NOW AVAILABLE: Mining and democracy in Intag, Ecuador

For those of you who've been waiting for it (probably no one), I've finally translated my final study abroad paper into English. You can view and download the entire thing as a PDF here.

 It's a thrilling tale of mining companies, small-scale farmers turned activists, betrayal, lies, possible illegal cyanide dumping, long speeches at regional assemblies, journalism and constitutional law, and all for the low, low price of FREE!

Readjustment

Things I missed
Seattle tap water
the smell of winter
cheese that isn't queso fresco
salt and vinegar chips
Netflix Instant
my cat
breathing deep and tasting pine trees
sourdough bread
baking cookies
the public library



Things I miss
yuca chips
sun
the ability to travel across the country for less than $10
speaking Spanish
the sunset in Intag
being able to buy a three course meal for $2
the abundance of pirated DVD stores



Things that are just weird
throwing toilet paper in the toilet
the fact that it's dark from 4pm-7am
not being visibly "different"
adjusting my stomach to American bacteria again
riding a bus without hearing Pitbull or traditional Ecuadorian music

Life lessons from Ecuador

As weird as it sounds to say it, I'm flying home later today. After four months in Ecuador, I have barely begun to process how I've changed and all the things I've learned this semester. At some point in the future, I'll be updating with more serious insights, but for now, it's time for a list of the important life lessons I've gotten out of this experience.

1) You haven't truly been on a motorcycle until you're hitchhiking up a cobblestoned and gravel road going up a mountain with three people on the back.
2) Real cheddar cheese is a sorely underappreciated thing. Especially on nachos. Relatedly, nachos should never involve eggplant.
3) Wearing an alpaca poncho may make you look like the world's biggest gringo, but it will also be the softest, warmest and most comfortable thing you've ever put on. Totally worth it when you're living in a wooden shack in the cloud forest.
4) When they tell you during orientation that the altitude will affect your body's ability to process alcohol, they are not kidding. Chupa con cuidado.
5) Every male in Quito between the ages of 15 and 30 knows exactly one English phrase: ¨Hey baby¨. The best way to deal with this situation involves your middle finger.
6) It doesn't matter how high-wasted your pants are, how much you tucked your shirt in or how much bug spray you're wearing. The wasps that live in the canopy tower will still find a way to sting you on the ass.
7) The best response to the overwhelming beauty of sunset in the Galapagos Islands involves warrior pose.
8) What happens on the chiva stays on the chiva. What happens on a park bench next to the chiva also stays on the chiva.
9) Harvesting oats for 25 hours by hand is exhausting, and working on a farm with Ecuadorian farmers will make you feel like the laziest person in the entire world.
10) When in the course of your journalism project to tour gold mines you get stranded in a town three hours from home and have to spend the night at a crazy old Russian man's house, you may want to make sure that he hasn't fathered a child with his own daughter first. Fortunately, nothing bad happened.
11) Just because someone is your host dad doesn't mean he won't charge you $80 to drive you to two interviews.
12) As much as American TV news seems to have embraced the ¨if it bleeds, it leads¨ philosophy of journalism, at least they generally don't go to the scene of a recent car crash to show graphic footage of bodies being removed from the wreckage and then interview the sobbing parents or siblings of the dead person on site and air all of this live at 7am while you're eating breakfast.
13) There's something about spending a month commuting on harrowing mountain roads mostly by sitting in the back of pickup trucks or standing in the aisle of Greyhound buses that makes you appreciate life a lot.
14) Ecuadorian clubs play a combined total of 7 songs. All of them are by Pitbull.
15) Spending two and a half hours going around a circle with your friends and telling everyone how awesome they are is one of the best ways to spend an evening.

Living on the internet

Last week, while waiting for the bus back home, my host dad William gave one of my brothers (Alexander) a toy gun to play around with. He was shooting tiny yellow balls and laughing and running to recollect them. My dad and I sat on a bench smiling at Alex’s enjoyment, and then my dad leaned in and told me that he’d given Alex the toy because today was Alex’s birthday. I was about to wish him a happy birthday and was feeling bad for not knowing earlier when my dad said, “It’s a surprise. We haven’t told him yet.” When we got back home, we had dinner like normal, and then my parents turned the lights off while my older brother, Richard, brought out a cake for Alex. Alex was delighted, beaming, and thrilled to be presented with a single gift—a battery powered wind-up truck. Sure enough, he’d completely forgotten that it was his birthday.

In the United States, I have a hard time imagining any child past the point of self-awareness not knowing when their own birthday is. Certianly our parents generally make a big deal about it, asking who we want to invite to parties and what gifts we’d like to receive, but once we’re old enough to know that one day a year is our special day, we start keeping track. I’m not sure what makes that different here—maybe rural Ecuadorian children are much less likely to be willing or able to keep precise track of the date, or maybe birthdays just aren’t a huge deal here the way they are back home (I suspect a bit of both). And now with Facebook, the rich and technologically privilged of the world (of which I’m definitely a part) have gone beyond the possibility of not knowing when our own birthdays are. Every time you log in, you’re greeted with a list of friends who are celebrating one more year of life—perhaps you’d like to write on their wall, or send them a digital gift? It’s so easy to keep in touch with people who are thousands of miles away and so easy to keep tabs on every single person you’ve ever run across in your life.

I’ve waffled back and forth with my feelings about the ever-increasing amount of information that’s just a click away from our fingertips. As much as I understand the dangers of digitizing my brain completely, I love having so much available to me. I’m completely addicted to information, and have been for a while. I spend over half of my income on books and magazine subscriptions. I’m constantly reading something. I got into journalism mostly because I realied that it’s a free pass to talk to anyone about anything you want and learn from them. Now, I follow almost 200 people on Twitter, mostly other news sources, and I’m constantly checking my feed for links to interesting articles from the New York Times, Mother Jones, Good, Slate and a million other sources. I love having a real-time idea of what’s happening, love that I can get links to five different commentaries on the same piece of news which all build off of and complement one another. But I’m starting to think that combining the seemingly unlimited potential of the internet with my information-craving brain is like building a meth lab in the basement of an addict. To be fair, information, unlike meth, is good for you in moderate amounts, but I  think there might be a limit to how much it’s healthy to know.

People, especially ones from older genertions, have been lamenting the effects of technology on the brains of our youth for as long as I can remember. As a child, my mom put a weekly limit on my and my brother’s computer time—four hours a week. We kept dilligent paper logs of our time (it would never have occurred to me to lie about it), and while the limit was at times annoying (like when I was just about to beat Pajama Sam for the six-hundredth time), I don’t remember it being a huge burden in my life. I didn’t really start using the computer much until seventh grade, when it became my after-school social life (AOL Instant Messanger and LiveJournal), and then in eigth grade, when I started using it more for research for school. The internet was certianly part of my life, but it wasn’t my main activity or a place where I spent the majority of my time. I read books. I talked to my friends on the phone. I went to movies. I wrote in a journal.

