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Virtual Book Launch – Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change

On Monday, 1 November, 2021 at 1 pm EDT/5pm GMT/6 pm CET, Kathleen Dean Moore and Tom Kerns will discuss their new book, Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change, along with special guest and GNHRE Founder Anna Grear.

You can register in advance for the launch here.

About the Book:

The book launch will include a screening of the documentary film “Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change“. Both the book and the film explore how fracking and climate change violate human rights, based on the arguments, witness testimony and findings of the week-long hearings in 2018 of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change. 

Bearing Witness maps a promising new direction in the ongoing struggle to protect the planet from climate chaos. It tells the story of the first, and so far only, international human-rights court special session on fracking and climate change, which issued a devastating indictment of oil and gas corporations and the governments that empower them, for massive violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The book includes eyewitness testimony, moral and legal arguments, the advisory opinion, and essays by thought-leaders such as Winona LaDuke, Mary Wood, John Knox, Anna Grear, and Sandra Steingraber.

About the Editors:

As Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Oregon State University, Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., writes extensively about the moral urgency of climate action. She is co-editor of  Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, essays by the world’s moral leaders about our obligations to the future, and the author of Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change and of Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. She is co-editor, with Thomas A. Kerns, of the recent book Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change, and screenwriter for the accompanying film, Bedrock Rights, A New Foundation for Global Action Against Fracking and Climate Change.  

Tom Kerns is professor emeritus of Philosophy at North Seattle College, and Founder/Director of Environment and Human Rights Advisory. His work brings human rights norms to bear on environmental issues, especially on the climate crisis. In 2015 he served on the drafting group for GNHRE’s international “Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change”, and he co-organized the 2018 Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change. He is co-editor, with Kathleen Dean Moore, of Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change; and author of Youth Climate Courts: How You Can Host a Human Rights Trial for People and Planet, just out last month from Routledge. He lives in a small village on the central Oregon coast.

Astrid Milena Bernal

By Astrid Milena Bernal

Astrid Milena Bernal Rubio is a Colombian environmental lawyer and a PhD-Law student at the University of Melbourne - Climate Futures Center. Formerly LL.M student at Pennsylvania State University (concentrations in International Law and Energy and Environmental Law). She is also a lawyer from the Universidad Católica de Colombia, a Magister in Environmental Law from the Complutense University of Madrid and a Specialist in human rights and critical legal studies from the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) Latin American School of Public Policy- ELAP.

As part of the technical team of GFLAC (climate finance group for Latin America and the Caribbean), she supported the creation of the MRV system (monitoring, reporting and verification) for climate finance in Colombia. In addition, she has been a consultant for the WRI (World Resources Institute) and The Access Initiative (TAI), working as the National researcher for the Environmental Democracy Index (EDI). Also, she has worked as a consultant for AVINA Foundation, The Bogotá’s drainage and sewerage company (EAAB), Green Faith (NY based NGO), Brighter Green (NY based NGO) and worked as Campaign coordinator against unsustainable livestock production at the Global Forest Coalition. Astrid has worked as a lawyer and researcher on issues associated with public participation, access to information, forests, carbon markets, Just Energy transition and rights of indigenous peoples and rural communities in Colombia.

Astrid was a volunteer for the Network for Environmental Justice in Colombia and promoted the creation and growth of the climate justice division at the Environment and Society Association (AAS) of Colombia. Astrid was a senior research coordinator in a joint research project with UNICEF to contribute to the fulfilment of the SDGs (6), focusing its work on guaranteeing the rights of access to sanitation for rural, indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in Colombia. She is also part of the founders of the Colombian NGO- CAMBIUM (Climate, Environment and Research-Action Uniting Worlds). This organization aims to, directly and indirectly, influence processes carried out by civil society and decision-makers related to climate change.

Astrid also supported the work of Pivot Point and the CLARA group (Climate, Land, Ambition and Rights Alliance), promoting the understanding and participation of CSOs to ensure higher ambition of NDC (Nationally Determined Contributions) in Spanish speakers countries through the website Ndcdemipueblo.org.

Astrid was a research assistant at Penn State University identifying how different kinds of transboundary river basin organizations have written and used dispute resolution mechanisms in both the bilateral agreements between the US, Mexico and Canada (NAFTA-USMCA) and the Autonomous Binational Authority of the Basin of Lake Titicaca (Bolivia, Peru).

Astrid was one of the members of the core team in the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE), and she is part of the global network of environmental lawyers (ELAW). In her free time, she collaborates as a volunteer for The Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition- CAIR coalition.