“We are the Lungs of the World”: Popular Environmentalism and the Local Politics of

Climate Change in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree

of Master of Philosophy in Development Studies

at the University of Oxford

by

Alexander Vosick Barnard

DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT QUEEN ELIZABETH HOUSE WORCESTER COLLEGE OXFORD UNIVERSITY MAY 2011

ii

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................iii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Abbreviations ...................................................................................................................... v Figures and Charts .............................................................................................................. v Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 The Big Idea from a Small Country.................................................................................... 1 A Parable of Failed Climate Mitigation? ........................................................................... 3

I. Environmentalism: Shifting Theories, Common Assumptions ...................................... 6 Post-Material Environmentalism ....................................................................................... 6 The Environmentalism of the Poor..................................................................................... 7 Cultural Ecologists............................................................................................................ 9 Colonists: Environmental Anti-Heroes ............................................................................ 11 Towards New Environmentalism(s) ................................................................................. 14

II. Theory and Methodology ............................................................................................. 16 The Liberation Ecology of Climate Change ..................................................................... 16 Research Methodology .................................................................................................... 18 Evaluation of Research Techniques ................................................................................. 20

III. The Political Economy of Non-Extraction ................................................................. 22 The Signing Ceremony..................................................................................................... 22 Oil State, Green State, Pink State .................................................................................... 23 Yasuní National Park(s) .................................................................................................. 26 The Two Plans................................................................................................................. 29 Amazonian Schizophrenia................................................................................................ 32

IV. Myths and Realities of Yasuní .................................................................................... 35 The Meat Market ............................................................................................................. 35 The State’s Initiative........................................................................................................ 36 Yasuní is not Yasunizado ................................................................................................. 38 Managing Man and Biosphere......................................................................................... 42 Friction ........................................................................................................................... 44

V. The Environmentalism of the People ........................................................................... 48 Nueva Roca Fuerte .......................................................................................................... 48 Leave It Underground! .................................................................................................... 49 Post-Materialism of the Poor?......................................................................................... 52 Crude and Contamination ............................................................................................... 55 The Lungs of the World ................................................................................................... 58

VI. The Local Politics of Climate Change ........................................................................ 61 Green Governance in Orellana........................................................................................ 61 Local Politics, National Development.............................................................................. 63 The (Un)Shifting Topography of Oil Extraction ............................................................... 64 The Return of the Indígena .............................................................................................. 67 Mestizo Environmentalism............................................................................................... 70 The Last Paradise?.......................................................................................................... 72

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 76 Works Cited....................................................................................................................... 79

iii

Acknowledgments

In 1969, my father spent two years in Peru with the Peace Corps, his first trip to Latin

America and the start of a long career of conservation work on the continent. This thesis

results from my own first trip to Latin America, taken at almost the exact same age, and

inspired by the same concerns for the protection of nature. In my time in Ecuador, I felt like

I could see my father’s footsteps all around me, whether bouncing around on a winding

Andean road—an experience about which I had heard many a story—or canoeing into

Yasuní—a place my father has had a hand in preserving—for the first time. I’m especially

lucky that, for the last two weeks of my research, I got to trace some of those steps with my

father by my side. Dad, this thesis is dedicated to you.

To Laura, I am grateful for your insightful and provocative advising and support

throughout this entire process. Nonetheless, my greatest debt to you is for introducing me to

Yasuní in the first place. While you had to drag me into this topic kicking and screaming, I

could not be more appreciative of the opportunity you have given me to learn about a truly

unique part of the world. I hope this is not our last intellectual collaboration.

For all the superficial isolation of graduate school, scholarship is never even close to

being an individual endeavor. A truncated list of Oxford friends who have helped me keep

my sanity—and, for the rowers in particular, tolerated my insanity—has to include Jackie,

Josh, Emily, Alia, Andrea, Sanne, Fauzia, Dave, Evan, TCS, and Andy. And, of course,

none of this would be possible without the generous support—and, perhaps more

importantly, faith in my abilities and goals—offered by the Sachs Scholarship, especially

Charles Gillespie and David Loevner.

To my Ecuadorian friends, Maria, Billi, Chris, and Cristina; I can’t quite imagine how

I would have gotten by for three months in a country where I barely spoke the language

without your patience, assistance, and, most of all, company. Promises to come back to visit

are usually taken overly lightly, but I am sure you will be seeing me again.

Finally, while it seems almost obligatory for a researcher to close by thanking his or

her “subjects”, my debt to the people of Ecuador runs deeper than my gratitude for their help

in attaching a few more initials to my name. My time in Ecuador and my work on the ITT

proposal reinvigorated my sense of hopefulness for humanity and reminded me that there is a

possibility for a saner, more sustainable society. As Joe Strummer said, “The future is

unwritten.” Down by the equator, though, they’re writing it.

iv

Abstract

This ethnographic pilot research addresses new forms of environmental

mobilization and ecological consciousness connected to Ecuador’s Yasuní-

ITT initiative, an innovative climate change mitigation project. The initiative,

which proposes to leave nearly a billion barrels of oil underground in an area

of high biodiversity in exchange for international compensation, has, thus far,

been analyzed primarily in terms of its relationship to carbon markets and

international climate negotiations. Drawing on fieldwork in the Yasuní

region, I explore local perceptions of, and engagement in, the initiative. I

focus particularly on the area’s mixed-race mestizo colonists, who have often

been invisible in discussions of the Amazon’s primarily indigenous

environmental movements. I argue that traditional frameworks for

understanding popular environmentalism—particularly, Joan Martinez-Alier’s

“environmentalism of the poor”, which focuses on how environmentalism

emerges from material livelihood interests—do not fully capture how

Ecuadorian activists value conservation and petroleum, use environmentalism

to construct identities and claim a connection to territory, and understand the

relationship between ecological protection and development. I propose the

“environmentalism of the people” as a new framework to guide further

research into the role of local governments, national politics, and non-

indigenous actors in generating popular environmentalism and influencing the

success and failure of climate mitigation projects.

v

Abbreviations

CO2 – Carbon Dioxide

CONAIE – La Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (“Confederation of

Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador”)

EJ – Environmental Justice

EotP – Environmentalism of the Poor

FICCKAE –Federación Indigena de Comunas y Comunidades Kichwas de la Amazonia

Ecuatoriana (“Indigenous Federation of Kichwa Communities of the Ecuadorian

Amazon”)

ITT – Ishpingo-Tambochocha-Tiputini

IZ – Intangible Zone

MoE – Ministry of Environment

NAWE – Nacionalidad Waorani del Ecuador (“Huaorani Nation of Ecuador”)

NGO – Non-Governmental Organization

NRF – Nueva Roca Fuerte

OAS – Organization of American States

OPEC – Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

PMC – Plan de Medidas Cautelares (“Plan of Precuationary Measures”)

REDD – Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation

T/T – Tagaeri and Taromenane

WCS – Wildlife Conservation Society

Figures and Charts

Table 2.1: Varieties of Environmentalism …………………………………………………. 12

Figure 3.1: Primary Study Area ……………………………………………………………..19

Figure 4.1: Oil Exploitation in the Ecuadorian Amazon …………………………………… 25

Figure 4.2: Overlapping Designations of Yasuní ……………………………………………28

Figure 5.1: The ITT Bloc, In Context ……………………………………………………….40

Graph 6.1: Support for Non-Exploitation of ITT …………………………………………... 50

Figure 7.1: Ecuador’s Rising, then Declining, Oil Production …………………………….. 67

Figure 7.2: Indigenous Peoples of Yasuní …………………………………………………..69

1

Introduction

The Big Idea from a Small Country

During the next decade, annual greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries

will surpass those of the developed world (Chandler et al. 2002). While often portrayed as

passive victims of climatalogical processes initiated elsewhere1, developing countries will

therefore play a determinative role in the success or failure of global efforts to mitigate

climate change (Markandya and Halsnaes 2001; Jotzo 2005; Helm 2009; Cardoso 2009).

Engaging developing countries in climate mitigation will require innovative policy

mechanisms that transfer significant resources from North to South2 and use those resources

to simultaneously address emissions, local environmental degradation, and human social and

economic needs (Halsnæs 1996; Najam, Huq, and Sokona 2003; Halsnæs and Verhagen

2007; Wagner et al. 2009). As the limited impact of international summits like that in

Copenhagen (2009) highlight, however, mitigating climate change will require more than just

clever policy. It will also require novel forms of politics that allow Southern governments to

resist institutional and popular pressures for carbon-intensive and extraction-financed

economic growth (Roberts and Parks 2007; Depledge and Yamin 2009; Giddens 2009;

Lahsen 2009). This thesis explores one such innovative policy mechanism—Ecuador’s

Yasuní-ITT initiative—and the national and local environmental politics that surround it.

The potential impacts of climate change in Ecuador, including losses in agricultural

production, stress on urban water systems from melting glaciers, and climatogical disasters,

are daunting (UNDP 2007; World Bank 2010; Vidal 2010a). Nonetheless, Ecuador seems an

unlikely candidate to be an innovator in climate mitigation. Its historical contributions to

greenhouse gas emissions are negligible3, and neighbouring governments have insisted that

the primary responsibility for addressing climate change rests with Northern countries (Adger

et al. 2001; Johnson 2001; Gudynas 2009). More importantly, Ecuador is Latin America’s

fifth-largest oil producer, and petroleum provides over a quarter of government revenue

(Sanchez-Paramo 2005).

1 This distinction between developing countries—with the responsibility and capacity to mitigate climate change—and poor ones—who can only adapt—is abundant in the literature (Gleick 1989; Grist 2008; Collier, Conway, and Venables 2009; Crate and Nuttall 2009) and cemented into policy by the “common but differentiated responsibilities” framework of the Kyoto protocol (Lemos and Agrawal 2006). 2 The World Bank (2010) estimates that the developing world will bear 75-80% of the costs of climate change, and that $140-175 billion a year will be required to finance climate mitigation in developing countries. 3 Ecuador’s yearly per capita emissions of CO2 are 2.3 tons, half the world average and an eighth those of the United States (Campodónico 2010).

2

Speaking to the UN General Assembly in September 2007, however, Ecuador’s leftist

president, Rafael Correa, offered a “pioneer initiative in the history of an oil-producing

country” (Correa and Moreno 2007), pledging to leave one billion barrels of oil underground

in the Ishpingo-Tambochocha-Tiputini (ITT) bloc of Yasuní National Park. This Amazonian

park is one of the most biodiverse in the world and home to the Tagaeri and Taromenane, two

indigenous groups that live in voluntary isolation (Bass et al. 2010). In exchange, Ecuador

asked for compensation—$3.6 billion, half the oil’s market value—to be deposited into a

UNDP trust fund that would finance reforestation, renewable energy, protection of Ecuador’s

parks, environmental research, and sustainable development in the Yasuní region. If Ecuador

ever exploited the oil, the funds would return to the contributors.

From the moment this Yasuní-ITT initiative was put forward, it received accolades

from international media, civil society, and academics. British news outlets like the BBC and

Financial Times called the initiative “pioneering”, “unprecedented”, and a “revolutionary

plan” that could “serve as a blueprint for saving large tracts of the planet” (Caselli 2010; Blair

2011; McAvoy 2010; Vidal 2010b). For Ecuadorian environmentalists, the proposal offered

a “change of paradigm” that “uproots the economic model in its entirety” (Martínez 2009:19).

Academics have explored Yasuní-ITT as a means of implementing “ecological economics”

(Rival 2010), establishing “eco-socialism” (Le Quang 2010), or creating new North-South

coalitions for environmental protection (Martin 2010, 2011).

The aspirations of the ITT proposal’s Ecuadorian authors reached beyond Ecuador.

Indeed, they claimed that the initiative’s central mechanism—compensation for leaving fossil

fuels underground—is a “post-resource curse” model for biodiverse developing countries

worldwide (Larrea 2010b).4 Activists have already seized the example of Yasuní-ITT in their

efforts to avert exploitation in Bolivia, Guyana, Guatemala, and Belize (Chávez 2010; LAHT

2010b; Ramos 2011). When the UN urged President Kabila of Congo to refrain from oil

exploration in Virunga Park, he responded that, if Congo were to do that, it would expect

compensation along the lines of Yasuní-ITT (Manson 2010).

4 According to the Ecuadorian government, countries that could use the ITT mechanism are Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Papa New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, and Venezuela (Larrea and Warnars 2009).

3

A Parable of Failed Climate Mitigation?

Undoubtably, the most significant feature of the Yasuní-ITT initiative is the

mechanism for mitigating climate change it proposes.5 If burned, the oil of Yasuní’s ITT

bloc would emit 407 million tons of CO₂, equivalent to the entire yearly emissions of France

(Koenig 2007). There is no precedent in existing climate treaties for leaving fossil fuels

underground as a tool for reducing emissions (Silvestrum 2009). As one Ecuadorian minister

described the initiative, “This is an entirely new model for fighting climate change that we

have devised, which is paying for non-emissions. It doesn’t exist in the world. It’s not in

Kyoto; it’s not anywhere.”6 In fact, by using international funds to preserve biodiversity,

protect indigenous livelihoods, and finance development, Yasuní-ITT appears to represent

just the sort of innovative, multi-dimensional policy scholars have identified as necessary to

bring developing countries into the international climate regime.

Yet, for all its promise, the Yasuní-ITT initiative appears unlikely to succeed. Despite

initial endorsements from European parliaments, the OAS, OPEC, and a raft of celebrities,

funds have not been forthcoming. As of November 2010, the trust fund had received only

$100,000 from Chile, a “symbolic” $20,000 from China, $12,000 from private donors, and

small pledges from Spain and a regional government in Belgium (Ortiz 2010; El Universo

2010; El Ciudadano 2010; LAHT 2010c). Most significantly, Germany—which had initially

promised €50 million a year for thirteen years—withdrew its pledge in September 2010,

citing mistrust of Ecuador’s intentions, concerns about the precedent the initiative would set,

and a desire to work within carbon markets (Lang 2010).

The apparent failure of Yasuní-ITT could be one more example of the “dysfunctional

North-South politics” (Depledge and Yamin 2009:443) that undermine efforts to achieve

international action on climate change. Existing work on Yasuní is congruent with this

perspective, situating the initiative within literature on international climate negotiations,

Ecuadorian political economy, and transnational environmental activism (Boedt and Martinez

2007; Finer et al. 2009; Imesch 2009; Vogel 2009; Warnars 2010; Rosendal et al. 2008;

Martin 2010; Larrea and Warnars 2009; Acosta et al. 2009; Martínez 2009; Fontaine 2007a).

In focusing primarily on the technical dimensions of Yasuní-ITT as a policy, though, these

studies have not fully explored the politics behind Yasuní. This thesis addresses this gap by

5 See, e.g., Gallagher (2009) [“What ups the ante [with Yasuní-ITT] is climate change”], Finer et al. (2009:63) [“The most innovative component of the Yasuní-ITT initiative is the concept of leaving oil underground…thus helping to combat climate change”] or Acosta et al. (2009:5) [Avoiding CO₂ emissions is “the key global contribution of the initiative”]. 6 All interviews were conducted in Spanish; translations are the author’s.

4

asking if, why, and how ordinary Ecuadorians living in the Yasuní region understand,

interpret, and mobilize around the initiative (although, see Rival 2009, 2010).

Existing theories suggest that poor people are unlikely to become involved in projects

to mitigate climate change, because awareness of climate change is limited, its culprits are

difficult to pinpoint, and addressing it often appears less pressing than poverty alleviation

(Gough and Shackley 2001; Roberts and Parks 2007; Kabubo-Mariara 2009). As Martinez-

Alier (2002:11) argues, people in the developing world instead engage with environmental

issues that have a direct, immediate, and material impact on their day-to-day livelihoods. In

the Amazonian context, this leads to the assumption that only indigenous people—with a

long-standing connection to the land as an economic and cultural base—will be involved in

environmental movements, while non-indigenous “colonist” migrants support extraction for

their own economic benefit. Nonetheless, these theoretical predictions have not been tested

with respect to climate mitigation projects.

This thesis shows the widespread support for leaving the ITT oil underground among

the largely poor and marginalized non-indigenous population living near Yasuní.7 In contrast

to literature that asserts that the poor support environmentalism only when it can be tied to

local, material livelihoods, I found that respondents understood the benefits of conserving

Yasuní in terms of the park’s value to the Ecuadorian nation. Examining the origins of this

framing of environmental protection—which, following Rival (2010:363), I label the

“environmentalism of the people”—I argue that environmentalism in the Yasuní region has

emerged as a highly politicized vehicle through which local actors, particularly municipal

governments, critique extraction-centered development, assert their place within the

Ecuadorian nation, and generate a new mestizo-Amazonian identity among non-indigenous

“colonists”. In short, local actors do engage with climate change in significant ways, but for

reasons much more complex than an interest in mitigating emissions.

In the next chapter, I review the literature on environmental movements in the

developing world. I focus on assumptions that cut across different theories: that Amazonian

“colonists” are disinterested in environmental protection, that “environmentalism of the poor”

emerges only in response to local threats to economic livelihoods, and that governments in

the developing world are always on the side of extraction and degradation. In Chapter II, I

describe my methods and theoretical framework, explaining why political ecology—

particularly, its post-structuralist-influenced variant, liberation ecology—is an appropriate

7 I use “the poor” throughout this thesis to refer to peoples living around Yasuní who, while varying in socioeconomic status, share economic and political marginality relative to other areas of Ecuador.

5

tool for making sense of the local politics of climate mitigation. I caution that this work is

preliminary, and can only provide a framework for more systematic investigation into the

forces driving developing-world mobilization around climate change.

In Chapter III, I offer a brief discussion of the political economy of modern Ecuador,

highlighting the deep tension between the state’s commitment to a new, environmentally-

sustainable economic model and renewed efforts at natural-resource fueled development.

Chapter IV examines how these contradictory forces have created a disparity between the

symbolic presentation of Yasuní National Park to international actors and the reality on the

ground, which in turn creates space for “local” populations to engage with a “global” carbon

mitigation project. Chapter V describes why local residents perceived involvement in

environmentalism as important, connecting ecological consciousness to experiences of

contamination from oil exploitation and marginalization from national development. In

Chapter VI, I attempt to explain how this came into being, arguing that environmentalism has

become a mechanism for populist political contention between the state, local governments,

and indigenous movements.

6

I. Environmentalism: Shifting Theories, Common Assumptions

Post-Material Environmentalism

“Environmentalism” has been broadly defined as an “explicit, active concern with the

relationship between human groups and their respective environments” (Little 1999:254),

manifested through individual behaviour, collection mobilization, and policy action.

Environmentalism has classically been described as an archetypal post-industrial and post-

class “New Social Movement,” focused not on economic distribution or political power but

quality of life (Foweraker 1995; Melucci 1996; Lee 2007). These theories of “post-material

environmentalism” argue that environmental values circulate primarily within educated,

urban middle classes (Dunlap and Catton 1979; Buttel 1987; Cable and Benson 1993;

Inglehart 1995; White 1996), who are economically secure and able to engage with abtract

issues like biodiversity and climate change. In this formulation, individuals mobilize to

protect the environment because they have an aesthetic, spiritual, or scientifically-based

concern for nature—not because they view the environment as critical to their day-to-day

survival.

Nominally “post-material” environmental groups have emerged dramatically in Latin

America during the last three decades. In 1979, there were fifty nationally-based

environmental NGOs in the region; by the 1990s, this had increased ten-fold (Price 1994).

This proliferation was heavily dependent on Northern support for conservation, suggesting

that Latin American environmentalism “has been largely inspired by political, economic, and

intellectual influences from the USA and Europe” (Kaimowitz 1996b:436; Keck and Sikkink

1998; Carruthers 2001). Most of these organizations are operated by well-educated upper-

class residents of capital cities (Kaimowitz 1996b; Christen et al. 1998; Reboratti 2008), and

draw on “new” social movements for human rights or democracy for their membership

(Hsiao and Liu 2002; Cova 2005; Hochstetler and Keck 2007).

These formal environmental organizations have focused their attention on policies

addressing a narrow range of issues, such as pollution control, park conservation, and

environmental education. They are reluctant to engage with politics more broadly, insisting

that the environment can be protected through existing institutions (Kaimowitz 1996a).

Partly as a consequence of their disengagement from wider issues of social justice,

environmental NGOs in Latin America are often perceived as elitist and unsympathetic to the

needs of the rest of the populace (García 1992; Berger 1997; Reboratti 2008). It is clear,

then, that such “post-materialist” environmentalism “is not widely embraced by Latin

7

Americans”, which points to the pessimistic conclusion that “For the poor of the developing

world, economic opportunity, no matter how short-lived, will always take precedence over

environmental protection” (Price 1994:42; Baker 1983; Broad and Cavanagh 1993; Dasgupta

1995). Similarly, in most Latin American cases popular political parties operate under the

assumption that there are “many more votes to be gained by parcelling out to the poor what is

left of the national patrimony than by preserving it” (Dean 1997:331).

