Environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, deported from Ecuador on Thursday after her arrest at a Quito demonstration, said she was outraged by the destruction she witnessed along an oil pipeline route carved through the country’s forests.
Her actions while in Ecuador, however, outraged oil company executives.
Hill, who gained fame from a two-year occupation of a Northern California redwood to protest logging practices, entered Ecuador on July 9 to observe a pipeline project slated to traverse the Mindo-Nambillo Reserve, one of the last tracts of high-elevation “cloud forest” left in the world.
“The cloud forest is stunning,” she said in an interview with The Chronicle from the Mexico City airport on Thursday. “It’s this deep, lush green, spangled with explosions of red, yellow and purple from the flowers, birds and insects. But the environmental destruction we saw along the pipelines that had already been built was horrendous.”
She and seven Ecuadorans were arrested Tuesday during protests at the Quito offices of Occidental Petroleum, a U.S. company that is one of the partners in the consortium building the 300-mile pipeline that ultimately will run from oil fields in the Amazon Basin to the Pacific Coast port of Esmeraldas.
Larry Meriage, a spokesman for Occidental, said Hill had not dealt in good faith with Occidental and the consortium.
“This is so maddening,” Meriage said. “Hill asked OCP for a meeting down there, and they called me and asked if they should. I said extend them every courtesy. But she shows up with 50 protesters, they storm the lobby and demanded that OCP meet with the entire group.”
OCP officials told Hill they would meet with her and not all 50 demonstrators, said Meriage, “and after that she refused. They all went back out on the street and got raucous, and then got arrested.”
After that, said Meriage, a representative of an environmental group called Amazon Watch “called us and tried to get us to intercede for Hill. That’s real temerity. We’re always accused of being unethical, but who’s unethical here? They twist things, and clearly play for media attention.”
South American environmentalists and townspeople who rely on ecotourism say the pipeline will do irreparable harm to the region. But Ecuadoran politicians say the Mindo pipeline will pull the country out of the economic slough where it has wallowed for years. They say it will provide 52,000 jobs and attract about $2.5 billion in foreign capital by 2004.
Hill said that on one day her group stopped at three different spill sites. “One had occurred in a river,” she said. “They had been cleaning it up for two months, but there was still oil everywhere.”
Even worse, she said, were huge pits used to contain sludge and other petrochemical wastes.
“You see them burning as you go through the jungle,” she said. “We stopped at one where there was a fire – it was the size of a big pond. All of a sudden the whole thing ignited in a huge explosion, and we had to run to escape. My hair was burning while I ran.”
Hill was deported from Ecuador at dawn Thursday.
She plans to attend a rally against Occidental Petroleum at their company headquarters in Los Angeles today.
“They (Occidental) messed up, because all my experience did was make me indignant,” she said. “I’m just going to dig in, not let this thing rest. Considering half the oil piped through Ecuador goes to the U.S., I’m feeling quite a bit of responsibility about the devastation down there.”
E-mail the writer at glenmartin@sfchronicle.com
