Yasuní and Hypocrisy

Some days I feel like the most important part of ethnographic fieldwork is not pissing people off. This is especially true at the university where I'm working right now, because I'm researching a topic that may seem boring/technocratic (university accreditation) but is actually quite politically sensitive. I try to do favors to help offset the fact that people may find me mildly annoying and maybe even intrusive. Often, this involves translation (e-mails, exams, essays, rap songs, article abstracts... I've done it all). Yesterday, I was helping a student prepare for a job interview, which will be conducted in English. I tried to assuage her pre-interview panic by jotting down proper translations for cliche phrases like "my biggest strength is my ability to work in teams" and "in five years I will be advancing in the company." I got near the end of her list of sample interview questions and read out loud: "What special skills could you bring to your position at Halliburton?" Major ick moment: I was helping a student land a job at Halliburton. I wanted so badly to advise her to put her industrial engineering degree to better use. Dick Cheney! Iraq! Don't do it! And still, I pocketed my geo-political rant. We went on to the proper pronunciation of the word "development."

Later that same afternoon, Ecuador's President, Rafael Correa, held a press conference where he extinguished my last environmentalist flame of hope for Ecuador. He announced he was terminating the Yasuní initiative (Yasuní-ITT), a project of his own government to protect a large portion of the Ecuadorian Amazon from oil drilling. Here are the basics of the (as-of-yesterday-defunct) Yasuní Initiative: Instead of drilling for oil in the Yasuní region, Ecuador would raise money from wealthy countries and donors concerned with climate change. These donations would replace some of the economic gains Ecuador would have earned upon drilling. The logic makes sense in a weird way: if the world doesn't want Ecuador to drill in the rainforest, they should pay Ecuador for the oil it won't be taking out of the ground. That way the state still gets money for its natural resources, without actually exploiting them.

"The petroleum stays underground. Buy a barrel. Yasuni-ITT."

The problem with the Yasuní Initiative was that no one would actually donate. Ecuador only raised a fraction of the money it had hoped for. While wealthy foreigners will claim to "protect the Amazon" in theory, they won't actually PAY to do so under Correa's terms. Yesterday Correa called this "the great hypocrisy" of powerful, greenhouse-gas-emitting countries, who say they're concerned about climate change but really just want more oil. He announced "the world has failed us" Ecuadorians. The end of the Yasuní Inititiative means that portions of the previously-protected Yasuni National Park, 9,820 of the most biodiverse square kilometers on the planet, will be opened for state oil exploitation.

Here's my problem with scrapping the Yasuni-ITT and opening the region for drilling. First, this region is way more special that other places anyone is (or could be) drilling for oil. I could go on for days trying to explain why this is the case, but I'll just quote this article by Jonathan Watts: "One Yasuni hectare – the area of two football pitches – is home to a wider variety of trees, birds, reptiles and amphibians than in the US and Canada combined." Tiny portion of Amazon > everything that exists in North America ever, in ecological terms.

Also, while it may be true that "the world has failed us," Correa's government also failed us. While wealthy countries may have been "hypocritical" to not support Yasuní-ITT, it is also hypocritical (& false) to conclude that Ecuador's only alternative is to take oil out of the ground. Instead of reaffirming his commitment to Amazonian peoples and ecosystems, or trying to find another way to protect the region, Correa gave up. Is there really no revenue alternative to oil? Or was Yasuni-ITT destined to fail all along, a way for Correa to say he "tried" to protect the Amazon while making other plans?

The socialist bright side is that the Ecuadorian state will receive the majority of Yasuní oil revenues (rather than private companies), which one hopes will help build a more robust and egalitarian society. And I always feel like I have to say this, but Correa is not evil-- he has lifted millions of Ecuadorians out of poverty, is wildly popular among citizens, and has stabilized Ecuador after a decade of intense political-economic distress. Still, I don't see how more oil exploitation benefits or will benefit Ecuador's poor people or help the state achieve its development goals in the long-term. Oil disasters overwhelmingly affect the poor & marginalized. The people who will get pushed off their land in the Yasuní protectorate won't be Spanish-speaking lawmakers in Quito, they'll be indigenous people who have lived on that land since before Ecuador was an idea. And when the oil runs out and we're left with a hot, flooding, drought-ridden piece of earth-- those same people will bear the brunt of it.

Protecting Yasuní from oil drilling isn't everything. The initiative wasn't single-handedly going to reverse climate change, protect the remaining indigenous tribes in the area (two of which are classified as "uncontacted"), or save us all from capitalism's seedy underbelly. Most of Ecuador's Amazon region is already open for state and private oil exploitation. But Yasuni-ITT was a kind of symbol for many Ecuadorians-- and not just environmental activists. It was this little piece of land Ecuadorians could point to and be like-- see? The rivers/monkeys/trees/oxygen/people are more special that the black gunk underneath them... at least in this one little part of our country. But even if Yasuni was just a symbol, anthropologists would say that symbolism is important, and sometimes it's everything.What does it mean that the Yasuni-ITT-- whose catch-phrase was "Create a New World"-- is over? I guess we're back to re-creating the old, crappy world?

I've seen/heard a few Ecuadorians react to this decision, and what most opponents are lamenting is not "the great hypocrisy" of an oil-consuming world who won't donate money to protect the rainforest. They are talking about "the great hypocrisy" of Correa, who was elected on a platform of concern for indigenous peoples and the rights of the Pacha Mama-- "Mother Earth" in the indigenous language of Quechua. Correa is "anti-imperial," but only when it benefits his own political movement. On environmental issues, he subscribes to the same relentless model of resource extraction that the imperial world established, and the imperial world demands.