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TechnoratiWhat Lies Beneath the Rainforest
You want the Amazon to survive? Then pay us not to pump the oil, says Ecuador.
The tropical rainforest in the eastern lowlands of Ecuador assaults the senses: the sunlight dazzles the eyes, the heat is so fierce that within seconds one's clothes are soaked in sweat. Then there are the sounds: a hypnotic symphony of frogs, crickets and other insects and birds which continues unabated day and night. There are sudden glimpses of the jungle's abundant wildlife: a spectacular flash of a blue morpho butterfly at the river's edge, a flock of green parakeets screeching.
![[Oil-covered dry leaves hang over a natural pool contaminated with crude oil in the oustskirts of Lago Agrio, 180km northwest of Quito, in 2003. (AFP/File/Martin Bernetti)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/ecuador_beneathrainforest.jpg "ecuador_beneathrainforest.jpg")
This stunning region, which covers more than a third of Ecuador's area, almost the size of England, and which is one of the world's richest biospheres, with a huge diversity of animals and plants, some found nowhere else on Earth, faces a double threat: from the logging industry, which would strip it bare, and from the oil industry, which for nearly 40 years has been exploiting the huge resources of crude beneath the soil. Now, however, Ecuador is betting it can keep what is left of the oil in the ground and hang onto its biosphere into the bargain.
The South American country has learned the hard way that oil brings human misery and environmental devastation along with billions in export earnings. Every new oil field is an invasion that brings tens of thousands of outsiders into the forest's heart, polluting the air, soil and water, destroying wildlife, and assaulting the support systems of indigenous tribes, which can lead to their extermination. And the damage is not confined to the immediate vicinity of the wells.
The Via Auca is the main highway cutting through the Ecuadorean Amazonia region, and it has been a lifeline of the oil industry for nearly 40 years, slicing through the countryside like a badly healed wound, the roadside lined with hellish flares, murky waste pits and corroded pipelines. Accidents involving the pipelines are frequent, and their consequences harrowing. On the far side of the town of Dayuma, which sprang up as an oil workers' shantytown and is still riddled with crime and prostitution, one of the ageing pipelines has ruptured, sending a jet of oil shooting 30 metres into the air, staining the vegetation black all around.
The sickly stench of crude oil is overwhelming in the midday tropical heat. A house and a field across the road have also been soaked by the filthy gusher. Sebastian Ortiz, whose elderly father owns the simple wooden house by the roadside on the edge of the jungle, points out where the oil has drenched the field and seeped into the ground. Petrobel, one of many oil companies now operating in the region, has said it will pay his father US$5,000 (£3,000) towards the clean-up costs. But Ortiz says: "I don't know when he will be paid, or even if it is still safe for him to carry on living here."
Pollution is only one of the many ills that the oil business brings with it. Fernando Moreno, an anthropologist
with the Ministry of the Environment, has been monitoring the oil industry's effect on the local community for years. "The people have become beggars" he says. "They have become accustomed to demanding whatever they need and more from the oil companies, just because they are in the same territory. Weighing up the benefits and drawbacks of the oil companies, I think it would be better not to have them. They lead to many bad habits, they make people avaricious, they increase the differences between people - and they are a source of contamination: for the land, the water and the people themselves."
For the last 16 years Ecuador has been embroiled in a bitter battle over a huge $27.3 billion environmental damages claim brought against US oil giant Chevron by 30,000 Amazonian inhabitants. The plaintiffs accuse Texaco (which Chevron acquired in 1993) of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest between 1964 and 1990, and claim that 1,400 deaths occurred in the region as a result of the contaminated soil and water, which brought unaccountably high levels of cancer, skin and breathing conditions. The Amazon Defence Coalition, which represents the plaintiffs, says the scale of the pollution makes it the biggest environmental disaster
in the world, dwarfing the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and leading some experts to dub it "South America's Chernobyl". It is certainly shaping up to become the world's biggest environmental lawsuit.
