Oil waste pit fire in Shushufindi in 1993. © Lou Dematteis/Redux
interview by Summer Bowie
photographs by Lou Dematteis
portraits by Caroline Tompkins
For three decades, Texaco Petroleum, which merged with Chevron in 2001, dumped more than 16 billion gallons of toxic waste water into the Ecuadorian rainforest, contaminating two million acres of the Amazon. Locals suffered a brutal wave of cancers, miscarriages, and birth defects. It is considered one of the world’s largest man-made environmental disasters in history—30 times greater than Exxon Valdez. In the landmark case, Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco (2001), filed on behalf of Amazonian Indigenous collectives, human rights lawyer Steven Donziger helped win the largest damages judgment ever awarded in an environmental lawsuit while up against the greatest defense expenditure by a corporation in history. He was the first lawyer detained and imprisoned on a misdemeanor contempt charge, posted the highest bail ever imposed for a misdemeanor charge, and is the only lawyer to have been criminally charged by a corporation and disbarred without a fact hearing. He is also the only US citizen to have their right to travel revoked as a sanction in a civil case. The temerity he has demonstrated in his defense strategy has been met with a terrifying extralegal assault by Chevron that has cost him and his clients dearly, but he remains undaunted.
SUMMER BOWIE What originally inspired you to become a human rights lawyer?
STEVEN DONZIGER I have always been interested in using whatever professional talents I could develop to address injustice. I felt this in my heart when I was a child and through my adolescence, so I decided to go to law school to help people who otherwise would not be able to access the legal process to deal with their problems. I didn’t necessarily start out wanting to work on environmental justice. There were lots of ways to carry out this mission, and it turns out because of an opportunity I had to go to Ecuador in 1993, I got involved in this particular situation, which turned into an epic legal case, which turned into my detention, which now has turned into me sitting here with you.
BOWIE It's no small feat that you successfully sued Chevron for dumping oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon, an area that became known as the Amazon Chernobyl, which injured and killed multiple generations of Indigenous people and destroyed their ancestral land. How many years did you spend on that case?
DONZIGER There's a lot of lawyers who have worked on this case over the years. I'm just one of them. It's now been over thirty years and we've accomplished amazing things. I’m really proud of that. But I'm left at this point with the fundamental reality that all of that work has actually not yet produced a concrete material result for the Indigenous and farmer communities in the Amazon that have been decimated by the pollution that was dumped by Texaco (now Chevron). So, while there have been great accomplishments, there's still a lot of work to do, and I live with that every day.
The idea of harnessing a capitalist investment model in service of a landmark human rights case was absolutely terrifying to Chevron and the oil industry writ large.
BOWIE The original judgment you won was for $18 billion, but in the end, with the appeals, it was reduced to $9.5 billion. However, they managed to not pay for any of the damages. How is that possible?
DONZIGER I'm speechless. It is so shocking to me that after winning the case, having it affirmed unanimously on appeal by Ecuador’s Supreme Court, then affirmed unanimously on appeal a second time by Ecuador's constitutional court in the country where Chevron insisted the trial be held, in the country where Chevron promised a US court that they would pay any adverse judgment, that they still have not paid a single dollar. That is an illustration of how corporate power can completely override the rule of law when it really needs to. Chevron is more than happy to abide by court decisions and the “rule of law” when they win. They sometimes abide by court decisions that are unfavorable but modest. What they cannot abide by is a court decision that is both sizable and landmark in nature, and one that calls into question their very business model, which is predicated on significant exploitation of vulnerable peoples and their resources so they can maintain their obscene level of profits. They externalize the cost of production by leaving the oil waste that's generated through drilling on the land and in the waterways of the communities where they're operating. And in Ecuador, they just dumped the toxic water of production directly into the rivers and streams that the local communities were relying on for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing. They did this knowing that over time it would kill people. They did it because the people living in the jungle had no money and almost no political power. But understand, these people were wealthy. I've learned a lot of things I didn't know at the beginning. One is that it’s possible to be wealthy with no money. That’s what the Indigenous people were before Texaco showed up and essentially stole their wealth by destroying the forest.
