Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change

Thomas A. Kerns, Kathleen Dean Moore

ISBN 10: 0870710729 / ISBN 13: 9780870710728

Published by Oregon State University Press April 2021, 2021

About this Item

Front and back covers have light edge and corner wear. Spine intact with no creasing or warping. Binding is tight and intact, pages clean and unmarked. Firefly sells new and used books through our store front. We try to add a detailed description to as many titles as possible. If you have questions regarding this title, please contact us. Photos available on request.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change
• Publisher: Oregon State University Press April 2021
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870710729
• ISBN 13: 9780870710728
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Condition: Used Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Science/Nature/Climate Change

About this title

Synopsis

Fracking, the practice of shattering underground rock to release oil and natural gas, is a major driver of climate change. The 300,000 fracking facilities in the US also directly harm the health and livelihoods of people in front-line communities, who are disproportionately poor and people of color. Impacted citizens have for years protested that their rights have been ignored.

On May 14, 2018, a respected international human-rights court, the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, began a week-long hearing on the impacts of fracking and climate change on human and Earth rights. In its advisory opinion, the Tribunal ruled that fracking systematically violates substantive and procedural human rights; that governments are complicit in the rights violations; and that to protect human rights and the climate, the practice of fracking should be banned.

The case makes history. It revokes the social license of extreme-extraction industries by connecting environmental destruction to human-rights violations. It affirms that climate change, and the extraction techniques that fuel it, directly violate deeply and broadly accepted moral norms encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Bearing Witness maps a promising new direction in the ongoing struggle to protect the planet from climate chaos. It tells the story of this landmark case through carefully curated court materials, including searing eye-witness testimony, groundbreaking legal testimony, and the Tribunal’s advisory opinion. Essays by leading climate writers such as Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Sandra Steingraber and legal experts such as John Knox, Mary Wood, and Anna Grear give context to the controversy. Framing essays by the editors, experts on climate ethics and human rights, demonstrate that a human-rights focus is a powerful, transformative new tool to address the climate crisis.

 

About the Author

Thomas A. Kerns, emeritus professor of philosophy at North Seattle College, is Director of  Environment and Human Rights Advisory. In 2015, he helped draft the international Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change. Dr. Kerns co-organized the International Tribunal on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change, which provides the substance of this book. 

Kathleen Dean Moore is a moral philosopher, environmental activist, and award-winning author or editor of a dozen books, including Moral Ground and Great Tide Rising. Her growing alarm at the devastation of nature led her to leave her longtime position as Distinguished Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Oregon State University to write and speak about the moral urgency of climate action. She writes from Corvallis, Oregon, and Chichagof Island, Alaska. www.riverwalking.com