Established in 2006, Freedom to Create is an international organisation that supports programmes and projects around the world that unleash people’s creativity and The Freedom to Create Prize celebrates the courage and creativity of artists who use their talents to build social foundations and inspire the human spirit. This year’s prize winners will be announced at an awards ceremony and concert at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens on 19 November 2011. As part of the celebrations, we will be screening a selection of films to celebrate this year’s best film entries.

Tickets can be reserved by calling The Labia at 021 424 5927. We strongly recommended that you reserve tickets to avoid disappointment.

The programme:

Son of Babylon

Monday 14 November
8.15pm

Northern Iraq, 2003. Two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Ahmed, a 12-year-old boy begrudgingly follows in the shadow of his grandmother. On hearing news that prisoners of war have been found alive in the South, she is determined to discover the fate of her missing son, Ahmed’s father, who never returned from the Gulf war. From the mountains of Kurdistan to the sands of Babylon, they hitch rides from strangers and cross paths with fellow pilgrims on all too similar journeys. Struggling to understand his grandmother’s search, Ahmed follows in the forgotten footsteps of a father he never knew. This journey will lead the boy to come of age. Son of Babylon raises awareness about Iraq’s one million and more missing people who, having faced death at the hands of a murderous regime, were at risk of being forgotten by history. This film also carries deep and hopeful messages asking us to think about how to deal with our unresolved issues from the past in order to move forward towards true peace and reconciliation.

Strangers No More and Teta, Alf Marra

Tuesday 15 November
8.15pm

Strangers No More, winner of the 2011 Best Documentary Short Subject Oscar, tells the story of the remarkable Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, where the pupils include 750 immigrants and refugees from 48 countries and every known religion. The film follows three children who fled their homelands in Darfur, South Africa and Eritrea. Over the course of 15 months, the film portrays their struggle to forget the past and rebuild their lives in this very rare community, where truly no one is a ‘stranger no more’.

Teta, Al Marra is a poetic documentary about a feisty Beiruti grandmother, bringing together a grandfather, grandmother and grandson in a playful magic-realist film that aims to defy both a past death and a future one. It documents the larger-than-life character of Teta Kaabour, her tales of the Beirut of her past and her imaginings about what awaits her after death. The film documents this very personal and cultural heritage and presents a unique view of Lebanon’s norms, sensitivities and aspirations.

Enemies of the People

Wednesday 16 November
6.15pm

The Khmer Rouge ran what is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most brutal regimes. Yet the Killing Fields of Cambodia remain unexplained. Until now. In Enemies of the People the men and women who perpetrated the massacres – from the foot-soldiers who slit throats to the party’s ideological leader, Nuon Chea aka Brother Number Two – break a 30-year silence to give testimony never before heard or seen. Unprecedented access from the top to the bottom of the Khmer Rouge has been achieved through a decade of work by one of Cambodia’s best investigative journalists, Thet Sambath. Sambath is on a personal quest: he lost his own family in the Killing Fields. The film is his journey to discover not how but why they died. In doing so, he hears and understands for the first time the real story of his country’s tragedy. After years of visits and trust-building, Sambath finally persuades Brother Number Two to admit (again, for the first time) in detail how he and Pol Pot (the two supreme powers in the Khmer Rouge state) decided to kill party members whom they considered ‘Enemies of the People’.

The Lost Girls of South Africa

Thursday 17 November
6.15pm

A child is raped in South Africa every three minutes. The Lost Girls of South Africa is a timely and revealing feature-length documentary that offers a privileged glimpse into what life is really like for young girls growing up in South Africa. It follows the stories of four girls, aged 11-13, who become victims of child rape, looking at the experience and its aftermath through their eyes and in their words. The girls involved in this film, along with their mothers, were all extensively consulted about the implications of taking part in this film, and being identified. It was explained to them that while the film would not be sold to South African television, it was still likely that their pictures would be accessible on the internet in SA. We were very clear about this, but they were equally clear that they had a right to tell their story, and wanted to, in order to try to reduce the likelihood of it happening to other girls.

All proceeds from the screening of The Lost Girls of South Africa will be donated to The Lost Girls Fund, set up by the makers of the film to provide viewers an opportunity to directly help the girls in the film. Find out more at www.lostgirlssa.org

I was Worth 50 Sheep

Friday 18 November
6.15pm

I Was Worth 50 Sheep is the story of a brave girl Sabere, and her struggle for life. When she was just ten years old she was sold to a man forty years her senior. After seven years of confinement and abuse, she escaped to find temporary refuge in a
women’s sanctuary. The camera picks up Sabere at the point where she has re-made contact with her family. This is the story of a courageous young Afghan girl, fighting hard for her fundamental rights. The film gives a voice to the voiceless – women who continue to suffer from violence, poverty and illiteracy in their country.