Huaorani women march to the Superior Court of Justice in Lago Agrio at the start of thetrial against Chevron (formerly Texaco) in October, 2003. © Lou Dematteis/Redux
BOWIE Right. To live in paradise…
DONZIGER To have everything you need: clean water, clean air, shelter, medicine, food. Many Indigenous peoples easily lived to more than a hundred years of age before oil development. There was no word in the native languages for cancer—that didn't exist, because there was no industry, no chemicals in the environment. But this all changed radically when Texaco went in there and decided to engineer a system to pollute. This was not an oil spill or an accident. This was a system engineered to dump millions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the environment every single day for twenty-five years in areas of the forest where thousands of people lived and that had some of the greatest biodiversity on the planet.
BOWIE It was a class action lawsuit representing 30,000 people who obviously couldn't afford to prosecute a company like Texaco/Chevron. So, you found a very innovative way to fund the lawsuit. Can you talk about that?
DONZIGER This is a critical piece of the story that most people do not know. Historically, with vulnerable communities that are victimized by industrial-scale pollution, there's a gap between the legitimacy of their claims and their ability to get those claims into court, and then into a trial. What we created was an economic model for a human rights case that had never existed in this context. In the process, we deprived Chevron of its main advantage: to use its money in a war of attrition to starve us to death so we could not litigate. The Indigenous and farmer communities in Ecuador have something very valuable, which is a legal claim against Chevron that is potentially worth many billions of dollars. So, if you can convince donors to invest in the case so that lawyers can do the work, you can create significant value over time by winning the case and collecting a sizable judgment. The idea of harnessing a capitalist investment model in service of a landmark human rights case was absolutely terrifying to Chevron and the oil industry writ large. It helps to explain why they have literally used 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers and legal personnel to go after me, a human rights lawyer who works out of his small apartment in Manhattan. They not only want to prevent the Ecuadorian communities from collecting on the judgment that they won, they want to use this to destroy the very idea that you can do a case like this.
Cofan leader Emergildo Criollo stands in front of the flares of a separation plant in theGuanta oil fields. The plant was built by Texaco on Cofan ancestral territory. © Lou Dematteis/Redux
Oil rises to the surface from a waste pit covered with dirt near Coca in 1993. © Lou Dematteis/Redux
BOWIE They really painted the picture as though you were the big lawyer coming up with so many resources to prosecute them. It was quite the projection.
DONZIGER It is quite the projection. The problem for Chevron is they had never met this type of situation and they underestimated us constantly. So, they jumped to the conclusion that I had found secret funding and had created multiple overseas bank accounts, and also that I was committing fraud by paying people off down in Ecuador. They couldn't explain how our little team, which included the amazing Ecuadorian lawyers Pablo Fajardo, Julio Prieto, Juan Pablo Saenz, Alejandro Ponce, and community leaders such as Luis Yanza, could push the case forward and win. I was mostly up here supporting the Ecuadorian legal team and getting funds to pay all the expenses—at my great expense, because I never made any money other than a modest stipend that I used to live. I'm basically broke right now because of the case, but the only way Chevron could explain why I would spend so many years doing this was they assumed that like them, I wanted money. And the hilarious part about that is they finally got a judge in the US to basically say to me, “You can't collect any legal fee ever from this case.” They probably thought I'd stop working at that point, but I've kept working because the money was just a tool to make the case happen. They thought they could win by might what they could not win on the merits, but that didn't happen. So then, they took it to the next level and basically corrupted the judicial system and had me incarcerated.
BOWIE I want to talk about Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation [SLAPP] because the response was not only to not pay, but to teach a lesson and prevent this from happening again. So, they hit you with what many consider to be a SLAPP lawsuit. Can you talk about what these are and how they undermine our constitutional right to freedom of speech?
