MaassPhoto courtesy Erinn Hartman/KnopfNew York Times Magazine contributing writer Peter Maass spent eight years following the flow of oil around the world, from fields in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Azerbaijan to corporate boardrooms. His new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, uses stories from these locales to show why the lucrative resource tends to be very bad for the people who live above it.

We spoke recently about his reporting on this resource curse, and about a strategy he proposes for environmental activists—sourcing gasoline to show buyers the violence their gas money supports.

Q. You call oil “black oxygen.” Unpack that phrase a little.

A.Oil makes our cars move. It makes the planes fly. It’s in our clothes. It’s in our food because it’s in fertilizers. It’s in chemicals. It is just absolutely everywhere in modern existence. It also is everywhere in terms of politics. It’s a major preoccupation of the governments that need it, and it’s the major preoccupation of the governments that have it.

Beyond that, it is a major factor in terms of pollution that occurs in the world today. Even when oil and natural gas are operating the way they are supposed to be, they still cause a lot of damage to the earth. Burning them puts a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. We all know where that’s leading us.

In my book I describe oil not only as black oxygen but also as like gravity, because it’s invisible in a way. From the moment it comes out of the ground until the moment it goes into our gas tank, we do not see it. Yet, like gravity, it influences everything we do.

Q. What makes the oil industry so much more harmful than others?

A.It’s an extractive industry. As with all extractive industries, the word itself tells you quite a lot: you’re gouging into the earth to get something, and that’s never a gentle process.

Second, unlike many other natural resources, oil is really concentrated and really valuable. Whoever owns a certain oilfield--and it usually ends up being a government or a royal family--has an extraordinary amount of concentrated money at their disposal. It’s not a resource like fertile land that is spread over many, many thousands of acres owned by many, many people. It’s not like manufacturing industries where there a lot of workers and a lot of owners and there are products that come out. This is really, really concentrated power. The cliché is that absolute power corrupts and corrupts absolutely. Oil can have a very similar effect because the possessor of oil possesses a country’s destiny.

Q. Does it matter where I buy my gas, or are all oil companies equally harmful? And what about state-owned oil companies like Brazil’s Petrobas?

A.I’ve looked at that question a lot. The more you look at it, there’s something objectionable about pretty much all the oil we consume. If the oil comes from Nigeria, there’s a war being fought over oil in Nigeria. If the oil comes from Ecuador, there’s a tremendous amount of environmental damage that’s coming from that oil. Ironically, most of Ecuador’s oil that goes to the United States goes to California, one of the most environmentally conscious states in the country. If the oil comes from Saudi Arabia, the income from it has gone to feed a lot of Islamic extremism.

Even if the oil is from Canada--which is actually the largest supplier of oil to the United States--a fair amount of Canadian oil comes from tar sands. There you have to cook the earth by using other forms of energy--natural gas, for example--and a lot of water. Canada is a great country politically, and there’s no corruption really associated with the Canadian oil. But there is an environmental toll.

Q. Your book focuses social and human-rights costs of oil extraction. How did climate change play into your reporting with political leaders, executives, and workers?

A.The climate argument has been made really well and continues to be made really well. But I was most interested in writing about the social costs of oil, meaning human rights, violence, and poverty.
So when I went to Nigeria, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, etc., I focused on how people’s lives been affected by the oil that they export.

And honestly, the environmental issues for them are not the same ones they are for us. When I went to the Niger Delta I had to get permission and an aide from the warlord, because if I didn’t have his protection I’d be kidnapped in an instant. We took a canoe up the creeks and it was a terrible situation with wells dripping oil into the water, with flares all over the place, with fighting going on. I spent the night in one totally destitute village. It has no running water or electricity, it has no healthcare, nothing.

Right across from the creek is a multi-billion dollar Shell natural gas processing facility, with massive flares. In the west, flaring is very tightly regulated. In Nigeria, it’s supposed to be but it’s not. At this particular Soku facility, which is actually shut down at the moment due to fighting, there are massive flares going off 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Huge, huge flares. This is consistent throughout the Niger Delta.

