cradle; the bed on which you lie; the board of your table and the board for your bread.
When I am living, harm me not.
When I am dead, respect me and use me kindly.
A trembling aspen (my favourite tree) I planted in front of my kitchen window. It recently died and had to be cut down. Aspen do not tolerate extreme heat. The gold finches mostly vanished during the frac invasion by Encana/Ovintiv.
***
In my view, the patriarchy is destroying everything needed to sustain human life on earth. How quickly will we wipe out the trees and frac away all safe water permanently?
***
Two planets are talking to each other.
One looks like a beautiful blue marble and the other a dirty brown ball.
“What on earth happened to you?” the beautiful planet asks the brown one.
“I have Homo sapiens,” answers the brown planet.
“Don’t worry,” says the blue planet. “They don’t last long.”
***
Oil, gas sector gets boost from infrastructure bill Nov 9, 2021, API in Upstream
The $1 trillion infrastructure bill that cleared the House of Representatives on Friday includes $4.7 billion for plugging abandoned wells, $9.5 billion for hydrogen development and more than $10 billion for carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies. “We are encouraged that the Senate’s proposal recognizes the importance of energy infrastructure for American families and businesses,” said American Petroleum Institute Senior Vice President of Policy, Economics and Regulatory Affairs Frank Macchiarola. Full story: Upstream
Joel Scott-Halkes@Joelscotthalkes Nov 2, 2021: Nearly every world leader at #COP26 is male. The #patriarchy seems abstract until you realise that the future or humanity rests this week almost exclusively in the hands of men.
A few tweets in response:
Kat P@KateProudman Replying to @Joelscotthalkes and @gailbradbrook:
There isn’t even diversity of suit colour
Bianca Pitt@BiancaPitt4 Replying to @Joelscotthalkes and @gailbradbrook:
And this has brought us to the point of extinction – the exclusion of the ‘other’ half of the world’s population: Women. How are we meant to solve the climate crisis when we apply the same thinking that created it? We urgently need new architects. @SheClimate
Catherine Mitchell@CathMitch14 Replying to @Joelscotthalkes and @gailbradbrook:
I imagine #patriarchy is largely abstract for most men. You don’t see it if you are inside the edifice looking out.
So I’m not surprised it’s come as a shock. It is not a shock for most women, who recognise its disfiguring effects on their lives and the planet every day.
A variation @Coldwar Steve:
***
Cartoon by Michael de Adder: Talking the talk on climate change in The Washington Post, Nov 2, 2021
ANNOUNCING: “The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change”
As activists in the streets of Glasgow make clear, climate change is not only a global environmental catastrophe, but a global crisis of justice. In a series of four articles, climate ethics writer Kathleen Dean Moore reports on an international human rights court ruling that transnational fossil fuel corporations and governments, in collusion, are directly violating rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
ORION magazine online is releasing an article each day, November 9 through 12. On Friday, November 12, the entire series will be available together. The articles can be accessed at https://orionmagazine.org/article/bedrock1/
- “The Human Rights Case Against Climate Change” Nov 8, 2021
In the first, and so far only, case of its kind, an international Tribunal of ten judges found that “there exists an axis of betrayal between transnational oil and gas corporations and governments,” which threatens the greatest violation of human rights the world has ever seen.
This week, more than 25,000 people gather at the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow to address what is not only a global environmental catastrophe, but a global crisis of justice. In a series of four articles, Orion contributor and former board member Kathleen Dean Moore reports on an international human rights court ruling that transnational fossil fuel corporations and governments, in collusion, are directly violating rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. …
2. “Fracking and Climate Change Violate the Human Right to Clean Water” Nov 10, 2021
A recent judgment from an international rights Tribunal condemned “deadly large-scale experiments in poisoning humans and nonhumans that the fracking industry is currently conducting in violation of the Nuremberg Code.”
BENZENE. Toluene. Ethylbenzene. Xylene. Arsenic. Cadmium. Formaldehyde. Hydrochloric acid. 2-Butoxyethanol. Ammonium chloride. Mercury. Glutaraldehyde. These are chemicals customarily used to kill insects, clean toilet bowls, strip paint, polish brass, etch glass, preserve corpses, and commit murder. Now, they are among an estimated 1,021 chemicals that the fossil fuel industry mixes with freshwater and forces underground to crack apart rock, releasing methane and oil—a process called hydraulic fracturing, “fracking.”
The chemicals used in fracking are customarily used to kill insects, clean toilet bowls, strip paint, polish brass, etch glass, preserve corpses, and commit murder.