Kinshasa Symphony

Saturday 19 November
1.45pm

Kinshasa Symphony is a study of people in one of the world’s most chaotic cities, doing their best to maintain one of the most complex human endeavours – a symphony orchestra. It is a film about the Congo, the people of Kinshasa and the power of music. The film documents the story of people achieving great things under the most difficult of circumstances. It is a measured, funny and lyrical film which portrays issues in the DRC such as poverty, poor housing and healthcare, while reminding us that the problems in the country are certainly not caused by deficiencies in its people. The film’s portrayal of Africans as heroes rather than victims has had a hugely powerful impact on many.

War Don Don

Sunday 20 November
6.15pm

In the heart of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, United Nations soldiers guard a heavily fortified building known as the “special court.” Inside, Issa Sesay awaits his trial. Prosecutors say Sesay is a war criminal, guilty of heinous crimes against humanity. His defenders say he is a reluctant fighter who protected civilians and played a crucial role in bringing peace to Sierra Leone. With unprecedented access to prosecutors, defence attorneys, victims, and, from behind bars, Sesay himself, War Don Don puts international justice on trial for the world to see – finding that in some cases the past is not just painful, it is also opaque. The international court in Sierra Leone will be the first major war crimes tribunal to conclude cases since the Nuremberg trials. This film gives us an insight into the court, allows the opportunity for a dialogue to emerge, assessing the ways in which the system is currently run, and asks us to find ways to improve it.

All screenings will be followed by a facilitated audience discussion.

Tickets can be reserved by calling The Labia at 021 424 5927. We strongly recommended that you reserve tickets to avoid disappointment.

This event is presented by Freedom to Create, the Labia and While You Were Sleeping, a Cape Town-based non-profit film collective committed to bringing progressive, non-mainstream documentaries with important social, political and environmental messages to South African audiences.

Contacts:

Freedom to Create:
www.freedomtocreate.com

The Labia:
021 424 5927

While You Were Sleeping:
Andreas Späth
084 749 9470
Andreas_Spath@yahoo.com
www.ftcdocumentaryweek.wordpress.com

On a winter’s night in 1985, an Apartheid police hit squad assassinated four young activists in the Eastern Cape. Among South Africa’s most notorious political murders, the abduction and brutal killing of Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkonto and Sicelo Mhlauli became a major turning point in the country’s history, triggering a state of emergency and eventually leading to the release of Mandela.

Having taken seven years to complete, David Forbes’ award-winning feature documentary film The Cradock Four explores who the four victims were and investigates the circumstances that led to their deaths. The murders became one of Apartheid’s murkiest and most controversial episodes and the film allows the viewer to perceive the oppressive climate of the racist regime and looks at both inquiries into the murders (in 1989 and 1992), as well as into the investigations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which denied amnesty to the killers. The Cradock Four weaves together interviews, archival footage, dramatic recreations and lyrical visual images to create a chilling story that reminds all of us of the many bloody sacrifices with which our democratic freedoms were won.

The Cradock Four is a must-see for anyone hoping to understand South Africa’s past, present and future.

Tickets are R20 and can be reserved by calling The Labia at (021) 424 5927. We strongly recommended that you reserve tickets to avoid disappointment.

This event is presented by the Labia and While You Were Sleeping, a Cape Town-based non-profit film collective committed to bringing progressive, non-mainstream documentaries with important social, political and environmental messages to South African audiences.

Contacts:

The Labia:
021 424 5927

Official film website:
http://www.thecradockfour.co.za

The War You Don’t See is powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of embedded and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and the disaster in Iraq.

As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an electronic battlefield in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?

John Pilger says in the film: “We journalists… have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else’s country… That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home… In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us… Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.”

The screenings will be followed by a facilitated audience discussion.

Tickets are R20 and can be reserved by calling The Labia at 021 424 5927. We strongly recommended that you reserve tickets to avoid disappointment.

This event is presented by the Labia and While You Were Sleeping, a Cape Town-based non-profit film collective committed to bringing progressive, non-mainstream documentaries with important social, political and environmental messages to South African audiences.