One of the reasons flaring is restricted in the United States and elsewhere is not simply because it emits a lot of greenhouse gases, but because it’s incredibly harmful to human health. The toxins and the chemicals that are emitted in flaring are tremendous. So for these villagers in the Niger Delta, the climate issue for them wasn’t that in 20 or 30 years the world temperatures will have increased by another degree and weather patterns will have changed slightly. The climate issue for them is that they were breathing toxic chemicals as a result of this flare that was 40 yards across the creek.

Q. A few years ago the Chicago Tribune published an impressive piece of reporting (Paul Salopek’s “A tank of gas, a world of trouble”) in which a reporter traced gasoline from a suburban gas station back into all the places it came from. What did you make of that?

A. What he did was fantastic. There’s myth that’s perpetrated by the oil industry, and accepted by pretty much everyone, that it’s impossible to trace the oil that you put into your tank. Shell or Exxon say their oil comes from a lot of different sources, it’s mixed together, and it’s just not tracked down to the local level. They say it’s impossible to do. Paul Salopek said, “Let me check into that.” He found out that it is possible to source gasoline that you put into your tank and find out where it actually comes from. He really blew the lid off this myth.

This knowledge needs to get out. When you don’t know the origin of the product you’re buying, you can’t possibly care about the human-rights abuses or the pollution at the point of origin. That goes for tennis shoes as well as oil. By sourcing it, there is a lever that environmental activist groups can use to make people aware on a very local level of what is in their gas tank and what the price is beyond the $2.50 or $3.00 that they are forking over per gallon. It’s a lever that I don’t think environmental activist groups are fully aware of. Who knows where it will get them, but it could be useful.

Q. Is sourcing gasoline still really difficult to do?

A. Salopek had to get some proprietary data in order to get the information. But he’s just one reporter. If he can do it then an environmental group could too, I would think.

Q. What about solutions to the oil problem—do you have any?

A. I do, but none that are original. There are lots of plans and a lot technology that make a lot of sense. The real problem for us isn’t solutions--the problem is embracing the solutions. The political leadership of this country, perhaps spurred on by the citizenry, needs to actually take the steps of investing in conservation, in efficiency, in renewable energy … the list goes on.

The main problem is motivating people, and motivating political leadership. Not just the White House, which seems quite motivated, but all of the interest groups that it has to deal with. All of the regional interest groups it has to deal with. That’s the problem area.

I don’t have an answer for getting from here to there. In writing the book I hoped to make people understand oil more, and therefore support the kinds of changes necessary to get us to a post-oil future.

The size of each country on this map reflects the relative size of its oil reserves. The colors reflect different level of oil consumption (per country, not per capita).

Click to enlarge.

Courtesy Aaron Pava of CivicActions

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Two new documentaries show the damaging effects of the world's addiction to oil, each film from its own unique angle. Crude, which opened in New York on Sept. 9, traces the story of a lawsuit brought by 30,000 rural Ecuadorians against Chevron, which denies responsibility for turning their traditional rainforest home into a dumping ground for crude oil waste, sickening and killing generations of people. And Fuel, which opened in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. on Sept. 18, follows director Josh Tickell on his quest to convert the world to biofuels, eliminating the need for oil and thus -- hopefully -- for lawsuits like the one in Ecuador.

Oil pollutes the water sources of the Ecuadorians in Crude.Both films succeed in engaging viewers with compelling characters and stories -- from the chipper Tickell driving his sunflower-painted, biodiesel-fueled Veggie Van across the country, to the earnest and dogged Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo visiting the grave of his murdered brother. And both expose the utter stupidity and reality-denial of Big Oil, an industry unafraid to trample anything or anyone blocking its path to profit, even as the product still driving those profits grows ever more obviously obsolete.

"It's overly simplistic to say these are greedy companies who want to make money at all costs," Joe Berlinger, who directed Crude, told me on the phone the day after his film's New York release. (His previous work includes Metallica: Some Kind of Monster). "But there's an institutional blindness to the impact of their activities on other parts of the world."

