The Real Price of Oil at the South Orange Public LIbrary

The South Orange Public Library, in partnership with the New Jersey Council for the Humanities (NJCH),  announces that Professor Frank J. Popper will host its two part series entitled Face to Face: Community Conversations on Environmental Justice. 

The series begins on May 5 at 7 p.m., with a screening and discussion of  Crude: The Real  Price of Oil, which has won numerous awards for documentary filmmaking and was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival.  The film provides an inside look at the infamous $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” case. The plaintiffs claimed that Texaco – which merged with Chevron in 2001 – spent three decades systematically contaminating one of the most bio-diverse regions on earth, poisoning the water, air and land, which  resulted in increased rates of cancer and a multiplicity of other health problems  and  contributed to the destruction of indigenous peoples and irrevocably impacted their traditional way of life. 

The second part of the series will be a discussion of selected readings on environmental justice  on June 2 at 7:30 p.m, also led by Dr. Popper.  The reading packets will be available at the May 5 program.

Popper teaches at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, where he also participates in the American Studies, Geography and Political Science Departments and the School of Arts and Sciences Honors Program.  He teaches regularly in the Environmental Studies Program at Princeton University.  He is author of The President's Commissions (1970) and The Politics of Land-Use Reform (1981), coauthor of Urban Nongrowth: City Planning for People (1976) and coeditor of Land Reform, American Style (1984).

For more information contact Ellen Columbus at the library at 973-762-0230.