Judith Kimerling is a Professor at The City University of New York (CUNY) Queens College. After graduating from University of Michigan and Yale Law School, she worked for seven years as an environmental litigator, including five years as an Assistant Attorney General for New York State, where she worked on the Love Canal litigation and other hazardous waste cleanup litigation and negotiations. In 1989, she moved to Ecuador and worked with indigenous organizations in the Amazon Rainforest to document the environmental and social impacts of oil development there. Her findings and photographs first placed concerns about the impact of oil production on indigenous peoples and the environment in tropical forests on the international environmental and human rights policy agendas. Her book Amazon Crude was called "the Silent Spring of Ecuador" by The New York Times. In the U.S., it prompted a prominent class action lawsuit, Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc.

Human Rights, Social Justice,