Ecuador: four months to save the world's last great wilderness from 'oil curse'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/14/ecuador-oil-yasuni-national-park

Ecuador: four months to save the world's last great wilderness from 'oil curse'

When large reserves of oil were discovered under Yasuní national park, Ecuador offered the world a choice: give us money and we will not allow drilling. Now $60m must be found by December


Where the foothills of the Andes meet the vast Amazonian rainforest in eastern Ecuador there is a small town called Shell. It's a pockmarked, termite-eaten, one-street place which doubles as a missionary centre and a regional airstrip, but it was here in 1937 that the mighty Shell oil company based its crack Latin American oil-prospecting team. The prize was the vast deposits of crude oil believed then – and now known – to lie beneath some of the densest forests in the world.

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But Ecuador now faces a dilemma. Five years ago the state oil company Petroecuador found a massive new oil field containing nearly a billion barrels of oil in Block 31 of the Yasuní national park close to the Brazilian border. The find was equivalent to 20% of all the nation's reserves, worth a minimum $7-10bn.

The dilemma is that the oil in the Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (ITT) field is below one of the most biodiverse areas of the world and to extract it would devastate one of the last great wildernesses.

Because of its location right on the equator at the junction of the forest and the mountains, Yasuní is one of the last places on earth which is truly undisturbed. As well being home to the the Tagaeri and the Taromenane, two of the world's last uncontacted tribes, the park is thought to have more species of plants, animals and insects per hectare than anywhere else on earth.

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That seems rather bizarre...even cruel.

How does anyone, particularly the people of these tribes, benefit from keeping them isolated from the reality of the modern world?

Ecuadorians should be more hospitable and invite them to join the rest of us in the 21st Century.

who were introduced to modern life and it didn't go well for them. The tribes should already have some idea about other more advanced people. I'm sure some of them have seen planes and people in boats with strange clothing. It's a tough call to decide whether or not the tribes would be better off in our world. They'll come into contact with us eventually, and that will probably be soon enough.

:-(

I am going there next year. Damn oil companies.