Chevron robustly refutes the allegations. It says Texaco spent US$40 million on a clean-up before it handed over operations to the state oil company in 1992. Ecuador's government then signed a release freeing Chevron from any liability for subsequent damages from potential oil contamination.
Whatever the outcome of the legal battle Ecuador is now banking on a new idea to help it shed its poisonous dependency on oil. The Yasuni-ITT Initiative aims to keep the region's remaining oil reserves untapped and underground, in return for financial compensation from the international community and carbon offsets from the carbon markets.
The crux of the scheme is simple: to keep the oil beneath the Yasuni National Park where it is, in perpetuity. Covering nearly 2.5 million acres of primary tropical rainforest, Yasuni is the ancestral territory of the Waorani people and two other tribes, the Tagaeri and the Taromenane. It was named a Unesco biosphere reserve in 1989, and scientists regard it one of the most biodiverse places on earth.
It is also the home of Ecuador's largest oil reserve. But by not extracting the estimated 846 million barrels of oil in the reserve, Ecuador will keep an estimated 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, making a big contribution to the fight against global warming.
It will also pledge to respect the territories of the indigenous cultures living in the national park, as well as protecting its flora and fauna. In return, the Ecuadorean Government has asked for compensation of $350 million a year for 10 years, which would be invested in environmental and social development programmes, helping the country move towards a sustainable economy.
After a slow start the plan has begun to attract serious promises of commitment. Amazon Watch, an organisation dedicated to protecting the rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants, calls it "a landmark proposal ... a precedent-setting effort by an oil-exporting nation to preserve a global biodiversity hotspot, protect indigenous rights and set the stage for its own economic and energetic shift away from fossil fuels".
Some big international players agree: Germany has offered $50 million on condition that other nations stump up similar sums. Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, and Yolanda Kakabadse, a senior member of the Yasuni commission, have been in London and continental European capitals this week spreading the word. And in December Ecuador's former chancellor Francisco Carrión, the Government's envoy on the initiative, will present it at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
Among Ecuadoreans themselves, the initiative is welcomed particularly by the flourishing tourist industry. With a spectacular range of natural attractions, from the Galapagos Islands to the snow-peaked Andes, Ecuador has long been a pioneer in ecotourism.
Fander Falconi the foreign minister and one of the founders of the initiative, says the scheme will work on the basis of shared responsibility, locally and globally. "What we are aiming for is global sustainability, but with a distinction drawn between those who harm the environment and those who suffer the consequences of this harm."
Luz Coloma, Yasuni-ITT's press officer, added, "Ecuador has had sad experiences with the exploitation of oil and no one wants any more environmental disasters like the Chevron-Texaco case."
On the banks of the Shiripuno river, to the west of the Yasuni National Park, is the Huaorani Ecolodge run and owned by formerly nomadic hunters who only came into contact with the outside world 50 years ago. Omene Paa, a tour guide at the lodge, tells how oil has been a curse for his people from the time "the path-cutters" first arrived. The "petrolera" companies brought disease and contaminated the water, he claims. One of his cousins died of a lung infection. Now Omene says his people, who first fought off the US oilmen with axes, just want to be allowed to live in peace. "Our battle should continue; we the Huaorani must look after our territory."
10 Comments so far
Show AllObviously, this is a brutal, emotionally charged case. No surprise there. But won't the scientific facts make the difference in the end rather than this noise? I just saw an activists' blog that seems to get at this issue, www.livesforoil.blogspot.com/.
I wonder if what they're saying will make any difference? Who knows ...
BTW, loved the lead on this story. Really painted a vivid picture!
Probably most of the materials that were used to produce the computers, and other infra structure with which this discussion and information transfer are occurring involve a great deal of similar environmental destruction. I tend to think of the god of the underworld where these materials originate as being somewhat upset at the desecration that is occurring in his world and what he might intend to do to us as a consequence of that desecration.
Curtis--
You are making a common mistake if you think that the only choice is between extraction or non-extraction off resources.
