‘We were eating, drinking, breathing the oil’: the villagers who stood up to big oil – and won

The fossil fuel industry faces a reckoning in the Niger Delta after disasters made it one of the most polluted places on the planet

On 10 October 2004, Eric Dooh received an urgent call from one of his father's employees: the waterway surrounding their houses was running black with oil. Near the outskirts of Dooh's village of Goi, a pipeline built by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1960s carried oil from inland Nigeria to an offshore terminal where it would be barreled and exported around the world. Dooh suspected the pipeline had sprung a leak. He attempted to alert the pipeline operator, but both Shell and its Nigerian subsidiary had largely abandoned oil operations in Goi a decade earlier in response to local uprisings. On that day, Shell's community relations officer was unavailable, Dooh recalled. He reported the leak to a nearby police station instead.

It wasn't until the next day that officials climbed onboard a helicopter, ascended over Dooh's village situated on the banks of the Oroberekiri Creek in Nigeria's southern Niger Delta region, and confirmed what villagers already knew: oil was spreading and not letting up.