The Environmentalism of the Poor

The theory that the environment is a “post-material” concern—however theoretically

coherent—is empirically untenable. Cross-country surveys of environmental attitudes show

that residents of poor countries consistently register more concern for the environment than

their rich counterparts (Brechin and Kempton 1994; Dunlap and York 2008), and the post-

material elite rarely view environmental protection as a priority (Martinez-Alier 1991; Reis

2005). Critically, sociologists have interpreted the interest of poor and marginal populations

in the environment as stemming from a different source than “post-material”

environmentalism. As Brechin and Kempton (1994) argue, poor people support conservation

in order to defend traditional livelihoods, ensure local control of land, and protect their living

conditions.

A paradigmatic example of this manifestation of environmentalism comes from

African Americans in the United States, who, despite their traditional hostility to bourgeoisie

environmentalism, mobilized in the 1980s to confront “environmental racism” (Bullard 1990;

Edwards 1995; McGurty 1997; Foster 1998). These “environmental justice” (EJ) movements

challenged “locally-unwanted land-uses” (Agyeman and Evans 2004:156), particularly the

placement of toxic waste dumps in low-income communities. The organizational and

ideological origins of EJ were the civil rights movement and its demands for social justice,

rather than “professional” environmental organizations (Kurtz 2003; Carruthers 2008;

Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010).

As the EJ literature makes clear, the perception that environmentalism is the sphere of

the wealthy—and, concomitantly, that marginalized populations are disinterested in

environmental protection—is an artefact of a particular definition of environmentalism.

Theories of post-materialist environmentalism equate environmental protection with

biodiversity conservation, wilderness preservation, and ecological modernization (Martinez-

Alier 2002). A wider definition of environmentalism captures not just professional NGOs but

also rubber tappers in the Brazilian Amazon seeking control of their forests, urban slum-

8

dwellers demanding access to clean water and air, and peasants seeking to revalorize

smallholder agriculture. The last twenty years have witnessed a burgeoning of scholarship on

environmentalism among marginal populations in South Asia (Karan 1994; Akula 1995;

Guha 2000), the Pacific (Lohmann 1995; Porio and Taylor 1995), and Africa (Bisner 1995;

Müller 1997). Martinez-Alier has labeled these movements the “environmentalism of the

poor” (EotP), a marker which—despite these movements’ heterogeneity—reflects a “clearly

articulated environmentalism in the countries of the South” (Martinez-Alier and Guha

1997:xx).

Like their counterparts in the EJ movement, participants in EotP are often reluctant to

self-identify as environmentalists and are suspicious of mainstream, professional

organizations (Blanco 1991; Rodrigues 2004). These movements use the vocabulary of

ecology and environmentalism instrumentally, adding an ecological dimension to long-

standing social conflicts in order to gain outside support and sympathy (Lohmann 1995;

Doane 2007). The rubber tappers’ movement of Brazil—which eventually became an icon of

rainforest preservation—was at its inception tied to the trade union movement and concerned

not with Brazilian environmental policy but the state’s model of industrial development

(Keck 1995; Hochstetler and Keck 2007; Acselrad 2008). Like EJ movements, these groups’

goal was not protection of the environment but control of it (Collinson 1996; Newell 2008),

agitating for “community-directed rational exploitation” (Klooster 2003:109) in place of both

wilderness preservation and unbridled degradation.

EotP is, at heart, a form of contestation over the distribution of resources that the poor

need for their livelihoods (Lynch 1993; Martinez-Alier 1995; Kaimowitz 1996b; Bryant and

Bailey 1997; Pezzoli 2002; Doane 2007). Developed-world opposition to building dams, for

example, might stem from anxiety over “the loss of the beauties of nature…or pleasures such

as rafting down a river” (Martinez-Alier 2002:129). In the developing world, activists are

more likely concerned that such projects “threaten to dislocate people and to affect their basic

human rights to land, water, and ecological stability of life-support systems” (Karan

1994:32). The importance of survival and livelihood as an impetus for environmental

mobilization helps explain why women play a dominant role in EotP, since women often bear

the burden of provisioning for households and do so using ecological resources (Akula 1995;

Bisner 1995; Lorentzen 1995).

EotP engages not just with conflicts over livelihood, but also over scale. While post-

material environmentalism frequently deals with issues like global mass-extinction or climate

change, those addressed by EotP are almost always local and place-based (Cable and Benson

9

1993; Kurtz 2003). Martinez-Alier and Guha (1997:18) frame struggles to maintain

community land management and resource use as “a defence of the locality against the

nation”. In their narrative, the state is an agent of environmental degradation and ally of

rapacious multi-national corporations, obeying a “common Southern pattern of cooperation

between the upper levels of the state and foreign private corporations for the use of natural

resources” (Martinez-Alier 2002:195). When Southern states do become involved in the

preservation of the environment, they often do so by replacing popular, social-justice-

oriented movements with exclusionary, managerial, and scientific ecology (Akula 1995;

Bryant and Bailey 1997; Acselrad 2008).

To Martinez-Alier, EotP is also a fight over how nature is to be valued. Developing-

world environmentalists resist the privatization and marketization of communally-shared

ecological services, arguing that their value for communal and individual reproduction is

unquantifiable and incommensurable. Nonetheless, the complex and multifarious means of

valuation deployed by movements of EotP rarely attribute any intrinsic value to nature itself.

When groups “appeal to indigenous territorial rights and also to the sacredness of Nature”,

they do so only “in order to defend and secure their livelihoods” (Martinez-Alier 2002:11).

The ecological conflicts described by Martinez-Alier are over distribution among individuals

and groups in present society, not between present and future generations or human beings

and other species.

Although Martinez-Alier (1995:84) insists that environmentalism, thus defined, is not

the “materialist” counterpart to “post-materialist” environmentalism, others have accepted

that this livelihood-centered approach suggests that environmentalism in Latin America is

“motivated by basic and immediate material interest” (Collinson 1996:2). In this view, the

poor are driven to conservation by rational calculations of self-interest8 within a given

incentive structure (Hall 1997; Kaimowitz 2002; Swinton, Escobar, and Reardon 2003). As a

consequence, they are easily drawn away from environmentalism if ecological degradation

offers greater material benefits than preservation (Stanley 1996).

Cultural Ecologists

These materialist, rational-choice, and deterministic readings of theories of EotP have,

unsurprisingly, drawn significant criticism. Arturo Escobar argues that environmental

movements in Latin America are simultaneously economic, political, and cultural struggles

8 As Lorentzen (1995:57) points out, “self-interest” is not necessarily individual, but could refer to actions taken on behalf of family or the community.

10

(Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Escobar 2008).9 An

environmental constructivist, Escobar (1999) views these “cultural ecologist” movements as

not only seeking to control the physical products of nature and how those products are

valued, but also the ideological and cultural production of nature itself. As a result, for

Escobar, environmental conflicts are not just about defending livelihoods, but also the

“lifeworlds” and “cosmovisions” that underpin them (see, also, De La Cadena 2010).10

The differences between Escobar’s and Martinez-Alier’s conceptualizations of

environmentalism should not be overstated. The conflicts described by Escobar all involve

local forms of degradation—gold mining, deforestation, and colonization—and, in contrast to

the deterritorialized struggles against biodiversity loss and climate change characteristic of

post-material environmentalism, are always tied to place (Oslender 2002:88). Moreover, like

Martinez-Alier, Escobar (2008) sees the state as either on the side of environmental

degradation or irrelevant to the global-local—or “glocal” (Escobar 2006:121)—interactions

that are at the heart of environmental conflicts. While international environmental networks

are important collaborators in such struggles, Escobar ultimately privileges the local as the

source of true environmental protection.

Although Escobar’s ethnographic focus is on Afro-Colombians, this “cultural

ecologist” framework is most visible in the literature on indigenous environmentalism.

Studies on the transnational indigenous rights movement, which emerged in force in the

1980s from the Arctic to the Amazon, chart how the movement weaved together demands for

territorial rights and cultural recognition, as Escobar envisions (Conklin and Graham 1995;

Cunha and Almeida 2000; Garí 2001; McSweeney 2006). Frequently, indigenous groups

have grounded political claims in environmental terms, asserting that, for them, “the

environment is not an issue…it is a way of life” (Robyn 2002:213; Cepek 2008; Schlosberg

and Carruthers 2010). The state, on the other hand, is once again framed as an overt enemy

of indigenous ecologists, or, at best, an institution committed to a weak version of

sustainability that is an “aestheticized, non-politicized discourse closely tied to a broader

official discourse of development” (Brosius 1999:286; Rodrigues 2004).

Nowhere has the relationship between indigenous cultures, environmental

mobilization, and the conservation of territory been explored with more depth than the 9 Escobar defines culture as the “collective and incessant process of producing meanings that shape social experience and configures social relations” (Alvarez et al. 1998a:3). 10 Martinez-Alier’s response to this culturalist critique is conflicted. On one hand, he dismisses post-structuralism, writing that “these are structural conflicts…not simply instances of the politics of place and identity” (2002:120). In a recent work, however, Martinez-Alier (2009:62) argues that the poor often side with conservation because of “livelihood needs and their cultural values”.

11

Amazon. In 1989, representatives from indigenous groups declared, “We use and care for the

resources of that [Amazonian] biosphere with respect, because it is our home, and because we

know our survival and that of our future generations depends on it” (Redford and Stearman

1993:249). Declarations by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and

World Wildlife Fund, as well as the Convention for Biological Diversity of the Rio Summit,

assent that indigenous groups are key actors in Amazonian conservation (Chapin 2004). A

wide swathe of literature now argues that indigenous “Traditional Ecological Knowledge,”

deeply embedded within their cultures, allows these groups to manage their territory

sustainably (Garland 1995; Varese 1996; Ellen, Parkes, and Bicker 2000; Etkin 2002; Drew

2005; Valdivia 2005; Stocks, McMahan, and Taber 2007; Brondizio, Ostrom, and Young

2009) and potentially even increase biodiversity (Posey 1985, 2000; Rival 2006). Indigenous

conservation stems not just from the dependence of communities on natural resources for

their survival, but also on aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural value attributed to nature (Cunha

and Almeida 2000; Garí 2001).

The notion that the indigenous peoples of the Amazon are “intrinsically”

conservationist, however, faces a growing challenge from ethnographers, biological

scientists, and conservation practitioners. Some argue that indigenous people have a long

history of unsustainable resource use (Alvard 1993; Coomes 1995; Dean 1997). Others claim

that indigenous people have abandoned conservation in favour of integration into the market,

invoking environmentalism only to legitimate demands for territory and recognition (Redford

and Stearman 1993:254; Bebbington et al. 1993; Sabin 1998; Raymond 2007). A middle-

ground position accepts that while there is “nothing intrinsically or automatically sustainable

about indigenous practices” (Carruthers 1996:1020), indigenous culture can lead to pro-

ecological behaviour under certain conditions (Aagesen 1998; Gray et al. 2008; Pace 2004).

This position is consistent with Escobar’s argument, which is that environmentalism among

the poor is not inevitable but constructed out of specific and contingent configurations of

identity, culture, and place.

Colonists: Environmental Anti-Heroes

The above theoretical frameworks widen our view of participation in environmental

movements. As Martinez-Alier (2002:vii) notes, though, it would be “patent nonsense” to

argue that poor people are “always and everywhere environmentalists.” All of the bodies of

theory discussed above assume some prerequisites for environmentalism, be they a long-

standing cultural connection to a given landscape or a strong livelihood interest in

12

Key

Environmental

Issues

Pro-

Environment

Actors

Scales of

Conflict

Environmental

Objective

Post-Materialist (Melucci 1996)

Climate change, biodiversity loss, wilderness preservation

“Post-materialist” urban middle classes, professional NGOs

National and international actors attempting to influence state policy

Preservation of wilderness for future generations, ecological modernization

Environmental

Justice

(Bullard 1990)

“Environmental racism”, locally unwanted land uses

Racial minorities in Western countries

Local communities seeking redress from the state

Justice in distribution of environmental “bads”

Environmentalism

of the Poor (Martinez-Alier 2002)

Traditional livelihoods, sustainable and locally-controlled resource exploitation

Resource-users in developing world, social justice movements, small-scale farmers

Local communities and some international allies fighting state/corporate penetration

Justice in distribution of benefits from resources, recognition of incommensurable value of nature for livelihoods

Cultural

Ecologism

(Escobar 2008)

Ecological-cultural reproduction, defence of indigenous territories and identities

Indigenous peoples, transnational activist networks

“Glocal” networks defending against transnational corporations and multilateral institutions

Protection of traditional cultures, reintegration of humans with nature

environmental protection. Inevitably, certain groups lack these characteristics, and are thus

assumed to be unlikely to mobilize around environmental issues.

Amazonian “colonists” represent one such group. Although the Ecuadorian Amazon

is often thought of as a space primarily inhabited by indigenous peoples, non-indigenous

mixed-race mestizos now make up 70% of its population (Gray et al. 2008). The discovery of

oil in the “Oriente” (“East”) in the 1970s spurred a rapid increase in population that

continues to the present (Marquette 1998; Pichón 1997; Bilsborrow, Barbieri, and Pan 2004).

This process of “colonization” of the Amazon was promoted by the Ecuadorian state, which

saw shifting population into the Amazon as an opportunity to ease pressure for agrarian land

reform in the highlands, integrate the region into the national economy, and secure rainforest

territory coveted by Ecuador’s neighbours (Vickers 1984; Uquillas 1984; Posey 2000).

Table 2.1: Varieties of Environmentalism

13

Despite the role of the state in encouraging colonization, however, it has done little to support

development or environmental awareness amongst colonists once they have settled (Hiraoka

and Yamamoto 1980; Macdonald 1981).

This entrance of poor outsiders into the delicate Amazonian ecosystem is typically

portrayed as one of inexorable destruction:

Once roads cut through the forest, they open the way for masses of landless migrants who, in an impoverished country such as Ecuador, see unclaimed land in the jungle as their last hope to make a living. Slash and burn practices prevail and soon the forest disappears. Both settlers and oil companies encroach on Amerindian territories, disrupting their inhabitants’ way of life and endangering their physical integrity (Rodrigues 2004:94).

Peasants in the Amazon are frequently described as refugees of hacienda modernization, soil

erosion, or natural disasters, and thus as having few skills appropriate for Amazonian

agriculture (Ryder and Brown 2000; Fearnside 2001; Bates 2007). Instead, colonists engage

in a “search for readily extractible wealth [that] is predictably desperate” (Lane 2003:79),

living from environmentally destructive cattle-ranching, deforestation, mining, and

employment from oil companies (Uquillas 1984; Lisansky 1990; Durham 1995). The

environmental impacts of Amazonian colonization through rural land use are exacerbated by

the formation of urban centres, which facilitate extraction and further colonization (Browder

and Godfrey 1997; Ryder and Brown 2000; Simmons et al. 2002; Bates 2008). As in other

Amazonian countries (Bunker 1985), the Ecuadorian state is thoroughly implicated in the

destructive process of colonization: in fact, the state has historically required colonists to

deforest half their land to acquire ownership rights (Suárez-Torres, Uggen, and Crawford

1997).

Meta-level surveys of literature on the connection between poverty and environmental

degradation show that poor, rural populations are rarely solely or even primarily responsible

for ecological destruction (Duraiappah 1998; Painter 1995; Gray and Moseley 2005;

Satterthwaite 2003). Ravnborg (2003) argues instead that such narratives are political

inventions used to distract attention from the structural factors that force individuals into

ecologically harmful behaviour. In the Amazon, these forces are clear: “pervasive poverty,

mal-distribution of farmland, lack of inputs for intensive cultivation, lack of non-agrarian

livelihood opportunities, and generally inadequate rural development” (Pichón 1997:707).

While such structuralist perspectives might morally exculpate colonists for environmental

damage, the perception that degradation is “overdetermined” (Schwartz 1995:102) and

colonists are “at the mercy of exogenous forces” (Ryder and Brown 2000:530) leave little

14

room for any discussion of environmental mobilization. Colonists’ lack of a livelihood based

on a longstanding connection to the land—a key element in both Escobar and Martinez-

Alier’s theories—offers a central explanation for their disinterest in environmental protection.

Consequently, some have concluded that the only way to protect the remainder of the

Amazon is to make it inaccessible to non-indigenous people (Fearnside 2001; Kaimowitz

2002).

The contrast between colonists and indigenous people is revealing. The indigenous

federations of Ecuador have been consistently depicted as guardians of the Amazon,

engaging in an integrated defence of territory, environment, and culture against both oil

companies and colonization (Gerlach 2003; Whitten, Whitten, and Chango 2003; Sawyer

2004). When non-indigenous groups—such as Brazilian rubber tappers—engage in pro-

environmental mobilization, they do so because they have crafted alliances with indigenous

groups or adopted indigenous practices, like community resource management (Keck 1995;

Cunha and Almeida 2000; Doane 2007). In short, colonists cease to be environmental anti-

heroes once they are no longer colonists (Caviglia-Harris and Sills 2004; Chapin 2004);11

indigenous people, on the other hand, lose their status as “ecologically noble savages” once

they begin to emulate non-indigenous peoples (Salazar 1981; Macdonald 1981; Gray et al.

2008). According to the literature, to be mestizo in the Amazon is to be a colonist; to be a

colonist is to have little interest in the protection of the environment.12

Towards New Environmentalism(s)

Scholarship on environmentalism has taken on a much more ecumenical focus since

its early fixation on Western, post-materialist movements. The theoretical frameworks of EJ,

EotP, and cultural ecologism call attention to the diverse ways that marginalized populations

can become involved in environmental protection. Nonetheless, they provide few tools for

understanding environmental mobilization among certain groups, such as Amazonian

colonists.

Nearly all of the environmental conflicts described by Escobar and Martinez-Alier are

place-based. This flows from both authors’ assumptions that environmental movements are

rooted in the defence of territory and livelihood against states and their international 11 Escobar (2008b:118), for example, explains Afro-Caribbean environmental mobilization by making them out to be proto-indigenous: “The natural environment—the rivers, sea, and forest—has sustained the black groups of the pacific for several centuries; the natural world thus has an intimate presence in the cultural imaginary of these groups.” 12 Throughout this thesis, I use mestizo and colonist to refer to the same non-indigenous Amazonian population. In Chapter VI, however, I problematize the meaning of “colonist.”

15

corporate allies. Global environmental threats—like climate change—however, are to some

extent “de-territorialized,” lacking clearly identifiable culprits and discernable local impacts

(Bryant and Bailey 1997). By attempting to address climate change and local conservation

and development simultaneously, though, Yasuní-ITT cuts across these spatial scales.

Moreover, the initiative has been actively promoted by the Ecuadorian state and, as I show

later, non-indigenous actors in the Yasuní region. It offers, therefore, a novel opportunity to

explore how grassroots environmentalism engages new issues and incorporates new actors.

The notion that the poor mobilize to defend their livelihoods and that

environmentalism must always be coupled with social justice cuts across all the frameworks

discussed above. It is nonetheless constraining, because it suggests that those poor people

who do not draw a direct benefit from use of the environment will be disinterested in

protecting it. Such determinism is almost as myopic as the post-materialist view: rather than

saying that the poor “can’t afford to be environmentalist”, some argue that they simply “can’t

afford not to”. As a result, environmental movements lose their political distinctiveness and

become class mobilizations demanding control of production factors which are, only

coincidentally, environmental (Vayda and Walters 1999).

A more dynamic approach is needed to explore how environmentalism can serve as a

force for constructing identity, creating connections to place, and generating livelihoods,

rather than simply flowing from place, identity, and livelihood in a unidirectional fashion. In

the Yasuní region, this necessarily entails paying more attention to colonists, who have

heretofore been treated as “contingent, incomplete haphazard meldings of the detritus of

aboriginal social formations…defined in terms of what they are not (aboriginal, national)

rather than in positive terms” (Nugent 1993:xxi). The next chapter explores how to bring

issues such as agency and actors such as the state and colonists back into discussions of

environmentalism.

16

II. Theory and Methodology

The Liberation Ecology of Climate Change

Political ecology—a theoretical perspective that draws on anthropology and

geography—emerged in order to explain complex, multi-scalar environmental conflicts

through attention to power, politics, and history (Watts and Peet 2004; Robbins 2004; Gray

and Moseley 2005). Traditionally, political ecologists focused on economic and political

structures, rather than individual actions, as the driving forces behind environmental change

(Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Stonich 1993; Durham 1995). In this way, political ecology

runs parallel to studies of climate politics, which argue that the outcome of mitigation

projects is primarily determined by international political structure (Roberts and Parks 2007;

Barrett 2009; Giddens 2009).

Despite these apparent congruencies, political ecologists have been reluctant to

engage with climate change, preferring instead localized issues like land degradation (Bryant

and Bailey 1997; Goldman and Schurman 2000). The study of climate politics, on the other

hand, usually begins with the assumption that climate change is an “inescapably” and

“unavoidably” global issue (Depledge and Yamin 2009:451; Roberts and Parks 2007:9;

Harrison and Sundstrom 2010; Hepburn 2009; Paterson and Grubb 1992; Peffer 1998).

Sources of greenhouse gas emissions are spread across the continents, climatological systems

are globally linked, and impacts are not easily constrained within national borders. In such a

conceptualization, the role of grassroots environmental mobilization is minimal: local actors

merely “suffer the consequences of acts that are largely outside their own sphere of

influence” (Byg and Salick 2009:165).

