Trudie Styler arrives in the Amazon to help support indigenous families (photo by Sebastian Posingis)

CRUDE: THE PRICE OF OIL (Joe Berlinger, 2009)
Now available on DVD
www.crudethemovie.com

British actress-producer Trudie Styler has been an environmental activist, humanitarian, and organic food advocate for more than twenty years. In 1989, she cofounded the Rainforest Foundation with her husband, Sting, and she recently found herself back in the Amazon, joining with a community of indigenous Ecuadorians who are in the midst of a sixteen-year legal battle with Texaco / Chevron over illegal dumping that has threatened the future of the area and its longtime residents. The struggle is documented in Joe Berlinger’s CRUDE: THE PRICE OF OIL, which opened last year at the IFC Center and is now available on DVD.

“I get a lot of important causes brought to my attention, and of course it’s impossible for one person to do justice to every issue that matters in the world,” Styler explained in an exclusive e-mail interview with twi-ny. “My focus, therefore, has to be confined to the issues that have had a personal impact on me, because it is by feeling emotionally engaged with a problem that I find I am most effective. My first exposure to the suffering of the Ecuadorian people whose land had been polluted by the oil industry was when I was in the country as an ambassador for UNICEF. I was taken to the Lago Agrio area and saw for myself some of the waste pits that had been left, saw for myself the oil-slicked water and sludgy soil, the dead birds. I sat and talked to doctors and nurses, to mothers with cancer who were giving up their own treatment in order to afford for their sick children to have chemotherapy.”

In the documentary, Styler, whose company, Xingu, has produced such recent films as Dito Montiel’s A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS and Duncan Jones’s MOON, gets down and dirty as she examines the contamination and meets with numerous ill people. And she’s not afraid to speak her mind on the issue.

Contamination has led to sickness, death, and a major lawsuit (photo by Sebastian Posingis)

“I was horrified that a multibillion-dollar industry, an American company, could have abused a land and its people so callously and carelessly,” Styler said. “It’s shameful. I just want to see Texaco/Chevron take responsibility for the devastation they left behind and show some respect for the people whose environment, whose families, and whose way of life have been decimated. It’s an important principle for multinationals operating all over the globe.

“The most surprising thing of all was that this systematic polluting of the land had gone on for nearly four decades, and they’d got away with it,” Styler added. “And all because the drilling practices being used were outdated and environmentally unsafe, and had been outlawed in the U.S. back in the 1930s. I believe that as a U.S. company, Texaco/Chevron should have carried out their business using U.S. legal standards. Anything else is an exploitation of the needs of developing countries.”

The legal wrangling has been going on since 1993. Styler hopes that by getting the word out through the documentary, more people will become aware of the situation in Ecuador and help support the indigenous Ecuadorians’ vital cause.

“If the judgment goes against Chevron, no doubt they will appeal, and I’m fearful that the legal process will continue to be dragged out. But there is more and more public awareness of this case, and I’d like to hope that one day soon Chevron will realize that their public image would be so much better served if they would choose to be a company that cared about this planet and its people. They can afford to clean up the land — why don’t they just get on with it?”