Episode Description
The [F]law podcast team sits down with Steven Donziger to discuss his litigation efforts against Chevron and his subsequent detainment by the US government.
Steven Donziger is a human rights lawyer who has spent the last three decades in a protracted fight to hold Chevron, an American oil company accountable for wreaking devastation on indigenous communities and farmland in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Beginning in the 1970s, Texaco, now owned by Chevron, began drilling for oil in the Amazon. As a result, rural farmers and indigenous communities were victims of an enormous ecological catastrophe. Chevron dumped billions of gallons of hazardous oil waste and millions of gallons of crude oil on Amazonian land leading to toxic pollution that contributed to widespread illness among the Ecuadorian people. When Steven Donziger visited the region, he described the landscape as an apocalyptic disaster. In response to Chevron's pollution, Donziger and a team of like-minded lawyers brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of over 30,000 indigenous people and rural farmers in Ecuador against Chevron. In legal documents, Donziger's team contended that Chevron's activity created an "Amazon Chernobyl" spanning 1700 square miles. Although in 2011, Donziger was able to initially win an $18 billion judgment against the oil company in Ecuadorian court. Chevron has since spent hundreds of millions of dollars to evade accountability, paying dozens of law firms to use a variety of novel and nefarious legal tactics to help complete its campaign to destroy Steven Donziger and his work.
To learn more about Steven Donziger and the fight for environmental justice in Ecuador:
Episode credits:
- Hosted by Andrew Rossi-Schroeder
- Produced by Liz Turner
- Edited by Liz Turner and Sean Healey
- Music by Sean Healey
The [F]law Podcast is the audio arm of The [F]law, an online magazine that shares stories that reveal how corporate law and power create social problems and systemic injustices. The [F]law publishes pieces that identify how corporate power has infiltrated social and political institutions, analyzes how it controls them, and proposes methods for dismantling corporate control & building collective power. The [F]law is the product of the Systemic Justice Project and the Critical Corporate Theory Lab at Harvard Law School. Through conversations with lawyers, journalists, organizers, and community advocates, we share stories that reveal how corporate law and power create social harms and systemic injustices.
Learn more about The [F]law Podcast on our website.