WHY IS THIS DOCUMENTARY IMPORTANT?

Although the Amazon rainforest is the biggest forest in the world and is shared by nine countries, deforestation is becoming a danger to its very existence. This is a story about Ecuador’s Amazon region; how the oil sector dominates the Ecuadorian economy, which results in not only rapid deforestation but also a decrease in the quality of life for people.

La Amazonía, also known as El Oriente (“the east”), accounts for around 7.5 million hectares, just under half of the country’s total surface area. Ecuador in itself is the eighth most bio-diverse country on Earth and has almost 20,000 species of plants, over 1,500 species of birds, more than 840 species of reptiles and amphibians, and 341 species of mammals.

Oil exploration, logging, and road building have had a disastrous impact on Ecuador’s primary rainforests, which now cover less than 15 percent of the country’s land mass. It is one of Latin America’s largest oil exporters, with net oil exports estimated at 327,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) in 2008.

Exploring for oil and extracting it from the Amazon region of north-eastern Ecuador has boosted the country’s income over the last several decades, but it has also resulted in a “public health emergency” due to the negative effects on the local environment and on the health of people who live in the petroleum-production areas. Since the 1970s more than two billion barrels of crude oil have been pumped from oil fields in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In spite of serious environmental concerns and previous disasters, oil companies continue building new pipe-lines in Ecuador rainforest.

Before the 1960s, El Oriente was pretty much an unexplored land isolated from the rest of the country. But the discovery of oil by Texaco (recently acquired by Chevron) by the end of the 60’s brought with it the construction of roads leading straight into the then-untapped rainforests and bringing crowds of migrants with them. This process gave rise to the “boom towns” such as Nueva Loja (or Lago Agrio), filled with migrant construction workers for the big oil company.

The impact of oil exploitation in Eastern Ecuador is now notorious as a result of a long-running $6 billion lawsuit involving 30,000 Amazon forest dwellers and Texaco. In the 25 years (prior to 1992) that Texaco operated in the Oriente region, it spilled around 64 million litres of crude oil from its pipeline into the local river systems, dumped more than 68 billion litres of toxic waste directly into the rainforest, and thus contaminating 442,000 hectares of pristine Ecuador rainforest with extremely dangerous chemicals. It also cleared forest for access roads, exploration, and production activities, putting previously inaccessible forest at risk of further deforestation, illegal hunting and logging.

In the last decades, scientific research has established a clear link between the health of the Amazon and the integrity of the global environment, but still only a fraction of its biological richness has been revealed. At current rates, 55 percent of its rain forests could be gone by 2030—a looming disaster not only for the region’s plants and animals, but for the world.

Researchers are urging companies to adopt a suspension on new road building, and instead use helicopters to ferry personnel and machinery to and from the sites, as has been done in some locations. They also call for governments to take a broader view of the environmental impacts of new projects, by assessing them as a group rather than individually.

Amazonia is a huge and very complex place where nature created a unique set of biological and geological cycles, hardly seen in other places, and where mankind developed different cultures, languages, and art. The mysteries and awe around the Amazon jungle is something we should know.