How quaint that notion seems to me today. I still do all of those things—I read a ton, I watch movies, I write in several journals, I talk to my friends. And I do almost all of it online. My hours spent reading books cover to cover have been replaced by my steady stream of online news and downloaded PDFs of books and articles. Sure, I read print a lot too, but nowhere near as much as I used to. I call my friends on the phone occasionally, but mostly, we communicate via Facebook wall posts, email messages, G-chat and Skype. I journal in print when I need to work something out by myself, but I blog much more regularly. And almost all of my media comsumption—TV and movies—takes place through Hulu, Netflix, YouTube or illegally downloaded media that plays right on my computer screen. Sometimes, I feel like my life is bending ever-so-perfectly to fit the narrative Justin Timberlake lays out when he plays Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, in The Social Network. “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the Internet,” he says, and I see my future laid out before me. And it scares me.

I love technology. I love the convenience, the information flow, the ability to meet, be connected to and stay in touch with people from every corner of the globe. I love the things social networking has enabled, love that the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street probably couldn’t have happened without Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. I love that it’s possible for me to teach myself about anarchist history or edible plants around Seattle or how to can fruit without ever leaving my room. But I’m worried about what it’s doing to me, to my relationship with people, with reality, with hard work, with secrecy, with anonymity.

Because of the internet, I’ve largely lost the ability to be uninformed, to make a conscious choice to not pay attention to current events or world news. Sure, I go hiking or backpacking and I don’t check my email for a week. But if it’s there, if I have the opportunity, I’m always online. If I’m not online, there’s always a to-do list in the back of my head for next time I am—check email, update the blog, come up with a witty Facebook status describing my adventures, check the New York Times to make sure we didn’t experience nuclear winter while I was away. I can’t focus for very long on any one thing—I always have four or five windows open and I switch between them, reading a chuck of each at a time. I do the same thing with books and magazines—I can’t sit down and read something for longer than about ten mintues before I get distracted by something else, even if it’s just another book. Some of that is just the way my brain is wired. I’m always thinking a mile a minute, always planning what I’m going to be doing next. But the internet has definitely accelerated the trend.

Besides just my brain, I’m getting a little unnerved by how much of my life takes place on the servers of Google. I use their search engine any time I need to look something up. This blog is hosted on Blogspot, which Google owns. I frequent YouTube, use Gmail for all of my email, use Chrome to browse the internet, Google translate to help me with Spanish papers and Google Maps anytime I need to get somewhere. Now I even have a profile on G+, their newsish social network. I don’t think Google is an evil empire, and I believe that they’re going to continue to be an absurdly successful company (which is why I surrendered a bit and bought a share of their stock). Google certianly doesn’t know everything about me, but if you add in the information from Facebook and Twitter, you’d probably get a pretty decent picture of my life. And that scares me a little. There’s nothing incriminating about me online as far as I know—no pictures of underage drinking, no nudity, no calls to arms other than occasional references to defending our land against things like the Keystone Pipeline. And it might be a bit hypocritical for me to complain about all of this data being out there when I’m the one who put it there in the first place. I think the pros of visibility—getting to share ideas, meet people, have interesting dicsussions—outweigh the cons, which is why I’m as wired in as I am. But it’s still a bit scary to think of how much of a digital paper trail is out there with my name on it, how much someone could learn about me without even needing to spy on me or hack into my accounts.

I talked to my dad about this over the summer a bit. He frequently warns me that everything I post on my blog will exist forever, and that I need to be careful about what I say so as to not scare off future employers. (I try to bite my lip and not point out that this advice seems a bit forced coming from someone who’s in the middle of starting his second company and hasn’t had a boss since he quit his job at Microsoft in 1997.) At one point, we talked a bit about my LiveJournal, which I used primarily in 8^th and 9^th grade to be an angsty teenager and talk to my friends about the drama going on in our lives. My dad said he felt sorry for my generation, because we don’t have the capacity to re-invent ourselves; everything’s out there forever. I said sure, maybe, but it’s not like the friends I’ve made at Whitman are going back and reading my blog from middle school and using it to form impressions of the person I am now. No, he said, he didn’t even mean that. He meant that because we have this permanent online record of ourselves, we’ve somewhat lost the capacity to re-invent ourselves in our own minds. Back when he was my age, you could do stupid stuff and forget about it. You could grow into a more mature person and let some of your youthful  angst and adventure fade away in your own mind. But I can’t do that. If I want to, I can recall with painful clarity the conversations I had with my best friends when I was suicidal in 7^th grade, because I have our AIM chats saved on my hard drive. I can go back and read my LiveJournal entries where I was whining that no one took me seriously and my family was driving me crazy, see all my friends’ comments and still feel guilty now for being so self-absorbed and needy for so many years. My self-perception has been shaped by my digital archive in ways I probably can’t fully comprehend.

It’s not bad to know yourself. But we’ve gotten increasingly caught up in this idea that pieces of data—discrete points in time—are ourselves*. As programmer Jaron Lanier says in his book You Are Not A Machine, data always and necessarily underrepresents reality. My sense of who I was in 7^th and 8^th grade comes almost exclusively from my print journals, my LiveJournal archive and my saved chat conversations with friends, because my memories of those years of my life are too distant to be clear any more. In other words, my self-perception is based off of a series of points, not a continuous arc. And those point cannot hope to convery the rich complexity of my life. During those years, I was a mess. I was depressed and borderline suicidal for most of a year, and that’s mostly what I wrote about. Looking at the data points I have, I find myself wondering how I survived. But those points aren’t the sum total of my life during those years. I had moments of joy, of laughter, of happiness, of enjoying time with friends. I read books and got new ideas and joked around and thought about things besides the best way to hurt myself. And those barely register in the data I have. It’s like I have a photo album that’s missing a third of its pictures.

And as it does this to the past, I worry that technology is also datafying our present. I am a person. I experience a variety of emotions—crushing lonliness, extreme joy—that cannot be captured online. The other day, I was walking home while the sun was just starting to set. I’m in the middle of a cloud forest, in what I’m pretty sure is the most beautiful place on earth, and the sunset was almost too much for my brain to handle. I was full of so much emotion seeing all of that beauty, I was running and skipping and shaking my head and telling my friend that seeing things like that made me want to sleep with someone or believe in God (he, naturally, told me that I’m ridiculous). And you absolutely cannot have a moment like that on the internet. Data cannot possibly hope to represent something that real or raw.

Because of that, I think I compartmentalize myself. There’s my online identity—someone a little crazy who cares about activism and food politics, who overthinks everything and pretends to be an anarchist every so often when she gets upset with politics. My status updates and tweets and blog posts all fit into this narrative. But that’s not all there is to me. I do the same thing with events. For me, a birthday isn’t just a day when you turn a year older. It’s a family dinner, it’s a thing that will show up on my Facebook friends’ sidebars, it’s an opportunity to create the perfect event page to invite people to my party. It cannot and will never be as simple as it was for my brother here, who didn’t even know it was his special day until his parents told him.