For example, there is nothing inherantly wrong with using soil to grow living things to sustain life, even though the process extracts from that soil its life- giving properties--minerals, enzymes, and micro-organizims--provided that provision is made to replace those life-giving properties through proper fertilization (manure, compost, complimentary cover crops).
The crime occurs when what gave life is either replaced by nothing (depleating the soil) or by petroleum-based fertilizers (depleating the life-giving potential of plants being grown as well as that soil in which they are grown).
Metal ore extraction is another example. It's not the removal of the ore from the earth that is the crime, it is the process used to extract and/or refine that ore which leads to the creation of waste products either improperly disposed of or inherantly so toxic (radioactive mineral extraction for instance) that until other safer processes are found it would be better if such substances remained un-mined.
None of this makes any sense to the prime-dierective of an inanimate corporation (which is nevertheless accorded personhood and perpetuity by imbecilic legal precedent) to maximize quarterly profits and exterminate anything which interferes with that prime directive. For the rest of us living organizims though, the indisputable facts remain that all life depends on all other life for its continued existence and that violence to one part of that web of life is violence against all parts of that web.
Poet
What Lies Beneath the Rainforest
You Are The River
Pretend you are a river
Pretend you are the mist that falls so fine, so gentle
That nothing separates water and air
You are the rain that falls in sheets
Explodes on to the ground to leave pocks and puddles
You are the ground that receives this water,
Soaking it up, taking it in, carrying it deep inside,
You are the cracks and fissures,
Where the waters accumulate, flow,
And fall to join more water,
More, in pools and rivers who move
More slowly through cavities, crevices, and pores,
You are the sounds of silence of water staying still,
You are the meeting of wet and dry
The union of liquid and solid,
Where solids dissolve and liquids solidify,
You are the pressure who pushes water through seams,
You are the rushing water who bubbles from the earth,
You are a tiny pool between rocks,
You over flow, find your way to join others
Who like you are moving, moving,
You are the air at the surface of the water,
The joining of substantial and insubstantial,
The union of under and over,
Of weight and not weight,
You are the ripple, the rapid,
The tiny waterfall that turns
Water to air and air to water,
You are the mist who settles on the soil
You are the plants who drink the mist
And you are the sun who warms and feeds them,
You are the fish who feed on insects,
Who feed on plants who feed on soils who feed on fish,
You are the fish who become soils,
Who become plants, who become insects, who become fish,
Who flow down the river,
You are the river who joins other rivers
To become a new river,
Who is all the rivers and something else,
You are the river
You do not stop at the banks
where liquid turns to solid,
You reach into the sky and into the soil
Water moves through rocks comes up to form pools
Far from the fast flow where the rivers move together,
Seeps down to join still waters deep below the surface,
Waters who sleep and wake and wake and sleep
And mingle with the stones who are the river too
You are the river who is married to the mountains
You have known since they were young,
Who have given themselves to you,
As you have given yourself to them
You are the canyons you nestle into
Each year deeper than the year before,
You are the forest who gives you their fallen trees,
The meadows you flood and feed
Who feed you back their fruits and fine insects
Who fly to your surface to be taken in by the fish
Who with their own bodies again feed the meadows
You are the river who feeds the ocean
Who feels the tides pushing and pulling
Against your mouth
The waves mixing fresh and salt
You are that intermingling
That is who you are
That is who you have always been,
You are the river
You have lived with volcanoes and glaciers,
You have been dammed by lava and ice,
You have carried log jams so large and so old
That they grow their own forest,
With you running beneath
You have lived through droughts and floods,
You are the river, you miss the salmon,
You miss the sturgeon, you miss the ocean
You miss the forest, you miss the beavers
And otters and grizzly bears,
You miss the humans,
You are the river, you want them back
You want to feel the tickling of the sturgeon
The thrusting of the salmon,
You want to carry food and salmon to the ocean,
You want to cover the meadows as you used to
And you want to give yourself to them,
And you want them to give themselves to you
As you have done forever,
And as they have too,
Now, pretend you are a forest,
You are the bark of trees and
The hairy moss that hangs from them,
You are the dust who becomes soil,
Who become trees who become seeds,
Who become squirrels, who become owls,
Who become slugs. who become shrews,
Who become soil,
You are the trees who cannot live without the fungi
Who cannot live without the voles,
Who cannot live without the trees,
You are the fire who cannot live without the trees,
Who cannot live without the woodpeckers,
Who cannot live without the beetles,
Who cannot live without the fire
You are the wind who speaks through the trees,
And the trees who speak through the wind,
You are the birds who sing and the birds who do not,
You are the salamanders, the ferns,
The millipedes, the bumble bees
Who sleep on flowers waiting for the morning
To warm you up so you can eat and fly on home,
You too have lived though drought and flood, hot and cold,
You too miss the salmon, you miss the owls
The grizzly bears, you miss the rivers,
You miss the people, the humans,
You want them all back, you need them back,
Or you will die
Derrick Jensen
From a Talk on: The End of Civilization
Poet
Make the oil companies pay. Make the entire fossil fuel industry and all associated industries pay. This means that anyone with money will pay; we will all pay. I am willing to pay to clean up the world because it will be money well spent. but only if the workers are educated and allowed to adjudicate the efficacy of those who brought us to this state, the management.
