ENTERTAINMENT
September 18, 2009 | KENNETH TURAN, FILM CRITIC
"Crude" sounds like the standard "this is an outrage" environmental degradation documentary, the latest in a line that includes "An Inconvenient Truth" and films about the death of the ocean, the evaporation of water, the murder of dolphins, even the disintegration of dirt. "Crude" fits that bill, but it is something considerably more interesting as well. The outrage in question is the subject of a class-action suit filed by 30,000 citizens of Ecuador against Chevron, the world's fifth-largest corporation, alleging that 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater were dumped into the Amazon between 1972 and 1990, fatally poisoning the land and water and sickening inhabitants.
OPINION
August 29, 2009
The facts of Aguinda vs. Texaco Inc. haven't changed since the lawsuit was first filed in 1993, but the world has. Climate change and environmental stewardship have become international concerns. The dignity of native populations around the world has been recognized in a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the United Nations. And after 16 years of litigation in the United States and, now, Ecuador, the lawsuit against Chevron Corp. has become a cause celebre among human rights activists and environmentalists.
NATIONAL
April 20, 2009 | Associated Press
In Maria Gunnoe's 11-year war over the strip mining she says has ruined her homestead, there have been casualties: Family dogs have been poisoned and shot, and her truck's fuel tank has been stuffed with sand. Yet she keeps fighting to stop mountaintop removal mining. And for confronting the coal industry in Appalachia, she is the 2009 North American winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize.
OPINION
April 16, 2008
The glorious Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, historic host to presidents and royals, was the improbable scene of a brawl this week. Squaring off beneath the cream-and-gilt ceilings and behind mahogany doors were oil behemoth Chevron Corp. and a pair of Ecuadorean environmental activists. It was not, however, a fair fight. Oil giant vs. environmentalists? In San Francisco? Chevron never had a chance. The occasion for the face-off was the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.
WORLD
April 18, 2005 | From Times Staff and Wire Reports
A Roman Catholic priest in rural Honduras who is a harsh critic of deforestation and its effects on poor communities has been named one of the six winners of this year's Goldman Environmental Prize, awarded by the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Fund. Father Andres Tamayo, 48, will receive $125,000. He leads a grass-roots movement that has imposed an unofficial moratorium on logging in his province of Olancho, spurred by the damage to local farming.
NEWS
April 17, 2000 | RENEE TAWA, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Hippo teeth had cachet. The way hunters saw it, elephant tusks and meat also were fine take-home prizes in the forests of southeast Liberia. Back then, in the early '70s, whole villages would slaughter an elephant in the forest and drag the pieces home, recalled Alexander Peal, who was a district forest officer for the country at the time. That was his introduction to the so-called wildlife protection laws in his West African homeland; the regulations, he found, were too loose to enforce.