I love the internet and I love technology. On the whole, those things have done far more good in my life than bad. But they’re also changing who I am, who we all are, the range and spectrum of experiences that are possible for us to have. I’m going to keep spending a lot of my time online, because there are tools and information there that I value. But in a completely digital world, Alex’s simple happiness at being presented with a birthday cake is not possible. And that’s why, unlike Sean Parker, I never want to live online.

*This point comes from an amazing article called Generation Why, which deconstructs Facebook and the impact of social networking on our self-perception. You should go read it now.

Friendship in a post-civilization world

For the next three weeks, I’m living in the Intag cloud forest region of Ecuador. The area is dotted with tiny pueblos which are tucked into valleys and nestled on top of ridges. The roads here are dirt and cobblestone, and they wind up and down hills through a green mosaic of forest and small agricultural plantations. I’m living with a family in Peñaherrera (population about 150 families) and commuting 20 minutes each day by overcrowded bus or motorcycle to Apuela, another small town where the regional newspaper I’m working for is based.

This year, I’ve spent a lot of time in places where life runs a lot slower than my usual mile-a-minute pace. When left to my own devices, I will triple-book myself from 8am-10pm, schedule conversations with friends to make sure I have time to see them, have sixteen windows open on my browser and spend the bulk of my day trying to get as much out of every second as I possibly can (that or watching stuff on Netflix). In Ghana, I got used to waiting for hours for people to show up for interviews in their villages because they were out farming or couldn’t catch a ride or just didn’t feel like showing up on time. Every night, I went home to a house with no TV, no internet and nothing much to do except talk to my dad, attempt to cook, or read. My first two weeks in Ecuador I was on a farm in the middle of nowhere—no Internet, no TV, no radio, no cell reception and nothing to do after work except read and talk to the other volunteers. Now, I’m in a similar situation. It looks like I’ll be getting home around 4pm everyday, and while there are ample TVs here and internet cafés close by, there’s still not really anything to do in the Western sense of the term (no movie theaters, bowling alleys, bars, cultural attractions, etc.) Mostly, it seems like people play volleyball, watch TV and sit around and talk to each other.

Spending time in places like this has made me think about the nature of my friendships. With casual friends, I do many of the same things people seem to do in rural Ecuador. We watch movies together, sit around chatting about what we did today, maybe go shopping or grab a meal. With my closest friends, though, I mostly share ideas with them. Sure, we hang out and waste time together, but my closest friendships are the ones where we stay up until all hours of the night discussing Occupy Wall Street, the border and the socioeconomic factors which create food deserts. Mostly, we talk about the world—what’s going on, what’s wrong with everything and how we might go about fixing it.

In my ideal world, communities would be a lot more local than they are now. People would spend a lot more time interacting with their neighbors, a lot more time doing things like taking care of community gardens and a lot less time online. In some versions of the future, there is no internet—post-gridcrash, we all go back to being people living in the rural Third World, with no power, little connection to the outside world and a radically local lifestyle. This is how humans have lived for thousands of years, for the majority of human history. And it’s occurred to me that in this world, I have no idea what a friendship looks like. If the world were such that there weren’t absurd problems to try and solve, or if I was living so locally and off-grid that I had no idea what was going on on other continents, I have no idea what I would do with my friends.

In many ways, the Ghanaian villages I visited this summer and the Ecuadorian cloud forest where I’m living now seem like a window into this world. Here, people seem to form relationships based more on proximity than anything else. You know the people you grow up near, because they’re close to you. Obviously, there are people you get along with better than others, and you gravitate towards them. People aren’t disconnected from the outside world by any means—Intag is a hotbed of environmental activism on issues ranging from deforestation to water pollution caused by mining. But most people here don’t seem to spend their free time discussing the philisophical implications of Occupy Wall Street imbracing an explicitly nonviolent strategy, for example. They mostly spend it being normal people.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the end of civilization (or at least a transition to a radically localized economy) would look like in economic, political and environmental terms. I’ve thought a lot about big picture things, how we would get food and energy, how democracies would function. But it’s interesting to think about the more personal—not just that my friends might be very different people, but that the entire nature of friendship might change too. I always think of things like types of food or manners of greeting people when asked to describe cultural differences. It’s kind of an exciting notion that something as basic as friendship isn’t a constant either. 

Turtles, time and something like silence

It’s almost one in the morning when I see my first turtle. She’s a leatherback, black and almost six feet long. She moves up the beach in the dark, slowly, as if carrying a great burden. Turning her massive body, back feet now facing us, she begins to dig. There’s sand flying everywhere, and we move to avoid it, trying to be quiet. There are six of us staring at her, but she seems almost oblivious to our presence. She’s focused on the task at hand. With the hole dug, she stands over it and lets her eggs drop in. They come in bursts, slimy and about the size of golf balls, falling into the sand, plopping into the nest she’s made. As she lets them go, tears stream down her face. Locals say that she’s crying at the thought of being separated from her babies. Science says she’s shedding salt from her body. There’s so much gravity in the air, so much at stake that I want to believe she feels what’s going on. In a world where fewer and fewer turtles are able to survive long enough to complete the cycle she’s beginning tonight, her presence here is beautiful, awe-inspiring, a tale of triumph. And yet the odds are stacked against her. I’m thirteen, only in eighth grade, but something in her eyes speaks to a much older part of me. I feel the emergency of the situation, the sad truth that the actions of my species are driving her kind to extinction. I see the same recognition in her tears, not directed at me, but a general sense of weariness, of someone who’s lived too long and watched the world grow less familiar, less safe. I’m afraid to move, afraid to disturb something much older and more profound than I will ever be. We all watch in silence as she covers her progeny in sand and heads back towards the ocean. And then the stillness of the moment is gone. Walkie-talkies crackle, informing others that we’ve got a turtle nest. And our work begins.

This night, I’m at a turtle station in Costa Rica. The station exists because leatherbacks and other sea turtles are under assault on multiple fronts. Habitat loss and pollution are disrupting their lives in the ocean. Human development and construction threaten the beaches where they lay their eggs. Hatchlings are confronted with a loud, confusing world upon their emergence from the safety of an eggshell, and too many of them head towards the glowing lights of civilization instead of into the water they should learn to call home. And as if all this weren’t enough, poaching of nests has become more common, turtle eggs having become a valuable black market delicacy. Our task, on this one stretch of beach, is simple. We find the nests, dig them up, and move the eggs to a fenced-off hatchery where they can be monitored and guarded against poachers. We take away their wildness in exchange for a higher survival rate because right now, the stakes are too high to sit by and let nature take its course. I’m on the late patrol, 12:30-4:30am. Since I’m thirteen, I’ve only stayed up this late once or twice in my life. The feeling that I’m awake well past my bedtime only adds to the gravity of the situation and makes the entire night feel surreal.

That week I spent in Costa Rica awakened something inside of me. I’d always known conservation was important, but that trip put that knowledge right in front of me. It’s so easy to rationalize away extinctions, to shrug and sigh and ask what we could have done differently. But spending a night watching turtles lay their eggs, and you start to see the stakes. You know in your head that their tears are just a process that’s evolved to allow them to live in salt water, but you still feel like you’re being initiated into the process of life and death, like the universe is giving you a glimpse behind the curtain.