While scientifically compelling, this “global” construction of climate change should

not be accepted uncritically (Lutes 1998; Adger et al. 2001). In reality, “global” processes

like climate change are the aggregate of local decisions, since all greenhouse gases enter the

atmosphere from specific sources (Sovacool and Brown 2009; Wagner et al. 2009). It

follows, then, that actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are never solely global,

but stem from multi-scalar policies implemented by states, international institutions, and

NGOs (Jagers and Stripple 2003; Lindseth 2004; Lemos and Agrawal 2006; Paterson 2009).

Municipal governments in particular play a critical role in regulating transport, heating, and

electricity use, and have been at the forefront of local-level experimentation in climate

mitigation (Collier and Lofstedt 1997; Betsill and Bulkeley 2006; Lutsey and Sperling 2008;

Schreurs 2008). Nevertheless, there is little in the way of a developed analysis of the politics

17

of why certain local actors—be they municipal governments, ecological movements, or

ordinary citizens—adopt climate mitigation policies and others do not.

“Liberation ecology” represents one variant on political ecology suited to addressing

these gaps in the climate politics literature. Liberation ecologists call attention to the way

that grassroots actors can exercise “incomplete agency” (Foster 1998:811) in the face of

external constraints (Watts and Peet 2004). Local actors rarely perceive themselves

exclusively as victims, but instead seek out spaces within which their choices have an impact

(Biersack 2007; Hvalkof 2007). Liberation ecology’s swing of the pendulum back from

structure towards agency coincides with a more concrete shift in explanatory approach.

Political ecologists focus on developing “chains of causation” that start with a local

environmental problem and link upward through spatial scales to the problem’s “true” global

or national source (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). This approach, however, makes an a priori

assumption that local environmental outcomes are always externally determined (Vayda and

Walters 1999). Liberation ecology, on the other hand, focuses on complex webs of causation

created by collective action taken at multiple spatial scales (Escobar 2008). Such an open-

ended, actor-oriented approach is key to understanding Yasuní, where the constraints of

international climate negotiations and government policy are critical starting points, but

cannot be separated from how local actors use and manipulate them.

Liberation ecology thus challenges the “fairly standard script” (Robbins 2004:182)

frequently deployed to describe environmental conflicts in the developing world. As

highlighted in the literature review, studies of the Amazon commonly juxtapose ecologically-

noble indigenous people and local resource-users against mestizo colonists and multinational

corporations. Usually, the state appears only as a single-minded monolith of environmental

destruction. Yet as Keil et al. (1998:13) point out, lost in these discussions is politics itself—

the dynamic and non-determinant process by which certain actors adopt and appropriate

environmental issues to various ends. Liberation ecology’s non-deterministic approach

allows researchers to “bring the state back in” as a potentially pro-environmental actor,

noting that the state has a unique capacity to enforce certain forms of environmental

protection (Gille 2002; Eckersley 2004). At the same time, it treats the state as only one

actor—itself fragmented and conflicted (Migdal 2001)—among a potentially diverse array of

potential institutions that could mobilize for or against environmental protection.

Liberation ecology also pushes researchers to take a more critical approach to the

relationship between environmentalism and identity. EotP assumes that environmentalist

identity flows from preexisting characteristics. The “anti-essentialist” approach of liberation

18

ecology, in contrast, sees environmentalist identity as growing from social position, history,

and more situational factors. For example, Agrawal (2005) found that categories like gender

and wealth were less influential in predicting environmental behaviour than the specific ways

certain individuals were (and were not) integrated into local programs for ecological

management. The relationship between identity and environmentalism is not unidirectional,

then: environmentalism can also be a source of new identities.

Just as actors and identities cannot be taken for granted in environmental conflicts,

liberation ecologists note that the environment itself is a contested and politicized social

construct. While trees, rocks and animals may be objectively “real,” the analytical category

of ”nature” is inevitably understood and deployed in divergent ways by different sets of

actors (Luke 1995; Low and Gleeson 1998; Escobar et al. 1999; Hannigan 2006; Alatout

2006). Liberation ecology calls our attention to “what reality [of nature] is being constructed,

by whom, for whom, for what political purpose, and to what political effect” (Biersack

2007:14). Yasuní National Park may be a real place, but representations of and narratives

about the park—as much as the physical space of the park itself—are objects of contestation.

Research Methodology

Liberation ecology—with its attention to the complex inter-linkages between power

and history, politics and economy, and culture and the environment—lends itself to an

ethnographic, case-study approach. This work draws on three months of fieldwork in

Ecuador during the summer of 2010, a period during which attention to the fate of Yasuní

was at its most intense and local action pronounced. Three different sources provide the bulk

of the data for this study, allowing me to “triangulate” my findings (Brady and Collier 2004).

The fulcrum of this research is fifty-five in-depth, semi-structured interviews. I spoke

at length with local and national government officials, indigenous community leaders, oil

workers, businesspeople, employees of Yasuní Park, tourist guides, and members of local,

national, and international civil society. Although informants were selected through

“snowball sampling,” I started my sample at multiple points in order to avoid being restricted

to individuals within a single network. Interviews were individually tailored but organized

around common themes: perceptions of oil exploitation, knowledge of the Yasuní-ITT

proposal, and participation in environmentalist activities. My approach was not to get a

comprehensive cross-section of popular opinion, but to interview within different sets of

actors until new perspectives were no longer forthcoming.

19

Source: Suarez et al. (2009)

Interviewing primarily explores beliefs and meanings, rather than actions (Arksey and

Knight 1999). In the case of Yasuní, where symbols and images of the park frequently stray

from reality, this bias is problematic. Ideally, researchers supplement interviews with

participant-observation (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995), but because my time in the field

was so limited, this ethnographic ideal was unattainable. Instead, I complemented my

interviews with “go-alongs”: outcome-oriented and active observation (Kusenbach 2003). I

attended meetings of the Yasuní-ITT Proposal Technical Committee and Management

Committee of the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve, and travelled extensively in the Yasuní area,

visiting communities surrounding the ITT Bloc, Huaorani villages in the interior of the park,

and the municipality of Fransisco de Orellana (Coca), which serves as the region’s

commercial and transport hub. “Go-alongs” allowed me to observe individuals using the

park while simultaneously conducting nearly one-hundred informal interviews to understand

the meaning behind these actions.

Figure 3.1: Primary Study Area

20

These two sources of ethnographic data were rounded out with analysis of media

coverage, a critical source given that “the momentum of an environmental campaign is to a

large extent an artefact of the amount of media coverage that it is able to attract” (Brosius

1999a:286). Although the voices of grassroots actors are rarely reflected in media coverage

of Yasuní, newspaper and online articles were nevertheless critical in adding context to my

study. As Duneier (1999) notes, the micro-level richness and detail offered by ethnography

loses its value if it is presented without considering broader, macro-level processes. Because

reporting tends to focus on events and outcomes, rather than more static beliefs and

institutions (Earl et al. 2004; McAdam et al. 2005), it balances my other sources of data by

situating my snapshot of environmentalism in Yasuní within a longer history. Media

coverage has also allowed me to continue to track developments in Yasuní after leaving the

field.

Evaluation of Research Techniques

The choice of research methodology inevitably entails trade-offs. A key benefit of

my qualitative approach was the ability to adapt my research in the face of new

circumstances. Changes in the international standing of the ITT proposal—caused by the

endorsements of European countries or negotiations with the UN—had an impact on

conditions in the Yasuní region during my fieldwork, and required alterations in my research

plan. Similarly, upon entering the field I found that “climate change” as a stand-alone theme

had little relevance for interviewees. I thus shifted towards investigating more general beliefs

about the environment, with which perceptions about climate change were intertwined.

An open-ended ethnographic methodology was not just a practical necessity, but also

an essential part of my theoretical approach. The existence of so many frameworks to

describe grassroots environmentalism created a strong temptation to try to force the forms of

environmental mobilization I observed into the mould of EJ or EotP. I elected, however, to

follow the precepts of “grounded theory” (Glaser and Strauss 1967) and to attempt to create

new theoretical concepts closely tailored to empirical data. My interviews, research articles,

and field notes were open-coded in nVivo. Data analysis started in the field, and filtered back

into my selection of individuals to interview, themes for questioning, and even choice of sites

to which I travelled. Because this approach produces concrete and accessible theory (Turner

1981), I was regularly able to test and refine the concepts I was developing with participants

themselves.

21

Nevertheless, this thesis bears out some of the weaknesses of a grounded theory

approach. My data do not suggest a coherent theory of environmentalism, nor, if they did,

would I have the depth of research necessary to lend such a framework validity. Indeed,

while in the field, I often had to reconsider what I meant when I said I was studying

“environmentalism.” This evoked a common problem in case study research: what is the

case actually being studied (Schrank 2006)? I certainly did not study membership and

participation in explicitly environmentalist organizations, which—in Ecuador, as elsewhere—

is infinitesimal (Dunlap and York 2008). At the same time, I did not want only to research

statements people made about the environment, since a rhetorical commitment to

environmental protection is nearly universal and, by extension, often meaningless.

I conceptualize my research as describing what sociologists characterize as social

movement “frames.” Frames are the mental tools by which individuals and collectives use

ideology to make sense of the world around them, with the intention of guiding meaningful

action:

Frames are constructed as movement adherents negotiate a shared understanding of some problematic condition or situation they define as in need of change, make attributions regarding who or what is to blame, articulate an alternative set of arrangements, and urge others to act in concert to effect change (Benford and Snow 2000:615)

Frames are “action-oriented,” insofar as they “inspire and legitimate activities and

campaigns” (Benford and Snow 2000:614), but they are not themselves actions. In effect, my

decision to study social movement frames in Yasuní directs me to focus on what individuals

believe should be done about oil, the environment, and Yasuní Park. I thus treat

“environmentalism” as a broad field of normative constructions about how people should

relate to nature, rather than a narrow type of action engaged in by explicitly-labelled social

movements and NGOs (Brosius 1999a).

As stated in the introduction, this project should be seen as pilot research. My goal is

to generate questions, concepts, and themes that can be evaluated through more extensive and

in-depth research. I attempt to show possibilities (Graeber 2004): different ways that

environmentalism is evolving in the face of new problems, like climate change, and novel

policy instruments, such as the Yasuní-ITT proposal. My hope is that they serve to broaden

the conceptual horizons of policy makers, activists, and academics.

22

III. The Political Economy of Non-Extraction

The Signing Ceremony

On August 3rd, 2010, three years of negotiations between Ecuador and the United

Nations—and a decade of campaigning by Ecuadorian environmentalists—culminated in the

Yasuní-ITT Trust Fund Agreement. Held in the white-pillared cancillería of Ecuador’s

foreign ministry in the capital, Quito, the signing ceremony officially set the terms by which

international funds could be contributed and would be subsequently managed. National elites

and foreign dignitaries arrived in luxury SUVs, ascending to the Salón los Proceses by way

of a red-carpeted marble staircase flanked by photographers.

The ceremony began with a multi-lingual rendition of the national anthem, while a

video in the background juxtaposed images of Ecuador’s immense biodiversity with its varied

indigenous cultures. Ministers from the UN and Ecuadorian government, speaking to a

packed audience, lauded the ITT proposal as “the first of its kind” and a “symbol for the rest

of the world.” They called attention to a group of Huaorani—an indigenous group from the

Yasuní area—who were seated near the front and wore red paint and crowns of feathers. As

the event came to a close, a group of schoolchildren sang a paean to “Pachamama,” Kichwa

for “Mother Earth.”

August 3rd symbolized a major turn in the self-presentation of the Ecuadorian state, in

which the machinery of a government historically dependent on oil exports re-oriented

towards promoting a “post-oil” initiative. Over and over, speakers emphasized that credit for

the apparent success of the Yasuní initiative, and the greening of the Ecuadorian state it

represented, belonged to the President of the Republic, Rafael Correa. Indeed, the embrace

of the proposal by Correa’s Alianza Pais party in 2007 was “decisive” (Martínez and Acosta

2010:13) in converting the initiative from the dream of radical environmentalists into serious

public policy. To outside observers, Correa has since been leading the international

campaign to protect Yasuní, as part of a wider reframing of environmental policy and

remaking of the Ecuadorian nation in accordance with “buen vivir,” the indigenous concept

of a harmonious “good life.”

For some environmentalists, however, August 3rd offered little cause for optimism.

Despite repeatedly declaring that the Yasuní-ITT initiative was his government’s “number-

one priority,” the President—in Quito at the time—did not attend the ceremony. In private

conversation, civil society leaders who had worked on the proposal for years admitted that

the trust fund was little more than an empty bank account. President Correa, they lamented,

23

had always said that if the $3.6 billion requested was not forthcoming, exploitation would

move forward.

This example hints at the deeply contradictory currents that run through modern

Ecuador. In this chapter, I explore how the Ecuadorian state is torn between new

commitments to environmental protection and a long-running, institutionalized orientation

towards resource-led development, seen at the level of the nation, Yasuní Park, and the ITT

initiative. This contradiction is crucial for understanding the Yasuní-ITT proposal itself, and

provides the national context for the local environmental mobilizations explored in

subsequent chapters.

Oil State, Green State, Pink State

Ecuador’s economy has long been underpinned by primary commodity exports:

bananas, cacao and, starting in the 1970s, oil (Peláez-Samaniegoa et al. 2007). The discovery

of oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon precipitated industrialization and the construction of

infrastructure (Whitten 1981; Valdivia 2008; Rival 2011), but also reinforced a lopsided

distribution of wealth and dependence on external markets which subsequent regimes have

been unable to reduce (Lane 2003; Gerlach 2003). Presently, 40% of the state’s revenue

comes from oil exports (SGI 2010), and for many Ecuadorians, reserves of crude oil “embody

the wealth of the nation” (Rival 2010:360). As a consequence, the state has traditionally

focused on maximizing oil production (Kilmerling 1991, 1996, 2000; Narváez 2007),

showing a consistent “lack of political will, technological capacity, and human resources”

(Suárez-Torres et al. 1997:98) to confront its environmental impacts.

A variety of factors have recently combined to impel change in Ecuador’s regulation

of the oil industry and, more generally, the entire field of environmental policy. The

indigenous movement, which emerged as a political force in the 1990s, has injected a new

vision of environmental protection into public discourse (Greene 2006; Stahler-Sholk,

Vanden, and Kuecker 2007; Zamosc 2007; Lucero 2008; Healey 2009). As many

interviewees suggested, the realization that Ecuador’s reserves are finite, alongside well-

publicized cases of harmful contamination caused by oil spills13, have also created public

pressure for stricter controls on the oil industry. Ecuador’s new constitution, passed by

referendum in 2008, reflects this environmental concern. The document is organized around

13 The best known of which is Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco, a class action lawsuit filed in 1993 against Texaco (now owned by Chevron) by 30,000 Ecuadorians for health and environmental damaged cause by the companies’ operations northwest of Yasuní.

24

the principle that a “good life” is achieved not through economic accumulation but through a

balanced relationship with nature (Acosta 2009). It prohibits transgenic crops and seeds,

proscribes the patenting of indigenous collective knowledge, recognizes water as a human

right, and perhaps most dramatically, gives certain rights to nature itself. Although some

commentators have reported the President Correa was initially resistant to this codification of

indigenous cosmovision (Cadena 2010; Jameson 2011), the government now frequently

presents itself as a defender of the “rights of nature” (Saavedra 2010).

Concern for environmental protection has also filtered into national development

policy. An official at SENPLADES, the planning ministry, explained that all projects that

rely on public investment now must detail their impact on Ecuador’s carbon footprint and

conform to Ecuador’s goal of converting its energy matrix to renwable energy. A new court

has been set up to adjudicate the rights given to nature by the new constitution; the first case

before it is a lawsuit against British Petroleum for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill (Jarrín

2010). Internationally, President Correa has advocated for an “eco-tax” on each barrel of oil

shipped from OPEC countries, which would be used towards developing new modes of

economic activity (Acosta et al. 2009). Across the government, ministers insisted that “we

are thinking on the level of the entire country about how we can change the base of

production in the country” away from oil. This is a significant shift for a nation in which the

first barrels of oil extracted were paraded through the streets of Quito like a conquering hero

and greeted as a source of national salvation (Kilmerling 1996).

Still, this apparent “greening” of the Ecuadorian state must be considered within its

wider context. By the end of the 1990s, many commentators felt that the only alternative to

neoliberalism was autonomous, indigenous-led community self-development (Munck 2000;

2003; Whitten 2003). The Correa regime, however, is one among a “pink wave” of left-

leaning regimes that swept across Latin America in the last decade, offering a third path: an

active role for the state in development, poverty alleviation, and economic management

(Blanco 2006; Beasley-Murray, Cameron, and Hershberg 2009; Panizza 2009; Cornia 2010).

While Ecuador’s new constitution may give rights to nature, it also creates new social rights

which can only be realized with government spending (Plaza 2007; Barrientos, Gideon, and

Molyneux 2008). In attempting to fund commitments to redistribution and poverty reduction,

leftist governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have embraced a “neo-

developmentalist” (Acosta 2009:111) ideology of national progress fueled by natural resource

extraction (Gudynas 2009; Bebbington 2009b; Ruiz-Marrero 2010; Chávez 2010).

25

Extraction, then, remains at the root of development in Ecuador (Mendoza 2007).

The same SENPLADES functionary who described to me the actions Ecuador was taking to

implement buen vivir eventually admitted:

Ecuador is not ready to give up all the revenues of petroleum. And we are not ready to get all the energy that we need without petroleum. So, we need planning to make these jumps [to a sustainable economy], but at the same time, we are thinking about the necessities of the people.

In practice, the government’s primary commitment has been to new models of extraction, not

non-exploitation (Perreault and Valdivia 2010). New petroleum laws passed in 2010 make

all foreign oil companies “service providers”: while they receive a fee for their work,

windfall profits are reserved for the state (Rival 2011; Swartz and Alvaro 2010). When

Correa declared a moratorium on new sites of petroleum extraction in 2007, his intention in

doing so was to give the government time to renegotiate contracts with foreign oil companies

in order to maximize revenues, not to limit oil exploitation itself (Fontaine 2007a; Martínez

and Acosta 2010). Indeed, 65% of the Ecuadorian Amazon has now been zoned into oil

blocs (Finer et al. 2008).

Source: Finer et al. (2008)

Figure 4.1: Oil Exploitation in the Ecuadorian Amazon

26

Like other left-of-center Andean governments, the Ecuadorian state has approached

natural resources in a centralized, nationalistic fashion (Bebbington 2009b). Under the new

constitution, indigenous groups lost the right—granted in the 1998 constitution, if rarely

actualized (Lara 2007)—to prior consent for extraction on their land. As one government

official explained:

To be informed, or to consent: there is a difference. And the [indigenous] pueblos wanted consent, of course. In the constitution of Ecuador, the first article speaks of natural resources. And it says that ‘Non-renewable natural resources belong to the national patrimony.’ The state is for all Ecuadorians, and for this reason, there is no prior consent.

As the signing ceremony showed, superficially the Correa regime has been more than willing

to appropriate images of a multi-cultural, multi-lingual nation. With its rhetoric of a state that

speaks and acts for all Ecuadorians, though, the administration appears to seek to “return in

time to the magical country of the ‘70s, a paradise of abundant resources, without indigenous

people, environmentalists, or bothersome environmental worries” (Abarca 2010:240).

Informants from a variety of NGOs felt that the Ecuadorian state had been strengthening

itself at the expense of civil society, particularly by recruiting professionals (including

conservationists) from the private sector into the government (Beasley-Murray et al. 2009;

Becker 2011). The consequence was a state without any strong counterbalancing force.

Obviously, this commitment to state-led development through natural resource

extraction has environmental consequences. Even as the government has talked about

leaving oil underground in ITT, Ecuador has accelerated efforts to open up gold and copper

mines in the Amazon (Bebbington et al. 2008). Environmental groups like Acción Ecológica

reported that the government had become increasingly hostile towards them, a claim

consistent with the labeling of such groups by Correa as “extortionists”, “terrorists”, and

“romantics” (Bebbington 2009:18). When I asked one employee of the Wildlife

Conservation Society, a transnational New York-based NGO that helps manage Yasuní Park,

about the importance he felt was being given by this government to issues like conservation,

he flatly answered, “They don’t compete with national interest issues like oil and major

infrastructure.”

Yasuní National Park(s)

The conflict between these two strands of modern Ecuadorian political economy—

renewed extractivism/developmentalism and environmentalism—is reflected, in microcosm,

in the area surrounding Yasuní National Park. Whatever the label of “National Park” might

27

suggest about the 900,000 hectare preserve on the far-eastern border of the country, Yasuní

falls under diverse jurisdictions and is designated for contradictory purposes (Narváez and

Fontaine 2007). On the one hand, because of its unique spatial positioning during the last

glacial epoch (Larrea 2010a:77), Yasuní is now arguably the most bio-diverse place on Earth

(Bass et al. 2010). It is also a “lonely park” (Bass et al. 2010:13), insofar as it is one of the

only parks in that area of the Amazon with an intact large-vertebrate population and the size

to sustain that population over time and in the face of climate change (Checa et al. 2010).