DONZIGER A SLAPP lawsuit is designed to harass and intimidate a person or an entity that is bothering the company or government entity that launches this kind of lawsuit. They're not designed to litigate on the merits of any particular claim. The litigant just invents civil claims and files a lawsuit to threaten the other side with massive legal fees and reputational harm, hoping they will shut up and go away. When they sued me for $60 billion, I had to use all my strength to get out of bed those first few days. I saw my life blowing up. At this point, I'm used to it. But to the average person, say a campaigner who's protesting the construction of a pipeline in their community, it's very intimidating to be hit with a lawsuit by the pipeline company. Most people just stop their advocacy because they cannot even afford to hire and pay a lawyer to fight it. So, industry uses these lawsuits to try to block people from engaging in advocacy and that violates the First Amendment that protects people's right to free speech. The lawsuit filed against me by Chevron is kind of the mother of all SLAPP lawsuits where they used hundreds of lawyers. I'm continuing to fight it and I think I have advantages that the average non-lawyer would not have, but look at the price I have paid personally for this SLAPP lawsuit. This is a huge danger to democracy and to the rule of law. Not just here, but in other countries as well.
BOWIE Are there currently any efforts being made to prevent SLAPP lawsuits?
DONZIGER Several states around the US have anti-SLAPP laws, but there is no such law at the federal level. So, if you get hit with one of these lawsuits, and you happen to be in one of the twenty states with such laws, you can file a motion right at the beginning to get it dismissed and get your legal fees paid. The offending corporation can also be fined. California has a good anti-SLAPP law, but not enough states have them, and those that exist are not that strong. The punishment for the company, even if they lose that motion, is like a slap on the wrist compared to the potential benefits. At the federal level, there's a bill right now before the House of Representatives [the SLAPP Protection Act] to create a federal anti-SLAPP law. That needs to pass and become law.
BOWIE You were given the highest bail for a misdemeanor in American history. I think it was $800,000. It’s very hard to find any misdemeanors where bail is set at all. From what I understand, Illinois was the first state to eliminate cash bail and there have been reforms in California, New York, and New Jersey. How does the cash bail system undermine the idea of justice for all?
DONZIGER It discriminates against those with no money. Cash bail is another example of how the law and the justice system are not neutral. So, to give a very basic example, if you get stopped for speeding, and the ticket is a $200 fine and you're worth $100 million dollars, that's a penny. If you don't have enough money to put food on the table, you can't pay it, and you can go to jail. So, the elimination of cash bail is really important.
BOWIE You were originally sentenced to six months in prison, but you were placed on house arrest for over two years prior to sentencing, and in the end you served a total of forty-five days in prison in addition to almost three years of house arrest. How did the sentence become so protracted?
DONZIGER First of all, I was the only lawyer who ever spent a single day detained on a misdemeanor contempt charge in the history of this country, and that pretrial detention was on top of a bond, which was higher than three of the four cops who killed George Floyd. And then, I was sentenced to six months in prison after a judge denied me a jury, refused to let me present my defense, and summarily found me guilty in a trial that clearly did not meet minimal standards of due process according to several international trial monitors. I reported to prison voluntarily on October 27th, 2021, and after six weeks, they “released” me to serve the rest of my sentence incarcerated in my apartment with an ankle bracelet. I was detained a total of 993 days from beginning to end on a misdemeanor charge that had a maximum sentence of 180 days. And the way the judge legally justified that—this is an example of the manipulation of the judicial system by Chevron—is that she claimed that my time detained at home waiting for my misdemeanor trial wasn't really detention. She created this legal fiction and called my home detention a condition of my freedom. It was Kafkaesque.
BOWIE Were you released early from prison because they were trying to prevent overcrowding during the early days of the COVID pandemic?