Now, I’m in the Galapagos Islands. The air here is pregnant with environmental conflict and scientific importance.  This is where Charles Darwin himself discovered natural selection, for God’s sake. And after centuries of human interference and millions of tourists coming in and out, Galapagos is threatened too. There are introduced species threatening native birds. There’s trash building up from residents and from ever-increasing levels of tourists. I don’t need to see turtles laying eggs in the wee hours of the morning to feel that same imperative, the same sense that very real things are at stake. Today, we hiked around Santiago Island on lava flows, and we saw a species of plant that’s endemic to that island only. This tiny little succulent vine has managed to survive growing between the black cracks in the lava, and it’s found nowhere else on earth. Everywhere we’ve been in Ecuador is ecologically important, and everywhere has endemic species. But something about the Galapagos Island manages to capture that imperative better even than remote corners of the Amazon that are threatened by oil extraction. The blue waters and sun and geologically spectacular islands make me feel like I’ve come to the end of the world, or a close enough approximation to serve as a set for either Planet Earth or Pirates of the Caribbean. There are sea lions and marine iguanas everywhere, plus Darwin’s famous finches. And it’s beautiful. Spectacularly so.

Here too, there are turtles in the water. They’re green sea turtles, smaller than the leatherbacks I saw in Costa Rica, but they look similar enough that I get the same feeling. These are old animals, both individually and evolutionarily. They’re reptiles who would not look out of place alongside the dinosaurs, and each individual lives longer than most humans ever will. The nature writer Craig Childs told me last fall that you should never listen to anyone who tells you not to anthropomorphize animals, because assigning human emotions and motivations to animals is the only way we have to relate, empathize and care for them. So I watch these turtles, the way they move through the water with such slow grace and I think that they must feel the changes in their world. Maybe they’re largely insulated from the effects of civilization since they live in one of the most protected marine reserves on earth. But turtles have been known to migrate extraordinary distances, and I can’t help but think that they must notice the plastic building up in the oceans, the rising temperatures and sea levels, the way more and more two-legged creatures come in boats every year, pointing cameras at them and exclaiming in delight every time one of them sticks its head above the water to breathe. More than noticing, I look at these old sea creatures, and I think they must understand. They have to see how it’s connected, how the increased presence of humans is tied to the trash in their home, to the slow erosion of their slow way of life.

I want someone from the animal kingdom to hold us accountable, and these ancient reptiles seem like appropriate stewards of the place where life began in a primordial stew. Every single species of marine turtle is endangered on a global level, and I worry that this is the only reprimand they’ll give us. Turtles don’t cry out asking to be saved, and they don’t hold the same imperative that seems to come with polar bears and wolves. I worry that their last message will be almost silent, that they won’t warn us. I worry that they will slip away, and their absence will speak louder than the rasping way they take in air, heads just barely above the surface of the water, entering our above-ground world for a second before vanishing back into the blue-green depths of the ocean.

Danger in the forest

Temperate forests train us to be passive. Occasionally, hikers get eaten by bears or cougars, or gored to death by mountain goats. But by and large, the biggest threats you face in a temperate forest are the elements. You’re much more likely to hurt yourself by getting lost, falling off of a cliff, drowning in a raging river or freezing to death. You’re constantly battling the elements when you’re outside--taking off a fleece, putting on a rain jacket. You’re afraid of getting wet, of cold, of the setting sun.

In the tropics, the elements are more or less constant. It might rain, but it’s so warm that it doesn’t really matter. It’s always hot and humid, and so you’re constantly drenched in your own sweat. And yet, walking through a tropical forest, you have to be constantly on guard. Here, all the threats to your existence are living. There are the standard subjects of nature documentaries—anacondas lurking in rivers, poisonous snakes tangled in the vines of a tree, ants whose sting will have you in bed for two days with a fever. But really, the danger is everywhere. Wasp stings become routine, like getting bitten by a mosquito while hiking in the Cascades. You have to re-learn how to walk in an environment where you can’t grab a tree to stop a fall because the trunk is covered in spines, home to a toxic caterpillar, or protected by a group of army ants. You’re constantly vigilant, because everything around you is full of poison—the spines of plants, the insects living on them, the snakes you’ve been afraid of your whole life, the frogs hiding between the leaves. There’s no place for idle daydreaming, for putting your hands on a blind ledge or grabbing a vine without really looking at it.

And yet, here I take risks. I strip naked, wearing nothing but my rain boots, and let wasps sting me in unmentionable places as I bathe in a puddle of water on the forest floor. I run through the forest on a moonless night without a headlamp, where the dark is so total that I can’t see my hand in front of my face. I swim in a river where I’ve seen an anaconda the night before, where there are piranhas and caimans and parasitic fish that will swim up your vagina and have to be surgically removed. I do this for a week, get stung by something large and black that I can’t quite see, and my hand is radiating burning pain past my wrist for an hour. But I’m fine. I survive, largely without incident.

Now, I want to go home and get to know my place better. I’ve never thought to run naked through a temperate forest, partially because I’d probably be close to well-frequented trails, but really because I just haven’t been trying hard enough to actually be outside. I don’t go into Discovery Park at night and run around without a headlamp. I don’t sit nestled between the roots of a hemlock tree and sketch the plants near me or close my eyes and see if I can hear the wind over the sound of my own thoughts. I haven’t even snuck back into Cleveland Memorial Forest, the Seattle School District-owned piece of old-growth where my high school ran outdoor program trips, to run around on the trails that used to be my home almost every weekend during the school year. I’ve been spending too much time reading, as usual, and not enough time getting to know the plants I live near.

When I come home to the US, I’m going to feel very homeless. Since I left for Ecuador, my cousin has moved into my room. My stuff is mostly in boxes in the basement. I have stuff in storage at Whitman, but I’m not moved into my house there either. I need focus and purpose for the month I’m home, or I’m going to drive myself crazy sitting at home and feeling like I don’t quite belong. And so, I want to try to re-learn the forests of my childhood, to connect with them better, to teach myself botany like a scientist and teach myself to see place like a tracker. I want to spend a good portion of a day or two every week in the forests by my house, not hiking, but just sitting and observing things and drawing leaves. So many indigenous people raised in the Amazon are able to walk through their tropical forests with completely confidence, knowing which plants are safe to eat and how to get where they need to go. I’ve been blessed to grow up near a forest that’s safe, a forest where I’m not going to get bitten by a poisonous snake or attacked by a bullet ant. And it’s time for me to start taking advantage of that.

The gay conversation

My host brother, Nico, had one of his friends over last week (they play in a band together), and I was chatting with them about music. My brother’s friend studied in the US for a while and has a gringa girlfriend, so his English is even better than Nico’s (he’s more or less fluent, but you can tell English isn’t his first language). He always wants to speak English with me, so we usually talk in a mixture of the two languages. The boys were discussing songs for their band, and Nico mentioned loving some song by John Mayer. His friend agreed, and I shook my head.

“What?” the friend asked me.