In apparent recognition of these factors, Yasuní was declared a national park in 1979

and a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve in 1989 (Finer et al. 2009). In the subsequent

decade, a third of the park was granted to the Huaorani indigenous people, and in 1999, an

area between the park and Huaorani territory was designated an “intangible zone” for the

preservation of the uncontacted indigenous people who live there. At least on paper, these

designations create layers of protection from extraction for the Yasuní area. Article 407 of

the new constitution prohibits extraction in protected areas—absent a petition of the

President, approved by the National Assembly, that affirms that such exploitation is a

fundamental national interest—and Article 57 guarantees the inviolability of the territory of

indigenous groups in voluntary isolation. Ecuador is also a signatory to numerous

international conventions that create parallel obligations (Plaza 2007).

On the other hand, these cultural and conservation designations overlap with a

geography of extraction and exploitation. The state prospected extensively for oil in

Huaorani territory during the 1970s (Rival 2002) and in the 1980s held multiple rounds of

bidding for access to oil blocs in the northern portions of Yasuní Park (Finer et al. 2009). At

present, the park is carved into six petroleum blocs, with the rest of the biosphere reserve and

Huaorani territory criss-crossed by further concessions. Rights to Blocs 14 and 17 are owned

by AndesPetroleum, a Chinese consortium, and Bloc 16 is presently operated by REPSOL, a

Spanish company (Martínez 2009). Bloc 15, which in 2006 passed from Occidental to

PetroEcuador, the Ecuadorian state oil company, accounts for 20% of Ecuador’s oil

production (SaveYasuní 2010). Even as the government has promoted the Yasuní-ITT

proposal, it also granted licences to PetroBras, the Brazilian national oil company, to drill in

Bloc 31, which abuts ITT.14 The park director told me he expected prospecting to begin in

late 2010; others have argued that this exploitation is not economically viable unless the

infrastructure in Bloc 31is also used to exploit ITT.

14 In fact, President Correa’s presentation of the ITT initiative to the United Nations happened one day after he gave license to PetroBas to exploit Bloc 31 (Martínez 2009).

28

Source: Finer et al. (2009)

The formal environmental protections granted to Yasuní are further undermined by a

lack of funds and capacity for implementation. Although this is a problem for national parks

across Latin America (Narváez and Fontaine 2007),15 the situation in Yasuní is particularly

dire, as it receives the least funding-per-hectare of any park in Ecuador (Boedt and Martínez

2007). One biologist with more than a decade of experience in Yasuní told me that in 2004

the park was receiving only $1,000 per year from the state, pushing it to the “border of

collapse” (Narváez 2007:35). Another scientist told me that when he visited the park in the

1990s, he saw local villagers hunting freely in the park—with park guards often joining them

during their shifts. The six guards and two managers employed during that time were almost

entirely paid for and trained by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Universally, informants stated that the situation has since improved. There are now

eleven guards, with better vehicles, and a newly-hired park manager with greater technical

15 The Nature Conservancy, a U.S.-based conservation NGO, determined that Ecuador’s thirty-four parks need $13 million per year, although their present budget is only $3 million. Cepek (2008:218) describes the Ecuadorian Ministry of the Environment as “under-funded, under-staffed, and often ineffective.”

Figure 4.2: Overlapping Designations of Yasuní

29

expertise. Nonetheless, the head of the Ministry of the Environment (MoE) in Orellana, one

of the provinces where the park is located, opined that “There aren’t sufficient resources to do

necessary operations [to protect the park]”, nor to hire the fifty-plus guards that are called for

in the park’s management plan. Moreover, MoE employees still cannot freely enter certain

areas of the park without permission from the oil companies that hold permits for those areas.

The overlapping jurisdictions and functions of the Yasuní area have created a heavily

contested space. International and national mobilizations in defence of Yasuní have been

active for decades (Christensen 2007; Rival 2011). Some—such as the movement against the

construction of the Maxus Highway into Bloc 16 or to prevent the government from altering

the limits of the park to facilitate extraction—have failed. Others—like that to force

PetroBras to enter Bloc 31 without constructing roads—have succeeded. Through these

struggles, Yasuní has become a focal point for environmental activism in Ecuador; however,

with 20% of the country’s remaining reserves locked in ITT (Finer et al. 2009), the park

remains a coveted frontier for further extraction. Yasuní Park and the surrounding areas,

then, are truly “emblem[s] of a development crisis bearing down on the entire western

headwaters of the Amazon basin” (Hearn 2010), where commitments to environmental

preservation clash with government plans for development and economic growth.

The Two Plans

Despite the Yasuní-ITT proposal’s green façade, these contradictions are visible in the

trajectory and contents of the initiative itself. As noted in the introduction, the ITT initiative

was conceived within Ecuadorian civil society as a way to give political life to concepts taken

from indigenous cosmovisions and ecological economics, such as the notion that ecosystem

services are “incommensurable” and thus should not be traded on markets (Martinez-Alier

2009; Rival 2010). This was why, Esperanza Martinez of Acción Ecológica explained, the

initiative at its launch was “profoundly critical of the carbon market” and proposed an

entirely new mechanism, a trust fund for leaving oil underground. This rhetoric has been

adopted by those government employees who are responsible for the initiative, who described

their proposal as a forward-thinking alternative to carbon markets and other existing tools for

climate mitigation, like the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Treaty.

The history of the project reveals a more complex relationship between the ITT

mechanism and carbon markets. When the government was fleshing out the proposal in

2007, they used the cost of one tonne of carbon under the European Emissions Trading

Scheme, a carbon market, to calculate the “value” of leaving the oil underground in Yasuní

30

(Sevilla 2010). In 2008, the government put forward the idea of “Yasuní Guarantee

Certificates” which would be tied to barrels of oil left underground and, they envisioned,

eventually tradable (Finer et al. 2009). Roque Sevilla, who was part of the initiative’s initial

negotiating team, offered this explanation:

What we were trying to do was come close to—fall within—a relation to the carbon market, but without some of its limitations. But when we looked at the rules of this market, we had to readjust, because this did not really fall within the carbon market. The problem has to do with the reduction of emissions versus the avoidance of emissions. But it still provided us with a point of reference. This is the only thing we have, at the global level, to figure out how much to pay now to avoid a ton of carbon emissions.

By these accounts, the Ecuadorian government only returned to the original idea of the

proposal—a new model independent of existing climate mitigation mechanisms—when an

independent evaluation made it clear that funds from carbon markets would not be

forthcoming (Silvestrum 2009).

Leaving oil underground is only one part of the climate impact of the Yasuní

proposal. By protecting the Yasuní forest—and using funds from the initiative for

reforestation—the project fits within Ecuador’s national strategy to embrace REDD

(Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) (Honty 2010). REDD,

though, is completely inconsistent with the principles of ecological economics on which

Yasuní is supposedly based, given that it falls within carbon markets and has been denounced

by indigenous leaders (Putz and Redford 2009). When I inquired about these seeming

incongruities, a government official explained that Ecuadorian policy is to work

simultaneously within and outside of carbon markets.

The gravest contradiction in the government’s approach to Yasuní, however, is that

the initiative to leave the ITT oil underground is only “Plan A.” Ivonne Baki, the present

head of the proposal’s negotiating team, explained:

When Alberto Acosta [then Minister of Energy and Mines] announced the initiative in 2007, the President said, ‘Dear Alberto, you have to understand that if the money does not come, we are going to exploit. We must have Plan B.’ He said this from the first day that they presented this proposal, so this possibility has always been there.

While even the employees of the now-relabeled Ministry of Non-Renewable Resources with

whom I spoke said that they supported the government’s stated priority of leaving the oil

underground, at times this “Plan B” for extraction seems more advanced than “Plan A.”16

PetroEcuador has been preparing for exploitation in ITT for some time: two exploratory wells

16 For simplicity, I refer to Yasuní-ITT Plan A as “the Yasuní proposal” or “initiative” throughout. References to Plan B will be explicitly identified as such.

31

were drilled in Ishpingo in 2002, a final development plan was presented in 2008, and

licensing began later that year. On the ground, residents even reported seeing preparations

for constructing infrastructure, such as generating stations and access roads.

Exploiting ITT, of course, would be consistent with the government’s

developmentalist rhetoric and stated commitment to raising output. Production in Ecuador

fell from 536,000 barrels-per-day to 470,000 in 2010 (U.S. EIA 2010)—in part because of the

departure of foreign companies but primarily, I was told, because existing oil fields were

approaching exhaustion. Exploiting ITT represents the best opportunity for Ecuador to raise

production and make profitable use of existing infrastructure, such as a new pipeline

inaugurated in 2006 and a $12.5 billion refinery being constructed on the coast.17 Even while

admitting to me that Ecuador could only continue to produce at significant levels for fifteen

more years, an engineer in the Ministry of Non-Renewable Resources said that the focus

remained on increasing output, not preparing for the post-oil era. A few weeks after missing

the ITT signing ceremony, President Correa inaugurated a new oil field in Pañancocha, just

north of Yasuní, declaring it a “symbol of the citizen’s revolution” (LAHT 2010a).

Although government officials repeatedly insisted that the government’s position has

been the same since 2007—Plan A as a first option, Plan B as a backup—its support for non-

extraction has seemed, at times, inconsistent and half-hearted. A website launched in 2007 to

support the initiative went down a few months later when the government failed to maintain

it (Martínez 2009). In 2008, Correa suggested removing a “T” from the project, protecting

only the Ishpingo and Tambococha blocs and exploiting reserves in Tiputini (Martínez and

Acosta 2010). The trust fund agreement was ready to be signed in December 2009 at the

Copenhagen Climate Conference, but in his weekly radio address, the President called the

terms that had been negotiated an affront to Ecuadorian sovereignty. In response, all but one

member of the team previously in charge of the initiative resigned. Under pressure, the

President appointed a new commission led by Ivonne Baki, a former presidential candidate

without strong environmentalist credentials (Sevilla 2010).

Since then, the Yasuní-ITT agreement has undergone significant revision. Most

importantly, the Ecuadorian government now holds a majority of the seats on the committee

17 A PetroEcuador document quoted in Aguirre (2010:173) states that “It is necessary to incorporate the reserves of ITT, which would permit an increase in present production and contribute to the amount of crude required by the Pacific Refinery.” The new pipeline is currently using only 60,000 bbl/d out of a 250,000 bbl/d capacity (see, also, Villavicencio 2010, and for an alternative perspective, Martínez and Acosta 2010)

32

that directs use of the ITT funds.18 This reconstituted commission for the ITT proposal

includes a “political committee” to ensure support for the initiative across various ministries

in the Ecuadorian government. Initially, one member refuted my assumption that the very

existence of a “political committee” implied dissension within the government:

There aren’t conflicts because the priority of the government is to leave the petroleum underground. So the Minister of Non-Renewable Resources, in an interview, said ‘Yes, this is the priority, to leave the petroleum underground.’

However, she later admitted:

The government, in general, is not homogeneous, on various issues, including on this. There are distinct interests inside the government. They are evident in some issues, not just this. But in this, yes, there is an estrangement of some people from the ITT initiative.

Over time, responsibility for the initiative has moved from the foreign ministry to the office

of the Vice President; past heads of PetroEcuador have declared themselves opposed, while

others have announced support. In short, the Yasuní-ITT initiative—supposedly the

crowning achievement of the Correa government—has “at times seemed like a hot potato that

no one wants to receive” (Martínez 2009:36).

Amazonian Schizophrenia

The uneasy coexistence of “Plan A” and “Plan B” for Yasuní—and the conflict

between environmentalism and developmentalism it represents—could be interpreted as

purely a matter of crass political calculation. Some Ecuadorians—as well as the US

ambassador, in a cable revealed by Wikileaks (Hodges 2009)—have concluded that the

initiative is just a “distraction and a trick” (Villavicencio 2010:100). Sevilla (2010:65), who

renounced his position on the ITT commission in January 2010, now claims that the President

is playing a “double game,” attempting to “green-mail” developed countries into giving

money and planning to blame those same countries in the event of exploitation.

To claim that all of the Ecuadorian state’s purported interest in environmental

protection is a sham, though, seems an exaggeration. One Ecuadorian environmental activist

summarized:

It [environmental regulation] has changed, it has changed a little. I think to say that nothing has changed would be an error. I have twelve years in this fight, and I will be continuing for maybe fifteen more. And when I analyze what has happened, it’s clear

18 Another change is that funds will no longer be directed towards the conservation of lands in the hands of indigenous communities. According to Sevilla, this occurred “because of the interest of the government in exploiting, in these areas, minerals and petroleum.”

33

that we have advanced a lot. We still lack a lot, and we want a much more profound change than Correa wants.

Park guards, international conservation professionals, and local environmentalists all used the

same phrase when describing environmental advances under the Correa government: “it’s

relative.” Ecuador’s efforts to protect the environment are halting, but still significant.

After all, that non-extraction is being discussed at all is noteworthy, given that in Peru oil

exploitation has advanced with little debate (Vega 2010) and the Brazilian government has

even resisted the scientific consensus that the Amazon is a carbon sink (Lahsen 2009).

Though it would have to be confirmed by more thorough and focused ethnographic

inquiry inside the Ecuadorian government, I view these contradictions as an example of what

Apffel-Marglin (2005) labels natural-resource “schizophrenia.” In this view, the interest of

many individuals, collectivities and governments in preserving the environment is real, but

traditional patterns of viewing nature as something to be dominated, controlled and exploited

are not easy to break. Analyses carried out by the technical committee of the ITT project

show that once the cost of infrastructure and the time period of extraction are taken into

consideration, leaving the oil underground for compensation is actually more profitable than

taking it out (Larrea 2010a). That so many are resistant to leaving oil in the ground anyway

suggests that this support for extraction stems not just from shrewd economic calculation but

also from deeply ingrained models of resource management (Rival 2009). As one supporter

of the initiative from within the government put it:

If you are a fisherman, what is your job? To fish. If you’re the Minister of Non-Renewable Resources, what is your job? Exploit. Minister of the Environment? Protect the environment. This is the same in all governments, England, France, Ecuador, Bolivia—any government. Obviously, the interests are simply opposed.

Correa once described himself as facing “a dilemma of conscience” (Campodónico

2010:169) with respect to exploitation in ITT—a statement to could reflect political

posturing, or, perhaps, a genuine case of environmental “schizophrenia.”

Regardless, this description of the tug-of-war between resource-fueled development

and conservation in Ecuador serves two purposes for the present analysis. First, it helps

explain why the initiative may be failing. As many interviewees noted, the initiative has lost

international credibility due to the government’s inconsistent support and its willingness to

exploit oil reserves in other parts of Yasuní Park. From this perspective, the problems of the

Yasuní-ITT initiative do not rest in the intricacies of policy design, as some seem to suggest

(Finer et al. 2009; Rosendal et al. 2008; Vogel 2009), but, more fundamentally, in domestic

politics.

34

Second, these contradictions create space for local environmental mobilization.

Christensen (2007:53) claims that, historically, the Ecuadorian state has suffered

“compromised sovereignty” and been unable to take meaningful decisions with respect to

regulating the environment. For better or for worse, the Ecuadorian state has now assumed a

more active role in guiding Amazonian development. Local social movements not only have

a tangible actor to mobilize against, then, but—through the new constitution—norms to

deploy against that actor. The new institutional, ideological and legal resources the state has

created for environmentalism—and the barriers it has erected to public participation—

represent the dynamic “political opportunity structure” of mobilization in the Yasuní region

(McAdam 1982).

35

IV. Myths and Realities of Yasuní

The Meat Market

On Saturday mornings, some of the biodiversity of Yasuní is on display in Pompeya,

a small colonist town on the Napo River, five kilometers outside of the Park. Starting at

dawn, indigenous Huaorani and Kichwa arrive via canoe, carrying corpses of picari,

guanta,19 and spider monkeys, as well as a handful of live tortoises and armadillo. Their kills

are purchased by a mestizo businessman, who will drive the bush-meat back to Tena, 150

kilometers away. He pays the hunters $2/kilo; a fortune to them, but a fraction of what the

meat will fetch in urban restaurants. By Ecuadorian law, these transactions are illegal, but the

middleman conducts his business openly and seems unfazed by the presence of an unfamiliar

outsider asking questions. He guesses that 70% of the money he pays to the hunters is

immediately spent on Pilsener, a popular local beer; a mound of empty bottles, already

present at 10 a.m., seems to confirm his estimate.

In 2005, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) began monitoring the Pompeya

market. The market has grown steadily over time, now trading in thirty-one different species

and moving 12,000 kilograms of meat a year (Suárez et al. 2009). While that quantity might

seem small relative to a 900,000 hectare park, studies suggest that tracts of Yasuní are now

“empty forests” devoid of large mammals (Franzen 2006). Huaorani hunters with whom I

spoke admitted that game was much less abundant than in the past, and that they were eating

new species of animals to compensate. Wildlife populations have been so depleted—and

human populations so expanded—that, according to my WCS contacts, there is now “no

conceivable scenario” under which continued hunting in Yasuní would be sustainable.

Assigning culpability for this apparent ecological catastrophe is complex. A local

anthropologist explained that the market is driven by demand in cities like Coca and Tena,

where tourists come hoping to try exotic meat and mestizo colonists view eating bush-meat as

symbolic of Amazonian life. Oil is also a central part of the story. In 1993, after years of

resistance, the Huaorani community relented and allowed Maxus Petroleum to construct a

road stretching through Bloc 16 into their territory (Sawyer 2004). Semi-nomadic Huaorani

family groups began settling near the road, availing themselves of subsidized transport

provided by the company (Suárez et al. 2009). That road leads directly into Pompeya.

Despite the complex forces that enabled the Pompeya Market, most individuals with

whom I spoke blamed its existence on the Huaorani. The Huaorani, I was told, had been

19 Large rodents and wild pigs endemic to Yasuní.

36

“fooled” or “corrupted” by gifts of cell phones and pick-up trucks from the oil companies,

and had given up their traditional way of life in favor of materialism, alcoholism, drug

addiction, and laziness. Anthropologists argue that the engagement of Huaorani in the bush-

meat trade reflects their rapid integration into the market subsequent to their first peaceful

contact with the Western world fifty years ago (Sierra, Rodriguez, and Losos 1999; Holt

2005; Lu 2007). The Huaorani are keenly aware that they are perceived as savages (Yost

1981), suggesting that participation in the meat market may be an attempt to fuse traditional

practices with a desire to engage with the outside world as “modern citizens” (Rival

2002:175).

Joe Vogel (2010), an international advocate for the Yasuní-ITT proposal, describes

Yasuní as “both a place and a metaphor.” His assertion is that a concrete policy to protect a

specific place—Yasuní National Park—has become an international symbol for innovative

strategies to combat climate change, protect biodiversity, and preserve indigenous cultures.

Within this international metaphor, the Huaorani invariably play the role of “ecologically

noble savages” (Redford and Stearman 1993:254) who carefully guard their ancestral

ecosystem. Local environmentalism, on the other hand, has little part to play in the success

of Yasuní-ITT.

The example of the Huaorani involvement in the meat market demonstrates that this

international portrait of Yasuní diverges from reality. As I argue in this chapter, the tension

between the Yasuní of place and metaphor is, in part, responsible for the unraveling of the

initiative. At the same time, it is through confronting these threats to Yasuní that a wide

range of local actors have become involved in defending the park. Understanding Yasuní the

place, then, is critical for understanding the new forms of environmentalism coming out of it.

The State’s Initiative

When asked to identify a weakness of the Yasuní-ITT proposal, nearly every

informant—whether in national or local government, civil society or the general population—

cited a lack of public participation (see, also, Acosta et al. 2009; Martínez 2009; Aguirre

2010). The near universal perception was that, despite its origins in civil society, the

proposal was now managed by the government without the input of local actors. While

“participation” could mean many things—ranging from government-sponsored events

explaining the proposal to active engagement of civil society in the appropriation of funds—it

was clear that none of these mechanisms had been implemented. Although I encountered

among the local population a certain baseline awareness of the broad outlines of the

37

proposal—that it involved foreign money for leaving oil underground—this understanding

was coupled with a great deal of confusion. Residents of Yasuní expressed frustration at the

steady stream of foreigners coming to the area who seemed to have better information about

what was happening than they did.

Members of the ITT-proposal’s directory were aware of this lack of participation, but

admitted it was a result of strategic choices. The project plan states that the first task is to

achieve international support, and the second is to ensure the backing of Ecuadorian society

(Larrea 2010b). Observers near Yasuní were possibly correct, then, when they stated that

“This whole campaign is towards foreigners, and has not come here.” The international

orientation of the proposal was clear at the signing ceremony itself. At one point, the

organizers screened a short film that highlighted, they said, the broad support that existed for

leaving oil underground. The film flipped between European human rights activists,

American environmentalists, and leaders of other Latin American governments. Not a single

featured speaker was Ecuadorian.

During a meeting of the Technical Committee for the Yasuní-ITT initiative which I

attended, government officials discussed how, with the signing of the trust fund, the initiative

was passing into a more “participatory” phase. The crux of this new participatory push was a

series of forums on the initiative with the Huaorani, carried out by Fundación Pachamama, a

civil society organization which was acting as a “pro-bono” assistant to the government.

