TsengFilmAnnotation1

Oil Politics Movie Annotation – ** Crude ** When the camera floated down the Putumayo River on a tiny shell, waddling up and down with a woman humming in the ancient Cofán, you remembered the memory and imagination you had when you first read about the Amazon, you remembered well because your little mind was impressed and filled with exclamations that were triggered by every bit of the exotic air that there could have been and you breathed, imagining that this breath of oxygen, could have very well been from that mysterious, beautiful, and glorious rainforest. You were young, you were not even ten, and two decades later, you saw what really go on behind that thick, green lush. The woman continued to sing, you embarked on that tiny shell, through the branches, through the leaves, you arrived at the center of the epidemic, a manmade epidemic. Crude- the documentary about one of the most controversial lawsuits on the planet was released in 2009, by director, filmmaker Joe Berlinger followed the suit of an Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo and an American lawyer Steve R. Donziger’s crusade to challenge the existing judicial system in order to give the indigenous long-awaited justice. Ever since 1964, Texaco (now Chevron) took over the drilling process that has caused an environmental massacre from PetroEcuador, a government run oil company. Berlinger captured the essence of the political battles between PetroEcuador, Chevron, the Ecuadorian government, and the battle victims, the indigenous Amazonians. The film promoted me to research more on several issues, first, when the Chief Environmental Analyst pointed out that the water samples they have collected met the EPA’s carbohydrate standard for drinking water while our professor pointed out that the said standard does not even exist. So what is the EPA drinking water standard? According to EPA, they have sorted the water contaminants into six main categories,   · [|Disinfectants]  · [|Disinfection Byproducts]  · [|Inorganic Chemicals]  · [|Organic Chemicals]  · [|Radionuclides] For carbohydrate contamination, I looked into the [|Organic Chemicals] category and will sadly confirm that it is true there is no category for carbohydrates, simply because the term is too broad. However, there are several contaminations that were not even brought up once in the film but I am sure should be carefully looked into, such as [|Ethylbenzene] and [|Ethylene dibromide], these are the two important compounds that come out of the petroleum refineries that will lead to kidney, liver, stomach problems and increase the risk of cancer or [|Toluene] and [|Xylenes (total)] both have effects on the nervous system, which I suspected after seeing the ducking twitching in the ditch. I am also wondering if Chevron has indeed tested the samples for these or they have only tested for the so-called “carbohydrates” instead of **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPHs) **<span style="color: #151515; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">. I have included a journal article from Occupational Environmental Medical Journal on the Amazon basin of Ecuador; it talks more in depth about the disease and what type of epidemic it was facing, in this paper it points out how much higher the cancer rate than suspected was when the research was conducted in 1989 to 1998. It has also pointed out the local residents were under “severe exposure” to the contaminated waters. //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Exposures and cancer incidence near oil fields in the Amazon basin of Ecuador, Occup Environ Med //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">2001;58:517–522M San Sebastián, B Armstrong, J A Córdoba, C Stephens. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif';"> <span style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: #151515; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">[] <span style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: #151515; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> There were several moments when your heart leaped with the potential hopefulness and there were moments when you understood that either there were greedy lawyers and judges across the borders, across the world, or the whole judicial system was failing and your mother was right when she told you, “But life isn’t fair, honey.” The American lawyer Steve Donziger pointed out in the film that “… the lawyer from the defendant’s firm having lunch, catching up with the judge who is handling this suit; you will never see that in the United States.” Really? He must not have been familiar with the Massey Energy’s case in West Virginia, not only the judge was spotted having lunch with Massey’s executives, and later on accepted a complimentary “business trip” to Paris, France with his female companion. Massey filed for at least four SLAPP suits since the spring of 2008 ( http://climategroundzero.net/2010/07/massey-slapp/ ) and with the judges and the lawyers hand-in-hand sipping coffee, it is not too difficult to predict which side is going to win these cases. Here is where your heart sinks and sighs, if a country where human rights have these kinds of issues, what hope there is left for people in Ecuador? <span style="background: white; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="color: #151515; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> Our dependency on oil makes the most vulnerable people on earth our victims, my mom’s right, life isn’t fair. But we have the responsibility to make it fair, to make it just. Chevron spends millions of dollars each year on advertisements and marketing campaign just to make them // look // good. And we buy it. We believe that they allocate their money carefully so while pumping their gas, we are investing in alternative energy as well, just like what they have said on their website. So we watch that petroleum gush out of the pipes and into our cars, and we forget that every drop, was composed of petroleum hydrocarbons, ethylbenzen, toluene, and tears and blood that dripped into that field in a remote rainforest village in an underdeveloped society, we watch those tears and blood drip and drip, into the river, into the earth, into every breath that they used to take and when they come out again, they become this matter, that smells, that combusts, and that is completely, hopelessly, viscously black. <span style="color: #151515; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">
 * <span style="background: white; color: #151515; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">[|Microorganisms]