Babson Hosts Ethos Alliance Film About “Amazon Chernobyl” Case -- CRUDE: The Real Price of Oil -- And Talk by Cofounder of The Men’s Wearhouse, Richie Goldman

Babson College will host the Ethos Alliance film, CRUDE: The Real Price of Oil, in Knight Auditorium, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm, Wednesday, October 14th.   Introducing the film will be Ethos Alliance founder Richie Goldman, cofounder of The Men’s Wearhouse.

Babson ’09 graduates Erin Connery and Oscar Quintero are leading this effort with the non-profit Ethos Alliance, which was established in May 2009 in San Francisco. Visit www.ethosalliance.org, www.crudethemovie.com . www.richiegoldman.com .

“Ethos is currently working on collaborative solutions to help some 30,000 affected Ecuadorians in the Amazon region” says Quintero. “The health and environment of these people have been seriously damaged as a result of decades of oil contamination in water supplies and the land itself."

Representatives from up to twelve local colleges, including students from the new Babson College, Olin College, and Wellesley College Collaboration, will attend the event.  “This will be a great chance for the newly proposed collaboration between Babson, Wellesley, and Olin to be put into effect” says Erin Connery. “The educational opportunities that come from Ethos Alliance and its focus on corporate social responsibility are tremendous. Creating entrepreneurial solutions to similarly large and devastating problems has a place in many of these colleges’ classrooms, whether the focus comes from the entrepreneurial side, ethics or cultural studies, or sustainability. To bring them all together will be a great thing.”

Ethos currently in the beginning stages of building representative college chapters on each of the major campuses across the nation.  For information, contact Ethos at info@ethosalliance.org ; Erin Connery at erin@ethosalliance.org ; Oscar Quintero at oscar@ethosalliance.org .

Ethos Alliance is sponsoring this event in connection with Net Impact, Babson Green Tower, and Babson E-Tower. Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP online at www.ethosalliance.eventbrite.com .

CRUDE:  From director Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) comes the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial environmental lawsuits on the planet. The inside story of the infamous “Amazon Chernobyl” case, Crude is a real-life high stakes legal drama, set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking, exploring a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.

www.ethosalliance.org

The Ethos Alliance was founded by Richie Goldman in July of 2009. EA is a bureaucracy free organization dedicated to policing the corporate sector and insuring that they live up to their responsibilities as good citizens, not simply acting as value-enhancers for their shareholders. To ensure corporate responsibility, EA picks a single target issue at a time and dedicates the full scope of its resources to addressing it to achieve the desired outcome.

www.richiegoldman.com

Richie Goldman is one of the original partners in Men’s Wearhouse.  He joined the company in 1973, two weeks after the first store opened in Houston.  While with Men’s Wearhouse, he was responsible for the overall marketing and advertising.  He retired in 2002.  Since then, he has been involved in several non-profits, including the acclaimed Project Homeless Connect in San Francisco.  His book, Luck by Design…Certain Success in an Uncertain World (Morgan-James 2009) has achieved critical acclaim and won the “Best Non-Fiction” at the San Francisco Book Festival.

www.crudethemovie.org

Three years in the making, this cinéma-vérité feature from acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) is an award-winning documentary film that chronicles the epic battle to hold oil giant Chevron (formerly Texaco) accountable for its systematic contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon – an environmental tragedy experts call "the Rainforest Chernobyl."  Centering on a $27 billion lawsuit filed by the indigenous people who continue to suffer a severe public health crisis caused by Chevron's contamination, CRUDE is a high-stakes David vs. Goliath legal drama with 30,000 Amazon rainforest dwellers facing down the 5th largest corporation on the planet.