Already, though, it was clear that this would be a challenging process. Carlos Larrea, an

economics professor and head of the technical committee, argued that the government had no

official policy towards the Huaorani, and that the Huaorani themselves had no vision for their

own future, no clear representatives, and were internally divided. The initiative, he added, is

a complicated one, and certain key concepts have no equivalent in the Huaorani language.20

The restricted scope of public participation in crafting and advancing the Yasuní-ITT

initiative, though, seems to be more than just a reflection of practical barriers. A narrow

focus on achieving Huaorani support for the initiative is consistent with the government’s

presentation of Yasuní as a space inhabited only by a handful of indigenous people. Many

outsiders felt that the Huaorani attracted the most attention from the government not because

they were going to be the most affected, but because—as itinerant hunter-gatherers with,

traditionally, a close connection to the environment—they were most representative of the

image and symbol of Yasuní that the government sought to project. The Huaoranis, as one

20 A situation only compounded by the fact that, by most accounts, no one in the Ecuadorian government speaks Huaorani.

38

put it, “are not so much actors [in the proposal]… more like subjects. They are like one more

element to preserve.” Yet only a single Huaorani settlement of around 70 individuals is

within the bloc itself. In fact, while the park itself has only 2,000 primarily indigenous

residents, the surrounding area has 45,000, most of whom are mestizo (Suárez et al. 2009).

The largest communities near the ITT bloc are actually agriculturalist-pastoralist Kichwa,

who are regarded as more “Westernized” and assimilated than the Huaorani. Nonetheless,

government officials struggled to envision why the participation of these other groups living

near the park might be particularly important:

The colonists are largely outside the park. As a result, their right to know is the same as people in Esmeraldas [a city on the coast] or people in a barrio in Quito. All Ecuadorians have a right to be informed. The communities have already played their role with respect to the initiative, because they essentially created it.

The support of civil society, government officials told me, was “fundamental” to the success

of the proposal, but few could offer any specific explanation of why.

Ultimately, the overwhelming image conveyed in my discussions about participation

was that, to most Ecuadorians, the proposal was “in the hands of the state.” This sentiment

was reflected in an editorial playing with the slogan of Acción Ecológica, “Yasuní depende

de ti” (“Yasuní depends on you”), which opined “Yasuní depends on you… but more on the

state” (Mena 2010:201). Within the government, some were blunt in telling me that efforts to

achieve popular participation were a waste of time: “When you say participation, if you ask

my opinion, it is not so important that the people participate as that the money comes.” In a

sense, they recreated a binary I noted in my discussion of EotP: local people can become

involved in defending their livelihoods from immanent destruction, but complex programs for

mitigating carbon are the purview of more sophisticated actors.

Yasuní is not Yasunizado

A central part of the “symbolism” of the Yasuní-ITT initiative is that it represents a

binary decision point about the future of Yasuní: either the oil is left underground, and the

park is saved, or it is extracted, and the park destroyed. Larrea presented the initiative in

terms of an ultimatum: “We do this, or the park will collapse. The park is going to disappear,

and the Huaoranis also.” Upon signing the trust fund, the government appeared to have opted

to save Yasuní. A few days later, I encountered a memo hanging on the wall of the MoE

office in Coca where the park’s management was based. Sent by a linguist at a national

university, it announced that since the word “Yasuní” meant “a sacred place,” “Yasunizar”—

a verb form in Spanish—would signify “to protect a sacred place.” The past participle,

39

“Yasunizado,” could be applied to “a sacred place that has been protected.” With the signing

of the trust fund, then, Yasuní had been officially Yasunizado.

The impact of the Yasuní-ITT initiative, if successful, would be more than symbolic.

Park officials were clear that “it is not possible to effectively manage the park without

confronting the petroleum industry” operating within it, adding that “the biggest threat to the

park is petroleum activity.” By opening up roads inside the park, oil companies facilitate

logging, commercial hunting, and colonization. Restricting oil exploration, therefore, would

have major indirect effects in addition to directly avoiding deforestation, road-building, and

contamination.

Still, those individuals closest to the day-to-day management and protection of the

park did not see the ITT initiative as “saving” the park, nor exploitation as signaling its end:

To be honest, when you consider that there are 150 petroleum wells inside the national park, what’s two more in Tiputini and Tambochocha? I don’t think this is going to make an enormous different on issues of conservation or non-conservation of the park.

While in Quito, the initiative was invariably represented as protecting “the park” writ large,

the ITT bloc is only around 20% of its total area. During a meeting of the Biosphere

Reserve’s Management Committee, a UN employee based in Quito stated that, with the

signing of the ITT agreement, “We are living in a new reality.” Few of the people around the

table seemed to concur: a representative from local civil society turned to me and snapped,

“What does this have to do with managing the park?” In the end, even though the initiative

promised to confront a major threat to Yasuní and to direct funds for the park’s management,

most park functionaries seemed to agree with the head of the park, for whom ITT was “not an

initiative to benefit the park...[but] an initiative to benefit the Ecuadorian state.”

That the ITT proposal will not directly address all of the conservation and

development challenges of Yasuní National Park and the surrounding areas is evident from

considering the situation of Yasuní’s nominally uncontacted indigenous groups, the Tagaeri

and Taromenane (T/T). These two groups are a potent symbol for the initiative, providing a

cultural analogue to the park’s biological diversity and highlighting that Yasuní is unlike

almost any other place in the world. In campaign literature, protection of the T/T is

inevitably cited as one of the top three benefits of the initiative, alongside the preservation of

biodiversity and non-emission of 407 million tonnes of CO2.

The way the case of the “uncontacted” groups has been represented by proponents of

the ITT proposal, however, differs from that reported to me by those in the Yasuní area. At

40

Source: Finer et al. (2009)

speeches and events, the government often presents ITT—along with the Intangible Zone

(IZ)—as the “home” of the T/T. The bloc is inundated for most of the year, though, so the

T/T use it only occasionally for hunting and rarely for residence. The IZ, which the

government declared in 1999, was only officially delineated in 2007; one individual involved

in the process admitted that it “does not actually represent their [uncontacted groups’]

territories” but instead was put in the only place where there were no immediate plans for oil

exploration. The T/T do not respect the limits of territories designated for their use, which

helps explain why colonists and loggers are encountering them with increasing frequency

(Narváez 2007; Aguirre 2010). A map of recent evidence of the groups’ presence which I

viewed indicated only one sighting of the groups within the ITT bloc. Instead, the most

recent interactions—including the killing of a logger, a colonist woman and two children—

have taken place in Armadillo, which is to the west of both the park and the IZ. Here, despite

the protestations of the government’s Plan de Medidas Cautelares (PMC) for the protection

of the T/T21, licensing is moving forward to exploit the bloc’s small petroleum reserves.

Oil, according to Paola Carrera, head of the PMC, is a grave threat to the T/T, but a

manageable and predictable one. More difficult to control is the impact of Huaorani

21 A division of the Ministries of Environment and Justice, formed by executive decree in 2006 after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights directed the Ecuadorian government to take measures to protect the isolated groups.

Figure 5.1: The ITT Bloc, In Context

41

activities. In my interviews, Huaorani leaders consistently expressed their deep concern for

the T/T, whom they perceive as close relatives. But hunting and logging in Huaorani

territory, facilitated by the Huaorani themselves, place enormous stress on the animal

populations used by the T/T, which, Carrera speculated, is one reason why contact with the

T/T is becoming more frequent: “They’re hungry.” A NGO employee involved in the

biosphere management committee explained the challenges incumbent on anyone attempting

to address these threats:

This is a delicate issue. It is very difficult to have any sort of restriction on a way of life that has an ancestral origin, although, in reality, neither selling animals nor logging is an ancestral way of life for the Huaorani. At the same time, though, they have an authority for managing their territory that we cannot just negate.

Consequently, the participation of the Huaorani is, according to Carrera, essential for the

long-term protection of the T/T. To this effect, the PMC has given numerous Huaorani

communities radios and paid some community members to report sightings of the T/T in

remote and inaccessible areas.

Local, mestizo-led governments also play a significant role. Informants noted a

pernicious cycle by which colonists would push the agricultural frontier further into

traditional T/T territory, then demand services on the basis of social rights guaranteed by the

new constitution. In the past, local governments, looking for votes, would oblige by

constructing roads and other infrastructure, which only facilitated further colonization (Rudel

2009:141). Colonists, I was told, perceived the T/T as “like ghosts in the forest…until they

are seen, they are believable as aliens” and blamed violence on angry Huaorani, not

uncontacted indigenous people.

The case of the Tagaeri and Taromenane demonstrates the dynamic topography of

threats to Yasuní National Park and its immediate environs. Logging, colonization, hunting,

and petroleum exploitation are mutually reinforcing yet constantly shifting. Actors like the

PMC have “very little space to get away from what is happening on the ground day-by-day”

and are reliant on the cooperation of a range of local constituencies. Carrera described the

complexities of her work:

These are issues that are interdependent, that cannot be separated. If the park is doing well, and the Huaorani are doing well, then the isolated pueblos will do well. If there are problems with one of them, then that is bad for everyone. There is interdependence in this territory that does not allow us to think in another manner.

The Yasuní-ITT proposal will have some impact on these challenges, but it will not make

them go away. In contrast to the international myth that the ITT initiative is the defining

42

moment for the park, managers viewed it as one among many efforts underway to address a

wide range of problems.

Managing Man and Biosphere

Like many other parks in Latin America (Zebich-Knos 2008), Yasuní was designated

in a top-down process that involved no meaningful popular input. Similar to the ITT-

initiative itself, the park has consistently suffered from “insufficient engagement of local

actors” (Fontaine 2007b:75), in addition to a lack of financial, technical, and human

resources. When asked about participation in park management, respondents stated flatly that

the park was controlled by the MoE, and no one else had authority over the area. In the

words of one biologist, local populations had “no role in things of the park, except to damage

it.”

Management of the biosphere reserve, of which the park is the nucleus, has

historically been even weaker. The 1989 designation of a biosphere reserve “binds neither

the Ecuadorian government nor the international community” and fails to define “rights,

responsibilities, or obligations” (Rival 2009:11). The reserve has no protective laws,

formally designated guardians, or institutionalized management structure. When I asked one

employee of the Ministry of Cultural Patrimony, which directs the ITT initiative, about the

biosphere reserve, he cut me off and stated “Look, the reserve doesn’t really exist. There is

no management.”

This dismissal is at odds with processes taking place in the biosphere reserve during

the last decade. The head of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Ecuador recounted that in

2001 there was a grand assembly in Coca of over 250 representatives of local NGOs, research

stations, indigenous federations, municipal governments, and the MoE. Attendees decided to

form a temporary management committee for the reserve which would develop statutes and

bylaws for a formal management process. This “temporary” committee has functioned for

ten years, she explained, as:

…a space in which almost all the actors that are considered key and are taking critical decisions with respect to the Biosphere Reserve interact. […] It doesn’t have specific powers, but it has the will of the organizations to develop and agree on actions. It doesn’t have a legal framework, but that isn’t important. It is a space in which organizations with a legal framework can come together and reach agreements that are very important.

Interest in the committee has ebbed and flowed, but during the last few years local actors

have re-engaged and created a management plan for the reserve. Through the committee,

43

different entities have pooled and channeled resources, coordinated campaigns, and

integrated efforts to promote sustainable development.

In contrast to narratives that placed the future of the park “in the hands of the

government,” participants in the committee described the reserve as a “space of convergence”

for a variety of non-state actors with the potential to have a significant impact. In the absence

of formal legal powers, none of the decisions of the management committee can be imposed.

The committee must negotiate across cultural diversity—the reserve has populations of

Huaorani, Shuar, Kichwa, Afro-Ecuadorians, and mestizos—and the dual purposes of the

biosphere reserve—environmental protection and sustainable development. Work on the

committee necessarily entails engagement with loggers—both legal and illegal—and

petroleum companies, who have primary control over large parts of the reserve. With respect

to the biosphere reserve, the head of the park admitted, “local decisions are

determinative…the Ministry of the Environment is not.”

At one of the management committee’s meetings, I witnessed the complex

negotiations entailed in responding to the threat of the commercial meat trade to the park.

After WCS biologists presented a report on the steadily increasing traffic through Pompeya,

the MoE reported that it was ready to crack down on the market. Its representative added that

civil society support would be essential, because some of the trade was not actually illegal,

and the parts that were could easily move elsewhere in the event of a police intervention. A

local academic working with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization stated that her

organization was actively collaborating with indigenous communities to develop economic

alternatives—such as handcrafts production and ecotourism—but that it would take some

time before these would be viable replacements for the income from hunting. The biologists,

however, insisted that action should be taken immediately: the market was a “luxury” for the

hunters and had nothing to do with subsistence.

This statement provoked a strident reaction by representatives of the Huaorani

federation, NAWE. This discussion of Huaorani culpability for the meat market, they

argued, was representative of the entire way Huaorani had been portrayed in their “short and

exploitative” contact with the Western world: “You speak of the Kichwa and Shuar as

communities, but only talk about the problems of the Huaorani. We are never spoken about

as a nation.” In their view, the Huaorani have been protecting the park without compensation

for decades, and were now developing their own sustainable economy—producing artisanal

goods for tourists—in spite of a lack of external support. The Huaorani presentation

prompted a conciliatory response. The head of Yasuní Park said that any action in Pompeya

44

would take place with the cooperation of the “organizations of our Huaorani brothers”, but he

added that, locally, the Ministry did not have the resources to offer the Huaorani

compensation for the lost income from hunting.

The conversation then made a major shift from addressing the production of bush-

meat to its consumption. The mestizo head of the Municipality of Coca’s Environmental

Department pointed out:

Many of you say we have to arrest these people [the hunters], but we can’t just say, ‘No.’ We have to start by creating awareness. I don’t want the sanctions on bringing the meat out; they should be on selling meals made with the meat. […] Why are we attacking the big guys and not the small ones?

He then announced that Coca could pass a resolution prohibiting restaurants in the city from

serving bush-meat. The group then discussed the political repercussions of such a move,

since the city’s economy depends on providing services, especially food, for tourists and

petroleum workers. Ultimately, the group decided that restrictions on consumption and sale

of meat should be coupled with a public awareness campaign addressed to mestizo colonists,

admonishing them “If you aren’t from the forest, don’t eat from the forest.”

It is too early to know if this multi-pronged campaign against the meat trade has been

successful. Certainly, it will be a long and halting process: as one Ecuadorian biologist put it,

“All things with the park are like a roller coaster—up and down, up and down. You can

never say that all is well, because it’s never all well. But things are better now.” Some

achievements of the management committee are already visible. Although data from 2008

indicate that Ecuador has the highest deforestation rate in Latin America (Mosandl et al.

2008), individuals involved with the committee reported that logging in the reserve had

decreased significantly—one estimated 70%—following a coordinated effort of control and

monitoring that has taken place over the last two years. The achievement highlights the

important role of on-the-ground environmental mobilization for protecting Yasuní.

Friction

The above section should not be read as an uncritical celebration of the power of local

actors to achieve conservation. Indeed, whether greater popular participation,

decentralization, and democracy lead to better outcomes for the environment is a hotly

debated question (Wilshusen et al. 2002; Larson 2003; Liverman and Vilas 2006; Larson and

Soto 2008; Brondizio et al. 2009) which this thesis does not attempt to answer. After all,

participants in the biosphere management committee—including park officials—saw

themselves as completely impotent in the face of the greatest threat to the park: oil. Despite

45

their positive role on the management committee, municipal governments are deeply

implicated in the process of colonization, which presents another critical challenge to the

integrity of the park. Participation in the committee is clearly imperfect: committee members

admitted that most members of Yasuní-area communities were unaware of the committee’s

work or even the existence of the reserve itself.22 These examples do, however, highlight an

alternative reality of Yasuní, one that diverges significantly from government rhetoric of an

untouched paradise that can be protected only from the top-down.

Travel and by extension, communication (since many communities do not have access

to radio, television, or print media) in the Yasuní region are difficult. It thus seems

reasonable to assume that only established local organizations with long-standing connections

and reach into communities can mediate popular participation in an initiative that is technical

and abstract. Given these challenges, it is surprising that the state has not involved the

management committee in disseminating the ITT proposal. Even the park office admitted it

had “no direct connection” with the initiative: park employees helped coordinate visits by

potential donors, but had not been consulted in the initiative’s development or diffusion.

Carrera, from the PMC, insisted that those working in the Yasuní area wanted to help:

There are a ton of instances in which these actors could have contributed enormously to the functioning of the initiative through their local work. They could have diminished the local conflicts and misconceptions. All of us that work for the state in the Amazon would gladly have helped them to socialize this issue and to look for and achieve local support. This is simply a strategic failure of the state, that it has not used its own entities.

While this expression of limitless goodwill may be an exaggeration, it is clear that if the state

wanted to increase awareness of and participation in the Yasuní-ITT initiative, there are

mechanisms to do so.

As I argued earlier, the realities of Yasuní the place have, in the minds of many of the

initiative’s national and international proponents, almost nothing to do with a proposal that

seeks to attract international funds to mitigate carbon emissions. When asked if local

communities would play a part in the success or failure of the initiative, one former employee

of the Yasuní-ITT negotiating team replied:

They are not going to have an important role. […] The issue is this: if you want something not to work, you form a committee. You invite Acción Ecológica, the whole government, all the ministries, all the parts of civil society, all the universities, all the indigenas. Invite everyone! And it’s not going to function, ever.

22 In the survey on perceptions of the ITT initiative discussed in the following chapter, only 28% of respondents were aware that they lived in a Biosphere Reserve.

46

In part, this commission member may be correct. The future of the park will be in large part

determined by the Ecuadorian state, which alone has the power to limit petroleum activities

and halt associated processes of colonization. The ITT proposal itself is heavily dependent

on decisions taken even further afield. Norway—which had been identified as a potentially

key contributor—decided not to support the initiative, because financing a project to leave oil

underground seemed hypocritical to Norwegian lawmakers (since much of their government

budget comes from oil extraction). Undoubtedly, international climate politics and the state

of the world economy are major factors in Yasuní-ITT, as with other developing-world

climate initiatives (Barrett 2009).

Symbol and reality, material and myth, and global and local can never be kept

perfectly separate, however. Tsing (2005) describes how global processes touch down onto

local realities in a process of “friction,” much like a spinning wheel gripping onto the road.

These connections are neither straightforward nor predictable, taking place in “grounded sites

of local-global articulation and interaction” (Biersack 2007:16) that are neither fully “local”

nor “global.” I witnessed just such a moment of friction during my trip to the Pompeya meat

market. Late in the morning, a white SUV pulled up, carrying two UN officials from Africa

and Asia who were in town for the ITT Trust Fund signing ceremony. They left after only a

few minutes, but not before expressing their surprise and disappointment that something like

this could happen just outside of a “protected” area.

Could moments of friction like this help explain why the Yasuní-ITT initiative has

failed to attract international funding? Some preliminary evidence suggests that Germany

withdrew its support for the ITT initiative because of domestic political changes which have

made it more enthusiastic for carbon markets and less so for other forms of foreign aid.23

Other signs hint that problems in Yasuní the place may have tarnished Yasuní the symbol as

it has been presented to international donors. As Tsing (2005:227) argues, environmental

activists tend to deploy “charismatic packages” that bind together different images and

symbols to make a cause compelling. The “charismatic package” of Yasuní is not just the

initiative’s promise to avert carbon emission, but also to preserve “traditional” indigenous

people and protect “untouched” biological diversity. Purportedly, the German ambassador

told one member of the ITT negotiating committee that the Ecuadorian government had done

such a poor job managing Yasuní it would be better off in the hands of oil companies (Sevilla

2010). Others suggest that Germany withdrew its support because of Ecuador’s contradictory

23 Personal Communication with Nadine Ruprecht, December 2010.

47

support for oil exploration in other parts of the park (Saavedra 2010). More research is

required to know if in allowing the park—the ITT initiative’s “natural capital”—to be

damaged, Ecuador has, as one informant put it, “killed the goose that lays the golden egg.”

These examples buttress literature claiming that the success and failure of climate

mitigation projects depend more on domestic politics and conditions on the ground than

previously realized (Jacques 2006; Schreurs 2008; Harrison and Sundstrom 2010). This

analysis also shows a wide variety of avenues through which grassroots environmental actors

can be—and already are—involved the protection of Yasuní. It blurs the division between

local, livelihood struggles—emphasized by Martinez-Alier and Escobar—and the more

explicitly global, technical, and abstract issues confronted, classically, by “post-material”

environmentalists. In the next chapter, I turn more explicitly to the forms of environmental

consciousness on which local environmental action in the region is rooted.

48

V. The Environmentalism of the People

Nueva Roca Fuerte

The ITT Bloc is one of Yasuní Park’s most remote regions. A visitor from Quito has

to ride ten hours by bus from the Andes to Coca, followed by another twelve hours—and

nearly three-hundred kilometers—by motorized canoe. At the end of the journey rests Nueva

Roca Fuerte (NRF), a town with a population of 600 hugging the banks of the Rio Napo.