The biggest problem of all is the modern bourgeois; the management class. For all his faults, Mao had a point.
Send Planned Parenthood!
About time.
Viva Ecuador!
Ecuador needs enough money to guard itself against encroachment.
We tend to forget that the western 'lifestyle' is supported by a darkened history of heavy industry. Mining, petrochemical, logging and now massive monoculture have their final products on store shelves and the ubiquitous auto industry.
In the US there is a socio-pathology of technological privilege to this marketplace as though it is *poof* - generated out of thin air, and *poof* without pollution, massive waste dumping and NIMBY denial.
Identity marketing designed to addict the consumer to 'loyalty' (market share) has become de facto public policy and process. Billions of people are impoverished by this paradigm and it long ago exceeded any rational 'bottom line' of companies and governments courageous enough to seriously factor in the 'externalization' of direct and indirect costs.
A four hundred year history of profound exploitation, ethnocide, genocide and ecocide. It has been fostered and maintained through deceit by both omission and comission, by governments as well as by the corporate interests and shareholders unwilling to face the truth.
There is denial of the political machinations that have undermined the rule of law and public commons. And yet still, if someone like Yvo Morales takes the bull by the horns that same privilege in denial points demonizing fingers projecting the paranoid fears inherent in the paradigm. The absurdity is exceeded only by the tragedy of what it represents.
We are challenged to live in dignity and frugality for the gift of creativity it fosters. Our power lies in consciously evaporating demand wherever possible and supporting in solidarity the innumerable peoples who now have nowhere else to go. It seems a harsh and immediate reality and yet holds the greatest promise imaginable - dignity in balance.
We have entered the period of minting paper scrip as the cover on the lie that nothing but debt or the plundering of the remaining integrity of planet support it.
What percentage of the bailout monies (taxpayer) does a project as proposed by Ecuador represent? What percentage of the military budget for the solipsistic perpetuation of wars and industries that are clearly outliving their reasonable mandate and shortcircuiting the creative and material resources needed for profound change?
I think it was Marshall McCluhan who noted that the supreme architectural form of the (20th and now 21st) century is the highway. Whoever said it hit the nail on the head.
I have been to Ecuador over 20 times since 1996, and I've been in the Oriente (Amazon region) many times. I have spent time in indigenous communities from the northern part of the Oriente up by the Colombian border down to the southern part bordering with Peru. The rainforest is indeed rich in biodiversity, and it would be a huge mistake to repeat the errors of the earlier period of petroleum exploitation in the untouched parts of the Oriente. The indigenous people who live in those untouched parts are dead set against petroleum development within their territories and have said that they would take up arms to stop it. Illegal logging is also a serious problem in the Oriente. And once a new road is constructed non-indigenous settlers move in who don't necessarily know how to live sustainably in rainforest.
Very interesting article. Thanks for posting. I posted on my blog.