At least 157 of the fracking chemicals are reproductive or developmental toxins, causing birth defects, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, and other heartbreaks. An additional 781 chemicals have not been studied. Yet fracking routinely injects the chemicals into the ground, forcing them through fissures in rock, where they contaminate aquifers, wells, and other sources of drinking water.
Tens of thousands of miles of oil pipelines crossing the U.S. contribute to this contamination. In 2019, the Keystone pipeline leaked 383,000 gallons of oil into wetlands in North Dakota. In 2013, an ExxonMobil pipeline ruptured, dumping more than 3,000 barrels of heavy crude in Arkansas. Data collected by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration recorded more than 1,300 crude oil spills in the United States between 2010 and 2016—an average of one spill every other day.
Indigenous Water Protectors and other protesters try to block the pipelines and pumpjacks, but they are met by phalanxes of police with so-called “nonlethal weapons,” who earn overtime pay from Big Oil. The U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act might be expected to protect water, but U.S. legislators in thrall to Big Oil created the “Halliburton Loophole,” which exempts fracking from regulations that would otherwise prevent them from poisoning groundwater, rivers, and wells.
Fracking practices thus constitute “deadly, large-scale experiments in poisoning humans and nonhumans that the fracking industry is currently conducting in violation of the Nuremberg Code,” according to a recent judgment from an international human rights tribunal. This is a dreadful indictment; the Nuremberg Code is a code of medical ethics developed in 1947 by a panel of experts investigating Nazi doctors who conducted brutal medical experiments in concentration camps.
Fracking constitutes “deadly, large-scale experiments in poisoning humans in violation of the Nuremberg Code.”
This judgment comes from the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Special Session on Human Rights, Fracking, and Climate Change, a highly respected international human rights tribunal based in Rome. In 2018, the tribunal took up the question: Under what circumstances does fracking, along with its impacts on the climate system, breach substantive and procedural rights? After long deliberation, the ten judges from eight countries issued an advisory opinion, which is available online and in a recently published book, Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change.
Among the rights the tribunal considered was the right to clean water. That right is articulated in United Nations Resolution 64/292: “The General Assembly . . . recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water . . . [as] a human right that is essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights.” Fracking, and the climate change it fuels, directly and indirectly violate that right, the tribunal ruled.
Fracking violates the right to clean water.
“Water is life.” “Mní wičhóni.” “El agua es vida.” The message is proclaimed by crowds marching against Big Oil’s trespasses around the world. It is undeniably true; the life of every person on the planet depends on the one percent of Earth’s water that is fresh and available. Of this limited supply, the U.S. fracking industry uses an average of 105 billion gallons each year—as much as the water use of 3 million citizens of Chicago—and renders it irredeemably poisonous.
“What does it mean, practically and morally, for humans to make fresh water disappear?” asks biologist Sandra Steingraber.
We’ve never done that before—to actually remove water from the hydrological cycle, ground water that is the mother of rivers that flow to the sea, that evaporates into clouds, that falls as rain or snow and rises again as sap or nectar, mist, and fog . . . This is a problem with no solution, because no technology exists to turn fracking waste back into drinkable water.
Because the fracking industries can’t clean the poisoned water, they store it in aboveground pools, some lined, some unlined, or dispose of it by injecting it into empty fracking wells. Ohio activist Maria Montanez halted a fracking operation by lying in the road, so afraid of fluid leaks that she would risk being run over by a truck. “There are more than 480,000 underground waste injection wells nationwide,” she said, “more than 30,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. [No one] knows how many sites are leaking. . . . Our rights to clean water would be decimated.”
Fracking industries breach the right to clean water with especially pernicious effect when they claim water in arid parts of the world. In Texas, where they suck water from rapidly shrinking Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, laws prohibit local groundwater districts from putting any limits on the oil and gas industries’ takings. Worse is when fossil fuel companies seize water used by local people and leave them with dried springs and empty wells.
After considering extensive evidence from experts and eyewitnesses, the tribunal concluded that the secret toxic brews of the fracking industry, “combined with the [explosive disruption] of geological boundaries, make inevitable not only widespread, catastrophic toxic contamination but also devastation of hydrological systems.” Accordingly, the tribunal ruled that fracking should be banned worldwide.
Fossil fuel–fired climate change also violates the right to clean water.
One of the ways that fracking affects the “entire Earth community to which humans belong” is through its contribution to climate change, the tribunal wrote. For 9,000 years, the atmosphere has been relatively stable, the great gyres of wind and water bringing rain in its season, sun in its own time. Civilizations and agricultural practices grew abundantly in the reliable flow of water. But the hydrological cycles are no longer so reliable, or so innocent. As transnational oil corporations release plumes of carbon dioxide and methane pollution, they unleash the dogs of climate chaos.
