Dr. Mary Wood:
Once a frac’ing company goes into a community, they never leave.
Long after they have left, the contamination stays.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber:
Frac’ing is not only systemic racism,
It’s not only misogyny,
It’s not only genocide against Indigenous people,
It’s also hate against people who are queer.
That’s just very plain in the frac’ing fields of the United States. …
The culture that comes in. … When you go into the frac’ing fields of America and you look around in the truck stops, in the bars, in the culture at large, you see things like people wearing T-shirts that say things like:
Going deep and pumping hard.
Frac that hole, Drill baby drill.
A coffee hut called Bakken Babes Breast Coffee.
Big cock country.
The brutality and disappearances that we see…that are violence that accompanies frac’ing. Every time frac’ing comes into a community, we have public health data showing violent victimization against women goes up, drunk driving rates go up, rape, sex trafficing go up…hate crimes, intersections with homophobia and disability rights…those are things we’re keeping an eye on, as we’re gathering data. …
Frac’ing requires a whole landscape to build the infrastructure out on. There’s no kind of industrial zone. It uses our own communities, literaly our own back yards as its factory floor. …
The permitting is easier in some kind of communities. It’s like a kind of frac’ing redlighting.
There’s not just one law for everyone.
Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change 40 Min. by Spring Creek Project, June 2, 2021
The documentary film “Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change” explores how fracking and climate change violate human rights. According to the findings of an international human rights tribunal, the violations include the right to health, the right to clean water, the rights of indigenous people, and the right to information and participation.
Climate change is of course a scientific and technological problem, but it is fundamentally a problem of environmental justice. Learn how a rights-based argument can empower new global action against fracking and climate change.
The film features:
• Poetry by Debra Marquart, a writer, singer, and teacher who has taught writing workshops in Bakken oil field communities most affected by fracking
• Interviews with Tom Kerns and Kathleen Dean Moore, co-editors of the book “Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change”
• Stories from those on the front lines of fracking
• Comments from environmental justice activists, including Sandra Steingraber and Jacqueline Patterson
• Comments from legal experts and key points from the advisory opinion of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking, and Climate Change
This film premiered on June 2, 2021. It was produced by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University, with production and videography by Fire+Bird Films.
We are making this film freely available and hope many future screenings of it will take place, in libraries, at public events, in classrooms, and elsewhere. If Spring Creek Project can assist in a screening, please contact us: https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/w…
Conversation: Sandra Steingraber & Mary Wood on Fracking and Human Rights — “Bedrock Rights” Film Premiere Event by Spring Creek Project, June 8, 2021
Following a screening of its documentary film “Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change” (https://youtu.be/qUgXyGuxDo8), Spring Creek Project hosted a conversation with two human rights thought-leaders, Sandra Steingraber and Mary Wood.
Sandra Steingraber is a biologist, author, and anti-fracking activist who serves as senior scientist for the Science and Environmental Health Network. Steingraber is an expert on the human health impacts of environmental conditions, especially related to fracking. She co-founded New Yorkers Against Fracking and serves as Science Advisor to Americans Against Fracking. She is the author of several books, including “Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment.”
Mary Wood is a Philip H. Knight Professor of Law at the University of Oregon and the Faculty Director of the law school’s nationally acclaimed Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center. She is an award-winning professor and the co-author of leading textbooks on public trust law and natural resources law. Her book “Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age” sets forth a new paradigm of global ecological responsibility. She originated the legal approach called Atmospheric Trust Litigation, now being used in cases brought on behalf of youth throughout the world seeking to hold governments accountable for carbon pollution. 
This is the part I find most fascinating from Ms. Wood’s Bio, U Oregon (she does not appear to be flogging the oil and gas industry’s and its enabling NGOs like Pembina Institute’s, $billions in corporate welfare pet projects like hydrogen and carbon sequestration, which enable more frac’ing for more oil and gas under the guise of pollution clean up but really escalate industry’s pollution, frac harms and rights violations): She has developed a corresponding approach called Atmospheric Recovery Litigation, which would hold fossil fuel companies responsible for funding an Atmospheric Recovery Plan to draw down excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere using natural climate solutions.
This conversation was hosted by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University and took place live on June 2, 2021. It is moderated by Program Manager Carly Lettero. The event ends with a round of thanks among the film’s collaborators.
1 Comment:
TC Mueller:
This discussion, in conjunction with “Bedrock Rights,” should be shown at college graduations to remind students that thought (and the resulting action) goes beyond the patterns, codes, and traditions of the classroom and the courtroom. Call it truth telling, or speaking from the heart, or drawing on the talents of the left side of the brain–it is a lovely human quality to tell our stories straight, unintimidated by the legal and societal boxes that can prevent real communication and necessary change. The conversation and film were riveting.
For example, in Alberta, Canada:
RCMP told Ernst they “don’t do surveillance” when she refused them entry into her home without a warrant while trespassing on her land, lying and trying to terrify her silent after she served legal papers on Encana/Ovintiv, AER & Alberta gov’t.