Ecuador: indigenous people fight to protect an Amazon treasure from oil destruction

Luis Garcia was close to tears. For three days, he had guided eight international journalists through a tract of Amazon so thick with wildlife that experts are yet to fully catalogue its riches. At a small Ecuadorian airport, Garcia gave a final, wet-eyed pitch on the threatened Yasuni National Park and, as he spoke, they appeared: the flashy watches, slick sneakers and logo-stitched chambray shirts of the oil industry.

In Coca, an industrial smudge of a town on the Amazon's western edge, two types of passengers use the airport - oil executives and eco-tourists. The oil executives are Spanish, Chinese, American and South American corporates extracting, or eager to extract, the heavy crude beneath the emerald forest. The eco-tourists - birdwatchers and backpackers sporting expensive waterproofs and zip-off trousers - are headed to the biodiversity haven of the Yasuni. Two industries are feeding from the Amazon; but only one is likely to prevail.

Ecuador, and the wider international community, faces a quandary in the Yasuni. It is, scientists believe, the most species-rich spot in the western hemisphere. But an almost irresistible thing lies untapped in the park's underbelly: one-fifth of Ecuador's oil.

In his hands ... Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa, has threatened to renege on a proposal to leave $3.6 billion of oil under the Amazon.

To solve this dilemma, this poor South American nation has come up with a unique idea that, if successful, could change the way the world deals with its most precious places and provide a concrete way to reduce carbon pollution in developing nations.

Ecuador wants the world to pay compensation for leaving 846 million barrels of oil under the park. The asking price, $3.6 billion over 13 years, or half the oil's value when the proposal was conceived, will help switch Ecuador from oil to renewable energy, halt deforestation, boost scientific research and support Yasuni's indigenous communities, two of which live deep in the park in voluntary isolation. The deal would ensure 407 million tonnes of carbon dioxide stays in the ground (Australia's annual emissions: 542 million tonnes).

The trust fund, set up last year by the United Nations Development Program, already has $52 million in donations and pledges from countries, including Australia, which recently committed $500,000, Italy, Turkey Colombia, Peru, France and Belgium. A New York investment banker has donated her annual salary and Bo Derek, Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Norton and Al Gore have lent their support. The only problem now, besides the global financial meltdown tightening Europe's purse strings, is Ecuador's left-wing President, Rafael Correa, appears to be holding the Yasuni as an environmental hostage.

Gas is flared off from an oil facility near Yasuni National Park in Orellana Province, Ecuador. Photo: Theresa Ambrose

Correa has driven the proposal to save the park, but has now issued a deadline: if pledges do not reach $100 million by December, he will reconsider Plan B - drilling for oil. ''We are renouncing an immense sum of money,'' Correa said on his September trip to the UN in New York. ''For us, the most financially lucrative option is to extract the gasoline.'' This is why the Herald and other journalists, were, courtesy of the Ecuadorian government, on a canoe in a small creek, deep in the Yasuni: Correa wants the world to see how special this national treasure is before he changes his mind.

The jungle sounds hit first. It's a twittersphere of chirps and odd calls, one like a car alarm, another the trill of a mobile phone, yet another like the yap of a small dog. The smell is like a Queensland night, frangipani-sweet and tropical. Above, a butterfly ballet: electric-blue morphos the size of small birds lope past. Strange dragonflies, like bright-red-winged matchsticks, hover above the creek and water-walking river spiders, like long-legged huntsmans, sun themselves on logs. These are just the small things.

Capuchin monkeys, the most intelligent of American monkeys, and olive-and-turmeric squirrel monkeys (our guide Luis Garcia: ''Oh nice, nice, I love these monkeys! Perfecto!'') trapeze and bungee-jump along the creek, while red howler monkeys release their unsettling horror-movie roars. But it was Yasuni's birds, creatures gilded with gold, azure, crimson and jade, that put on the most extraordinary show.

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Last year, a team of scientists who want to save Yasuni compared the richness of the park to other parts of the Amazon and globally. They found the park was one of the planet's most biodiverse places because of the concentration of species across all taxonomic groups - amphibians, birds, mammals and plants.

This is partly because of Yasuni's isolation (canoe is the main form of access) but mostly because it was a refuge for plants and animals in the last major climate upheaval, the Pleistocene epoch, which ended 12,000 years ago. Yasuni is known as ''core Amazon'' because its position near the Andes' eastern flank guarantees reliable rain. For these reasons, scientists believe it will become a species refuge in the next major climate upheaval brought to us by global warming, while much of the Amazon may become drought-affected.

But there's more to the Yasuni than its potential for a David Attenborough documentary. The director of Harvard's Centre for Health and the Global Environment, Eric Chivian, a Nobel peace prize winner, has made a plea to save Yasuni in science's name. Yasuni's potential in unlocking a cancer treatment or amphibian-based painkiller or antibiotic should not be lost, he says. ''If we destroy the Yasuni it will not just be a tragedy for those species and the people that live there, it will be a tragedy for all mankind, for human health,'' he told a government-made documentary. Ecuadorian professor of biological science David Romo told us in Quito it would take 400 years to identify Yasuni's insect species.

The development of Yasuni's Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini (ITT) oil blocks is also likely to affect the ''uncontacted peoples'' of the Tagaeri and Taromenane tribes. In 2007 the park's southern area was declared a no-go zone or intangible, after a series of murders and massacres involving illegal loggers and tribal reckonings. In 1987, an oil helicopter dropped a priest and nun into a Tagaeri camp; they were later found dead with multiple spear wounds. No one knows how viable these tribes are long-term (they are thought to number between 400 and 500 people) but their wish to remain in isolation is now recognised under the Ecuadorian constitution. ''Obviously we are afraid that any of the oil activity will be the end for these people,'' says Professor Carlos Larrea, an economist at Ecuador's Andean University, and a technical consultant to the so-called Yasuni-ITT initiative.

Ecuadorians already know the costs of oil extraction. In February, an Ecuadorian court fined American oil multinational Chevron $US8.6 billion ($8 billion) for polluting the Amazon. The action was brought by 30,000 people. In a country that relies on oil for 57 per cent of its export income, not even Yasuni has remained untouched. The Spanish company Repsol has wells in one area of the park, which unleashed oil spills and road damage. The day this development came to Yasuni in 1993 was a day the 47-year-old Luis Garcia never forgot. ''It was so sad to see a bulldozer on this side of the river,'' he said, referring to the great Napo River, which runs along the park's flank.


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