The effect of global warming on the right to water has been devastating. The tribunal wrote:
Fossil fuel–caused climate changes become themselves threats to fresh water through the saltwater invasion of freshwater lakes and farmland subsoils, serious and prolonged droughts, destruction of ecological systems that purify water, melting of glaciers, and so forth.
According to the World Health Organization, “water scarcity impacts 40 percent of the world’s population, and as many as 700 million people are at risk of being displaced as a result of drought by 2030.”
Drought especially violates the rights of women and children, the tribunal noted, given their traditional roles as water-bearers. When nearby wells dry up, women are forced to carry water for miles, exposing themselves to assault and rape. When drought or severe floods ruin crops, children are the first to suffer malnutrition and, of those suffering malnutrition, children are the first to die. Then, the fossil fuel industry violates not only the right to clean water, but also the very right to life itself.
The violation of the right to water is linked to racism and colonialism.
“We’ve been at this fight against Enbridge [tar sands pipelines] for seven years already. It’s like an invasion,” said Winona LaDuke, the Anishinaabe leader of Honor the Earth. Wearing a water is sacred T-shirt, she kneels straight-backed on the ground. Her face is defiant and weary.
This time, the Water Protectors’ fight is against the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota. They are defending accustomed ways of life, which would be hit a hard blow if heavy oil leaking from the pipeline were to settle to the bottom of the lakes and streams in their land, poisoning the fish and rice. They are battling also for recognition of their Indigenous rights, guaranteed by United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Article 29: “Indigenous peoples have the right to the conservation and protection of the environment and the productive capacity of their lands.”
In this, they are up against a long history of contempt for Indigenous land and lifeways. The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal took pains to point out that “the system of laws [regulating fracking] is underpinned, accompanied, and permeated by racism and colonialism.” Fracking is economically feasible, they wrote, only because it legally devalues the lifeways and history of the people displaced by fracking. Thus, fracking, in the court’s judgment, could not be made “nonracist” or “noncolonialist” without incurring costs that the industry is unwilling to pay.
Fracking could not be made “nonracist” or “noncolonialist” without incurring costs that the industry is unwilling to pay.
The judges’ argument parallels that made by Boston College scholar Ibram X. Kendi: It is not possible to frack without wrecking the land. It is not possible to wreck the land without destroying the livelihoods and homes of people. It is not possible to destroy peoples’ livelihoods and homes without devaluing their way of life. It is not possible to devalue entire ways of life without devaluing also the people. And that, both he and the tribunal point out, is racism.
And so, in regard to the right to clean water, the tribunal drew the connection between social justice and environmental thriving, each a necessary condition for the other, each threatened by extreme oil and gas extraction. The tribunal concluded that it is irrational, and potentially catastrophic, “to allow an industry that is unnecessary, known not to be sustainable for the long term, and inherently abusive of human and nature’s rights to continue operating.” …
3. “Climate Change Violates the Right to Life” Nov 11, 2021
It will not do to say, “It’s too bad that an estimated 83 million people will die from the effects of climate change in this century alone, but that is the price we have to pay to stay in a business that annually earns $2.1 trillion, as it keeps the lights on and the world economy growing.” A human life is not a chit, something that can be cashed in for something else. …
Rights violations require moral agents who fully understand the short- and long-term violative consequences of their actions and makes a decision to act nonetheless.
Accordingly, courts have traced responsibility for cancer deaths to cigarette manufacturers, and responsibility for overdose deaths to opioid magnates.
Who are the agents of climate deaths? Responsibility falls on the leaders of the transnational oil and gas corporations, and those governments that fail in their fundamental duty to restrain them. Climate change, a geophysical process, is not to blame; blame belongs to those who choose to create the conditions for climate change, even as they understand the massive human rights violations it will inflict.
International human rights court slams states for complicity in corporate violations of the right to life. …
Too often, governments and oil and gas industries are joined in an “axis of betrayal,” the tribunal wrote, where both benefit from the economic bonanza made possible by human rights violations.
Evidence presented in the hearings showed that, in the name of promised “economic development,” Big Oil corporations are allowed to violate rights either “under what have become symbolic environmental laws that have been implemented to allow [practices] or . . . in violation of such laws but with impunity from the state.” States fail to perform their regulatory function “for any number of reasons, especially financial but also ideological, or corruption arising out of an inappropriate relationship with the industry to be regulated.” …
Governments break the terms of the social contract when they fail to protect human rights and, worse, become complicit in their violation. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer calls double wrongs of this sort, “treachery.”