“Nothing, he’s just an asshole and a womanizer,” I responded. We discussed this for a little while—they wanted to know how I knew this (“Have reasons, Rachel,” said Nico). I said I saw stuff about him on supermarket tabloid covers. Eventually, we agreed that his music was one thing, but as a person, he was probably an asshole.

And then Nico’s friend says, “Well, at least he’s not gay.”

Quito as a city looks pretty developed. The more rural areas of Ecuador seem more classically “third world”, but Quito might as well be a major city in the US, at least in many regards. So sometimes I forget how different cultures can be here. But this is one of the most striking differences between the US and the Third World that I’ve noticed. Say what you will about the US’s policies towards gay people, but at least among our urban, well-educated population, being gay has become almost completely normal. Not to say that there isn’t discrimination, but being gay is not the awful, secret thing it was fifty years ago. A friend coming out to me wouldn’t elicit anything more than, “Oh, ok, cool.” I’ve almost gotten to the point where I stop assuming gender when someone mentions having a significant other.

So here I am, radical feminist/ally Rachel, sitting across the table from two nice, well-educated guys who happen to believe that about half of my friends are disgusting. Cultural sensitivity is one thing, but I wasn’t letting that one slide.

“What does that mean?” I asked. Nico’s friend said something I don’t remember about gay people being gross. I said, “You know, like half of my friends at school are gay.”

He countered with, “That’s ok because you’re a girl, though. It’s not weird if they’re lesbian.”

This sentiment, that somehow lesbians are ok, or aren’t really gay, is something I also noticed in Ghana. While I was there, homosexuality was causing quite the controversy in the local papers (this all started when the main government-owned daily paper ran as a front page headline: 8000 HOMOS FOUND IN TWO REGIONS. The deck was, “majority infected with HIV/AIDS”. The actual story was that the UN AIDS program was trying to get people to come forward and get tested for HIV as a public health measure, and some of them happened to be gay.) So the whole time I was there, there were opinion columns and articles debating the ethics of tolerating homosexuals, one of which defined bisexuality as “when someone is married but maintains sexual relations with the same sex.” And yet invariably, every single article would spend paragraphs bashing gay people and then say something to the effect of, “Lesbians are totally cool, though.” I think it’s a pretty common attitude in general. For people threatened by gay-ness, lesbians are much safer. First of all, girls don’t have sex (because we’re all proper and don’t have any libido and are just waiting to be seduced by nice guys). So if someone says they’re lesbian, no one pictures two girls going at it. Also, lesbians come with the possibility of girls making out with each other! Which many straight guys seem to think is the most exciting thing in the world.

Anyway, back in Ecuador, I was shaking my head and trying to figure out what I could say to these guys. I said, “No, they’re not all lesbian, I have guy friends who are gay too.”

And then, Nico’s friend says, “Oh, that’s scary though…” He motions cutting himself and blood dripping, and says, “…and then you’ll get HIV.”

At that point, I just got mad. I said, no, that’s absurd, most gay people do not have HIV. He said, yes they do, because they all have anal sex. I said that not all gay people have anal sex, and anyway, that’s why condoms were invented. He said, no, condoms were invented for guys and girls to use, not for gay people. Clearly, I was not getting anywhere here.

And so he kept talking with Nico, and I thought about straight privilege. It hurts me to hear people talk this way about people I know and love. Two of my best friends from high school are gay. Another one is trans. My roommate freshman year was queer. About half of my friends at Whitman are not straight in some capacity. And yet, as a straight person, I can travel to countries where the prevailing attitude towards gayness is one of disgust and judgment, and I can feel safe. My relationships will never be questioned. I am normal. I fit the mold.

As I’m sitting here, thinking, he asks me what I’m thinking about. I shook my head, not sure how to explain. He says, “You’re thinking about them having sex, aren’t you?” I said no, I was thinking about all the people I know and care about who happen to be gay, but also happen to be people with characteristics other than their sexuality. He laughed and said, “But now you’re thinking about sex.” I said yes, since he brought it up. He said it would just be weird to have gay friends, because they might start liking you. I said, so what, I’ve had guy friends who liked me when I didn’t feel the same way, and it’s weird, but it wouldn’t  be any weirder if it was a girl. He shook his head and employed the standard Latino guy defense. “It’s just because we have a machista culture”, he said. That’s why we’re not ok with the gays.

Machista culture is obviously something I have a hard time with. It’s employed during orientation to tell women that we shouldn’t drink much and need to be extra careful (not that this isn’t true, but I would rather live in a world where we educate men not to rape women, rather than educating women about how not to get raped). It’s the excuse given for the men who whistle at you on the bus and creep on you when you’re walking home. It’s the go-to explanation for behavior that I would label as obsessive, bordering on stalking, when dealing with men my age in Latin America. I’m just worried about you. That’s why I’ve texted you every ten minutes for the past two hours to ask you why you weren’t responding to my first message. It’s probably the reason that when I left the club I was at on Friday night at 2am, a random strange man asked me where I was going, and when I said home, he asked if he could come with me and got offended when I said absolutely not. I can get on board with cultural sensitivity when it’s about the fact that Ecuadorians will tell you a time for something and mean an hour later. Or when it’s about the fact that food=love, so you have to finish everything on your plate lest you gravely offend your host mom. But the machista thing, I don’t buy. Cultural differences are great, but some things need to evolve. Sexism is one of them. Homophobia is another.

And yet, during this conversation with Nico and his friend, I asked them if homosexuality was illegal here. Both of them said no, absolutely not. How could that even be illegal, they asked? I said that gay sex had been illegal in many states in the US until 2003, that it was absolutely illegal in many other countries, especially in Africa, and that in Uganda, it was punishable by death. They looked at me incredulously and said no, we don’t do that here. And both of them seemed to think that the notion of making anyone’s sexual orientation illegal was absurd. I suppose that’s progress of a kind. And given how far the US has come on LGBT issues in the past fifty years, I’m optimistic that the rest of the world will soon follow.

Fútbol in Ecuador

Mostly, I write about ideas and politics on here, but I thought I’d take a break and describe some of the things I’ve actually been doing in Ecuador. Last Friday afternoon, the Ecuadorian national soccer team played the Venezuelan team in the first round of eliminator games for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Naturally, our whole group decided to go. Fútbol is almost more of a religion here than Catholicism is. The stadium was surrounded by people selling team jerseys (which we all bought), people doing face painting, and perhaps most comically, people filling giant bottles (we’re talking gallons) of beer to take into the stadium. Apparently Ecuador hasn’t caught up with the US in terms of concessions monopolies, so you’re absolutely allowed to bring beverages into the stadium. My group elected to buy a bunch of rum, three liters of Coke and some limes before we went in, so we had a great time mixing Cuba Libres on the sidewalk outside of the stadium while trying to look nonchalant when the police walked by. In the end, we were able to walk into the stadium with three liters of rum and Coke without incident.

Seats are not assigned at the stadium, and by the time we got there (an hour before the game started), every single seat was full. I use the term “seat” loosely, since they’re really concrete benches, and everyone’s goal is to squeeze as many people as possible onto them. Somehow, I talked a nice guy into giving me and a friend seats that he’d been saving, so we were able to actually sit down for most of the game.

