This is a guest repost from Wonk Room’s itinerant Brad Johnson.
I just returned from a two-week vacation in Ecuador. The nation, slightly smaller than the state of Nevada, is fascinating for its diversity. From the isolated Galapagos archipelago to the fecund jungles of the Amazon headwaters, from coastal forests to the volcanic highlands of Quito, one finds an explosion of life, culture, and language straddling the equator.
Part of my trip was spent in the rainforests of the Napo River, at an eco-lodge on the border of Yasun National Park, at the intersection of the Andean foothills, the Amazon basin, and the equator. Each day offered the chance to see dozens of species of birds, insects, and reptiles, as well as a practically uncountable array of plantlife. The Kichwa people own and maintain the land, farming on the river banks, hunting in the forests, and selling crafts in the city upstream. The apparent diversity is no mistake:
A team of scientists has documented that Yasun National Park, in the core of the Ecuadorian Amazon, shatters world records for a wide array of plant and animal groups, from amphibians to trees to insects.
The newly-published study by a group of international scientists found that Yasun contains more species of frogs and toads than are native to the United States and Canada combined. The plant and insect diversity is even more striking “” each hectare of the park contains more tree and shrub species than all of the United States and Canada combined, with 100,000 species of insect estimated in each hectare. The entire park covers about 9,820 square kilometers, less than Los Angeles County, a little larger than Yellowstone National Park.
However, this vast store of biodiversity and culture is under unprecedented threat:
However, numerous major threats confront the ecosystems of this region””including hydrocarbon and mining projects, illegal logging, oil palm plantations, and large- scale transportation projects under the umbrella of IIRSA (Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America). For example, oil and gas concessions now cover vast areas, even overlapping protected areas and titled indigenous lands.
In particular, Ecuador’s second largest untapped oil fields lie beneath the largely intact, northeastern section of the park, known as the “ITT” block for the Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini oil fields, representing 20 percent of Ecuador’s crude oil reserves. In 2007, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa proposed the Yasun-ITT Initiative, which would prevent exploitation of its $6 billion worth of oil in exchange for some percentage of international aid or carbon market proceeds. In the run up to the Copenhagen conference, it appeared that Yasun-ITT would coalesce into a deal, with Germany taking the lead with seed financing. However, Correa joined the Hugo Chavez bloc of South American countries that condemned the limited accord struck by leading nations, leaving the fate of Yasun in doubt. After Correa announced on January 9 his intentions to drill in the park, several members of his government resigned in protest, including Fander Falconi, Minister of Foreign Affairs.
This battle over conserving untold riches of life and our fragile atmosphere versus a decade or two of polluting but valuable energy is repeated throughout the globe, including the United States. The Appalachian hardwood forest is a center of biodiversity in the United States, but mountaintop removal coal mining is literally stripping away the mountains and filling the streams, as people choose profit over their children’s future.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Calvin: We seem to understand the value of oil, timber, minerals, and housing, but not the value of unspoiled beauty, wildlife, solitude, and spiritual renewal.
Hobbes: We need to start putting prices on the priceless.
We need to CHARGE pollution, first and foremost IMO. If I throw a candy rapper out the car window and get caught, guess what, $100 fine. Show me the justice! Now that Corporations have the same rights as individuals they have lost the special privilege of free pollution in my view. Nail the _______! You pick the term you like.
forgot, here’s the link to the cartoon:
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/calvin-on-pricing-the-environment.gif
Leif, that was great! Ha! Ha! And absolutely right!
Squirming, here.
A nice article, and thank you. Reminders of sacrifices we may inadvertently be committing are useful and bear constant repetition.
On the other hand, we’re faced daily with personal choices seemingly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, yet which because we’re so many swiftly add up.
(for a ironically humorous take on this, see: http://www.theonion.com/content/news/how_bad_for_the_environment_can )
In my family circle we’re currently discussing the possibility of traveling to England this year to see a unique biological specimen, my father’s sister who is the sole remaining living member of the previous generation on my side of our marriage. She’s elderly, trips of this kind are difficult to arrange and expensive, so this hypothetical journey could be our last opportunity for this experience. For our son, it would be one of two visits resulting in lasting memories.
There is irreplaceable value in seeing my Aunt first hand, though we’re connected via email, Skype and of course meatspace mail.
Yet I’m hesitating about this, thinking if we make this trip we’re consciously pretending we’re the only people on the planet and our actions don’t matter, don’t have an impact. Some 2 billion aircraft passenger boardings occur each year. How many of these trips are strictly necessary and where does that threshold of need lie?
Hopefully for their sake not many other people are capable of such seemingly neurotic thinking but all the same I don’t think my analysis is completely irrational.