DONZIGER That was one reason, but it was a lot of things. When I got to prison, I was the only one in the entire 900-person prison convicted of a misdemeanor. Everyone else was a felon. So, the line staff at the prison examined my case and saw that there appeared to be a vendetta against me by Chevron and these judges, and that gave them some perspective that ended up helping me. I mean, I was the only lawyer ever to be sentenced to prison on a misdemeanor contempt in the entire country. The conditions were another reason. There was one full-time doctor for 1,300 male and female inmates, and it was very difficult to get medical care. People with COVID were waiting weeks for treatment. A lot of inmates across the country started getting the virus and dying. Congress passed the First Step Act, which allowed wardens at federal prisons to send people home if they had served at least 25% of their sentence, were sixty years of age or older, and had a comorbidity. I had no idea that this law existed until I got there. I had just turned sixty before I went to prison, so after forty-five days they sent me home. I was high-profile and I was getting dozens of letters a day from around the world. Important people were trying to visit me. They didn’t want the scrutiny. I returned to my home detention with the ankle monitor for the remainder of my sentence, which was another four and one-half months.
BOWIE You were criminally prosecuted by Chevron’s private law firm, rather than the government, and disbarred without a trial by jury. Is that correct?
DONZIGER Yeah, this is another first. As far as we can tell, I’m the only lawyer in history to have his law license removed without a fact hearing. They basically used this RICO [Racketeer Influenced & Corrupted Organizations] case judgment against me where I was denied a jury as a basis to disbar me when I couldn't get a hearing to challenge the facts in that judgment, which was a civil case without a jury where I was denied the right to testify on my behalf and present a defense.
BOWIE And you're currently campaigning for a presidential pardon from Biden. This is, of course, after the Supreme Court refused to take up your appeal. Short of that pardon, is there any way that you can ever go back to work as a lawyer?
DONZIGER A pardon is very important in this particular case because the principle that private corporations cannot prosecute and detain their adversaries needs to be established very clearly by our President. If we're going to have a country that protects the First Amendment and the freedom of people to engage in advocacy, my private corporate prosecution must be nullified immediately by the President. It is really disappointing to me that our federal courts, including our Supreme Court, refused to deal with this corporate prosecution. They only take approximately one percent of petitions. (laughs) They're really a lazy court. They only hear fifty cases a year. Most Supreme Courts do hundreds or even thousands of cases. So, to get your case heard is a heavy lift. My petition to get my appeal heard got re-listed five times. It's never happened before. There clearly was an intense internal debate among the nine about whether to take my case and I actually believe when I look at the proclivities of all the nine justices, everyone probably was in agreement that what happened to me was unconstitutional. When the petition to hear the appeal is denied, you almost never get a written opinion, but I got one from Gorsuch and Kavanaugh basically saying my case was unconstitutional and they wanted to take it. But nobody else, including the three so-called liberals, would agree to take my case. All I needed was four.
BOWIE Are you still limited to travel within the US, or did you get your passport back?
DONZIGER I have no passport. They took it on August 6th, 2019. I've not left the country nor seen my clients since. I've been to Ecuador over 250 times prior to the confiscation of my passport. They're trying to prevent me from continuing my relationship with people who need my services. Never before has a US citizen been denied his or her right to international travel indefinitely as a sanction in a civil case. I have this claim against the US government and there's also a group of professional, international trial monitors led by Stephen J. Rapp, a former war crimes prosecutor who served as the US Ambassador for War Crimes under the Obama administration, that observed my entire trial and determined that it was illegal and did not meet international standards of due process. It's been verified by multiple international jurists who are highly respected. All of these factors together, but most importantly a pardon, will help me travel again and work as a lawyer.
BOWIE I know how hard Chevron hit you in this case. Did they attack Pablo Fajardo and the rest of the Ecuadorian lawyers in kind?