(This column was first published on 2011-03-30 at News24 here)

Shell wants us to believe that in exploring for and extracting natural gas from underground layers of shale in the Karoo using the polluting and extremely water-intensive technique of hydraulic fracturing or fracking, they have all of our best interests as well as those of the environment at heart.

They must also think us the most gullible halfwits this side of the Niger Delta.

In a recent full-page newspaper ad, the multi-billion dollar oil giant’s Bonang Mohale writes passionately about his company’s “commitments to the Karoo”, promising not to despoil and pollute it in the way fracking has been documented to mess up formerly pristine landscapes and water sources  elsewhere. He describes natural gas as a “more environmentally friendly” option and a “cleaner energy source” and twice refers to its role in building a “sustainable energy future”.

Pure greenwash! In 2008 the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority ruled Shell’s use of the word “sustainable” in an ad about its involvement in extracting oil from Canadian tar sands “misleading” and in violation of industry codes for “environmental claims”, “substantiation” and “truthfulness”. The same standards ought to apply here.

In complete contradiction to their PR-laced public utterances, Shell has an atrocious environmental and human rights record, as even a cursory glance into their skeleton-packed closet reveals:

• In County Mayo on Ireland’s west coast, a fishing and farming community has been fighting a protracted battle against Shell’s plans to build a pipeline and gas refinery that has involved violent clashes with police, hunger strikes, arrests, and masked men beating up local activists and sinking an outspoken opponent’s fishing boat.

• In 1995 Greenpeace activists stopped Shell from sinking the Brent Spar oil platform, laden with tonnes of toxic and radioactive waste, at sea.

• Shell has a long and sinister history of environmental destruction and human rights abuses in Nigeria. More than a thousand oil spill cases have been brought against the company in the Niger Delta, where it continues to illegally flare natural gas, a practice that causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa combined. Long implicated in bribing local officials and politicians, WikiLeaks cables reveal that Shell inserted employees into all main ministries of the Nigerian government and “knew everything that was being done in those ministries”. Shell is deeply implicated in the Nigerian government’s 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and 8 fellow environmental and human rights activists and in 2009 agreed to pay their families $15.5m as a “humanitarian gesture”.

• Environmentalists have warned that Shells’ Sakhalin II oil and gas operations in Russia will contribute to pushing the critically endangered Western Pacific Grey Whale towards extinction.

• Shell has plans to drill for oil just 30 kilometres from Western Australia’s ecologically sensitive Ningaloo Reef and off the coast of the USA’s fragile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

• Shell has contributed more than a million dollars towards defeating legislation to set goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in California.

• Shell is coming under increasing pressure from environmentalists, indigenous communities and its own shareholders over its extraction of oil from tar sands in Canada, which involves strip mining large swaths of forest and wetlands and uses and pollutes vast quantities of water while generating at least five times more carbon emissions than conventional sources of oil.

If Shell were a person, we’d have no hesitation in recognising this list as the shocking resume of a sociopathic career criminal whom we’d never let anywhere near our homes or children. We cannot afford to trust them with the Karoo.

Note to Shell: Even in the extremely unlikely event of you being able to convince us that you are capable of producing gas in the Karoo without wasting and polluting our water, we wouldn’t want you to. We don’t even want you to explore for it. We want you to leave the gas in the ground. The age of carbon-based fossil fuels – of coal, oil and natural gas – is coming to a close and until you propose to help us develop our abundant, clean, green and truly sustainable renewable energy sources, including solar and wind power, stay out of the Karoo.

(This column was first published on 2011-03-23 at News24 here)

Arnold “I’ll be back” Schwarzenegger has been inciting Americans to rise up in revolt to overthrow the dirty industry that is holding back a clean, renewable energy future. And no, I’m not talking about his latest Hollywood blockbuster.

After expressing his admiration for the popular rebellions against dictators in North Africa and the Middle East at a recent US Department of Energy summit, the former Governator of California encouraged similar actions against American oil and gas barons: “we want to overturn the old energy order”.

Given the very broad definition of what qualifies as eco-terrorism under legislation like the US Patriot Act and given that the FBI has identified greens as the “number one domestic terror threat”, you’d think that Arnie would, at the very least, have been subjected to some form of official knuckle-rapping. He got away scot-free.

If ordinary citizens act on Schwarzenegger’s advice, they’re unlikely to be so lucky. The case of Tim DeChristopher proves my point.