One of the things about going to a national sporting event (as opposed to say, a baseball game in the US), is that supporting the team boils down to a thinly-disguised fanatic sort of nationalism. It’s like how everyone in the US gets during the Olympics, except when you’re actually watching the game, it’s right next to you and much, much louder. Ecuadorians have a fútbol song, which I’m convinced every single person in the country knows the words to, and people just started singing it all the time before and during the game. The words are, “Vamos, Ecuatorianos, esta noche, tenemos que ganar,”

 which translates to, “Let’s go, Ecuadorians, tonight, we have to win.” (It sounds a lot better when it’s being sung in Spanish). My favorite part of the game was when they announced the Venezuelan team. I didn’t even realize they were announcing anything—the sound system wasn’t much of a match for the noise made by a full stadium of fútbol fans—but as soon as they called the first player’s name, the entire stadium raised their fists in the air and chanted, “¡Hijo de puta!” (son of a whore). All of this, perfectly coordinated, for every single player on the team. I was impressed.

Ecuador won the game (thank god), 2-0. The whole experience made me wish soccer was more of a thing in the US. I’ve always been a baseball girl, though I stopped watching pros when the Mariners started sucking so much. But soccer is so energetic and fast-paced, and it’s so easy to appreciate the athleticism of someone who can head a ball into the goal. Plus, I love the rowdiness of soccer fans, though I think a lot of that has to do with the extremely lax rules about alcohol consumption in the stadium. (The section next to ours had a guy who was repeatedly chugging beers, which prompted the entire crowd to form a circle around him and cheer him on, breaking into applause when he finished.) There were a few minor fights, but nothing serious, probably because almost everyone in attendance was supporting the same team.

I’m always amazed by the unity of sports fans, and sometimes I find myself wondering what would happen if we could get so many people to come together so clearly for something that actually mattered, or if even a fraction of the money and time and energy spent on professional sports franchises were spent on health care or improving education or something socially beneficial. And yet, sports seem to be the great unifier in the world—regardless of country, race, class and increasingly gender, most people can appreciate watching a team, feeling part of something bigger, having common ground with strangers. Marx may have thought religion is the opiate of the masses, but I’m starting to think that it’s soccer. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Occupy Wall Street, cynicism, and power

Wall Street has been occupied for over three weeks now. (If you’ve been living in a cave and are unaware of the existence of Occupy Wall Street, you can read up on it here.) That sense of rage, the slow-burning knowledge that things are not ok, has finally come to the surface. I’ve been praying for this for almost a year. Watching the Arab Spring unfold, seeing the protests rippling across Europe in the wake of austerity measures, I asked again and again, “What will it take for us to wake up? What will it take for Americans to take to the streets?” I wanted our moment of revolution, the rejection of existing methods of expression, a truly grassroots expression of uncompromised anti-establishment action, desde abajo y a la izquierda.

I want to believe so much that this movement can accomplish something, that there are policy changes which would meaningfully address the growing wealth gap. I want to let this be the re-growth of my idealism, my faith that a group of committed citizens can spur lasting changes in the power structure of the state. I want to believe that the state is not irredeemable. Even President Obama said that the protesters were expressing legitimate grievances, that growing inequality is an unfortunate fact of our society. And for a split second, I thought that might mean things would change.

But there’s always reality, and power. Or more accurately, the reality of power. And the reality of power is that the United States government, regardless of the party the president happens to belong to, exists primarily to defend the interests of business and capital. The government does not exist to protect your family, or ensure access to health care, or protect your grandchildren from the accumulation of toxic chemicals in their food. The government exists to defend existing power structures.

In this case, that means setting forth new trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. Specifically, the agreements submitted by the Obama administration to Congress yesterday would allow foreign companies to be bailed out by the US government if changes our environmental and labor laws cause them to lose money. These agreements are literally the antithesis of everything that Occupy Wall Street stands for, and their timing seems like cruel irony. In the wake of the State Department’s approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, these things have ceased to shock me. But my lack of shock is in itself, surprising to me. Every time Obama does one more thing I disagree with, every time I shake my head and say, “It figures”, I can’t help but wonder—when did I become this cynical? And more disturbing than my cynicism—which has reached levels more appropriate for a 70-year old man than a young college student—is the fact that it exists in spite of my best efforts to the contrary. In spite of spending months trying to find reasons for hope, trying to believe that the abuses of those in power were not systematic and deliberate, that government could be redeemed—I can’t help but feel that the deep level of cynicism I’ve sunk to is nothing more than an accurate assessment of reality.

Even Ecuador has failed to provide a safe haven from the cruel reality of power. My host dad just returned from the Amazon, where he works as a petroleum engineer (he spends twenty days in the field, then ten days back home in Quito). Upon his return, he told me that he had talked to some indigenous people who live in Yasuní National Park. Yasuní sits on top of ample reserves of tar sands oil, which President Correa says he’s willing to leave in the ground if the international community pays Ecuador half the value of the oil—$3.5 billion over a ten year period. German delegates just visited Ecuador to see Yasuní, and have committed millions to the proposal. Correa went to the UN to raise support, and has $55 million pledged (he needs $100 million by the end of the year, or else he says he’ll open Yasuní).

I asked my dad about the Yasuní initiative. He said the indigenous people he talked to told him that there are already wells in the ground in the park, that the oil sitting underground has already been sold to China. He said that Correa’s efforts to raise money for the proposal amounted to nothing more than political theater, that he will be shocked if Yasuní doesn’t open for oil extraction eventually. I wish I could say I was surprised, but after everything I’ve heard about the Ecuadorian government, this seemed inevitable. Of course we’re going to take the most biodiverse place on earth and extract oil from it. Correa may succeed in painting himself and his country as victims of capitalism at the hands of Western neo-imperialist powers. “We wanted to save Yasuní,” he’ll tell the cameras, “but we needed money, and since the rich countries wouldn’t pay us to not destroy the rainforest, we had no choice.” I’ve never met the man; I can’t say whether he truly cares about conservation or just pays lip service when he knows it’s politically expedient to do so. But given that oil accounts for at least 50% of Ecuador’s export earnings, 15-20% of GDP and 30-40% of the government’s total revenues, the Ecuadorian government is logically going to defend extraction. Correa, unlike Obama, at least has the justification that the revenues are going to finance social programs to benefit the poor (at least in theory).

Knowing all this, I’m paralyzed by inaction. I know the Keystone pipeline cannot be built; I also know that I’m powerless to stop it. Even the group that’s organized to defeat it, Tar Sands Action, doesn’t seem to have a plan B. I asked them on Twitter, “Do you have a plan besides asking Obama nicely not to kill our planet?” Their response: “Yes, two weeks of sit-ins [at the White House] in August”. Then they linked to their action proposal, which included demands that the pipeline not be built, but no tactics beyond asking those in power to act against their own perceived self-interest. I tweeted back, “Sit-ins seem like a slightly more militant form of asking nicely.” I never received a response.

