Oil exploitation by Texaco (now Chevron) over the last three decades resulted in over 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater being dumped into the rainforest and 17 million gallons of crude oil spill, leaving local people suffering a wave of cancers, miscarriages and birth defects. Oil pools (over 100 hundred of them) have also been left behind and Chevron’s responsibility for action, also know as “The Chernobyl of the Rainforest”, has been taken up in the courts as one of the largest class action lawsuits in history.