Human Rights at Home and Abroad: Past, Present, and Future

located only a few thousand feet above the fractured spot, that supply thousands to millions of homes
with healthy drinking water. Fox states on the Gasland website that over 80,000 chemicals are injected
into the earth‘s crust with each fracking process and out of that number, 65 compounds used are deemed
hazardous to the human health (GASLAND). The families affected by the hazardous drilling have
reported arsenic poisoning and cancer from drinking the gas-ridden tap water. While one particular family
is capable of lighting the water pouring out of the kitchen faucet on fire due to the presence of high levels
of gas.
Josh Fox‘s depiction of the dangers natural gas drilling has on the environment and humans
surrounding the drilling holes, does impact human rights in the United States. In human rights, men and
women are entitled to an environment that provides an adequate lifestyle. However, in the thirty-seven
states that approve fracking, humans are at a great risk of diseases that will eventually kill them due to the
unstable environment that possess an unlimited amount of harmful chemicals and presence of gas in the
drinking water. Thus, those operating with hydraulic fracking are not only making the dangers to humans
present, but also to the environment, which ultimately sustains life.
Not only are human rights being effected in the United States, but also on an international level.
In the past five years, indigenous tribes in the Peruvian Amazon recklessly protest the laws pass by
President Garcia, that allows for the destruction of the Amazon‘s rainforest for oil and gas exploration,
logging and mining. Indigenous groups started to protest the destruction by blockading roads and airports,
threatening to set fire to oil pumping stations, and shutting down the oil pipeline that enables oil to travel
from the jungle to the Pacific Ocean. The government has been selling and leasing concessions to foreign
investments for the exploitation of natural resources, which Peruvians argue, only make the elites richer
while the poverty rate continues to loom at a dangerous 40 percent (Ortega, ―Thousands of Indigenous
Peruvians…,‖ 1).
Peruvians also show increasing aggravation at the government because the biodiversity of the
Amazon, which ―scientists estimate is home to some [10 percent of the world total] plant species and to
1,816 bird species,‖ is continuously at risk for extinction (Ortega, 1). Vivienne Ortega reports that a
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