In 2008, DeChristopher attended a demonstration outside an oil and gas lease auction organised by the US Bureau of Land Management. A last minute fire-sale by the outgoing administration of George W Bush, the auction was to distribute oil and gas drilling rights on remote patches of public land at bargain-basement prices.

By happy coincidence DeChristopher found himself inside the auction rather than demonstrating against it from the outside. On the spur of the moment, he decided to monkey-wrench proceedings by “participating” in the auction. He entered outlandishly large offers, drove up prices, out-bid oil and gas companies and ended up “buying” drilling rights to 22 500 acres of land in 13 parcels for some $1.7 million before he was stopped by a federal agent. By then he’d effectively scuttled the entire auction.

I consider DeChristopher’s action a brilliantly creative example of peaceful civil disobedience. The US legal system considers it a crime, even though the entire auction was subsequently declared illegitimate by the Obama administration. On the 3^rd of March 2011, DeChristopher was convicted of two felony counts in a Salt Lake City court and now faces up to 10 years in prison and fines of as much as $750 000. I agree with noted climate activist and author Bill McKibben, who tweeted “The government should give him a medal, not a sentence”.

DeChristopher’s criminalisation is neither unusual nor unexpected, of course. So-called democratic governments around the world have been conducting a low-level war against people prepared to act non-violently in defence of the environment for years. Militant groups of animal rights activists bore the initial brunt, but in recent times even your average garden variety eco-organisation is being targeted.

Like the FBI, the UK’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit, a private company largely funded by government, but accountable to no one in particular, has recently been revealed to maintain lists of “extremists” and employ undercover surveillance officers to infiltrate green organisations. Major companies are getting in on the act, too. Scottish Resources, E.ON and Scottish Power, three of the UK’s biggest energy companies, as well as Monsanto, one the world’s largest peddlers of genetically modified seeds, have employed private security outfits to conduct covert intelligence-gathering and monitoring operations against eco-activists.

Closer to home, the local nuclear industry is said to cultivate a watch-list of prominent anti nuke-activists and last December 14 Earthlife Africa members were arrested and charged with “illegal gathering” and “public indecency” for picketing outside a public hearing of the government’s flawed IRP2 electricity master plan.

Is it just me or are these symptoms of a world in which what’s right and what’s wrong has been turned upside down? Bradley Manning, the suspected WikiLeaks whistleblower, is potentially facing the death penalty for exposing government wrongdoings ranging from misdemeanours to war crimes. Bankers involved in precipitating a devastating global financial disaster get bailed-out instead of jailed. Not a single BP bigwig gets charged with negligent ecocide in the Gulf of Mexico.

I’m with Arnie on this one. We need to support people like Tim DeChristopher and stand up to those who threaten life on our planet for the sake of short-term material gains and financial profits. Call me an eco-terrorist if you like.

(This column was first published on 2011-03-16 at News24 here)

I’ve had it with nuclear power. And I’ve had enough of nuclear pundits telling me how cheap and clean and green and low-carbon, oh and yes, how safe it is.

Repeated hydrogen explosions at Fukushima Daiichi, the stricken Japanese nuclear power plant; engineers scrambling desperately to stop several plutonium reactors from melting down by using “innovative” (read “improvised”) techniques; a spent fuel storage pond on fire; radioactivity being released into the atmosphere; and traumatised politicians who keep enlarging the evacuation zone look anything but safe to me, not even from half a world away.

Claims that under the circumstances Japan’s nuclear installations have done remarkably well and that things could be much worse and could never get as bad as Chernobyl don’t fill me with comfort either. How bad do things have to get for them to be disastrous? Just ask the tens of thousands of people who’ve been evacuated from their homes around Fukushima.

I have no time for nuclear engineers who assure us that their reactors were designed to cope with the worst possible case scenario and then complain that they were not prepared for the severity of this particular combination of natural calamities – a more than puzzling admission in a country as prone to large earthquake and tsunami double whammies as Japan.

It constantly amazes me that people whose entire industry is based on quantum mechanics, which itself is all about statistical probabilities, can so habitually overlook the fact that even catastrophic natural events with exceedingly low probabilities have a nasty tendency of happening unexpectedly.

And don’t tell me that we’re completely safe from earthquakes in South Africa. The Milnerton earthquake (estimated magnitude: 6.3) which struck the West Coast 200 years ago may have been much weaker than the latest Japanese shaker (magnitude 9.0), but its epicentre was also much closer to the location of Koeberg, currently our only atomic energy plant. The most recent environmental impact report for a further nuclear plant at Koeberg suggests that, taking into account statistical errors, the seismic risk could be significantly higher than the rating typically used in nuclear plant designs.

