Crimes Against Nature: Chevron and the Fisherwomen of Nigeria

You must read this front-page story in the Sunday New York Times to understand what we're up against, as we try to fight for human survival against the forces of greed and destruction. The fisherwomen of the Niger Delta in Nigeria were finally forced to occupy a Chevron facility after the Big Oil company refused to fix a leaking pipe that was spewing oil into their waters, killing fish and the entire food chain that kept alive their families and communities. Since the 1950s, when Big Oil giants like Chevron, Shell and Eni began drilling in the region -- once booming with aquatic life -- millions of gallons of oil have been spilled into its water, quadruple the volume of oil spilled in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Now that they've made billions of dollars off the Niger Delta, Chevron and the other Big Oil despoilers want to cut and run. The fisherwomen and their villages did not share in the oil bounty, but now they're being left with cleaning up one of the most polluted areas on the globe. "Chevron's a very rich company," says a village elder quoted in the article, "but they're very wicked to us." Chevron has promised a formal investigation of the leaking oil pipe, but so far (of course ) the investigation hasn't started -- and nobody expects it to produce any real results.

We need to build an international coalition against despoilers of the planet like Chevron, which is headquartered right here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, whom I've written about before, is a true corporate villain. While Chevron is contributing heavily to the climate crisis that is wreaking havoc in California -- including drought and wildfires -- Wirth had the nerve to complain about the PG&E blackouts that have been made necessary by the environmental destruction. If that's not enough to make you gag, he's also been a major financial supporter of Donald Trump.

Clearly all of us have a common enemy in men like this. We need to treat them like the criminal outlaws that they are.

Women protest the despoiling of the Niger Delta by Big Oil giants like Chevron