Sandy Tolan: How Oil Spills Like BP's Can Reshape Politics
[Sandy Tolan is author of “The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East.” He is associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.]
Twenty years ago, near the beginning of that transformation, I sat beside a campesino-turned-community activist, Segundo Jaramillo, as our small plane banked low over the company oil town of Lago Agrio.
Below lay the grimy hub of Texaco’s former operation in Ecuador, with its maze of pipelines, pumping stations, and Wild West bars. Mr. Jaramillo gripped his armrests and looked out the window nervously; it was his first flight.
Heartsick and angered by the oil-smeared landscape that surrounded his home and threatened his family’s health, he had come to Quito by an arduous bus ride through the Andes.
In the capital, he met with Texaco critics and antipetroleum activists, who introduced us. Now we were returning to the Amazon so he could show me his homeland.
In the coming days with Jaramillo and local indigenous leaders along the Napo and Aguarico rivers, I began to understand the extent of the damage.
Huge open pools of oil and toxic sludge were scattered throughout the rain forest, dumped unceremoniously by indifferent oil workers. Contaminated water supplies had Jaramillo’s neighbors complaining of skin diseases, nonstop headaches, and internal organ pain.
In the Cofan Indian village of Dureno, the Aguarico – “River of Rich Waters” – was so polluted that villagers could no longer bathe in it.
A young leader called Toribe told me the population of Cofanes in the area, once 70,000, had shrunk to 3,000 since the day “a large and noisy bird” – actually a Texaco helicopter – appeared in the early 1970s, scoping the then-pristine forest for places to drill. “Many fled from here,” the young indigenous activist told me. “The whole structure of our lives has changed.”
In all, according to the book “Amazon Crude Oil,” edited by the environmental lawyer Judith Kimerling, Texaco dumped 19 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into the Amazon, while nearly 17 million gallons of crude – many more than in the Exxon-Valdez disaster – spilled from the main Amazon-Andes pipeline, which feeds tankers bound for the United States. The impact on public health is impossible to quantify, but one study, citing benzene contamination leaking from unlined pits, links oil production to 1,401 cancer deaths in the Ecuadorean Amazon.
The human toll of Ecuador’s toxic oil legacy helped remake the country’s politics....
Read entire article at CS Monitor
Twenty years ago, near the beginning of that transformation, I sat beside a campesino-turned-community activist, Segundo Jaramillo, as our small plane banked low over the company oil town of Lago Agrio.
Below lay the grimy hub of Texaco’s former operation in Ecuador, with its maze of pipelines, pumping stations, and Wild West bars. Mr. Jaramillo gripped his armrests and looked out the window nervously; it was his first flight.
Heartsick and angered by the oil-smeared landscape that surrounded his home and threatened his family’s health, he had come to Quito by an arduous bus ride through the Andes.
In the capital, he met with Texaco critics and antipetroleum activists, who introduced us. Now we were returning to the Amazon so he could show me his homeland.
In the coming days with Jaramillo and local indigenous leaders along the Napo and Aguarico rivers, I began to understand the extent of the damage.
Huge open pools of oil and toxic sludge were scattered throughout the rain forest, dumped unceremoniously by indifferent oil workers. Contaminated water supplies had Jaramillo’s neighbors complaining of skin diseases, nonstop headaches, and internal organ pain.
In the Cofan Indian village of Dureno, the Aguarico – “River of Rich Waters” – was so polluted that villagers could no longer bathe in it.
A young leader called Toribe told me the population of Cofanes in the area, once 70,000, had shrunk to 3,000 since the day “a large and noisy bird” – actually a Texaco helicopter – appeared in the early 1970s, scoping the then-pristine forest for places to drill. “Many fled from here,” the young indigenous activist told me. “The whole structure of our lives has changed.”
In all, according to the book “Amazon Crude Oil,” edited by the environmental lawyer Judith Kimerling, Texaco dumped 19 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into the Amazon, while nearly 17 million gallons of crude – many more than in the Exxon-Valdez disaster – spilled from the main Amazon-Andes pipeline, which feeds tankers bound for the United States. The impact on public health is impossible to quantify, but one study, citing benzene contamination leaking from unlined pits, links oil production to 1,401 cancer deaths in the Ecuadorean Amazon.
The human toll of Ecuador’s toxic oil legacy helped remake the country’s politics....