As the planet’s last hectares of wilderness give way to roads and towns, farms and soccer fields, gas stations and Starbucks, the Anthropocene marches on. While humans have exerted their influence on portions of our planet for tens of thousands of years, only recently has the Earth entered into this geologic epoch in which our species represents the dominant influence on its climate and its environment. Perhaps nowhere does the struggle between wild and manicured feel more palpable than in Ecuador, and nowhere in Ecuador is the battle for biological and cultural diversity more profound than in Yasuní National Park.
Situated on Ecuador’s easternmost flank with Peru to the south and east and Colombia only a short distance north, the 9,820-square-kilometer park sits at the confluence of the western Amazon basin, the Andean foothills, and the equator. The park’s boundary encircles one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. A single hectare, an area roughly the size of a soccer field, might boast as many as 655 different kinds of trees, more than all native tree species in the continental U.S. and Canada. Some 500 fish species and 600 kinds of birds live in Yasuní’s streams and skies. Among the thousands of species that call this forest home are the endangered white-bellied spider monkey (Ateles belzebuth) and giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), and the near-threatened golden-mantled tamarin monkey (Saguinus tripartitus). The park is also the ancestral home of three indigenous tribes, the Huaorani, Tagaeri, and Taromenane, who still rely almost exclusively on the rainforest’s abundance for their food, medicine, and shelter.
Beneath this ecological and cultural gem sits another kind of treasure: crude oil. Almost a billion barrels of it, around 20 percent of Ecuador’s untapped oil reserves. (By comparison, North America’s largest oil field in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay originally held 25 billion barrels.)
For a small country dependent on oil exports for a third of its federal budget, those riches have been almost irresistibly tantalizing. Yet Ecuador has resisted, even going so far as to ask other countries to contribute to an innovative campaign to avoid extracting Yasuní’s oil. The move wasn’t intended as a bribe, proponents said, but rather as acknowledgement that the health of Amazonian forests has global climate implications.
Then, just this past spring, in a move that shocked the international conservation community, Ecuador began trucking the first barrels of crude out of Yasuní. Is this the beginning of the end for one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems? It’s certainly a pivotal moment. The tiny country is now poised to cash in on one of its most valuable assets, but at what cost to Yasuní’s countless inhabitants, and to the world?
Please continue to bioGraphic to view this remarkable photo essay »
