Riding over 4000-meter passes on roads built and paid for by oil, we drop into the cloud forest. Volcan Antisana beckons for a closer look, before once again drifting behind the clouds illumined in the last of the evening’s light that pours from the west. Tequila shot stops at the kayaker’s beloved guesthouse in Baeza morph into a winding, cascading, pothole-infested road down into the high jungle and the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest. Foreigner and potentially unwittingly naïve I have flown, driven, and descended into one of the most environmentally and politically contentious places in our world.
Environmental lawyer, Steven Donzigner was held under house arrest for 993 days in his New York apartment under false contempt of court charges, for not turning over his personal computer. The trial was completely bought by Chevron with paid lawyers and an appointed judge who is a personal beneficiary of Chevron’s global oil atrocities. It took Donzigner, a journalist turned lawyer, 25 years to gather the evidence and funding to prosecute Chevron for its massive environmental and human rights violations in the Northeastern Ecuadorian Amazon. The lawsuit they brought successfully against Chevron in Ecuador’s Highest courts, fought to bring 18 billion dollars to the Cofan Indigenous peoples, predominantly those in the Aguarico river basin, who saw the first and most drastic impacts of the intentional oil disaster. The suit was then reduced to 9 billion dollars, chump change for a multiple trillion-dollar multinational corporation. in a more than 20 years trial, and four years after the prosecution Chevron still hasn’t paid a dime, it is cheaper to pay 60 high-level lawyers from the biggest and most corrupt law firms in the United States for a proxy trial against the small underfunded American lawyer in the case, than it is to pay the bare minimum for environmental cleanup.
Rio Jondachi, Napo Ecuador – a dam has been proposed to completely dewater the river here.
At home in the Nooksack Watershed, the landscape has already been so altered that it is difficult to understand what has happened; a 250-year process of ecocide, genocide, and colonial development that has completely reconfigured the land and water of the Nooksack River drainage. Here now in the Sacred Headwaters of the Amazon, we pass by a lot of hundreds of parked excavators used to dig for minerals in the Rio Napo, Rio Anzu, and Rio Juntun Yaku, all rivers that flow near the quickly developing city of Tena. In an eddy, I catch Diego yelling out to me over the noisy rapids, “low water was never an issue here… but now the water, the sun it soaks it all up or something”. I looked at him and nodded in understanding, the Nooksack river of my home had been the lowest I had ever witnessed the last few days before my departure. Everywhere on earth our climate is changing. We proceeded to go down the rocky jumbled river, passing over manufactured spillway dams for water diversion that had created dangerous hazards in the river.
Now en mi nueva vida I cruise the streets in Tena Ecuador, a town that has grown into a bustling economic hub in the Napo province. Just a few hours by car from here is the location of these massive oil atrocities that have caused skyrocketing cancer rates from old to young. As the oil resources dwindle, and many people fight to protect what is left of the Amazon in Ecuador, a new crisis arises in the sacred headwaters. Mineria (mining) has gone into full swing in Napo and throughout eastern Ecuador, illegal and legal. Swaths of rainforests are being clearcut and overturned, with mercury used to distill each mineral, mostly lithium and gold. These mines have begun to pour mercury and arsenic into the rivers here.
March! Speak up! Napo Resiste!
Mineria es Muerte!
Mining is death!
We march through a city that less than thirty years ago was a small village in the rainforest.
The jungle seems to never sleep. I follow Diego’s steps cautiously with the faint moonlight that shines through the canopy. We are walking into the Llangantes National Park, the largest conserved land mass in Ecuador. It stems from high in the Paramo down into the steep and inaccessible (unless by kayak or helicopter) high rainforest. In the darkness comes an overwhelming and complex sense of anxiety, I feel so deeply exposed to all lives that are present here… there are many. Five deadly venomous snakes to be exact. As the fresh daylight rings, he cares to mention that the whole path we were walking on in the forest was the perfect snake habitat. By now my senses are far too overstimulated to care, we are off trail working our way crawling, wrestling, and hacking through the deep undergrowth along the Jatun Yaku River. The only people who travel into the jungle here are Kichwa locals looking for gold upstream or illegal miners. Everyone fears the miners. Diego and I have come in search of a relatively small side creek that seems via satellite images to offer a tremendous waterfall that cascades into the Jatun Yaku.
The rains have finally come, and the metal roofs vibrate with ferocity all night as I toss and turn under its thundering. With rain comes more opportunities to explore the countless rivers in this area that are proposed for large mining and hydroelectric projects. It has been an intense first month here in the rainforest.
Extending a massive thank you to the people who are actively connected and intermingled in the work to come back to a place of sanity, care, and of respect for the land and water of the Nooksack. Keep up the fight, the walk, the love, the friendship, the kayaking… You all give me so much hope!
Resources:
https://theintercept.com/2022/04/27/deconstructed-steven-donziger-chevron-ecuador/