DONZIGER They attacked a bunch of people, not just me. Over time, I became the main object of their attacks because they realized I had played a very important role in designing various strategies, recruiting lawyers, and setting up an economic model that attracted millions of dollars of donations and support. They concluded that if they could knock me out, the whole case would fall apart. They focused a massive amount of firepower on me personally, probably more than any lawyer ever has been subjected to in the history of our country. They had websites created to defame me. They hired Kroll, the private investigations firm, to spy on me and my family. They had a massive media strategy to destroy my credibility. They sued me for $60 billion, the most amount of money any person ever has been sued for in this country. There was a time I literally feared my life would fall apart and I would not survive. If it weren’t for my family, for my incredible wife Laura Miller, my son Matthew, my sister Susan and many others, I don't know if I could have gotten up. When the attacks began, I didn't think I'd ever get my reputation back. One day, the Wall Street Journal came out with an editorial called “The Amazon Swindle” written by Bret Stephens who's since reinvented himself as a New York Times columnist. And most of my friends and people I'd worked with over the years were just stunned. They were all so into the case, and treated me with respect, and saw me as a good person and a really good lawyer. Then overnight, in a matter of weeks, it all just disappeared. My wife one day asked me, “Do you think you'll ever get your name back?” And that's when I realized that while Chevron was crushing me, we still had the power to tell the truth and put it out there, so at a minimum there would be two competing narratives when people investigated the case. I decided that at some point my son would be ten or so, and he’d go on the internet, and he’d learn about what I had done. So, I decided that I needed to conduct myself with dignity and just do the best I could, so that when he does do that Google search, he will be able to at least be proud of how I handled it, even if it didn't turn out well for me personally or for the people of Ecuador.
Nine-year-old Jairo Yumbo shows his deformed hand on the Via Auca in front of his home in Rumipamba. © Lou Dematteis/Redux
We cannot go on with business as usual because on a dying planet there will be no art.
BOWIE Since your release, in lieu of practicing as a lawyer, you’ve done a lot of activist work. You've mobilized your social media to call attention to a lot of other causes. One that I remember you posting about in June involved thirteen activists in Hawaii who managed to win a historical legal settlement that puts the state on a path toward ending all gas-powered vehicles by 2025. How did they do that?
DONZIGER There's a whole series of climate lawsuits, I would say 2,000 or so in US courts right now, against municipalities, states, the federal government, and fossil fuel companies for engaging in deception and creating harm reflected mostly in weather-related events: droughts, hurricanes, heat waves, floods that the industry should really pay for because they caused the damage. The one in Hawaii was particularly astute because it's one of a series brought by a nonprofit group in Oregon called Our Children’s Trust representing plaintiffs who are all children and they're seeking changes in state policy. There's another successful one in Montana that is hopefully going to force government officials to come up with plans to phase out fossil fuels. Children in many ways have a better standing than the rest of us to bring these lawsuits because they will pay a higher price for our collective failure to deal with the climate crisis. It’s shocking that despite the evidence that the planet is essentially burning up, our national government has never actually come up with a plan to have an orderly and just transition away from fossil fuels. So, a lot of these climate lawsuits are provoking the creation of these phase-out plans at the state level, and the case in Hawaii is doing that. It's a really great example of how courts can be used for good.
BOWIE How do you feel about the Just Stop Oil Movement, where we have a lot of activists who are coming out in various nonviolent ways and calling attention to the oil industry at various art museums around the world?
DONZIGER Well, first of all, I don't believe art should be defaced in service of trying to draw attention to the climate crisis. However, the high-profile examples that we’ve seen are situations where people have defaced the glass encasing art. These actions can be effective in conveying to the world that we cannot go on with business as usual because on a dying planet there will be no art. A friend of mine who is a mother just went into federal prison for two months for defacing the casing covering a work of art in the National Gallery in Washington. Normally, a first-time offender would not go to prison. So, I think the system is feeling the heat. Meeting deep resistance is a sign you are making a difference. It's being reflected in some very harsh sentences being imposed on peaceful, nonviolent protesters who are trying to call attention to this crisis here, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada. The asymmetries are startling: on the one hand, you have companies dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste who are reporting record-breaking profits. On the other, you have regular campaigners who try to stop it through peaceful nonviolent civil disobedience, and they get years in prison. Industry is trying to criminalize climate activism, and way too many judges are playing along.