While nuclear accidents in various parts of the world are blamed on earthquakes, tsunamis, human error by incompetent operators and flawed, previous-generation reactor designs, we’re forever asked to believe that it can’t happen here. Which is exactly what the people of Fukushima believed until a few days ago.

I haven’t even mentioned the environmental havoc caused by uranium mining (think radioactive streams in the Witwatersrand), the health hazards associated with every-day operation, the ever-present threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, the fact that nuclear energy is neither carbon-neutral nor a panacea for climate change, or that nobody really knows what to do with the high-level waste accumulating worldwide which will remain dangerously radioactive for a very long time.

The time to argue that we need nuclear power because it causes less environmental damage and loss of lives through pollution and climate change than energy generated by burning oil, coal or natural gas has come and gone. The implication that our only energy options involve either carbon-based fossil fuels or nuclear power is a red herring.

In fact, the best reason why we should give up on nukes is simply that we don’t need them. There is a growing body of scientific evidence that suggests that the lion’s share, if not all, of our electricity needs can be met cost-competitively by truly green, long-term sustainable and renewable energy sources including solar and wind power.

In South Africa, the nuclear industry has the ear of government and unless we start shouting our opposition we’ll soon have more nuclear power rather than less. It’s on the cards and it will happen unless we stop it.

Now is the time to consign this dangerous and out-dated technology to the dustbin of history. We should have abandoned nuclear power after Three Mile Island in 1979. We should have outlawed it after Chernobyl in 1986. And we should most definitely get rid of it for good after Fukushima in 2011. Enough is enough.

(This column was first published on 2011-03-09 at News24 here)

Last year’s furore over organised rhino poaching elicited widely contrasting responses from South Africans. Bunny-huggers turned into rhino-huggers by their hundreds and declared the crimes bad enough to warrant the re-institution of the death penalty.

Others considered the outrage over the illegal hunting of a couple of glorified zoo animals as overly emotional and insignificant in a country plagued with many bigger problems from chronic poverty to large-scale unemployment.

It might sound disingenuous, but as far as I’m concerned both of these opinions contain a kernel of truth (although, rhino-huggers, you’ll never get my vote on the death penalty…).

The survival of a single endangered species like the rhino is insignificant in the sense that it merely represents the tip of an iceberg of animals and plants that are threatened by extinction, not because of the nefarious operations of a few crime syndicates, but because of our own activities. Yours and mine.

We should care about butchered rhinos in the hope that such high-profile incidents will put the spotlight on the much, much larger, global crisis of biodiversity.

So today’s take-away phrase is mass extinction. The one we humans are currently in the process of precipitating.

Brand new species usually evolve at more or less the same rate as others die out, keeping overall biodiversity at a relatively constant level. When die-offs outpace new arrivals too rapidly, however, mass extinctions literally change the face of the earth by almost wiping the biological slate clean.

Periods of major mass extinction in which 75% or more of the earth’s plant and animal species disappear forever are natural phenomena that have occurred five times in the geological past, the most well-know example being the cataclysmic event that killed off the dinosaurs and many other species about 65 million years ago.

Exactly what causes such extinctions has been hotly debated by scientists for decades. Clearly it’s complicated, but the main culprits are asteroid or comet impacts and volcanic eruptions on a scale big enough to make Eyjafjallajökull (the Icelandic volcano that grounded Europe’s commercial airline fleet last year) look like the geological equivalent of a pimple. The fossil record also suggests that extinctions tend to be more common during relatively warm, “greenhouse” phases of the earth’s history compared to the cooler “icehouse” periods.

Today, some researchers are predicting that we’re on course for a sixth mass extinction. About a fifth of all vertebrate species are currently considered “threatened”. Increasing numbers of freshwater fish, shark and ray species, reef-building corals, turtles, birds, amphibians, insects and plants are heading for the evolutionary exit. Get ready to wave good-bye to the Sumatran rhinoceros and orang-utan, the Philippine crocodile, the mountain gorilla, the red wolf, the western gray whale and many more critically endangered animals.

This time round the causes are much less ambiguous than they are for previous mass extinctions. No asteroid or comet. No infernal volcanic outpourings. Just us humans causing climate change, habitat loss, deforestation, pollution, over-fishing and spreading invasive species and disease.