In another thread on this site today, a conformist troll posted some nonsense about Al Gore’s carbon impact, ignoring entirely of course that Al Gore has undoubtedly aborted the launching of significantly more C02 into the atmosphere than he has unleashed. Brad Johnson has used his trip narrated here somewhat as a lever, taking the opportunity to describe what we’re putting at risk and thus offsetting to some microscopic degree the impact of his journey. I can make no such claim about the travel we’re contemplating.
Not sure what the outcome for us will be, but the whole thing strikes me as a case history illustrating how easy it is to talk while not walking.
Brad – thanks for this post. I have fond memories of my visit to Sacha Lodge on the Rio Napo (sounds like you went to the same place.)
The story of oil versus the Amazon jungle and its people is playing out in various forms. Residents affected by leaking oil from Texaco/PetroEcuador operations have a huge class-action lawsuit pending against Chevron, now owners of Texaco.
You can read about the case and background at http://www.chevrontoxico.org
I also got great insight from several eye-opening books about this area:
_Savages_ by Joe Cane, about living with the Huaorani people in the Ecuadorean Amazon
_Crisis Under the Canopy_ by Randy Smith
_Trekking through History: The Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador_ by Laura Rival
Another author who recounts the horrific impacts of sloppy oil extraction on Amazonian indigenous people is Randy Borman:
http://www.conservation.org/FMG/Articles/Pages/meet_randy_borman_ecuador.aspx
Judith Kimmerling’s book and documentary film entitled _Amazon Crude_ which was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes last May:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/01/60minutes/main4983549.shtml
An excellent group advocating for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon jungle is http://amazonwatch.org/ On their site you’ll find parallel stories of the impact of careless oil exploration in Peru, as well.
Doug, re family flight to England, my first thought is “carbon offsets” but as long as they’re not well regulated, it’s not a comfortable one.
What I’d like to see, is someone who has access to brilliant minds and whose integrity is above reproach, to provide a portfolio of stock investments, instead of carbon offsets, in promising next-generation energy and energy-efficiency-retrofitting ventures – so instead of buying carbon offsets, we could offset an impact by investing in future-friendly ventures.
IMO that’d probably be a more effective offset. It’d need oversight to prevent it from sliding into inefficiency though.
See Steve Easterbrook, on Udell’s Carbon Theater, which is “insidious…. It’s the very idea that an appropriate response to climate change is to make personal sacrifices. Like giving up flying. And driving. And running the air conditioner. And so on. The problem is, we approach these things like a dieter approaches the goal of losing weight….
Carbon theatre means focusing on carbon footprint reduction without fixing the broader system that would make such changes sustainable.“
Doug Bostrom (#5), well-put! I think about this stuff all the time as well, and there are many facets to it.
I’m of course happiest when biking to the climate change events I produce and moderate and to my own talks, which I’ve done often. But given that others have had to drive to the events with projectors, video cameras, tripods etc it’s at most a symbolic gesture, as are the train tickets we’ve purchased for panelists.
My ultimate goal is a bike/train tour of such events.
Since it’s doubtful your eldery aunt (she sounds like a great aunt) could walk/bike/sail/paddle to you, it’s nice you’re thinking of such things. While the techno fixers might wish for nuclear ocean liners (like the U.S. Navy has operated for over 5400 reactor/years), it’d be wonderful if large and efficient sail transport was revitalized, in combination with more efficient rail. This might begin as a novelty and guilt-trip-easer for people like us, but could become a necessity at some future date.
In the meantime it’s nice you’re thinking about it and making the trip (which all things considered I’d like to hear that you make) as efficiently as possible. Our 17-year-old daughter has lived on four continents for at least three and a half months when her mom and I were teaching/writing, but she and I have never made an overseas trip shorter than that, and we’ve only made the three overseas trips total in my life and hers. So getting the most bang for your buck is also nice, and it sounds like you’re doing that.
I guess the ultimate carbon offset is trying to save the world, so I don’t begrudge Gore, McKibben, Romm, any climate scientist or any of the rest of us engaged in this work the opportunity to travel to do that.
However extravagances that are purely recreational are far more dubious, so I haven’t made a long trip unrelated to my work for many years and I’m surprised and dismayed at the many climate and energy experts I know who routinely globe-hop for fun (they have mega-frequent flyer miles from attending conferences, etc).
In fact I’ve joked many times that the Aspen Institute is where people fly to in their private jets to tell the rest of us how to lower our carbon footprints.
But I’d always count those consuming and polluting the most to the least benefit of anyone else (think billionaires on airliner-sized private jets wanting a meal or round of golf or clubbing or gambling or whoring junket on another continent for the weekend) first, and down the list from there in pointless consumption and pollution.