BOWIE I want to talk about the role of the media, because we live in a time and in a country with a 24-hour live news cycle on multiple TV and radio stations. Plus, we have a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, many of them with companion podcasts. And yet, we have to dig—often through social media—to learn about things such as the ICC and ICJ cases against Netanyahu and Israel, respectively. Or the specific demands that were being made by students protesting the war on Palestine. Why do you think it's so difficult to get into the substance of the major issues at hand?
DONZIGER The answer is relatively simple. The biggest media outlets in our country are profit-generating businesses that depend on corporate advertising, and their primary function is not to disseminate the news in a way that would allow people to be informed or to think critically. Their primary function is to make money. So, they have to curate the news in a way that keeps their major advertisers comfortable or at least minimizes their discomfort. This serves to keep much of the population anesthetized to some of the key issues of the day with childhood poverty or the extent of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza being examples. The New York Times, which has Chevron as a major advertiser, never even covered my arbitrary detention as a human rights lawyer in the United States. Now it is possible because of social media to dig in and spend a lot of time trying to decontaminate your head and get accurate information, but it's a massive endeavor.
It’s hard to get any sense of the deep issues from the cable networks or the major newspapers. They'll ignore or downplay things like the World Court asserting that Israel actually engages in a policy of apartheid in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the occupied territories. Apartheid. That, along with genocide, is literally the world's worst crime. But this is a US ally, so they downplay it in the headlines with something like, “Israel Found to Be in Violation of International Law.” They don't even mention the word apartheid.
Dolores Morales with her 15-year-old son Jose, who suffers from leukemia, at their home in Sacha. © Lou Dematteis/Redux
BOWIE Can you talk about South Africa's ICJ [International Court Of Justice] case against Israel and how the efficacy of that ruling bodes for any hopes of real international justice?
DONZIGER The South Africa case is incredibly significant. Israel, backed by the United States, is trying to rule by might and is trampling on the rule of law. There are now multiple court decisions that have determined the country’s occupation of the territories and the nature of the prosecution of its so-called war are illegal, and probably constitute the crimes of genocide and apartheid. Israel’s current crop of extremist leaders are very cognizant of the ICJ rulings against them and they care deeply about how they look, but they have chosen to ignore the rule of law in service of the illegal goal of creating a Greater Israel and relegating all Palestinians to a second-class legal status. And essentially, Israel slaughtering tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people—most women and children—is one of the most horrific things I’ve seen in my lifetime. That our own country is financing it and providing the weapons is maddening. A recent article came out in a prestigious journal called The Lancet that at least 186,000 people have died in Gaza since October 7th if one counts direct and indirect deaths. Not just from bombs, but from disease, lack of water, sanitation, starvation, and the like. The South Africa case was maybe the most profound lawsuit ever brought in history on the questions of war crimes and genocide. It was incredibly well-documented, comprehensive, and I would say unimpeachable in its evidence. When I read that lawsuit, I was like, Wow, the quality of your lawyer really matters. That was high-quality legal work and it's since continued with other filings by this incredible legal team from multiple countries. The substance of the South Africa case and the fact that it is going to lead to a full-blown genocide trial against the state of Israel, whose basic rationale for existing was to protect the Jewish people from genocide, is one of the most profound things I've ever witnessed in my lifetime. I don't think it's going to lead to anything other than the undermining of the concept of the state of Israel over time. It certainly doesn’t help protect Jews. There's millions of Jews around the world, including myself, who frankly are repulsed by it all. If anything, Israel’s governance via apartheid and the policies of the Netenyahu government threaten Jews all over the world.