Located just over the border from Peru, the town had strategic significance when Ecuador

and its neighbour were at war. Although the town still hosts a small military garrison, it is

hard not to agree with those residents who describe it as “abandoned.” The river is gnawing

at its foundations, having reclaimed NRF’s original main street. The electricity turns off at

10 p.m.; the town’s water piping system is decaying; cell-phone service is non-existent; its

airstrip has fallen into disuse. For most residents, the river remains their only conduit to the

outside world, but few can afford to travel frequently. Indeed, because of its remoteness,

nearly everything in NRF costs two or three times what it does upriver in Coca.

Economic options for NRF are limited. The town is too distant to bring agricultural

products to market, and new controls on access to the park restrict hunting and fishing. Some

of NRF’s inhabitants are attempting to develop small tourism businesses, but the town’s

remoteness is a barrier.24 In recent years, one of the only sources of employment has been

occasional work for oil companies doing exploratory work in the ITT bloc. Given these stark

economic realities, many informants outside NRF assumed that the population there

supported exploitation. Even strong advocates of the proposal, who initially claimed that

“everyone” near Yasuní wanted to leave the oil underground, would often admit that they

meant “everyone except the people of NRF.” In fact, during the last several years the mayor

of NRF had been promoting exploitation to the Ecuadorian state and negotiated with

PetroEcuador to maximize the local benefits of exploitation.

When I visited NRF I encountered a more nuanced situation. The pro-drilling mayor

had clashed with members of the community, and as a consequence had moved the regional

government upriver to Tiputini, where he continued to advocate for exploitation. While some

residents said that they wanted the jobs from drilling, others insisted that they preferred NRF

to be free from the contamination they thought oil would bring. Ecuador’s Vice President,

Lenin Moreno, was born in NRF, and one shop owner claimed this meant that the proposal to

leave oil underground belonged to the town.

24 I spent four days in NRF. During that time, only four other tourists passed through: a Chinese woman and three French backpackers who claimed indigency and wanted free food and lodging.

49

Consistent with my findings on participation in the ITT initiative, many expressed

their frustration that information about the proposal for the area in which they lived had not

reached them and skepticism that resources from the initiative would ever come. During my

discussions in the town, I repeatedly heard that NRF desperately needed “development.”

Only some, however, were willing to support oil exploitation in the hopes of getting it.

While concerns about the immediate needs of the community predominated in these

conversations, several mentioned the biodiversity and natural beauty of the park as a reason

for leaving the oil underground.

The example of NRF highlights the central problematic addressed by this chapter:

how to make sense of a form of local environmentalism that defies the assumption that poor

and marginalized people support only forms of conservation which advance their

socioeconomic standing. As Martinez-Alier (2002:165) himself claims, “an environmental

improvement, if gained at the cost of a worsening economic distribution, will be opposed by

poor people” (see, also, Evans 2002:223). Yet while NRF residents stand to gain

economically from drilling, are colonists rather than indigenous, and are not middle-class,

educated “post-materialists”, many expressed support for non-exploitation anyway.

In this chapter, I sketch the outlines of “the environmentalism of the people.” I argue

that this environmentalism is defined by a partial willingness to separate livelihoods and

environmental protection, a perception of linkage between local, national, and global

contamination by oil, and a valuation of Yasuní Park based on its role in an alternative

developmental course for Ecuador. This portrayal is not necessarily consistent or complete,

which reflects the preliminary nature of this investigation. It is also, however, a

manifestation of my conclusion that “the environmentalism of the people” is not a coherent

ethical and political approach to the environment, but a situational response to the

experiences of the Amazon population with oil exploitation and political exclusion.

Leave It Underground!

The starting point for this examination of the “environmentalism of the people” is the

widespread support among Ecuador’s population for leaving the oil underground in Yasuní.

A 2008 survey found that 58% of respondents supported “Plan A” for ITT.25 A more recent

poll found 77% of the population in favor of the initiative.26 While on the international scene

the proposal appears to have lost credibility, these statistics suggest that the central idea of the

25 See Rival (2009), quoting Larrea (2008). 26 http://www.amazoniaporlavida.org/es/files/perfiles_opinion_yasuni.PDF

50

\

Do you support leaving the ITT crude underground?

0102030405060708090100

Larrea (2008) Perfiles de

Opinión (2009)

Grupo Faro

(2009)

Barnard (2010)

Yes

No

initiative—leaving the oil in ITT underground—has gained legitimacy among the Ecuadorian

population.

These two polls were conducted in Ecuador’s main cities, Quito and Guayaquil, and

tell us nothing about support among the population living around Yasuní. Another poll

conducted by Grupo Faro, an Ecuadorian think-tank, surveyed 600 residents of Orellana, the

province inside of which much of Yasuní is located. Although the sample is not random—

and therefore, no test statistics were conducted—the poll does represent a cross-section of

rural and urban, mestizo and indigenous, and long-term residents and recent arrivals. Once

again, support for the initiative was extremely high: 94% of respondents believed that the oil

in the ITT bloc should be left underground. Opposition to drilling in the park was strong

irrespective of gender, ethnic identity, period of residence, and education.

We should be skeptical of any finding that shows nearly universal support for

environmental protection (Dunlap and York 2008). Because concern for the environment

tends to be “a mile wide and an inch deep”27, questions eliciting a general interest in the

environment are much less revealing than those which examine the willingness of

respondents to make concrete trade-offs for conservation (Brechin and Kempton 1994). This

is precisely what the survey on Yasuní asks, of course: whether respondents are willing to

forego the presumed benefits of oil exploitation for the protection of the park. Still, the

results of this survey should be scrutinized carefully.

27 I am indebted to Geoff Barnard (personal communication, August 2010) for this description of environmental attitudes in Latin America.

Graph 6.1: Support for Non-Exploitation of ITT

51

Ethnographic examination offers a less clear-cut portrait of popular perceptions of the

ITT initiative. A great deal of misinformation, distrust, and confusion with respect to the

initiative circulates in the areas around the park. Many doubted that the national government

was actually interested in leaving the oil underground. Of those that did trust their own

government’s intentions, some cast aspersions on those of the international donors:

I think that they are tricking us. For the best intentions that this government has, I don’t think other countries will say, ‘Take this [money].’ Instead, they are going to ask ‘What are you going to give me in exchange?’ And this country has one of the greatest reserves of freshwater in the world.

Another common rumor was that Peru was preparing “directional wells” which could remove

the petroleum in ITT from the other side of the border.28 More generally, many were

frustrated that Ecuador seemed to be shouldering the burden of conservation alone: “other

countries have petroleum, why aren’t they leaving it in the ground?”

When considered independently of the ITT initiative’s problematic political context,

non-extraction still commanded the support of much of the local population. Excluding those

individuals I interviewed specifically because of their previous advocacy on behalf of the

proposal, I asked fifty-two individuals their opinion on leaving the oil in ITT underground.

Forty-four (nearly 85%) expressed their approval, some quite vehemently (“I’d rather the

government grow drugs for its revenue than drill for oil”). The reasons given by those who

did not support the initiative varied. One woman told me that, since Ecuador would get more

money from drilling, that was preferable. At other times, individuals seemed to oppose “Plan

A” only because they were resigned to its failure, as the following two quotes demonstrate:

The exploitation of Yasuní is going to happen because it is going to happen. And as citizens, our hope is that we can make it so that it does not damage the ecosystem, as has happened in past epochs. I think that, rather than invest so much stupid energy in the ITT initiative, we should invest our energy in making sure the new contracts with the companies are truly just, and we should demand the best, cleanest technology, and look for minimum standards of quality in petroleum extraction.

Indeed, one of my most disillusioned interviewees said his problem with the ITT initiative

was that it would only protect 20% of the park.

As previously noted, there are good reasons to look at these professions of

environmental sanctity critically. While it often seemed, as one Coca resident put it, that

“Everyone here wants the oil to be left underground”, some of those same supporters were

actively involved in damaging the park. A group of oil company employees told me that they 28 Although Peru and Colombia have recently increased their exploratory activities along the Ecuadorian border (Finer et al. 2008), officials confirmed that extraction of ITT by Peru is technically and politically impossible.

52

supported “Plan A”—although they would be ready to carry out “Plan B” if needed. Still,

these cases suggest—in contrast to previous findings (Rival 2009; Abad 2010)—that leaving

the oil underground is considered a credible alternative to extraction among much of the

population. Indeed, a finding that answers in support of leaving oil underground are the

product of social expectations—rather than real convictions—itself would reveal a

generalized hostility towards extraction among the population.

Post-Materialism of the Poor?

The Ecuadorian state has consistently stated that if revenues from foreign donors are

not forthcoming, it will exploit ITT. This assertion that the poor—whether poor people or a

poor country—must be compensated for environmental protection seems fully consistent with

Martinez-Alier’s notion of social-justice oriented environmentalism. Interestingly, though, in

the Grupo Faro poll 88% of respondents were unaware of the government’s plan to receive

international funds as compensation for not drilling29—but most expressed their support

anyway. In Quito, individuals frequently said that they supported non-extraction so long as

the government received something in exchange. Near Yasuní, in contrast, I often heard that

the oil should be left underground irrespective of external support. As representatives from

civil society reminded me, the original idea that emerged from the Amazon and inspired the

ITT proposal was for an unconditional moratorium on further expansion of the petroleum

frontier. Unlikely though it may seem, I encountered substantial backing for this “Plan C”

(Martínez and Acosta 2010): non-exploitation even without international money.

Regardless of whether they wanted “Plan A”—non-drilling with compensation—or

“Plan C”—non-drilling with or without compensation—nearly everyone agreed that creating

alternative forms of economic generation was critical for sustaining support for conservation.

Government officials involved in the management of the Yasuní proposal worried that “if

there is no exploitation, the communities are going to want to know what kind of alternatives

of development there are.” When I asked them what “alternatives” were viable, the

immediate answer was almost always “ecotourism.”

The barriers to sustainable and economically successful ecotourism in the Yasuní

area, however, are substantial. Despite its “eco” label, ecotourism often effects significant

environmental harm without bringing substantial economic benefits to participating

29 This survey was conducted in September 2009. During my fieldwork nine months later, I found a much higher level of awareness of the proposal, suggesting that some diffusion had taken place in spite of the government’s anemic efforts to secure popular participation.

53

communities (Pattullo 1996; Chernela 2005; Zebich-Knos 2008). Presently, tourism garners

only $5 million a year for the Yasuní region (Gallagher 2009). Those in the industry

complained that they were already underemployed, even without anyone else attempting to

make a living from the business. While I found that many indigenous individuals were

extremely enthusiastic about ecotourism—“less oil, more tourists” was a frequent refrain—

colonist’s hopes for an economic future rooted in ecotourism were more muted.30 Even while

stating that funds from the ITT initiative should be used to promote tourism, no one with

whom I spoke thought the initiative would create enough growth that they could enter the

industry themselves.

Beyond ecotourism, no single idea for an economic alternative predominated.

Kichwa and Shuar indigenous leaders told me that they hoped to attract pharmaceutical

researchers interested in rainforest plants. A few members of local civil society said that they

hoped someday factories would be built in the Oriente. Agriculture was mentioned

frequently, but because of the Amazon’s poor soil and distance from major markets, its

prospects are limited. One local admitted, “Agriculture in the Amazon is agriculture for

survival. It is not agriculture for commercialization.”

In short, there is no obvious short-term alternative to petroleum exploitation for the

economy of the Yasuní region. Yet this lack of an immanently viable substitute may not be

as catastrophic, with respect to popular support for the initiative, as many seemed to think.

While both Escobar and Martinez-Alier argue that, for the poor, environmental protection,

social development, and livelihood preservation are inseparable, some in the Yasuní region

viewed them in isolation from one another. Esperanza Martinez of Acción Ecológica

summarized:

In the surveys that we have carried out, the population speaks about non-exploitation. The majority says ‘no exploitation’. The problem with the local population is that they have many needs. They want no exploitation, but they also want someone to respond to the needs of the area.

The discourse among colonists, as one described it, is “conserve, but not conserve

everything.” While I was waiting in the MoE office in Coca, a campesino (mestizo farmer)

came in seeking title to his farmland. He insisted that what the government really needed to

do was to put in a road all the way to NRF, so that farmers could more easily sell their

produce. He paused for a few seconds, and added, “But the road would have to go around the

30 The division between colonists and indigenous with respect to the perceived benefits of ecotourism is unsurprising. Indigenous communities are almost certainly more likely to attract tourists than colonist ones, and indigenous guides are advertised by many tourism companies.

54

park [Yasuní].” Undoubtedly, the colonist population of the Yasuní region takes advantage

of land, timber, and other natural resources; they also seemed willing to support leaving

certain places and resources unexploited. In contrast to existing studies of socio-

environmentalism, informants appeared to back this conservation even though they doubted

they would derive any material benefit from it.

The counterpoint to EotP, post-materialism, posits that interest in ecological

protection stems from aesthetic appreciation of nature and scientifically sophisticated

knowledge of environmental risks. While some of my conversations in the Yasuní region

were with educated, middle-class individuals, though, I also found support among people

with lower socioeconomic status. Nonetheless, Yasuní has attracted an enormous amount of

attention from developed-world environmental groups (Martin 2010, 2011)—like The Nature

Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, and Wildlife Conservation Society—and it seems

plausible that global post-materialist discourses about Yasuní Park have been adopted by the

region’s population.

As I have already noted, international interest in Yasuní has been chiefly motivated by

concern for climate change. On the ground, residents reported a wide range of climatic

shifts: rivers were lower, rainfall more irregular and the seasons unpredictable. Few,

however, used the specific phrases “climate change” and “global warming” or could

articulate any sense of the origins of these phenomena. One leader of a campesino federation

affirmed that environmental messages about the welfare of the planet had little meaning for

her:

We don’t feel the human impact of every bad thing in the environment. We don’t feel it, for example, when people in Austria or Argentina die from the cold, when people die from the heat in Africa.

If local people seemed disconnected from the international symbol of Yasuní Park, they

seemed no closer to the physical place. Colonists did not “use” the park for their livelihoods

nor did they see the park as a space for their aesthetic enjoyment. Although Coca is near the

park, one city employee explained that visiting the park is simply not a priority for most

residents:

Coca is a commercial city. Here, the people love to work. They don’t like to walk around the forest. […] If you say to a man who sells cocos here, ‘Let’s go to Yasuní’, he is going to say, ‘I have to work.’ One day they don’t sell is a lost day to them. Our idea of a vacation is to go to the coast.

Park officials worried that colonists saw the park as “something that belongs to outsiders”,

assuming that no one would want to protect a place that existed only for foreign tourists.

55

Locals in Coca did indeed perceive the park as a space of prohibition, but it wasn’t clear that

they resented this protection. When one woman vented, “Tourists keep coming wanting to

know about Yasuní-ITT, but we Ecuadorians can’t even afford to go,” I asked her if

Ecuadorians should have a subsidy to help them visit the park. She replied, “No, we can

damage the park as much as anyone else.” As examples like this suggest, the origins of

environmentalism in Yasuní must rest outside of “local” livelihoods or “global” values.

Crude and Contamination

During an interview, one journalist based in Coca described petroleum as an

instrument that could be used towards any manner of positive or negative ends:

I am not pro-petroleum or anti-petroleum. Petroleum is a resource. And we have to determine when to take out this resource, and how to do it, and what’s going to happen to Amazonia. […] I believe that the entire environmentalist and academic world are wasting their time [talking about non-exploitation]. We need to see immediate solutions to the immediate problems of the people.

I highlight this quote not because it is representative of how petroleum was perceived by

many residents of the Amazon, but instead to show its idiosyncracy. A representative of

Fundación Pachamama, an environmental group that works with indigenous communities,

offered an alternative perspective:

The most important part of the ITT initiative is that people see that the problem is petroleum. We speak of ‘climate change, climate change’, but in the end this is intangible. The important thing here is to stop talking about CO2 and more about consumption of fossil fuels. It is not reducing CO2 but reducing petroleum.

This statement was, initially, somewhat confusing. A wide array of literature has shown the

negative human and environmental consequences of petroleum exploitation in the Ecuadorian

Amazon (Kilmerling 1991; CESR 1994; San Sebastián and Córdoba 1999; Hvalkof 2000;

San Sebastián and Hurtig 2004; Finer et al. 2008). Yet why is petroleum itself, rather than its

effects (such as CO2 emissions, spills and contamination, or the corrupting impact of oil

revenue), perceived as problematic?

Many of the harmful impacts of oil exploitation identified by local community

members mirror those reported in the above studies. Kichwa and Shuar leaders described life

prior to petroleum as “free and healthy” and the arrival of companies in the 1970s as

degrading traditional practices, livelihood, and health. Colonists living in rural areas around

Coca claimed that petroleum had contaminated their water supply, causing abnormally high

levels of gastro-intestinal diseases and cancer. One colonist described the abundant game and

56

fish he encountered when he first moved to the Oriente, which had now disappeared because,

he claimed, oil had poisoned them.

The debate within local communities about the impacts of oil exploitation, however,

went far beyond anything documented in the literature. Several Huaoranis told me that the

noise generated by oil wells had ruined their hunting areas and diminished their quality of

life. The leader of the Kichwa community federation traced problems of prostitution,

alcoholism, and drug use to petroleum companies. Representatives of colonist communities

leveled their own set of grievances at the oil industry: the companies had given settlers gifts

in exchange for permission to exploit, making them lazy and corrupt. Even urban residents—

somewhat removed from the sites of extraction—had their own complaints. Prices for goods

and services in Coca are twice as high as in other cities of the Oriente, I was informed,

because petroleros have so much money to dispense.

These multifarious complaints about petroleum exploitation were often organized

around the concept of “contamination”, as a quote from a municipal employee in Coca

shows:

What petroleum has brought is destruction, death, diseases of animals, people, children, and of nature, which, at this moment in the Amazon, is sick. Here, the water is contaminated, the air is contaminated, the soil is contaminated.

In Sacha, a town a few dozen kilometers to the north, another government functionary

invoked “contamination”, stating that “The contamination does not have frontiers, it does not

have limits, it does not need a visa, it does not need anything.” Among Western

environmentalists, the notion of “waste” has become a metaphor for a wide range of social

ills that extend far beyond the inefficient use of resources (Scanlon 2005; Barnard 2011).

While this point needs to be explored more fully, these data imply that “contamination” has

similarly fungible significance. To many of my informants, it was not just the land, air, and

water around sites of petroleum extraction that had become contaminated, but their entire

ecological and social milieu.

The perceived harms of contamination were not framed solely in terms of local

effects. In contrast to the locally-oriented focus of EotP, respondents freely associated local,

regional, national, and global scales of environmental problems. One taxi driver in Coca, for

example, described changes in the patterns of rainfall he had observed and stronger sunlight,

which he said were causing skin cancer and lowering the productivity of coffee farms.

Petroleum contamination, he explained, accounted for all of this. Spanish does not have a

clear division between “weather” and “climate”, and in my discussions of these issues,

57

respondents easily shifted between short-term and long-term perceptions of environmental

change, deploying a mish-mash of folk and scientific knowledge to interpret it. While

professional environmentalists found this frustrating, my own impression was that this sense

of inter-linkage between social and environmental problems at multiple scales—bound

together by omnipresent petroleum contamination—helps explain why so many individuals

supported leaving oil underground, even though few had any direct connection to Yasuní.

In fact, many colonists explicitly attributed their experience with the oil industry as

the source of their environmental concern. Colonists readily admitted that they came to the

Oriente with little ecological consciousness and looked to petroleum extraction as a source of

employment. Both the literature (Valdivia 2008) and my informants stated that, historically,

colonists deliberately settled close to sites of oil exploitation in the hopes that they could gain

benefits and compensation from the companies. At the same time, many claimed that

precisely because of this they had suffered from petroleum contamination more than their

indigenous counterparts. Consequently, some external environmentalists with experience in

the region told me that they thought that colonists were more resistant to the expansion of the

petroleum frontier than indigenous people. While I cannot validate that claim, colonists did

seem better informed about the impact of oil exploitation than any other environmental issue.

The harmful environmental and social costs of oil exploitation, of course, must be

balanced against its perceived economic benefits. My informants, however, were often

reluctant to admit that oil had brought anything to the region at all. In their eyes, revenue

from oil flowed to Quito and Guayaquil or Western countries; “barely 1% stays here.”

Inhabitants of the Oriente contrasted the “wealth” that had been extracted with their own lack

of basic services. Residents of Coca complained that the city had only been linked to a paved

road in 2008: “Imagine this city, with all the money from petroleum, and up to two years ago,

we lacked a highway!” While outsiders and even some members of the municipal

government claimed that “everyone has petroleum money here,” most of the people of Coca

with whom I spoke did not agree. Petroleum jobs inevitably went to highly educated

outsiders who flew in from Quito during the week and then disappeared.31 This “floating

population”, respondents insisted, contributed little to the local economy. Even the

vegetables that oil workers ate during the week, they informed me, were brought in from

elsewhere, because the workers know that they have “contaminated” the local food supply.

31 Ryder and Brown (2000) show the diminishing contribution of the petroleum industry to employment in cities of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

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In the rare events that locals did gain employment in the petroleum industry, the jobs were

short-term, low-skill, and poorly paid.

