Back from the Jungle

Hola Amigos!

Well, I returned from the Jungle nearly three weeks ago. It was an incredibly beautiful and wonderful experience. I saw tarantulas, scorpions, boa constrictors, frogs, turtles, alligators, parrots, and crazy monkeys. There were also so many beautiful flowers, giant trees, and vibrant butterflies. The heat was intense and so was the rain. Our trip started off in Puyo at the edge of the Amazon region, we made our way to Tena on a very bumpy bus, then visited a very small secluded Indigenous community near Rio Blanco. The community was incredible, we stayed in little huts next to the river and heard the scary sounds of snakes, frogs, birds and other animals all around us. Then we took a five hour canoe ride to Misahualli, which is a small fishing town that is full of absolutely crazy monkeys. These monkeys stole my bracelets and money from my pockets. They also took Sunni’s bag of granola and banged it on the ground until it exploded and then picked out the raisins and left the rest for the stray dogs to eat. Then we traveled to Cocoa which is basically an ugly oil town that’s full of wealthy foreigners, cement buildings, and sin.

For the last few weeks I have been studying the effects that oil exploration, logging, and mining have had on the country. The complex economic and social problems that these industries have created within the country alone are horrible. The environmental effects have also been quite atrocious. I’m going to go on a little oil rant, after I saw with my own eyes some things that I am still trying to understand.

My Oil Rant- It’s the Crude

The Ecuadorian Rainforest is one of the most biologically diverse areas of the world. Within one square kilometer there are over 300 different plant and animal species. In Canada as a whole there are only 268. This seems absolutely crazy to me, as I’m a girl who grew up on the east coast of Canada where we have lots of different varieties of trees, plants, raccoons and squirrels. I honestly saw trees, plants and bugs that I didn’t even know existed just while I was making the two hour hike into Rio Blanco. I’m also a person who is not very fond of snakes or bugs, however this experience has opened my eyes and I am now starting to realize that these snakes, bugs and crazy plants have existed on this earth for a lot longer than any of us. And even though they might be huge and scary they still have the right to live in their home, which just happens to be the rainforest.

On the last day of our Jungle adventure we left Cocoa and drove for about 45 minutes in the back of a pickup truck into the forest to see the devastation that has been caused by oil exploration and oil extraction. We met a man who gave us a tour of the different pits, ponds, and lakes that are now full of tar and crude oil. He had lived in this area for his whole life, and he explained how he had seen the area change dramatically over the last 30 years. He also told us that because he was such a strong activist against the oil companies he had to sleep at different houses within the community every night. He explained that there was a price on his head of 20,000$ USD. He took us to the graves of his mother and brother who had been killed because they had been outspoken critics of the oil companies as well. This sounds like something out of movie, but its not.

When we saw the oil pits it was almost unbelievable, there were rusty barrels full of tar next to the pits, and a few small plants struggling to survive in the pool of oil. Even in pictures it just doesn’t look the same as it did in person. We saw three oil pits and one large lake that were full of oil and tar. The oil pits were about three feet deep and the lake was at least eight. There were empty, rusty barrels floating and half sunk in the lake. Security officers from the oil companies followed us the whole time, and didn’t like that we were asking questions and taking pictures. Oddly enough all of this disastrous mess was created by Texaco who was the largest oil company in Ecuador up until the 1990’s when the government took over the exportation with the national company Petro-Ecuador. Texaco left behind this truly hideous mess and now it’s the Ecuadorian government’s job to clean it up. Since Correa was elected the clean up process has begun, and although that is a positive, there just really is not anywhere to put the mess, or any real affective methods of properly cleaning up the countless gallons of oil that are slowly seeping back into the earth.