In rural Ecuador, as in many other places off the radar of American consumers, that impact manifests itself in the form of communities that "have been systematically poisoned," as Trudie Styler (wife of Sting and co-founder of the Rainforest Foundation) put it in the film. Her involvement in and support of the case make up just one part of the starry journey that ultimately led to lawyer Fajardo being featured in Vanity Fair and giving a press conference at the Live Earth concert in New York in 2007.

"Pablo Fajardo walks into a room and just reeks of authenticity and heroism," Berlinger said of his film's central character. "This guy has this incredible story. [He] pulls himself up by the bootstraps, gets himself educated with the help of the Catholic church, because he's motivated to do something about the injustices that he saw as a young man working in those fields. I mean, you can't make this stuff up."

Fajardo's story infuses Crude with what Berlinger calls "the human element," something he thinks is often missing from the environmental movement. The passion and struggle of Fajardo and other characters -- like Maria Garofalo, whose 18-year-old daughter has to travel 18 hours to receive cancer treatments, which she can only afford by continuing to work in the fields -- embody the film's larger theme of environmental justice and oppression.

"It's kind of a wake-up call as to how we treat our indigenous people," Berlinger said. "We are eradicating the knowledge and the culture of people who have lived in harmony with nature for millennia, and we should be cherishing their view of consumption and interaction with nature as opposed to eliminating it."

Berlinger acknowledged that his film is a departure from the theme -- heard more loudly in environmental conversations -- of the effects of burning fossil fuels. "This is a film about the devastating effects of the procurement of those resources," he said. "Part of the debate about renewable energy should include, obviously, the impact of production on people and the environment."

Crude tells the story of those who suffer so we can get our oil fix. Fuel explores the ins and outs of that addiction, and promotes a solution that could kick the habit: biodiesel.

Fuel director Josh Tickell and his Veggie Van.Speaking through a sometimes-fuzzy cell phone as he crossed mountains in an algae-powered vehicle on his way to Reno, Fuel director Josh Tickell explained how, from its beginnings, "diesel was based in one concept, the nexus of efficiency and sustainability." Part of his film tells the story of Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine, whose values of social and economic justice sometimes went hand-in-hand with his engineering. His engine was created to run on vegetable oil, with the hope that this would "put power back in the hands of everyday farmers."

"This is the kind of engine we'd all be driving today had Diesel's engines been realized," Tickell said of his car, the Algaeus. But Rudolf Diesel disappeared mysteriously from a ship crossing the English Channel in 1913. Some suggest foul play on the part of competing business interests may have been involved.

Tickell remains remarkably upbeat about biofuels, despite the recent media backlash against them, which, he said, "decimated the biodiesel industry." His current tour across the country in a fleet of algae-powered vehicles focuses on dispersing information about biofuels and engaging politicians with that information.

"We're dissolving the barrier between this movement, which is largely an individualistic movement of personal choice, and what should be, needs to be, and will be a political movement," Tickell said. "We've got to get the environmentalists to get that we have allies in our local political leaders."

Tickell planned to meet with Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons in Reno, where Gibbons would pour a gallon of algae fuel into the Algaeus. A symbolic gesture, surely, but Fuel shows how it was an accumulation of such small steps that propelled biodiesel on its original path to popularity. Although he said he's "not going to hold [his] breath for Congress" to pass sweeping climate legislation, Tickell sees the tide turning toward renewable energy.

"We're in a time of tremendous sea change," he said. "The corporate concept of a triple bottom line -- incorporating sustainability and your ecological footprint into your product -- it's that triple bottom line that's guiding the next generation of energy companies."

Put together, Fuel and Crude offer a wide-ranging look at the vast, complex system of interests swirling in the orbit of one magnetically addictive resource. Rather than being disheartened by this intricacy, though, viewers can find inspiration in both films' stories of struggle and triumph. A goofy college graduate driving a van that smells like French fries can help spark a shift to a new kind of fuel -- and all of a sudden veteran truck drivers are filling their rigs with biodiesel and calling our dependence on foreign oil "a flat-ass shame." A man born into poverty in the Ecuadorian jungle can rise up as a leader for 30,000 of his people, who marvel at his picture in the pages of Vanity Fair. These struggles are far from over, but they're stories we need to hear. Both new films tell them with spirit and compassion.