The Lungs of the World

The amount requested by the Ecuadorian government as compensation for leaving the

ITT-bloc oil underground—$3.6 billion—was initially calculated based on the likely

revenues from exploitation, using the market price of a barrel of oil, which in 2009 was

$61.21 (Warnars 2010). As the previous section demonstrates, though, locals living around

Yasuní had a different sense of the value of oil. The “worth” of a barrel of oil to someone

living near Yasuní might be calculated from the benefits it brings to his or her community

(almost nothing) minus its environmental and social costs (which are high). Consequently,

national discourse about the “sacrifices” involved in leaving petroleum underground did not

resonate at the local level:

They said before that constructing a pipeline for heavy crude is a question of life or death, because the campesinos are poor, they are dying of hunger, they don’t have health [care], they don’t have education. Seven years ago, they constructed the pipeline, and now they are saying, ‘We have to exploit Yasuní, it’s life or death, because the people are poor.’ We ask ourselves: are these the same poor people as seven years ago, or are they other poor people now? It’s always ‘Life or death’, but at the end, it’s death.

As Rival (2010) argues, a key outcome of the ITT initiative, if successful, would be to show

that petroleum can be worth more under the ground than above it. These data demonstrate

that at the local level, though, a revaluation of petroleum has already taken place. This was

not based on the sacredness or inviolability of nature. People were happy to accept benefits

from petroleum when they came, and, when pressed, would admit that extraction could have

a value greater than zero.32 They saw the worth of petroleum as extremely low, though,

which drastically altered their sense of the need for international compensation.

Counterpoised against the value of the hydrocarbons underneath Yasuní is the social,

environmental, and cultural value of the park itself. As argued earlier, few colonists

perceived the biological resources of the park as critical for their own livelihoods.

Nonetheless, it was clear that most people had a sense that “the riches of the park are not its

petroleum.” Particularly, in describing the value of the park, non-indigenous residents

emphasized that it was “the lung of the world”:

32 For example, many people opposed to exploitation said that, if Peru were going to drill ITT anyway, Ecuador might as well do it first.

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The world needs to understand this: the Amazon is the only lung that still exists. If we don’t maintain the last lung, the climate change will be significant [in ways that] we’ve never seen. […] Petroleum is the blood in the veins of the earth. If we keep sucking the blood; it will end up dry.

While statements like these seem to reflect a post-materialist concern for the whole of

humanity, further investigation of the idea of “the lungs of the world” revealed otherwise.

Respondents invariably underlined that “we”, as “Ecuadorians” or “Amazonians”, were

producing oxygen for “them”, the rest of the world. Far from seeing the park and the

environmental services it provides as a patrimony of all humanity beyond monetary

valuation, many felt that they deserved compensation for this (cf. Auyero 2004). Other

countries destroyed their forests in the course of development, and now they were reliant on

Ecuador, so “someone needs to pay. […] We are not selling the park, but we need a policy of

compensation.” Part of the national dialogue about international compensation, clearly, had

filtered down to the local level; what had not was that compensation be predicated on the

market value of oil.

“The nation” is often invisible in studies of environmentalism that oscillate between

the local and the global (Brosius 1999a). Consistent with recent scholarship on the

importance of national environmental movements (Tsing 2005; Hochstetler and Keck 2007),

I found that the colonists interpreted the value of Yasuní with reference to the Ecuadorian

nation, rather than to their own community (as Martinez-Alier might assume) or to the world

at large (as a post-materialist). This became evident when I gathered local perceptions of the

massive body of scientific work produced on Yasuní’s biodiversity. Yasuní is one of the

most studied places in the Amazon (Pitman et al. 2011), yet in Quito I was cautioned that

“scientific knowledge of why Yasuní is important has not permeated the population.” Locals,

however, readily cited a study which found that one hectare of Yasuní Park contained more

species of vascular plants than the United States and Canada combined (Bass et al. 2010).

When translated into colloquial interchange, though, the study took on new dimensions: I was

informed that Yasuní had more species of everything than the United States, or that there

were more individual insects in Yasuní than in all of North America. The one constant was

that tiny Ecuador had more of something than the United States.

Oil is traditionally closely intertwined with Ecuadorian national identity. Perrault and

Valdivia (2010:697) link “alternative imaginaries of ‘proper’ hydrocarbon production (i.e.

extraction, distribution of rents) with struggles over the meaning of development, citizenship,

and the nation.” Debates over oil in Ecuador are “never only (or even primarily) about

resources” (2010:692), but instead engage deeper questions about the reproduction of the

60

state and nation. Traditionally, these popular movements have demanded nationalization of

natural resources in order to maximize the benefits of extraction for Ecuadorians (Valdivia

2008), predicated on the notion that, in spite of its past flaws, “just maybe” (Bebbington et al.

2008:887) oil production could become equitable and sustainable.

For many Amazonians, however, there is no “just maybe”: oil is beyond redemption.

I conducted my fieldwork during summer 2010, as an exploded British Petroleum well

spewed crude into the Gulf of Mexico. If the United States, with all of its wealth and

technology, could not stop this spill, interviewees mused, how could Ecuador ever expect to

avoid such catastrophes? Many of the people of Yasuní were aware that the crude of ITT

was of high density and low quality (Rival 2009), making extraction even more

environmentally problematic. Even those that believed that the environmental impact of oil

could be allayed through technology felt that the broader social effects of contamination

could not be reduced.33 In so doing, they were rejecting a forty-year conflation of the

Ecuadorian nation with oil.

Acción Ecológica conducted a survey in which they asked what made people proud to

be Ecuadorian: number one was the national football team; the second was nature. For many

in the population, leaving oil underground in Yasuní represented not so much a radical

change to their own livelihoods as a responsible step towards acknowledging what was—and

was not—a sensible developmental path for Ecuador. “We are not Venezuela”, I was told

over and over again, a statement which reflected knowledge that Ecuador’s petroleum

reserves were much smaller and thus could not underpin national development to the same

extent. Knowing that petroleum was finite and fleeting, respondents thus looked to other

countries—often Costa Rica—for alternatives. Precisely because non-exploitation seemed

like such a reasonable approach, given the failure of petroleum to provide benefits for the

nation, some people were confused as to why Ecuador seemed to be begging for

compensation internationally. Petroleum was “not a synonym of wealth, but a synonym of

poverty”, so giving it up was not an obvious loss. Within the “environmentalism of the

people”, then, environmental preservation represented one long-term strategy for developing

a different national economy based on sustainable resource use, biodiversity, and tourism.

33 Empirical analysis shows that oil companies have committed substantially more resources towards, and been far more successful in, reducing environmental than social impacts (Moser 2001).

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VI. The Local Politics of Climate Change

Green Governance in Orellana

In summer 2010, CocaTV, the local television station in Orellana province, was

playing an advertisement about Yasuní. The commercial began with images of

environmental devastation taken from “ChevronToxico”, a campaign involved in a long-

running class action lawsuit against Chevron-Texaco in the province to the north, Sucumbios.

The screen then switched to stock footage of rainforest wildlife, while a narrator—speaking

in Huaorani, with Spanish subtitles—spoke of “the most diverse place on the planet.” At the

end, words flashed in the shape of a slowly beating heart: “No to a slow death. No to

exploitation in ITT.” The final frame showed a picture of the provincial prefect, and stated

that the provincial government paid for the advertisement.

Yasuní is not just visible on the televisions of Coca, a town of around 25,000 fifty

kilometers upriver from the park. Storefronts are adorned with posters advertising Yasuní

Park, and the first thing that greets arrivals in the Coca airport is a display on Yasuní’s fauna.

During my time in the town, every festival and public event included a mention of Yasuní

and the need to leave the oil underground. Yet the television advertisement made no

reference to the national government’s proposal, and a local reporter told me that news of the

ITT trust fund signing was barely reported in the province. In fact, many residents who

considered themselves well-informed confidently told me that the two proposals for Yasuní

were not “Plan A” and “Plan B”, but the national government’s plan to exploit Yasuní and

the municipality’s proposal to protect it.

This perception is not entirely incorrect. The mayor of Coca, Anita Rivas, created a

campaign called Yasuní Oro Verde (“Yasuní Green Gold”) which she has promoted around

the world. Although she claimed in our interview to have conducted this campaign to support

the central government’s “Plan A”, residents of Coca perceived it differently:

Here in Orellana, we have heard about lots of proposals. One of these that the municipality is carrying out is called Yasuní Oro Verde. The municipal government is, in one manner or another, supporting the [national] government without supporting them. […] In this initiative, the national government is trying to acquire funds so that they don’t exploit Yasuní. But here, lots of people still believe that the government wants to exploit Yasuní. Why do they have this idea? Because this is the idea that the prefect is leaving in the communities.

Yasuní Oro Verde was only one prong of the local government’s environmental efforts. The

director of the municipal environmental office stated that his staff was working to make

residents aware of their rights with respect to oil exploitation, monitor drilling, and mitigate

existing contamination. Other programs funded by the city sought to educate the population

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about solid waste, improve water quality, and assist the management committee of the

biosphere reserve.

This active engagement with environmental issues is not easy to explain.

Theoretically, the incentives for local governments to become involved in climate mitigation

are extremely low (Qi et al. 2008). Coca’s position on the preservation of Yasuní is not

shared by neighboring governments in Pastaza province where, I was told, elected leaders

were not even aware that their districts were within the biosphere reserve. This interest in

leaving the oil underground also does not reflect an unequivocal moral commitment to

conservation. Mayor Rivas admitted that her primary concern was providing public works

for a population that was growing 7% per year, which inevitably meant building

infrastructure that facilitated colonization and the deforestation it brought with it. One

member of the national MoE reported to me that when he confronted her about an

unauthorized highway, she responded “I don’t need environmental permission, because my

pueblo needs this road.” Moreover, survey data on Coca depicts an archetypal colonist

community—two-thirds urban, 79% non-indigenous, and 67% born outside the province—

which does not fit the profile of the social base of environmental movements described by

EotP, cultural ecologism, or post-materialism.

Given this, the answer I received when I asked people in Coca why their local

government was so involved in Yasuní was surprising: “The environment is a positive aspect

for our government…this can win them votes.” Mayor Rivas seemed to agree, reporting that

“In our campaigns in the pueblos, Yasuní is our central theme.” This chapter explores how

the popular values of “the environmentalism of the people” are reflected in the politicization

of the Yasuní-ITT proposal and, in turn, explores how local politics promote that

environmentalism. These examples suggest that, in part, environmentalism around Yasuní

emerges not from livelihood interests or preexisting identities, but from the construction of

political legitimacy and power.

I situate local government action on behalf of the environment within Ecuador’s long

history of populist mobilization (Quintero-López 1997; Sosa-Buchholz 1999; Torre 1997,

2000). As Jansen (2011:19) argues, populism is at heart a valorization of “ordinary” people

against an “elite” other. Precisely who is “tarred with the elite brush” varies by context. In

this case, I argue that environmentalism has been appropriated in local political discourse as a

vehicle to celebrate “ordinary” mestizo colonists. The politicization of Yasuní, in turn, is

used to challenge both national elites, who are perceived as instigators of oil exploitation and

the Amazon’s political exclusion, and the resurgent indigenous movement.

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Local Politics, National Development

Nationalists have long insisted that “Ecuador has been, is, and will be an Amazonian

country” (Whitten 1981:5).34 This phrase is belied, however, by Ecuador’s history of

profound regional division (Crain 1990; Pineo 1996; Weismantel 2003; Torre and Striffler

2008), within which the true heart of the Ecuadorian nation is presumed to rest in its highland

capital, Quito (Stutzman 1981; Rahier 1998). Indeed, by some accounts, the Amazon is a

liminal “Fourth World”, marginalized not just with respect to the world economy but also

via-a-vis the rest of Ecuador (Kilmerling 2000).35 Although the state has long sought to

integrate the Amazon into national development (Hiraoka and Yamamoto 1980; Uquillas

1984; Muratorio 2008), the reality for many Amazonian residents has been a government

visible only through the armed forces and, later, the national petroleum company (Ruiz

1993). In the past, municipal authorities have attempted to fill this void by provisioning

social services (Keese and Argudo 2006). Many residents of Coca still felt that this historical

inattention from the national government meant that only provincial and municipal

governments could attend to and represent their needs.

Amazonian municipal governments are dominated by Pachakutik, Ecuador’s

indigenous party. Although authors have described Pachakutik as “transformative” and

outside traditional politics (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001; Becker 2008; Cadena 2010; Van Cott

2010), in Orellana Pachakutik is primarily controlled by mestizos and involved in

conventional struggles for patronage and resources (Beck and Mijeski 2001). President

Correa was elected with Pachakutik’s support in 2007, and municipal leaders told me that

they had hoped that the new regime would end the region’s traditional marginality. In spite

of this early optimism, relations quickly soured. At the heart of local-national conflict was

resources; local governments in the Amazon do not have autonomous sources of revenue and

are dependent on grants from the national government.

In late 2007, Prefect Lori of Orellana began organizing strikes and protests against the

national government. Although accounts of what happened next are inconsistent (see, also,

Becker 2011), it is clear that a series of major protests over oil spills, governmental neglect,

and the failure of petroleum companies to carry out promised road-building took place in

Dayuma, a region to the south-west of Yasuní. The military and police attempted to quell the

strike, killing a protester and arresting twenty-five. A week later, the prefect was arrested

34 The statement reflects the loss of 75% of Ecuador’s Amazonian territory in wars with its neighbors, including one with Peru in the 1940s. 35 This marginality is reflected in the Ecuadorian Amazon’s poverty rate: 79.2%, compared to 54.5% nationally (Narváez 2007).

64

and, purportedly, tortured. Shortly after her release, however, the prefect won reelection.

According to a reporter in Coca, since then local authorities in Orellana “have broken all

relations and become 100% enemies of the government. Any action the government tries to

carry out, she [Lori] is against it, even if it is something positive.”

Three years later, no rapprochement between local and national governments had

taken place. Coca’s Mayor Rivas told me that “They [the national government] enter like a

thief in the darkness, and once they are in the house they point the gun at you and you can’t

do anything.” The head of Coca’s Environment Department was no more charitable:

The problem is also that the government thinks it can do whatever it wants from Quito and many times doesn’t take our reality into account. […] It’s because they don’t care about the population here in Orellana. What does it matter, our votes against the million or two million votes in the big cities?

In the neighboring municipality of Sacha, the mayor deployed less invective, but still

expressed his frustration that the national government “lacked the maturity” to “work in its

own area of competence” and leave municipal institutions responsible for local affairs.

This depiction of the state as “cowboys that come in order to invade land and invade

rights”—as one respondent characterized it—was shared by both elected officials and the

general population. Local governments, on the other hand, were immensely popular.36 The

mayor of Coca had a 75% approval rating in the opinion poll conducted by Grupo Faro, and

informants in Coca repeatedly told me that they trusted their municipal government, more

than other institutions, to promote their interests. This broad support gave Mayor Rivas, in

her own words, a “moral authority” to do what she saw as needed by her pueblo. While these

conflicts between Amazon and Highlands are nothing new, the fact that this “moral

authority” is being used in defense of the environment is and bears further analysis.

The (Un)Shifting Topography of Oil Extraction

In the last chapter, I showed that the population of the Yasuní region overwhelmingly

perceives the Amazon’s forty-year history of oil extraction as having brought environmental

and social contamination with little economic benefit. One key achievement claimed by the

Correa administration, however, is a better-regulated oil industry that more equitably

distributes revenues. Under Correa, the state has committed to sharing a greater proportion of

oil revenues with the Amazon, which has been designated a “special” region alongside the

Galapagos Islands. With respect to the environment, officials insisted that ecological

36 At least with mestizos; indigenous respondents told me that they viewed the government of Coca as disrespectful of their cultures and promoting further colonization of their territory.

65

catastrophes were “something in the past” and that oil companies were now given “very little

margin.”

In communities near where the petroleum was actually being extracted, though, most

reported that the petroleum policy of the Correa regime had been no more positive for the

Amazon region than other developments under the new government. Stated the head of

Coca’s Human Rights Department:

The petroleum situation has not changed for anything. The way that they take out petroleum is the exact same. When there are spills, the practices are the same: cover it [the petroleum], hide it, and threaten and persecute the people who try to defend themselves. […] From the outside, it seems like it has changed because now you don’t see many uprisings or strikes, like there were until 2007. But this is not because there aren’t problems. Simply, it’s because the people are afraid, because they are terrorized.

Others were more nuanced, but still insisted that the new regime had not meaningfully

improved extraction. For example, while the national government had vaunted a reduction in

the number of spills as a sign that new regulations were working, officials in Coca claimed

that spills still happened on a monthly basis without proper remediation or compensation.37

In Quito, it was evident that many Ecuadorians looked favorably upon the increasing

role of PetroEcuador in extraction, a finding consistent with the “petro-nationalism”

described by Valvidia (2008). The view of nationalization from the Amazon was less

sanguine. State oil companies across Latin America have older infrastructure, less human

capacity, and more dated technology than their private counterparts (Moser 2001; Liverman

and Vilas 2006; Peláez-Samaniegoa et al. 2007). Locals perceived PetroEcuador as,

comparatively, careless and incompetent. The public-versus-private debate in the Amazon is

about more than just environmental impact. For all their complaints about the social impacts

of oil exploitation, residents and community leaders understood that, in exchange for their

acquiescence to drilling, private companies might build sports fields, roads, or schools.

Through nationalization, the state was reasserting its prerogative for social provisioning, and

therefore forbidding private companies from providing these things. Colonists insisted that

the state still had not picked up the slack, though: “Now, we have a disgraceful situation in

which one isn’t giving it [health and education] and the other is prohibited from giving it.”

For actors around Yasuní, the government’s ITT proposal—despite rhetoric about a

radical paradigm shift in development—would do little to alter this overall exploitative

37 Indeed, during my interview with the head of Coca’s Environmental Department, he received a phone call reporting a new spill that had happened that day.

66

Source: Larrea (2009)

topography. In my conversations with municipal officials, it was often unclear whether they

were discussing “Plan A” or “Plan B”: in general terms, they described an oil-related

proposal which had little popular participation and would bring the state significant revenue

that it would not redistribute. Even when municipal officials were clearly speaking of “Plan

A”, they downplayed its significance. While the state insisted that the ITT proposal would be

a model that could be replicated across Ecuador, those around Yasuní understood it as a one-

off, idiosyncratic proposal. In the distrinct of Sacha, reported the town’s mayor, there are

nearly 300 operational wells. Given this, it is easy to understand why a proposal for not

building seven platforms in the ITT bloc—250 kilometers away—led residents to muse,

“What’s one more well, one less well?”

In criticizing the national ITT initiative, officials referred back to the original proposal

that emerged from the Amazon, which had called for a broader moratorium:

They changed our idea! We said no more exploitation inside the park. This would imply that REPSOL should revise their concession, that ANDES-PETRO should revise their concession, and decide if we’re exploiting crude in the park or not. Now this proposal has become something that comes from the central authority, and almost… it speaks of Yasuní, but it is more like an emblem of Yasuní. […] It is not ‘No more exploitation in the park.’ It’s a proposal that tries to gather some resources to not exploit one well in a park.

Numerous respondents criticized the government’s apparent environmental schizophrenia:

the new Constitution already forbade further exploitation in national parks, so all they were

asking was that the national government comply with its own norms. That the state had

appropriated the Yasuní proposal—while altering its original meaning—was described as one

Figure 7.1: Ecuador’s Rising, then Declining, Oil Production

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more example of how the Amazon was excluded from national politics, despite producing

much of Ecuador’s wealth.

The municipal government of Coca—like many of the town’s citizens—viewed

limiting petroleum exploitation as the only reasonable path for developing the region, given

the past damages caused by exploitation and the reality that Ecuador’s reserves are finite.

Regional governments in Orellana are not ecologically saintly: all my data indicate that,

posturing aside, these entities were disposed to build roads, populate the region, and attain

what benefits from oil exploitation they could. Instead, their concern, as one administrator

explained, was that the municipality needed:

…to create an economy based on our region. […] Nobody [in the national government] is looking with a perspective of twenty to thirty years out, as to what will happen when the petroleum is gone. […] If we don’t do this, we’re going to be a ghost town. The only thing we have left to protect is Yasuní; that’s what we have, our rainforest. They thus promoted what they viewed as a pragmatic, common-sense sense alternative to

exploitation. Given the high level of consciousness within the colonist population about the

harmful effects of oil and contamination, a strong anti-petroleum, anti-national-elite discourse

was evidently something that local politicians perceived as politically advantageous.

The Return of the Indígena

Any account of the political milieu swirling around Yasuní-ITT must take into

account the unprecedented role assumed by indigenous people in Ecuador’s national politics

during the last decade. Starting in the 1990s, Ecuador’s indigenous movement—led by the

Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)—instigated a series of

dramatic uprisings that won significant territorial concessions, earned constitutional

recognition of multiculturalism, and even unseated a President (Jackson and Warren 2005;

Lucero 2008; Jameson 2011). Although the locus of indigenous mobilization was Quito, the

movement originated in and has been most successful in the Amazon (Salazar 1981; Sawyer

2004). There, the political reassertion of indigenous people has been coupled with a

demographic rise that, in part, reflects an attempt to repopulate lost territory (McSweeney and

Arps 2005; Hvalkof 2007).

