Bedrock Rights Film | 2021
The documentary film "Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change" explores how fracking and climate change violate human rights. According to the findings of an international human rights tribunal, the violations include the right to health, the right to clean water, the rights of Indigenous people, and the right to information and participation.
Climate change is of course a scientific and technological problem, but it is fundamentally a problem of environmental justice. Learn how a rights-based argument can empower new global action against fracking and climate change.
The film features:
- Poetry by Debra Marquart, a writer, singer, and teacher who has taught writing workshops in Bakken oil field communities most affected by fracking
- Interviews with Tom Kerns and Kathleen Dean Moore, co-editors of the book "Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change"
- Stories from those on the front lines of fracking
- Comments from environmental justice activists, including Sandra Steingraber and Jacqueline Patterson
- Comments from legal experts and key points from the advisory opinion of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change
This film premiered on June 2, 2021. It was produced by the Spring Creek Project with production and videography by Fire+Bird Films.
We are making this film freely available and hope many future screenings of it will take place, in libraries, at public events, in classrooms and elsewhere. If Spring Creek Project can assist in a screening, please contact us.
A Post-Premiere Discussion
Following the film’s premiere screening, Spring Creek Project hosted a conversation with two human rights thought-leaders, Sandra Steingraber and Mary Wood.
Sandra Steingraber is a biologist, author and anti-fracking activist who serves as senior scientist for the Science and Environmental Health Network. Steingraber is an expert on the human health impacts of environmental conditions, especially related to fracking. She co-founded New Yorkers Against Fracking and serves as Science Advisor to Americans Against Fracking. She is the author of several books, including "Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment."
Mary Wood is a Philip H. Knight Professor of Law at the University of Oregon and the faculty director of the law school's nationally acclaimed Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center. She is an award-winning professor and the co-author of leading textbooks on public trust law and natural resources law. Her book "Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age" sets forth a new paradigm of global ecological responsibility. She originated the legal approach called Atmospheric Trust Litigation, now being used in cases brought on behalf of youth throughout the world, seeking to hold governments accountable for carbon pollution.
This conversation was moderated by Spring Creek Project’s director, Carly Lettero. The event ends with a round of thanks among the film's collaborators.