People are underestimating this case. There will be massive evidence presented of everything Israel is doing in Gaza, the atrocities, the executions of intellectuals, the obliteration of universities, the obliteration of mosques, the bombings of population centers, the theft of people's personal items from their homes, the attacks on humanitarian workers, the cutting off of the water supply, the deliberate starvation of a population, the attacks on health centers. It's being documented, much of it by Israeli soldiers who post on social media. Just like at the Nuremberg trials after World War II, where the Nazis were appropriately in the dock, Israel's leaders are likely going to be in the dock either physically or figuratively. I'm obviously not justifying what Hamas did on October 7th, but Biden and the media try to act like, Oh, Hamas did this, therefore Israel had to do that. At this point, the reaction is so disproportionate that many legal experts around the world have concluded that it does constitute genocide. And the ICJ itself has preliminarily found, based on what South Africa presented, that there is a plausible case of genocide. This is extremely humiliating for the government of Israel and a very significant advance for human rights.
Maria Aguinda, of the Kichwa Indigenous group, with her family on the oil-soaked Via Auca in the family's village of Rumipamba in 1993. Aguinda is the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit against Chevron (formerly Texaco) seeking a cleanup of petroleum contamination in the Amazon rainforest. © Lou Dematteis/Redux
BOWIE I want to come back home for a moment because we have this two-party system that has clearly reached its threshold in upholding democracy. Will you vote for a third-party candidate? And if so, is there anyone specific you would endorse?
DONZIGER Well, first of all, as a human rights advocate, I've tried really hard to not go too deep into the US electoral process because I consider it to be a very unfair, if not rigged, system. So, to participate in it, either as a voter or even an advocate, as if it's the only game in town, is only going to give credibility to something that I think has failed almost every cycle of my entire life. I mean, five of the six ultraconservative Supreme Court Justices were appointed by Presidents who did not win the popular vote. That’s not democracy. I also think there's no one person anymore who can really lead this country toward the paradigmatic, fundamental change that is needed to rescue our planet and put us on the right footing. It's a systemic problem. Anyone who gets too caught up in these elections and the personalities of the candidates is missing the larger point. Barack Obama, who I knew from law school, proved that one person cannot come close to fixing our problems. We need to create a real grassroots movement. And there’s a lot of monied forces in our society trying to stop that and many are willing to break laws to stop that.
It would help deepen our democracy and protect our freedoms if a viable labor party could be created in the United States. We need to build a new coalition to really take back our country. I would much prefer Kamala over Donald, if that's the choice between the two major parties, but there are other candidates out there who really are moving the needle on the conversation our country needs to have in a very serious way. I would urge people to look at those candidates and understand what they're saying and consider them, recognizing that the two-party system itself is, to a great degree, unresponsive to the deeper needs.
BOWIE Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American philosopher and academic, warned that obsession with the past will doom a movement. In the case of both the Indigenous Palestinians and the Indigenous Ecuadorians that you defended, we're looking at problems that began in the mid-20th century and have only compounded over time. In your opinion, what does forward motion look like in these cases?
DONZIGER Well, I am a firm believer in almost always trying to move forward with a vision of the future you want, whether it's in a particular legal case or in society writ large. It's important to try to understand history, and to understand mistakes, and to understand how major achievements came to pass. They can provide very valuable lessons on how to move forward. But the fundamental emphasis and emotional center of any movement has to be on what the vision is. Where's the Democratic version of Project 2025? The Democratic Party’s lack of vision has made our society really vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover. So, I try to keep looking forward as much as I can. It's funny because I'm writing a book now about my experience with the Ecuador case dating back to 1993, and I'm spending a lot of time looking at what we really accomplished. I've been so focused for the last decade on surviving Chevron’s demonization campaign that I actually forgot how we won the case. We presented evidence, we had experts, we had reports, and we did a great job as lawyers, just like what South Africa's doing now before the International Court of Justice.
BOWIE That brings me to my last question, which is that you are currently writing—is it a memoir?
DONZIGER It's basically the story of the case through my point of view. So, it's got some memoir elements, but it's really the story of the case written in a way that would be accessible to the widest possible audience.
BOWIE Do you know when we can expect to read it?
DONZIGER (laughs) No. It's taken me longer than I thought, because I'm realizing how deep it is. Hopefully in a year.
Achuar boy in Tsunkintsa in the southern Amazon. © Lou Dematteis/Redux