Judith Kimerling on her book, Amazon Crude
This past Tuesday, Professor Judith Kimerling from CUNY Queens gave a lecture covering the oil contamination in the Ecuadorian Amazon and efforts to bring those responsible to justice. The event was co-sponsored by the Cofán-Brown Student Alliance, the Watson Institute, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Andean Project, bringing together a variety of perspectives to discuss efforts to mitigate the environmental and social impacts of oil development in the Amazon.In 1989, Professor Kimerling moved to Ecuador and worked with indigenous organizations in the Amazon Rainforest, learning about the harmful impact of oil production on indigenous peoples and the environment in tropical forests on the international environmental and human rights policy agendas. Her book Amazon Crude was called “The Silent Spring of Ecuador” by The New York Times. In the U.S., it prompted a historic class action lawsuit, Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc., which led to related proceedings in Ecuador and other fora.
Open crude oil pit abandoned by Texaco
Because oil resources are nonrenewable, levels of production and subsequent revenues cannot be sustained without perpetual site expansion. Oil politics is heavily linked to a quasi-national homogenization strategy in Ecuador. Despite the presence of indigenous nations in the Amazon, the federal government denied their existence and justified its support of oil exploration on their land. Although this government support was eventually challenged publicly, it effectively displaced indigenous tribes for generations, like the Cofán. The Cofán are an indigenous people whose ancestral territories lie in the part of the Amazon that Texaco Oil used as a wastewater dumping ground for 30 years.While Texaco no longer operates in Ecuador, additional international oil companies are working to discover new crude oil outlets in the Ecuadorian Amazon.This lecture represents part of an ongoing effort to strengthen ties between indigenous Cofán communities of northern Ecuador and the Brown University student body. The Cofán-Brown Student Alliance, led by Cofán native and Brown undergraduate Hugo Lucitante '19, is a group of student activists from a wide range of concentrations whose aim is to engage the Brown community and mobilize support for the Cofán.Before he came to Brown, Lucitante was the protagonist in the 2014 PBS documentary Oil and Water, which was included in the Class of 2018’s First Readings assignment. One of the organization's main programs is the Cofán Heritage Project, co-founded by Professor of Latin American History James Green. This project represents a campus-wide, multi-disciplinary approach to learning about the Cofán. This collaboration aims to assist this group of indigenous people in their campaign for cultural preservation in the face of ecocide.