Ecuador: the Amazon’s dirty war

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6931573.ece

From The Sunday Times
November 29, 2009

Ecuador: the Amazon’s dirty war

In the Ecuadorean Amazon basin our thirst for oil has triggered an eco-disaster: wholesale pollution and catastrophic cancer rates. And a bloody turf war has broken out. Ecuador is taking a survival plan to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. But will western governments listen?

Christine Toomey

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Sandra Zavala, her son Byron and daughter Damaris were easy targets, stragglers behind a group of men with machetes who were working to clear a path through the rainforest. Oil exploration in the forest has encouraged illegal logging and colonisation by poor Ecuadoreans from other parts of the country and led to clashes in which many innocent lives have been lost. Sandra, 35, and her children were just the latest victims in a vicious turf war triggered by our thirst for oil.

Close to Ecuador’s borders with Colombia and Peru, this swathe of territory — much of it now included in the Yasuni national park — is also at the forefront of another, global battle. Yasuni is home to a vast array of rare flora and fauna. It has the largest number of tree species per hectare in the world (more in just one hectare than the whole of North America), together with endangered monkeys, pumas and jaguars and 44% of the entire bird population of the Amazon basin stretching far beyond its borders. But beneath the surface is immense wealth of a different kind: more than a billion barrels of crude oil.

Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, is promoting a plan he describes as “not only simple, but audacious and revolutionary”. In the run-up to next month’s UN climate-change conference in Copenhagen, he and his team have been circling the globe to drum up support for a scheme that would leave 850m barrels of oil in the eastern section of the park untouched underground.

In return for not pumping this oil, they are asking other countries to pay Ecuador $350m a year for the next 10 years to compensate for lost income. Correa’s plan is designed to preserve what is left of Yasuni’s unique biosphere and the territory of its indigenous people and would also prevent carbon-dioxide emissions caused by extracting and burning this oil — an estimated total of 410m metric tons of CO2.

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[gateley]

1. I accidentally unrecced -- sorry -- this is a really interesting piece!

:banghead:

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. It's late… it happens…

No need to pound your head…