Monthly Archives for May 2011

Chevron Annual Shareholders Meeting 2011

Chevron World Headquarters
San Ramon, CA
May 25, 2011

With $20 billion in profits for 2010, and in the face of rising gas prices contributing to crippling worldwide inflation, oil giant Chevron met with opposition Wednesday as activists from across the globe converged at their world headquarters to give shareholders and executives a reality check about the ‘True Cost of Chevron’.

Issues ranged from the massive contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon to human rights abuse in Burma and elsewhere. They have already been found guilty in Ecuadorian Court of having caused pollution in the Amazon at a devastating level, but Chevron’s lawyers continue to appeal and refuse to take responsibility for their devastating environmental policies. As one Chevron executive states, “It sure doesn’t look good, Chevron vs. the Amazon villages”.  

Earlier this week, advocates from the Rainforest Action Network in Northern California unfurled a 50’ banner on the lower deck of the Richmond Bridge blasting Chevron for it’s toxic legacy in the Amazon.

Representatives from Ecuador, Angola, Nigeria, Indonesia, Thailand, The Philippines, The Tar Sands region of Canada, Alaska, the Kimberly Region of Australia, Burma, and locals from Richmond, CA gathered to let Chevron shareholders hear about the true cost of maintaining our addiction to Chevron’s oil.  The folks from the Turtle Island Restoration Network were even there to represent the oceans and it’s creatures who cannot speak for themselves.



After being banned from last year’s meeting in Houston, 22 speakers were at last able to address shareholders from the podium. It was heartbreaking to hear stories of entire families lost to cancer, to see the tears and suffering first hand. But Chevron has not yet agreed to pay the fines in Ecuador, and it continues to make plans to expand its oil ventures to other ecologically and culturally delicate areas. 

These activists will not back down until their voices are heard and their grievances addressed.  As Antonia Juhasz from The Global Network states, “we will continue to work to fundamentally transform and restrict the way Chevron does business until we no longer need it’s operations at all.” 

For me, having spent most of this past year focused on the mess that we have created in the Gulf of Mexico, today was a huge wakeup call. I saw stark evidence of worldwide human rights violations, ‘pollute and run’ tactics, and multiple levels of environmental devastation far beyond what I previously knew about.  If you’d like to learn more about the havoc that Chevron has brought to the four corners of the globe, follow the links below. 

Participating Organizations

Amazon Watch
http://amazonwatch.org/

Asian Pacific Environmental Network
http://www.apen4ej.org/

Burma America Democratic Alliance
http://www.badasf.org/

Justice in Nigeria Now
http://justiceinnigeria.wordpress.com/about-chevron/

 




Rainforest Action Network


Sea Turtle Restoration Project

http://www.seaturtles.org/

The Global Exchange
http://www.globalexchange.org/

The True Cost of Chevron
http://truecostofchevron.com/report.html





Chandeleur Islands – 2011 April 21st

2011 April 21 Thursday (posted 2011 May 05)
Posted Courtesy of ‘On Wings of Care’

Four weeks since we first returned to the Gulf in March 2011, where on our first day of flying we had found vast expanses of subsurface plumes and streamers and some surface sheen extending along the west shores of the Chandeleur Islands, dramatically surrounding a very active rookery on Breton Island, and extending from the shores of Grand Isle, LA southward at least 10 miles and southwestward almost 30 miles. We wondered what we would see today. 
  
The weather during the preceding week had been windy, and the sea was choppy and murky. We knew we wouldn’t see many animals, but choppy water doesn’t hide the kinds of huge quantitites of crude and crude-dispersant that we documented all last summer and saw again in March of this year.  We were on a tight time constraint for this flight, just 90 minutes.  So I  headed directly to the GPS points I had marked previously in late March as looking the worst.

 

John Quigley
The shores of the Chandeleurs looked very dirty, with trucks and evidence of dredging work all along that once-pristine and rarely-visited chain of islands and wildlife sanctuary.  But when we reached the southern Chandeleurs and Breton Island, we were upset to see remains of those expansive subsurface sheets of deep red.
 
Not wanting to create a lot of frustration and anger without having good knowledge of what the stuff we found in March was, we didn’t publish this report right away.  But now, May 5, we are publishing our photos,  for now we have results of laboratory analyses of the waters near Breton Island sampled in late March.  Samples from those subsurface sheets of deep red oily stuff all around Breton Island and along the Chandeleurs were positively identified as BP MC252 (Deepwater Horizon) oil, still showing highly toxic concentrations of polyaromatic nuclear hydrocarbons (PAHs). 
The adult seabirds setting up their nests on this popular rookery have been eating highly contaminated fish here for quite a while, and now they are setting up their nests to raise their young in this toxic environment.
   
This day was not great for photography.  Clouds were thick and low and there was much moisture in the air.  And in the haste to fly within our short time window, we forgot to bring our polarizing lens. But look closely at these photos, and you’ll see the lines — the lines of deep red, the lines of foam, tragically not the natural lines of rip tides and convergence zones and sandbars.  We also spotted a dead dolphin on the east shore of Breton Island.  The photo did not come out well, but flying low and slow over it left us certain of what we saw.  Who knows how many others there are that have not yet washed up or been seen, and whether we will ultimately be able to understand and prove what caused the many ‘unusual mortality events’ of dolphins and sea turtles in these waters since last spring.
 