A new study published in the scientific journal Nature last week confirms that extinction is happening between 3 and 12 times faster today than would be expected if there was no crisis and that we can expect a new mass extinction with unpredictable consequences within as little as 300 years unless we act now.

And that’s why we shouldn’t just dismiss rhino poaching as a liberal non-issue and also why we shouldn’t fetishise media-friendly species like the rhino at the expense of the rest of the endangered biosphere.

Forget the schmaltzy appeals to help ensure that your grandchildren live to see rhinos in the wild or even the argument that humans have a moral obligation to preserve the other life forms with whom we share our planet – although personally, I’m rather partial to both of those arguments.

Help to save the rhino and all the other species for the entirely unemotional and selfish reason that we simply can’t afford to lose them. Our economies, our livelihoods and our own long-term survival as a species literally depend on them for food and medicine, to pollinate our crops, purify our water, oxygenate our air and fertilise our soil.

(This column was first published on 2011-02-23 at News24 here)

Caltex, your friendly neighbourhood petrol dealers, have a dirty little secret they’d rather you not hear too much about.

Last week, a judge in the small Ecuadorian jungle town of Lago Agrio fined the US oil giant Chevron more than $8bn for causing devastating environmental damage in a million acre oil concession of remote Amazon rainforest.

“So it’s not really Caltex, is it?” you might think, but Caltex is just the brand name of Chevron in South Africa. It’s the same company. “But it’s not really a secret either!” Well, judging by the scant exposure the story has received in the mainstream press, it might as well be. Unpleasant things that happen in some God-awful, swampy Latin American backwater simply don’t get a lot of media coverage. It’s actually not little either, but it sure as hell is dirty!

The relevant timeline looks approximately like this:

• 1964-1990: the US oil company Texaco is the sole operator in the oil field, extracting crude oil from some 327 wells.

• 1992: Texaco leaves Ecuador.

• 1993: The original lawsuit is filed against Texaco in New York.

• 2001: Chevron (aka Caltex) merges with Texaco, taking on the company’s liabilities in Ecuador.

• 2003: After Chevron succeeds in having the case transferred out of US courts, it is re-filed, as a class action suit on behalf of 30 000 residents, in Ecuador.

• 2011: After more than 17 years and numerous allegations of bribery, espionage, delays, dirty tricks, evidence-tampering and cover-ups, the Ecuadorian court hands Chevron one of the largest environmental fines on record.

Between 1972 and 1990, Chevron (then Texaco) deliberately dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste sludge, containing carcinogens and other toxins, into rivers, streams and unlined pits. Just to be clear: this was not a case of accidental leakage or negligence as in the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but hazardous waste, intentionally pumped into the Amazon ecosystem.

Along the way Chevron also managed to spill millions of gallons of crude oil and left behind as many as 1000 open waste pits that continue to leak dangerous pollutants into the air, soil and groundwater. And all of that in an area where the locals are dependant on river water for cooking, fishing, drinking and cleaning.

The impact has been devastating, effectively destroying large tracts of rainforest, damaging crops and killing farm animals. The health of the local population has plummeted, with the risk of cancers, miscarriages and birth defects all on the increase. Indigenous communities and their traditional way of life have been decimated.

Chevron has called the court ruling a “product of fraud”, “illegitimate and unenforceable”. The company has never accepted responsibility for its dirty legacy in Ecuador and it is not about to do so now, promising the plaintiffs a “lifetime of litigation”. In their final argument before the court, they claimed that no negligence was established or damage proven by the plaintiffs. According to them neither the environment nor a single human being has been harmed.

Of course they would respond that way. What precedent would it set, after all, if a bunch of semi-civilised Third-Worlders could successfully sue a multinational corporation?

What the company, which in 2010 tripled its second quarter profits to $5.4bn compared to a year earlier, has done, is spend millions on lobbying and PR efforts to clean up its public image. Among other things, Chevron launched their “We Agree” ad campaign – you may have seen it on DSTV – portraying themselves as concerned, eco-conscious and socially responsible corporate citizens.

Don’t believe a word of it! Until they face the music and pay their fair share of what’s necessary to fix the problems they have caused in Ecuador, all of that remains transparently cosmetic. And for every tank-full of Caltex with Techron® – that’s the magic petrol additive that injects your car with an army of tiny little people who tirelessly scrub and clean your engine as you drive – you also get a glob of oily, ugly, smelly and deadly rainforest pollution.