Watch the trailer for Crude:

And for Fuel:

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In “The Limits of Science Diplomacy,” SciDev.net Director David Dickson argues that scientific collaboration can achieve only very limited diplomatic victories. A conference hosted by the Royal Society in London earlier this month, entitled “New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy” (agenda), seems to have arrived at a similar conclusion.

But this view of science diplomacy is overly pessimistic. It sets unrealistically high expectations such dialogue could never hope to achieve. Science diplomacy is not meant to solve all aspects of conflicts or distrustful relationships, so setting such a high bar is a bit of a straw man. Science, as well as dialogue on the management of shared natural resources, remains an under-utilized and under-studied tool for trust-building, so it is premature to declare it a failure before we have sufficient evidence for evaluation.

Veterans of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and other Cold War-era scientific dialogues might suggest we are neglecting some rich experiences from this era. It bears remembering that Pugwash was awarded the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize (and current U.S. Science Adviser John Holdren delivered the acceptance speech as then executive director of Pugwash).

A distinct but related arena for further policy attempts and research inquiries is environmental peacebuilding, where mutual interdependence around natural resources provides pathways for dialogue in the midst of conflict. The establishment of the Cordillera del Condor Transboundary Protected Area between Ecuador and Peru was a result of integrating joint environmental management structures in the 1998 peace agreement that ended a long-festering border conflict. Negotiation over shared resources, such as water, can be a diplomatic lifeline for otherwise-hostile countries, such as Israel and Jordan, which held secret “picnic table” talks to manage the Jordan River while they were officially at war. And the U.S. military has successfully uses environmental cooperation to engage both friends and adversaries.

Collaboration on scientific and environmental issues won’t solve all our problems. And defining and identifying success remains a fundamental challenge when success is the absence of something (conflict). But let’s not retreat to the common church-and-state division where scientists fear being “contaminated” by participating in policy-relevant dialogues. And let’s certainly not declare science diplomacy a failure—and stop trying to make it a success—based on unrealistic expectations for the benefits such efforts might produce.

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Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa

Last Monday, environmentalists were shocked to learn that the Ecuadorian government had shut down Acción Ecológica (Environmental Action), withdrawing the legal status of one of South America’s best-known environmental groups. Acción Ecológica has in recent months supported indigenous-led, mass protests and highway blockades against President Rafael Correa’s support for large-scale mining.

Ecuador possesses a fantastic ecological and cultural diversity, from coastal dry forests and mangroves, to Andean wetlands, to a breathtaking corner of the Amazon rainforest. Ecuador’s environmental movement, sustained by an alliance between the country’s indigenous and peasant organizations and urban environmental groups, is one of Latin America’s strongest, making Ecuador’s Left one of the region’s greenest.

Health Minister Caroline Chang initially claimed that Acción Ecológica failed to undertake the work specified by the NGO’s charter. But as a public outcry arose in Ecuador and criticism poured in from civil society organizations around the world, including Amnesty International, Chang changed tack, saying that it was simply a matter of needing to move Acción Ecológica’s registration to the Ministry of the Environment, a body that did not exist at the time of Acción Ecológica’s founding. In a press release, the Health Ministry said, “the suspension of the environmentalist NGO Acción Ecológica has nothing to do with persecuting this organization.”

Yet Acción Ecológica now has no legal status with which to operate and was not warned in advance of the ministry’s action, making it hard for most activists to believe that the move was merely an attempt at streamlining government administration.

Acción Ecológica leader Ivonne Ramos released a statement calling the government’s action arbitrary. “If the elimination of our legal status is a retaliation against our organization’s opposition to government policies such as large-scale mining and the expansion of the oil frontier, it would set a precedent for authoritarianism that is intolerable in a democratic regime,” she wrote.

Organizations in North America have helped to publicize Acción Ecológica’s predicament, including Canada-based Mining Watch, San Francisco-based Amazon Watch, and the Ecuador Solidarity Network (with whom this writer volunteers his time).