In these photos you’ll also a see a shrimp boat with his nets down, not two miles northeast of the island!  We wondered if he knew what lurked in the waters so close to him.
Special Thanks to
by Dr. Bonny Schumaker

‘A Day of Remembrance’ at Grand Isle

April 24, 2011


~ In Memory of the Victims of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

My return to Grand Isle was far different from what I’d expected. Often referred toas the hardest hit area from the Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster, Grand Isleclings to the edge of the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana ~ the fastestdisappearing land mass on earth. It was quintessential American beach town with long stretches of white sand beaches until last year when the BP Oil Disaster changed everything.

Tar balls
Redfish

But as Rocky Kistner of NRDC points out, there is a ‘Parallel Universe’ phenomenon going on at Grand Isle. 

On one hand, there is incredible degradationof the previously powdery sand beaches – most of which is now completely compacted by heavy equipment from cleanup operations. It’s now as hardas pavement. And where it’s not as hard as a rock, your shoes stickin oily gooey muck as you walk. Tar balls litter the beach ranging from almost powder sizedto the size of a large hamburger. When you look out to the Gulf, the waves are opaque and dark brown ~ not clear and blue. And it doesn’t smell one bit like the ocean.

But then you realize that up and down the beach, there arefamilies doing what they have always done. Kids building sandcastles andfrolicking in the waves, in many instances stepping over large rotting redfish or catfish to reach the water’s edge.  I cannot help but wonder –“What are these people thinking?”… and “What health problems will they haveahead of them now?”


Rocky Kistner reported that earlier that day, “Auniformed park ranger packing a 9 mm pistol and a broad-brimmed hat marchedthrough the sand towards us, clearly on a mission. “Excuse me but everyone hereneeds to get off the beach,” he barked. “This beach is closed.”  This, due to tar balls and tar mats that continue to coat the previously sandy beach. 

Later in the day when I arrived, families with their beach chairs & umbrellas dotted the beach and not one officer was present. And no warning signs wereposted whatsoever.

Karen Hopkins,  Jessica Hagan, Darlene Eschete

Beyond this, it is puzzling how parents can be so unaware of the potential hazards in this water that they would allow their kids near it atall. Unfortunately it may be the children who will pay the dearest price, asthey receive a much greater dose of toxins due to their size than the adults.  I question how so many Americans can bury theirheads in this oily sand.

We as Americans are in denial about just how bad this environmental disaster really is. And shame on us as a people for continuing to delay in moving toward alternative energy and to change our lifestyles to lessen our dependence on petroleum. We’re going to pay a heavy price, but the heaviest price, I am afraid will be paid by future generations long after we are gone.

Grand Isle Documentarian Betty Doud
A small but deeply dedicated group of activists attended a rally at this ‘Day ofRemembrance for the Victims of the Deepwater Horizon’. 
But for the most part, onGrand Isle, it was business as usual. Long lines at the Snow Cone stand, peopleswimming, and a baseball game being played on the town field. The dichotomy was striking.  My old and new friends at the rally remarked that most of the residents of Grand Isle don’t want to hear about the oil or protests anymore. They just want things to go back to normal. All they want is to sit in the bleachers and watch their kids play the great American pastime. Just for a while, until Monday comes around again and they face the fact that their lives will never be the same. 


Those businesses that have not closed since my last visit, are barely holding on. Last summer, The Subway, the bars & even the gift shops still had the BP cleanup crews to bring in business. Today there is only a fraction of the number of workers from last summer. Although there are some tourists here, the fishing charter boats are largely without work.

I was surprised to see shrimp trawlers maneuvering in the current by the Route 1 Bridge into Caminada Bay. The water around the boats was black. I wondered if these boats were using TEDs, or Turtle Extrusion Devices, to prevent endangered sea turtles from being drowned in their nets. The situation for the fishermen in the Gulf is serious. There simply are no easy answers to the dilemmas facing the population of the Delta.

And a final word from Mac MacKenzie

Gulf of Mexico Beaches ~ One Year Later

April 18 – 28, 2011

One year after the Deepwater Horizon Disaster began, just a few days of walks on Gulf beaches from Grand Isle to Biloxi, Mississippi produce a haunting set of photographs showing just how deep the toll on marine life has been from the worst environmental disaster in American history. Walk with me and take a few minutes to think about the fate of the Gulf of Mexico. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Oceans of Inspiration – Sylvia Earle at Momentum 2011

Sustainable Seas: The Vision, The Reality

On May 12th, Dr. Earle addressed a crowd of more than 500 at Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis as the final speaker in the Institute on the Environment’s groundbreaking Momentum 2011 event series.


To say that her talk was inspirational would be an understatement. With lyrical words and stunning underwater images,  Sylvia took us on an expedition from the deepest ocean to our neighboring planets, bringing into sharp focus what the  future may hold. She conveyed not only her passion for what she calls “the blue heart of the planet,” but also her conviction that we must – and can – still rescue it from the overfishing, climate change and other onslaughts it faces today.


With the message that the next 10 years on earth will be the most important in the next 10,000, Sylvia invites us again to participate in her TED wish, “I wish you would use all means at your disposal — films! expeditions! the web! more! — to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.”

Click here for a video of highlights, Sylvia’s full speech is below.