Putting faith in the state is an ineffective strategy for activism. If your entire plan consists of getting Congress to pass some piece of carefully-crafted legislation, what do you do when they refuse? If Obama’s State Department can say with a straight face that the construction of a major oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast will have “no significant adverse impacts” on the environment, how can any reasonable strategy for action rely on asking them to change their mind based on rational argument? Sure, you could tie a project up for years with lawsuits, but if you make it all the way to the Supreme Court and lose, what recourse do you have? Yet even knowing this, I can’t come up with plan B. We need the same critical mass that was willing to get arrested sitting peacefully in front of the White House to go sit in front of the bulldozers that break ground for the pipeline. We need a steady stream of cynics and idealists who care about the living planet to put themselves between power and the things it seeks to destroy. We need people willing to sabotage the pipeline. But as much as I believe in defending our earth, I have to wonder if we can win at all, even if we’re willing to break the law. Stand in front of bulldozers, and you will be arrested. Fight back, and you will get shot. Attack the pipeline, and you’ll shut down production for a little while, causing an oil spill in the process. And then it will be fixed. You’ll have to attack it again, and again. You will be caught and arrested. You’ll get a life sentence for domestic terrorism, if you’re lucky. In Ecuador, they don’t always bother with sentencing you. Assassins can be hired in Coca, an oil town in the Amazon, for less than $50. Naturally, oil companies have made use of this fact get rid of problematic activists. One way or another, you will be silenced, and maybe someone will follow in your footsteps, but the overwhelming odds are in favor of power. They always are.

I have to believe that some of the people who are occupying Wall Street know this. And perhaps that’s why they’re out there, day after day, without a cohesive platform or leader or proposal for action. If I were home right now, I’d be in the streets too. I’m angry and cynical and exhausted just trying to keep track of the latest abuses and casualties of those in power. But I don’t have a plan for fixing it all. There are reforms that would help, that would put sufficiently large Band-Aids over the gaping holes in our social structure to make the lives of average people better. I’m in favor of anything that marginally improves the lives of average Americans, that helps to close the gaping wealth gap. I’m in favor of job creation programs and more progressive taxation and the whole laundry list of liberal reform goals. But it won’t be enough. It never is. And knowing that scares me unspeakably. It makes me terrified for the future, not so much for myself, but for indigenous communities and the working poor and the rare species of amphibians that live in Yasuní. It makes me want to do something, anything. It makes me want to take to the streets, placard in hand, chanting about democracy and wealth distribution and power, because I don’t know what else to do. I’m hoping that someone will figure that out before it’s too late, and I say that knowing that hope, just like putting faith in the state, is the antithesis of meaningful activism.

Best of the Oriente

I just got back from a week in the Oriente, which is what Ecuadorians call the Amazonian region of the country (basically, everything east of the Andes). I’ll update later with some thoughts on ecology, oil and all the rest, but for now, I’m just going to list the coolest things I did.

1) Saw an anaconda eating a caiman. We were out on a night boat ride to see wildlife, and we’re apparently one of only two SIT groups to have ever seen an anaconda, much less one strangling its prey. This was, naturally, the same river we were all swimming in every day. It also has piranhas and little fish that can swim up your urethra or vagina and stick there (they’re fish parasites that live in fish gills, but sometimes they get confused).

2) Got up at 4:45 to hike up to the canopy tower in the rainforest and watch dawn break over the tops of the trees, with a soundtrack of scarlet macaws, thousands of insects, and howler monkeys.

3) In response to a severe rainstorm, we all put on our bathing suits, covered ourselves in mud and formed a tribe called the Goops. It was kind of a lot like Avatar, and involved running around mostly naked, making up a nature song, finding our plant souls and sliding down a muddy hill into the anaconda-infested river to rinse off.

4) Spending a few hours in the canopy tower in the dark, on a half-moon night with stars, getting completely naked 120 feet above the forest and watching the heat lightning in the distance before hiking back to camp wearing nothing but my rain boots.

5) Teaching several of my fellow program participants how to navigate using a compass, take bearings on a map and triangulate. And then, for the first time in my life, getting lost in a forest and actually using a compass successfully to get unlost! I knew all that high school outdoor program stuff would come in handy sometime.

6) Explaining to a group of woolly monkeys in a tree that if the land across the river opens for oil exploration, they should try to sabotage company operations by throwing feces at oil company workers and destroying their machinery. Not sure they understood me; they kept eating and throwing leaves at me instead. Maybe they don’t speak English.

7) The moment when Taylor accidentally let a snake loose in the classroom and I had to go outside (other than flying/takeoff, snakes are the only thing I’m really afraid of, though in a pretty rational fashion). And then I got to watch through the window while four people attempted to find and recapture the snake (which they eventually succeeded in doing).

8) Leaving the hotel where we were waiting for our bus to take us to the Coca airport and wandering around town by myself for ten minutes. Probably the most interesting ten minutes of my week that didn’t include wildlife. I was the only gringa on the street and got a lot of whistles, catcalls and greetings from men. The stores and general smell reminded me of Ghana—a hot, humid place where most of life takes place outside and there are giant cuts of raw meat dangling from awnings on the street. It also underscored how coddled we are on this program—I wasn’t supposed to leave the hotel, supposedly because of “safety”, which I understand is important to an institution, but still struck me as a bit odd. After all, it was broad daylight, anyone trying to hurt me would have had to do so in plain view of about three dozen other people, and the only thing I had on me other than my clothes was fifteen dollars tucked in my bra.

From above the canopy

Tonight I stand on the edge of a thousand universes knowing nothing on earth can touch me. Tonight I run naked through the forest, grateful that the snakes and jaguars allow me to continue my fantasy where I am dominant in a land I do not know. Tonight I learn to see heat lightning and take photos of black to tell a story about place which cannot be put into words. Tonight, I know I can fly. Tonight I smell myself, feel the moths and ants crawling on my skin, sweat, run, jump and pray. Tonight I see the moon in all her glory. Tonight I am infinite and so connected to all that is and has ever existed. Tonight I let myself feel place without seeing the scars. Tonight I take a journey to a land far from home. Tonight I know danger and hope I won’t feel it. Tonight I could jump off this tower and be the happiest I’ve ever been until the second I hit solid ground. Tonight I want to spend hours watching the stars, going back in time to the universe where all of them burned bright. Tonight I feel whole because I am uncivilized.

Tonight, I see the glow of the oil town to the north, and I know why I am fighting.

Yasuní: time for environmentalists to hold the line

Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park is one of the most biodiverse areas on earth. In one hectare, you’ll find more tree species in Yasuní than exist in the entirety of North America. The area is also home to several uncontacted tribes—indigenous Huaorani people who have chosen to isolate themselves from the rest of Ecuador and western civilization. They’re among the few holdouts in a world where American culture and businesses have penetrated to the furthest reaches of the globe, where children are almost as likely to recognize Mickey Mouse as they are Jesus or Santa Claus.