After weighing the evidence presented during the hearing, the tribunal’s conclusion is damning: government authorities in collusion with powerful corporate violators have “betrayed the people and in doing so, have made a mockery of democracy, the rule of law and the right of peoples to determine their own destiny, and that of the planet.” …
4. “Follow the Science. Follow the Money. Follow Your Conscience.” Nov 12, 2021
Climate change is fundamentally a moral crisis and can be powerfully confronted on that field of engagement. Steeped in a toxic mix of capitalism and colonialism, causing wise-spread suffering and injustice, the fossil fuel industry is in terrible moral peril. … The articles are based on a new book, Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change, ed. Thomas A. Kerns and Kathleen Dean Moore, published by Oregon State University Press.
Conclusions
After this summer of heat, floods, wildfire, and government inaction, a strong majority of Americans are now “alarmed” and “concerned” about climate change.
As directed, we follow the science: Unless nations take immediate action to stop greenhouse gas emissions, by the time today’s children are middle-aged, the life-supporting systems of the planet will be irretrievably damaged. At current rates of warming, planetary temperatures will warm 3.5 to 8°F by the end of the century, and rising sea levels will displace 2 billion people, almost a quarter of the world’s population.
As advised, we follow the money: As it drives global warming, the oil and gas sector of the world economy is on track to earn $21 trillion in 2021. The annual compensation for Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, just rose to $23.5 million, after a recent 25 percent raise. Joe Manchin—the coal magnate and U.S. senator (D-WV) who is now blocking any significant climate legislation—accepted $420,000 in fossil fuel donations during the Senate climate deliberations.
Now, we are called to follow our conscience: It’s wrong to wreck the world. Climate change seethes with suffering and injustice. Steeped in a toxic stew of capitalism and colonialism, the fossil fuel industry wrests land from the people and wealth from the land, leaving both people and land poisoned and poor. Those most directly harmed—the world’s poor, Indigenous, and people of color, and generations of children yet to be born to a planet that will not support their lives—have done nothing to deserve this assault.
Climate change is fundamentally a moral crisis and can be powerfully confronted on that field of engagement. “We’re not going to win this as bean counters,” Naomi Klein wrote in 2015. “We’re going to win this because this is an issue of values, human rights, right and wrong.”
“We’re not going to win this as bean counters.”
Moral power can change history.
Self-proclaimed realists might scoff that moral arguments don’t change history. But they are badly misreading their textbooks. Time after time, a rising wave of moral affirmation—a stubborn insistence on what is right—has “bent the arc” of history. Beyond a doubt, these changes are still in progress, and outcomes are uncertain. But when enough people stood up for what they knew was right, and stood against what they knew was irrefutably wrong, the moral story they told overwhelmed old assertions of righteousness based on conquest, power, and wealth:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—a moral principle if there ever was one—and the great European monarchies fell like dominoes.
“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” Lincoln said, and a nation went to war, ultimately freeing 20,000 African Americans from bondage.
“Hell no, we won’t go,” and an endless war finally ended.
“Black lives matter,” and they do, in still unfolding and powerful ways.
A small girl’s voice, “Shame!” and 4 million people took to the streets in the largest mass protest for action on global warming in history.
Is there a moral principle big enough to overwhelm the entrenched fossil fuel industries and their government allies?
Now, as nations gather for another chance, maybe a last chance, to stop the toxic violence of oil extraction, is there a moral principle big enough to overwhelm the entrenched fossil fuel industries and their government allies? If there is, it might be this:
Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: All people have the right to life, liberty, and security of person.
Human rights declarations offer powerful legal and moral leverage against the violence of international oil and gas corporations.
“Nothing could be more urgent . . . than finding apertures of resistance and protest exposing the calculated cruelty and indifference of the fossil fuel industry,” asserts Anna Grear, who is the founder of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment.
International human rights covenants offer particular moral clarity, based on global consensus about standards of minimally acceptable behavior. They undermine Big Oil’s financial, social, and legal impunity, even as the industry doubles down on its world-ending work.
The industry is in terrible moral peril. It has no well-rehearsed response to charges of iniquity, such as Greta Thunberg’s grim statement: “You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But . . . I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil.”
The industry is in terrible moral peril.
Already, a rights-based strategy is surging on several fronts.
National courts require governments to protect universal human rights.
In the United States case of Juliana v. United States, twenty-one young people claim that the nation’s current energy policy is unconstitutional and violates their rights to life, liberty, and property. In a Canadian case, La Rose v. Her Majesty the Queen, fifteen children argue that the government’s actions in support of massive fossil fuel development violate their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The 2018 Urgenda case in the Netherlands marked an even more dramatic step. For the first time in history, a nation was required by its own courts to protect the human rights of its citizens—rights guaranteed not by that nation’s laws, but by the European Convention on Human Rights. The nation’s Supreme Court affirmed an order directing the Dutch government to slash carbon emissions 25 percent by 2020.