In Ecuador, as elsewhere in Latin America, indigenous demands for territorial

autonomy are buttressed by assertions that Indians are “natural environmentalists with a

close, spiritual, non-capitalist relationship to land” (Hooker 2005:304; Cepek 2008; Martí i

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Source: Lu (2005)

Puig 2010). Community leaders representing the Shuar, Huaorani, and Kichwa federations in

Orellana all told me that, as the park’s historical denizens, they were appropriate stewards for

Yasuní.38 They rejected the notion that, due to population growth or market integration, they

were no longer managing the park sustainably: “We conserve because the forest is what feeds

us. We only take what we need.” It was revealing to note how they appropriated some of the

universalistic language and symbolism surrounding the park, but reframed it in terms of

indigenous territoriality and history. One Huaorani man, for example, said that Yasuní was

the “last lung of the Huaorani.” For him, Yasuní was not just a territory that produced

material resources, like game, but also critical for the reproduction of Huaorani culture and

society.

The central role of indigenous federations—particularly the Huaorani—in resisting

the expansion of oil exploration into Yasuní is well-documented (Ziegler-Otero 2004; Finer

et al. 2008; Rival 2011). Past experience with government-led extraction appeared to have

left the indigenous people of Yasuní even more distrustful than local mestizo governments of

38 Because this research focused on mestizo and colonist environmentalism, I only conducted seven interviews with indigenous actors. These conclusions should be evaluated with this limitation in mind.

Figure 7.2: Indigenous Peoples of Yasuní

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the central state39, which filtered into perceptions of the Yasuní-ITT initiative. Although I am

confident that all the indigenous leaders with whom I spoke were aware of the government’s

“Plan A”, they often made no mention of it, and instead told me that the central government’s

only plan was to exploit ITT.40 Still, all expressed a strong commitment to ensuring that the

oil in ITT was left underground: one Huaorani community leader even said his group would

respond to drilling with spear attacks.

In reality, the relationship between indigenous communities and petroleum

exploitation is not always one of straightforward opposition. In Quito, members of the ITT

technical committee said that the Huaorani leadership had made it clear that their support for

the ITT initiative was contingent on guarantees that resources would flow to Huaorani

communities and that they would have a role in the trust fund’s management. Other

informants told me that the Kichwa communities located around the ITT bloc—like the

mestizos in NRF—wanted exploitation (a claim I can neither confirm nor deny). A reporter

described how, in March 2010, the government held an assembly in Coca in support of

Yasuní; in the front row were painted Huaorani, there to show their backing for non-

exploitation. In the back—away from the cameras—was a group of Kichwa from downriver,

holding a banner that said “We want development.”

My point here is not to suggest that indigenous people are “more” pro-petroleum than

colonists, only to highlight their unique positioning with respect to exploitation. Thanks to

grassroots mobilization, national recognition, and international attention, indigenous people

have achieved some success in striking a “middle ground” with petroleum companies that

allows extraction in exchange for social development (Sabin 1998; Rodrigues 2004; Haley

2004). Indigenous people have gained these benefits by virtue of being indigenous, which

gives them “the right as a culturally different collective individual to negotiate with oil

companies (something that mestizos, for instance, are not able to do)” (Valdivia 2005:295).

Consider, for example, this statement by a representative of the Shuar Federation:

We have seen this penetration since the time of the conquistadors, but it continues with petroleum. […] As a nationality, we have existed from the creation of the world, and we have not come from anywhere else. We are owners, and defenders, and guardians of the environment.

39 Unsurprising, given that oil exploitation has eradicated two indigenous groups, the Tetetes and Sasahuaris, whose names now adorn two petroleum blocs (Martínez and Acosta 2010). 40 For example, FICCKAE, the Kichwa federation, has been involved in several assemblies to promote the ITT initiative, and yet when I spoke with its leader, she made no mention of the initiative and spoke only of Kichwa resistance to further exploitation.

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In truth, the Shuar are recent arrivals in Yasuní, having migrated from the south around the

same time as many colonists. Nonetheless, the discursive construction of indigenous

people—who “should” live in the rainforest, unlike colonists who “should not” (Brosius

1999b:282)—buttresses environmental claims by certain groups while discounting those of

others. Groups like the Shuar can make claims that link environment, identity, history, and

territory in a way that colonists cannot. As I argue in the next section, mestizo colonists in

the Yasuní region have responded by developing their own framework to claim, just like

indigenous people, rights to territory and power based on environmental stewardship.

Mestizo Environmentalism

During the uprisings of the 1990s, “Nothing only for the Indians” (Whitten 2003:8)

was a rallying cry used to insist that indigenous mobilizations were undertaken on behalf of

all Ecuadorians. Data show mestizo collaboration in indigenous mobilizations and that, for a

time, CONAIE was one of the most trusted political movements in Ecuador (Radcliffe 1999;

Gerlach 2003; Sawyer 2004). This appeared to be a startling reversal for a country where

indigenous people have been historically viewed as “dirty, lazy, irrational, and backward”

(Colloredo-Mansfeld 1998:186) and thought to be destined to disappear in mestizaje, the

gradual whitening and unification of the nation (Wade 1997; Rahier 1998; Applebaum,

Macpherson, and Rosemblatt 2003). In general, however, comments about how mestizos

interpreted the rise of indigenous people have only been attached as addenda to works whose

primary focus is indigenous movements themselves (see, e.g., Warren 1998; Hale 2002;

Perreault 2003; Taylor, Moran-Taylor, and Ruiz 2006).

My own tentative finding is that many non-indigenous Ecuadorians still do not fully

accept that indigenous people have a veritable place in national politics. Mestizo informants

claimed that leaders of indigenous federations had been corrupted by money from oil

companies and foreign NGOs. Indigenous constituencies were uneducated and malleable, I

was told, and could be convinced to go to any protest as long as the federation paid their bus

ticket. One government official fumed that “the indigenous people…speak of us mestizos as

their younger bothers. They are the wise older brothers, they say.” When I asked one

mestizo if indigenous people were generally from the political right or left, she responded that

they were neither—indigenous people were only interested in benefiting other indigenous

people. In short, two decades after the dramatic emergence of the indigenous movement in

national politics, many mestizos still perceive that claims for “differentiated citizenship”—at

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the heart of demands for a plurinational Ecuador—are sectional and exclusionary challenges

to national unity and individual equality (Stutzman 1981; Yashar 1999; Stavenhagen 2002).

Lucero (2008:94) points out that the struggles of indigenous organizations are “not

only over material resources, but also over the symbolic resources of authenticity and

legitimacy.” My observation that indigenous people are still considered outside the populist

masses of “ordinary” people—because they are viewed as bearers of “special” rights who

lead lives apart from the nation—has been made before (Torre 2000). What seemed more

novel was the way that mestizo actors attacked the heart of indigenous peoples’ symbolic

power: the notion that they are natural conservationists (Conklin and Graham 1995; Pace

2004; Nugent 2007).

In many cases, mestizos claimed that, in reality, colonists caused less damage to the

environment than indigenous people. As one park employee asserted:

Based on my experience, the colonists are those who impact less. You know that the colonists deforest, but deforest in order to plant. He cuts the trees but he will leave [tree] cover. He’ll change the crops, but the cover is still there. In the case of the Kichwa communities, they only gather, they want to live by hunting, but they don’t plant much. So they exhaust what there is in the forest. The colonist does not dedicate himself to hunting, and depends on what he plants. If I had to say who is doing more damage, it’s the [indigenous] communities, whether they are Huaorani or Kichwa. As they finish off the fauna, they leave empty forests; forests that have the vegetative forest cover but don’t have life.

It is probably impossible to determine whether an “empty” or a “cleared” forest represents

more environmental destruction; the rhetorical machinations required to make this assertion,

are nonetheless telling. Many mestizos—in civil society, municipal government, and the

general population—declared that because indigenous people derived benefits from oil

companies and no longer lived “traditionally”, they could not be trusted with conservation.

The mayor of Sacha explained:

Indigenous communities have been great predators on the environment. They have sold the very best parts of their territory for little money. They throw dynamite and chemicals into the river to catch a few fish. Their form of living is sedentary and lazy. They like when people give them things; when the companies come, they ask for ponchos, boats, machetes, things to use for hunting. They have always preferred laziness, not their own initiative.

He concluded, “They need other people to teach them about nature.”

As I argue earlier, mestizos are not able to burnish their environmental credentials

through claims to past stewardship or a cultural connection to the land. Mestizos challenged

the notion that these factors are what matters, arguing that the indigenous cosmovision—

which views nature as being regenerated through human use—is not a legitimate basis for

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environmental protection. Instead, they claimed that, in certain places like Yasuní, the use of

the environment and its preservation are incompatible. In so doing, these actors moved

beyond a locality and livelihood-centered approach to environmentalism, claiming a moral

basis for conservation that, in their view, benefited not just the community but Ecuador and

the world as a whole.

These observations are not meant to reflect any judgment about the actual

environmental impacts of different groups. That said, they do show the politicization of

Yasuní-ITT which I have been describing. While colonists claimed they were becoming less

dependent on petroleum and searching for an alternative economic future, they saw

indigenous people as becoming steadily more reliant on oil-company largesse. As municipal

leaders told me, “indigenous people don’t vote.” This statement is at odds with the Ecuador’s

legal requirement for voting (Beck and Mijeski 2001), but reflects an understanding that local

governments’ electoral base was mestizo colonists, many of whom were skeptical of

indigenous politics. Contestation over the mantle of “environmentalist” appeared to be one

way these struggles for control and political power manifested themselves.

The Last Paradise?

In essence, I argue that—thanks in part to national changes, like the new constitution,

and local ones, such as a shift in thinking about the oil industry—environmentalism in

Ecuador has become a form of political currency. It is perhaps for this reason that, while

everyone claimed that they, themselves, did not support exploiting ITT, they often said that

others did: accusations of ecological misdeeds have become one way of de-legitimizing

competing groups’ claims for resources, land, and power. More broadly, through the

language of ecological preservation, mestizo-colonist political actors inject themselves into a

terrain traditionally dominated by indigenous groups and the state, and, in the long term,

insist on their own belonging and distinctive identity.

In the Chapter I, I chronicled how Amazonian colonists have been characterized as

leading a precarious existence marked by “insecurity, desperation, and suffering” (Lisansky

1990:80). Colonists, a wide range of sources informed me, “do not feel like they belong to

this area…they still feel like people just passing through.” They are a “classic marginal

population” which have “very bad conditions of life.” Colonists themselves did their own

part to circulate this narrative of exclusion and deprivation. Even one resolutely middle-class

professional who had migrated to Coca during the last year told me, “Here in Orellana, we

lack practically everything. We lack good centers of education, centers of health.”

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And yet, when I asked him if he planned on staying in the Oriente after his contract as

a college administrator ended, he responded, “I hope so. That is my dream.” Like other

migrants, he offered a double narrative about his life in the Amazon: colonists would insist on

their abandonment and exclusion, and then state that they nonetheless found the Amazon to

be a place filled with hope and opportunity. Longer-term residents of Coca perceived the city

as advancing by leaps and bounds: water, electricity, and road access were all improving.

People in the cities thought that employment opportunities were superior to those in the

highlands; farmers, for all their concerns about the quality of the soil, knew that remaining in

the Oriente was their best hope for gaining land title. In contrast to expectations, many

young, middle-class, educated informants with whom I talked said that they wanted to remain

in the Amazon in the future.

Typically, migrants paint a romanticized picture of the landscape and lifestyle of the

places from which they emigrated (Lynch 1993; Alkon and Traugot 2008). In Quito, many

environmentalists assumed that colonists in the Amazon felt the same, and used this to

explain why, with respect to the environment, colonists would always be ecologically

apathetic. Many of the colonists with whom I spoke, contrary to expectations, idealized the

environment of the Amazon relative to their previous homelands. Farmers rejected the notion

that they were environmental refugees who came because they were fleeing drought or

poverty: “All the people here have come on their own initiative, to have their land, so they

can make a living.” Consistent with literature on “repeasantization” (Cohn et al. 2006; Moyo

and Yeros 2005; van der Ploeg 2008), which finds that in now-overwhelmingly urbanized

Latin America some people are revalorizing rural life, informants insisted that Amazonian

life was “cleaner”, “healthier”, and “more tranquil”. Although Coca’s tourism campaign—

“Yasuní: The Last Paradise”—was obviously directed at outsiders, its message appeared to

reflect a general narrative that living in the Amazon was, at least in some senses, a privilege.

87% of those surveyed in Coca identified themselves as “citizens” of the province of

Orellana, including a majority of those born elsewhere. Although I have thus far used

“colonist” and “mestizo” interchangeably to describe the Amazon’s non-indigenous

population, some rejected the colonist label, pointing out that it made no sense to call a new

generation of people born in the Amazon “colonists.” As self-styled long-term residents of

the Amazon, they saw no reason why indigenous people should have a privileged claim to it.

Those responsible for environmental degradation were, many insisted, a “floating population”

that flew in from Quito, with the blessing of the national government, to work in extractive

industries. Ultimately, they claimed that, to truly be “of the Oriente”, one needed to oppose

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petroleum—and therefore, support the preservation of ITT. To quote Mayor Rivas: “It has

been like a template or letterhead for us that we are petroleros. But we are not really

petroleros because there aren’t opportunities for the local people in the industry.” If the

Oriente symbolized an opportunity for a healthier and more successful life, oil was a symbol

of everything that the Oriente was not.

These conclusions need further research for confirmation. Yet they undoubtedly

suggest the need for some theoretical revision. First, we need to reconsider the “sense of

gloom and pessimism [that] pervades recent studies of the Oriente”, based in the sense that

“development is up against overwhelming obstacles” and the area’s residents are “at the

mercy of exogenous forces” (Ryder and Brown 2000:527,530). Not everyone perceived life

in the Amazon as marked by desperation, and partly as a consequence, not all mestizos

appeared to support, as the literature assumes, the frantic short-term exploitation of resources.

Secondly, we should reconsider the relationship that has been theorized between

territory, identity, and ecologism. Martinez-Alier argues that environmentalism is born out of

pre-existing livelihoods, culture, and connections to land. I would tend to agree with

Agrawal (2005), who argues that actors do not always enter into resource-related conflicts

with their identities and outlooks fully formed (see, also, Robbins 2004; Little 1999). For

many mestizos, a connection to territory did not lead to environmentalism; instead,

environmentalism was a medium through which they asserted a connection to territory. This

should not be overstated: it would be presumptious to allege that environmentalism was the

centerpiece of Amazonian identity. Instead, support for certain forms of conservation was

intertwined with pride at being Ecuadorian, a desire for the Oriente to be fully incorporated

into national development, and an insistence that indigenous actors should not have sole

control over the Amazon.

One day during my time in Coca, I stepped into a local tourism office and asked the

attendant if she could tell me anything about Yasuní-ITT. After she handed me a simple

government flier, I explained that I was a researcher and had been hoping for more in-depth

information. She started describing the proposal—mentioning how it would avert carbon

emissions and protect uncontacted groups—but then stopped abruptly. She had recently

learned that the proposal would only protect a corner of the park, and now, she said, she “just

didn’t believe in it anymore.” What she did believe in, though, was Ecuador’s new

constitution. She pulled a highlighted and dog-eared pocket-copy out of her purse and read

out Article 250, which states:

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The territory of the Amazon provinces is part of an ecosystem that is necessary for the environmental equilibrium of the planet. This territory constitutes a special territorial district which will have an integrated planning that includes social, economic, environmental, and cultural aspects, with a territorial arrangement that guarantees conservation, protection of ecosystems, and the principle of buen vivir.

The woman was a recent migrant and had never visited Yasuní. Her simultaneous

invocations of the importance of the Amazon to the region, nation, and world, and her

connection to it, fit at best uneasily into existing theorizations of popular environmentalism.

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Conclusion

Given the preliminary nature of my research, this thesis cannot offer a comprehensive

theory of the “environmentalism of the people,” which would require systematic attention not

just to discursive framings of environmental issues but also to individual production and

consumption decisions, voting behaviour, and social movement mobilization. Furthermore,

this thesis does not provide a full accounting of the impending failure of the Yasuní-ITT

initiative, which would necessitate more investigation within the Ecuadorian government and

among potential international contributors. The purpose of this conclusion is, however, to

tease out some key trends in the data which could guide research to address these questions

fully and, more broadly, the urgent challenge of developing successful projects for climate

mitigation.

In Chapter VI, I pointed out that popular environmentalism in Yasuní appears to be

rooted in the politicization of oil production, ethnic and regional identity, and the ITT

initiative. In Quito, members of national civil society lamented this politicization, reflecting

a general belief among many environmentalists that conservation should be a point of societal

consensus that transcends political division (Berger 1997). Yet it seems unlikely that certain

groups—such as Amazonian colonists—will ever come to environmentalism organically,

given that they have no tradition of sustainable resource use and have little likelihood of

benefiting from ecotourism or conservation-and-development programs. Clearly, other

mechanisms are necessary to generate interest and support for environmental protection

among groups other than “natural conservationists” like indigenous people.

The local politics of Yasuní-ITT point to one such avenue. Local mestizo

environmentalism appears to have emerged from a deliberately political mobilization of

values, identity, and the desire for power and recognition. The result, admittedly, is a mode

of environmentalism that seems far less romantic than that portrayed in existing work on the

“environmentalism of the poor.” Mestizo environmentalism around Yasuní was both

exclusionary—in its attitude towards indigenous people—and highly inconsistent—as

evidenced by local government’s simultaneous desire to leave the oil of Yasuní underground

and build roads right up to the boundaries of the park. Moreover, the scope of the

“environmentalism of the people” appears to be situational and contingent, rather than

universal and unequivocal, as evidenced in Chapter V.

These factors do not necessarily, however, preclude the “environmentalism of the

people” from having a positive impact on specific environmental challenges. As Martinez-

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Alier (2002:255) asks, “Why cannot local rural poor people have contradictory values

simultaneously in favor of more money and more wilderness, as exhibited by many members

of the governing bodies of IUCN [International Union for the Conservation of Nature] or

WWF [World Wildlife Fund]?” Populations like that around Yasuní can be hypocritical and

unreliable advocates for environmental preservation—like anyone else—and nonetheless play

a crucial role in pressuring political leaders to support conservation in certain contexts.

Indeed, this more detached environmentalism may be precisely what is necessary to engage

large numbers of people—not just the subaltern, rural poor, but a broad swathe of

developing-world actors—in confronting urgent ecological problems like climate change,

while acknowledging that most are also concerned with a wide range of other issues.

These comments return us to the overarching issue that has framed this thesis, which

is the role of inhabitants of the developing world in mitigating climate change. In Chapter

IV, I argued that local action is critical to ensuring the success of Yasuní-ITT as an integrated

attempt to protect biodiversity, mitigate carbon emissions, and preserve indigenous cultures.

As the literature makes clear, however, decentralization and democratization do not

automatically lead to positive outcomes for the environment. If anything, the differential

responses to Yasuní-ITT by varying local actors—ranging between complete ignorance,

support of exploitation, and international advocacy on behalf of non-extraction—highlight a

limited, but potentially still significant, role for leadership and agency in climate outcomes

that might otherwise be assumed to be externally determined (Collier and Lofstedt 1997;

Rodrigues 2004; Qi et al. 2008). As I suggest, the roots of this engagement are more morally

complex than those focused only on economic livelihoods might assume: effective and

durable environmental movements of the poor may be rooted in “mixed motives” rather than

purely economic ones (Proctor 1996; Dosh 2009).

Ultimately, effective mitigation of climate change will require a significant shift in

developmental paradigms, which acknowledges limits to growth, accepts alternative

measures of well-being, and attaches new value to the environment (Clark and York 2005).

Through the widest lens available, the Yasuní-ITT proposal offers one lesson in how these

paradigms do—and do not—shift. International and national advocates for the ITT proposal

have largely assumed that, with the right policy design, political support will follow suit. As

I highlighted in my discussion of the tension between myths and realities of Yasuní, however,

the symbolic policy of Yasuní-ITT has run up against deeply engrained realities of

Ecuadorian (and international) political economy. Viewed from this perspective, Yasuní-ITT

represents a case of putting the proverbial cart before the horse, an instance where leaders

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promoted an innovative mechanism for addressing climate change before fully understanding

how that mechanism would be interpreted and appropriated.

This thesis endeavours to move us beyond Yasuní the symbol, however, and return to

Yasuní the place. There, it is clear that we still “do not have a developed analysis of the

political innovations that have to be made if our aspirations to limit global warming are to

become real” (Giddens 2009:4). Nonetheless, on the ground, amidst the messy local realities

of global conservation, fragments of a new politics of climate mitigation have emerged.

While the Yasuní-ITT policy might fail, the awareness and engagement with environmental

issues that have grown around it offer a lesson that should not be ignored. As Yasuní shows,

climate mitigation may not be about climate change at all, but about complex desires for

recognition, visibility, and political power, factors which must be accounted for in theories

both of environmentalism generally and climate politics specifically.

79

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