Crude – the movie

“From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rain-forest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island.”   –  from wikipedia

This movie is of the quest of activists to bring accountability and conscience to our world.  The plight of ecology and the people of the world who have not severed human relationship to earth and creatures, should not be something sensational but should be seen as something we have chosen or willed to forget, or do not understand as having been ‘forgotten out of us’ –meaning that sometimes our forgetting is not personal, so much as having been a strategy by larger forces, so that we may drive our cars and keep our lights on and party in all-hours of the night without a thought to the violence this attests to.

Our world, a neo-colonialist world, has made natural the exploitation. Of each other, of others, of ourselves.  We make the abusive corporatocracy unapproachable in our self-hatred.  Our ignorance is a child of self-hatred and ineptness.  We shrink and sometimes feel paralyzed and small.  That’s what many of the elites who are exploiting our earth and communities want us to do.  Are we that obedient?  Are the indigenous people just people with colorful clothes that we think are behind us in history?  I am certainly not.  I have Cherokee heritage.  All of us are indigenous.  The indigenous communities who still lived as linked with the earth thrived in all of Europe and Asia and the Americas and the Middle East.  Those ties have all been systematically severed in one way or another and at different speeds and intensities that usually mirror the amount of modernization that has accumulated.  The Irish and Welsh Celts and the Ainu and the indigenous of Okinawa and others continue to battle.  Are the indigenous people of the Americas indigenous?  All of us come from earth.  Why is it that the ‘brown people’ with colorful clothes are left to fend for a life on this planet that doesn’t equal plunder and genocide while the rest of us have ambivalence about all of it?  We are humanity, we are earth.  Do we ignore our mothers and foremothers and forefathers as a ‘progress,’ as some kind of maturity?  Who taught us these things?

Instead of guilt, there needs to be a reckoning.  A courageous facing, shifts in behavior, but not a reconstitution of a heavy punishment-as-morality, but a compassionate turn, a vigorous turn to actually care for our ancestors, for our planet.  Not just in our own recycling projects and moral superiority in not driving SUVs.  I’m talking more about working with those, like the gentlemen, women, children, ladies, lawyers, and all others who are struggling and need our creativity, alliance, knowledge, privileges.  Act.  And hopefully movies such as this, can inspire, inform, shift you and those you know, with a ruthless love of life and diversity.