An international court hears previously silenced witnesses and names the wrongs against them.
The 2018 Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, an international human rights court that had previously exposed human rights abuses in Vietnam, Bhopal, and Chernobyl, found massive human rights abuses by the fossil fuel industry in collusion with governments. This is the first, and so far only, case of its kind. Although international courts have no enforcement powers, the tribunal informed the international legal imagination with innovative arguments about the human rights obligations of governments in a world staggered by climate change.
Perhaps the primary result of the tribunal was to hear the wrongs that are revealed when “the voices of the afflicted are given a space in which to speak the injustices done to them by a system radically tilted toward corporate plunder and profit,” in Anna Grear’s words. The hearing united the witnesses, not only as Big Oil’s intended victims, but also as champions of justice. This is important when, through greenwashing, harassing lawsuits, multimillion-dollar social media campaigns, and other deceits, fossil fuel companies try to outsource their shame onto those bearing the burden of their iniquity.
A human rights lens can reveal a vision of a better world.
As the UN Human Rights Council states, governments have the duty to “respect, protect, and fulfill” human rights without discrimination—that is, to stay out of the way of individuals’ exercise of their rights, to defend them from outside threats, and to take affirmative steps to create a world that nourishes human dignity and thriving.
Life is perilous, liberty is meaningless, and security of persons is impossible on a scorched planet whose life support systems are collapsing. However, the full manifestation of human potential is nurtured by fertile soil, reliable rain, abundant food, stable temperatures, and stable governments, as civilizations have found again and again. Thus, as the NAACP’s Jacqueline Patterson says, what is required is a “radical transformation from extracting, polluting, and dominating policies and practices that negatively impact our communities to regenerative, cooperative systems that uplift all rights for all people while preserving the environment.” It follows that shut it down and keep it in the ground are not only aspirational slogans. They are moral obligations.
What is required is a “radical transformation from extracting, polluting, and dominating policies.”
How shall we go forward?
Fossil fuels now rule every aspect of our lives, from the moment the alarm clock jerks us awake in the morning to the last moment, when we turn out the lights. Ending the hegemony of the largest industry on Earth will not be easy. It will take every possible strategy—including the radical reimagining of who we are on the planet, beings of such clumsy promise.
The struggle will not be a matter of winning or losing, but of small victories endlessly multiplied, a million micro tipping points as the work goes on. Although much has been lost, we can still save much—from great systems such as democracies and ocean currents, to individual species and particular human lives. This anxious child. That hidden songbird. This honorable senator. The shining ice.
We have powerful allies in this struggle. We have the collective moral wisdom of the planet, declared in international human rights covenants. Imagine that.
We have the conscience of the street, expressed in great shouts for justice and joy. Celebrate that.
We have the eager urgency of life itself, which will not be denied; it’s there in the shining eyes of children, in the exuberance of prairies and marshlands, in the weary pride of our ancestors and the wary trust of our descendants. Honor that.
Who, on this reeling planet, does not yearn for life, liberty, and security for themselves and their families? Fight for that.
The author would like to thank Thomas A. Kerns, whose ideas and knowledge fill these pages, and Carly Lettero, Shelley Stonebrook, and Emily Grubby, of the Spring Creek Project, whose goodwill, expertise, and endless work produced the foundations of this narrative. Overwhelming gratitude goes to Frank Moore, my bedrock. Some of the passages in these articles are adapted from Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change.
Part One: Introduction
Part Two: Water
Part Three: Life
Additional Resources:
Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change, published by Oregon State University Press and edited by Thomas A. Kerns and Kathleen Dean Moore, tells the story of the landmark case through carefully curated court materials, including eyewitness testimony, legal and moral testimony, and the Tribunal’s Advisory Opinion. Essays by leading climate writers such as Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber and legal experts such as John Knox, Mary Wood, and Anna Grear give context to the controversy.
A forty-minute film about the Tribunal, Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change, is available free online. The film, created by the Spring Creek Project, features appearances by Jacqueline Patterson, of the NAACP; Winona LaDuke, of Honor the Earth; Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream; and many others. It powerfully showcases the Tribunal’s findings that the oil and gas industry and their government allies routinely violate the right to clean water, Indigenous rights to the land, the right to life and health, and the right to information and participation. Spring Creek offers assistance to any groups that would like to hold a community screening of the film. Contact them here.
Documentary production and videography was provided by Fire+Bird Films.