Naturally, Yasuní also has huge oil reserves buried under it. Under the lush forest, there are estimated to be 846 million barrels of oil (20% of Ecuador’s total reserve), which would take ten years to extract. It’s not just any oil, either. It’s bituminous oil, better known as tar sands, oil that wasn’t even economically viable to extract until recently, oil that releases 5-15% more carbon dioxide carbon in its extraction and refinement than traditional crude does. If you’ve paid attention to environmental news at all over the past few decades, then you know that the Ecuadorian Amazon basically wrote the book on how indigenous communities are exploited in the name of resource extraction. I can’t think of any other place on earth, except the Niger Delta, where local communities have been so hurt by petroleum. Cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, skin lesions, chronic infections and other medical problems are drastically elevated in people living near oil installations. Spills are extremely common, and attempts to clean them up are nonexistent or laughably inadequate (I’ve seen photos of a piece of wood stuffed inside a pipeline, supposedly to stop it from leaking). The roads in and out of the forest are unpaved, and to keep dust from blowing away, the companies regularly coat the roads in crude oil. Water is contaminated everywhere. Species are going extinct. People can’t farm. They can’t survive.

Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador, has proposed a somewhat novelconservation plan. Instead of extracting the oil in Yasuní, he’s said that he’s willing to leave it underground if the international community will pay him half of the value of the oil instead—about $350 million annually, or $3.5 billion total. (In Ecuador, all mineral resources underground automatically belong to the government, regardless of who owns the land above them.) This plan has stalled a bit since its proposal. Germany committed $50 million annually to the government of Ecuador for 30 years, but backed out because they felt that Correa wasn’t serious about conservation. Correa’s attempts to actually raise the money haven’t gone particularly well, so earlier this year, he announced plan B. Either he gets $100 million by the end of this year, or Yasuní opens for oil extraction. (Incidentally, the new constitution of Ecuador, which was ratified in 2008 under Correa’s administration, specifically prohibits resource extraction in national parks. But there are exceptions which can be made by order of the president.) Correa went to the UN this week to try to raise support for this plan, which Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has supported. So far, $55 million of the necessary $100 million has been pledged. The Ecuadorians I’ve spoken to about this are deeply skeptical. My host dad, who works as a petroleum engineer in the Amazon, is doesn’t believe that Correa’s plan will work, because he doesn’t think Ecuador will be able to come up with the money. The clock’s ticking, and while Bill Gates could easily come up with the $45 million needed to stop what will probably be the greatest environmental disaster in the history of the world, he’s too busy focusing on “global health” to worry about the health of the living planet. Many Ecuadorians I’ve talked to feel that Correa doesn’t really care about preventing the extraction—he’s been overzealously threatening to go ahead with plan B instead of devoting time and energy to raising money for plan A. In general, his administration has been very pro-extraction (“We can’t afford to be beggars sitting on a pile of gold”, he’s said, conveniently ignoring the fact that Ecuador’s national debt has risen exponentially since oil extraction started in earnest.)

If the history of resource extraction is any indication, Yasuní will likely go through. And that absolutely cannot happen. This is the front line of our climate war. Just as much as the Keystone XL pipeline cannot be allowed to happen, Yasuní needs to stay protected. Extracting the oil will involve massive deforestation to build roads, pipelines, and the like. The spills that will inevitably occur will have devastating impacts on the health of indigenous communities, not to mention the non-human inhabitants of the area. And then, of course, the actual burning of the oil will be an environmental disaster. I know we’re not going to win this war. But I also know that there are some battles that really, really matter. These are the ones that go into the history books, the ones where strategy and tactics are analyzed again and again, where tides turn and names are made, remembered. I want us to win this one.

Normally, my approach to activism involves documentation. Go into the Amazon, talk to the tribes, take dramatic high-contrast photos of oil spills and dignified mostly-naked hunters staring off into the brush. Show the world what’s at stake, make people aware of the situation, and pray that they’ll do the right thing.

The petroleum situation in the Amazon has been documented ad nauseum. Most people who are aware of environmental issues at all have read Savages or watched Crude or read about the suit against Texaco/Chevron, where earlier this year an Ecuadorian judge ordered the company to pay $18.2 billion in damages against communities in the Amazon during the 1970s (naturally, they’re still appealing, and trying to get the US government to intervene on their behalf, as Wikileaks recently uncovered/reported). If the proverbial bulldozers come to Yasuní, we won’t be saved by gorgeous magazine spreads showing exactly what will be lost in the extraction. We might be saved if people have the courage to stand in front of those bulldozers, to fight back whatever the cost.

I’m going to borrow a comparison from Lierre Keith here (used in her essay “It Takes A Village to Raise a Prarie”, which appeared in the last issue of the Earth First! Journal). In 1854, the US government passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which stated that residents of each state would be able to decide if slavery was allowed there. Abolitionists felt the emergency of the situation. They knew that if Kansas fell to slavery, the rest of the West would go too. And so they moved to Kansas by the thousands to put a stop to something they knew was wrong. They left their homes behind and risked their lives because they knew that they had to go, that this was simply the right thing to do.

I know that bringing a bunch of white environmentalists into the Amazon to stand up for tribes there is potentially problematic and paternalistic. Communities in the Amazon need to decide for themselves if they want oil companies there, though my understanding is that pretty much every indigenous community that has come into contact with oil companies has been very clear in their opposition to the theft and exploitation of their land. But if communities decide to fight and are willing to accept help, we need to answer that call. We need to do something besides writing nicely-worded petitions to the Ecuadorian government. We need the Kansas ethic again. We need a committed group of activists who are willing to go to the front lines, no matter what the risks, and stay there until the battle is over. Because doing anything else—turning a blind eye, putting our faith in the state, hoping without taking action—leaves us complicit.

I may still be here at the end of December, when Correa makes his decision. Assuming politics functions the way it always does, I’m sure the deadline will be pushed back, renegotiated. I’m sure actual work won’t start until later, even if he gives the go-ahead at the end of the year. But if I’m here when those bulldozers start clearing the way, I have no idea what I’ll do. I want, so badly, to say no, you can’t do this here. I want to stand for something real, and this is about as real as it gets. But I also don’t want to spend my life rotting in an Ecuadorian prison for something that ultimately didn’t make a difference (environmental protest is heavily criminalized here—blocking a road carries a five year minimum sentence, and 95% of people arrested on this charge are activists protesting mining and oil extraction). I’m an idealistic coward, and I don’t know how big the stakes need to be before that will change.

I’m going to Yasuní for a week on Monday. We’re going to be spending our time at an ecological reserve doing ecology and natural history stuff. I feel like an underground agent, pretending to be a scientist while searching for any glimmer of truth related to petroleum. We drive in on oil company roads, past their checkpoints. We show our WHO cards, proof that we’ve been vaccinated against yellow fever so we won’t expose the indigenous groups in the area. We go deep, deep into the forest, two canoe trips and two bus rides past the airport in Coca, and still, if you hike too far north from the station we’re staying at, you can hear company generators roaring in the night. I have no idea what I will see, if I’ll see anything, if it will give me some kind of moral clarity. But whatever it is, I’ll report back.