Maybe if we put the #1 consumer in the most remote Amazon jungle to prove a point, then #2, then #3, etc, maybe #4 would immediately lower his carbon footprint. This might be difficult to legislate, but I think it’s a useful thought-experiment.
There are still countless people pulling their children around lakes on room-sized inflatables pulled by powerboats using gallons an hour, etc.
So your agony and mine is something shared by I’m sure less than 1 per cent of those in the U.S. or world. Somehow the other 99 per cent needs to share the same concerns, and while we need to try education first and all we can, only regulations or more likely economic realities like peak oil and resulting large or small global or national economic collapse are going to dramatically change behavior.
We need to be prepared for this when it happens, like using rationing to get food into supermarkets and other outlets. This is unimaginable to most now and would be political suicide for any politician to mention, but the planning needs to begin at all levels for any possibilities, because I think in the decades ahead some of the scenarios are going to come to pass and the experts that have thought about this most deeply like Matt Simmons, Colin Campbell, Al Bartlett, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler and John Michael Greer agree.
Although there certainly is a lot of oil in the ITT field, it is very heavy, about 12 degrees API, if I recall correctly. Not only will this oil be difficult to produce, it will have to be upgraded before it can be put into Ecuador’s export pipeline system. This will all be very expensive and also very dirty, especially due to the absence of nearby natural gas reserves.
There are good economic, as well as environmental, reasons why ITT has not been produced to date and I would guess that Ecuador’s threats to develop it are hollow. In any case, ITT will require foreign capital and technology, which Ecuador, like Venezuela, is doing its level best to repel. This part of the Amazon Basin is safe for now.
Drat, my earlier comment got zapped – probably too many URLs.
I wanted to thank Brad for this post. I have fond memories of our visit to this same region, at Sacha Lodge on the Rio Napo. I went for birdwatching, but what struck me most in the end was the wonderful yet threatened world of the “stone age” cultures still living throughout the remote Amazon: Cofan, Huaorani, Achuar, Yanomamo, Tikuna, and so many others.
I read a stack of books on this during and after our visit, and I was both saddened and resolved to respond. The biggest threats to the well-being of these cultures is outside intrusion, in the forms of missionaries, oil drillers, and just visitors bringing in the flu, etc.
The saga of past oil drilling in the Amazon basin is one of appalling negligence. Local tribal residents are poisoned by oil spills into once pristine river systems, leading to outbreaks of cancer and other illnesses. Widespread spills deprived residents of both safe drinking water and the livelihood from freshwater fisheries.
Currently one of the largest environmental lawsuits in history is pending – a class action suit by the native peoples of Ecuador against Chevron, current owner of Texaco which partnered with PetroEcuador to carry out the drilling that led to such widespread contamination.
To learn more about this appalling situation, consult amazonwatch.org.
An excellent book with a more upbeat account of life among Amazonian natives is Joe Kane’s brilliant book Savages
I could go on but I don’t want to put too many URLs for fear of offending the spam filter gods.
Oh geez, now my earlier post is showing up. I was sure I’d checked just now. Weird. Oh well, sorry for the duplication, just please read the book and the website, as well as these related ones:
legal commentary by New York lawyer Judith Kimerling. Also look up her documentary “Amazon Crude” (featured on CBS’ 60 Minutes last May)..
Randy Borman, son of missionaries, raised among the Cofan tribe, ‘went native’ to marry and live among them, and advocated for their interests on the national and international stage.
Survival International, an NGO devoted to preservation of extant pre-industrial/pre-urban cultures around the world.
To Doug, #9, if you’re asking about how to offset your carbon footprint in exchange for making the trip (sorry, it’s late and I’m too sleepy to read it all thorougly)… why not try going vegetarian for awhile? I don’t eat animals, personally (too much like eating my brother’s arm). However, I realize it’s probably difficult for many people to switch to vegetarian diet. Anyhow, just a thought… good night.
To Richard Brenne–#9. I’ve read Kunstler’s book on Peak Oil– “The Long Emergency”. It’s an excellent book- easy reading and extremely interesting and informative! Highly recommended!
espiritwater says: January 25, 2010 at 11:15 pm
From what I’ve read, vegetarian diets do reduce fossil fuel consumption an astounding amount, particularly when it come to eliminating beef and pork. A good tip, thank you.
I think I’ll try some calculations around that. Maybe menu choices can be traded for airline tickets…
Jim — actually, it was La Selva Lodge, just down the Napo from Sascha Lodge.
Hope you enjoyed your vacation. Going out in nature just reminds me what we are fighting for.