Rafael Correa’s 2006 presidential campaign called for a crackdown on tax evasion by the wealthy, better funding for social services like health care and education, and a foreign policy more independent of U.S. power. Correa also spoke in favor of environmental rights, and received the backing of many Ecuadorian environmentalists and the country’s powerful indigenous confederation. But disagreement over large-scale mining, and the concessions awarded largely to Canadian mining companies, has created a growing rift between the president and the country’s grassroots movements.

In January, indigenous-led street blockades protesting a new mining law shut down highways throughout the country.

In a Thursday interview with Quito’s El Comercio, former Minister of Mines and Energy Alberto Acosta called the government’s move “a form of violence.” He said, “If Acción Ecológica had committed an error, there should have been some mechanism for them to respond to the allegations—but not just withdrawing their legal status.” The erstwhile Correa ally has long worked with the country’s environmental and indigenous peoples’ movements. In July 2008, he quit as president of the assembly drafting Ecuador’s new constitution, but played a key role in ensuring that a number of green provisions were included; the establishment of legal rights for nature has drawn a fair share of international attention, protecting the earth’s “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”

Acción Ecológica has often criticized mainstream environmentalism, arguing in favor of ecologismo popular, similar to what people in the United States call environmental justice. Confronting the stereotype that environmentalism is only espoused by the comfortable and middle class, Acción Ecológica works closely with communities affected by industrial shrimping, logging, mining, and oil exploitation, forming a particularly strong bond with the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), one of Latin America’s most powerful movements.

Since its founding 20 years ago, Acción Ecológica has played a lead role in defending Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest against oil exploitation, logging, and mining. Since the 1990s, they have supported the landmark, multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Texaco, accusing the oil giant of polluting the rainforest’s land and water and sickening the indigenous people and peasant farmers who live there. But opposition to large-scale mining, built upon decades of experience with oil exploitation, has increasingly defined Ecuadorian politics. Movements now pose the novel question of whether, in a poor country like Ecuador, natural resource exploitation is truly the only path to development.

——-

Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist and author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, wrote the following open letter to Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa about the Acción Ecológica shutdown. Klein visited Ecuador in May 2008.

March 12, 2009

Dear President Correa,

As you may know, last May I had a wonderful visit to Ecuador during which I witnessed firsthand many of the bold and innovative measures your government is taking to deepen national democracy and advance the goal of economic and ecological justice. In my book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, I write with great admiration about how you have stood up to U.S. imperialism in multiple ways, from exposing World Bank extortion to the closure of the base at Manta.

So it was with genuine shock and confusion that I learned of the Health Ministry’s move to close down Acción Ecológica by withdrawing its legal status. I have been following Acción Ecológica’s groundbreaking (or should I say “ground protecting”) work for years. When I was in Quito, it was a genuine thrill to meet several of the group’s leaders in person and I was very proud to share a platform with the incomparable Esperanza Martinez at the official launch of the Ecuadorian edition of my book.

In my research and public speaking, I have been very fortunate to travel widely, meeting with hundreds of activist groups around the world. Yet I have never seen an environmental organization like Acción Ecológica. Too often the environmental movement is part of a professional class of NGOs, more interested in nature than in people. What impressed me so much about Acción Ecológica was the fact that it is so clearly part of a genuine people’s movement, working in direct solidarity with the communities affected by the extractive industries. It is also on the absolute vanguard of what will surely prove to be the most important intellectual movement of our time: the one seeking to protect the “rights of nature” and to fund that project by requiring the wealthy polluting nations to pay our “ecological debts.” Related to this, I was excited to learn recently that you had signed a decree to keep the Yasuni-ITT oil in the ground (at least for now).

That is what makes the attacks on Acción Ecológica so disconcerting. As you well know, in nine months, the United Nations Climate Change Conference will take place in Copenhagen. This may be the most important gathering for the future of our planet, a chance to put global warming back on the international agenda (after being pushed off by the financial meltdown) and, more importantly, to resist the push from financial speculators to have a “green bubble” to replace the derivatives bubble.

There are many of us who are determined to put the issue of “ecological debt” at the very center of the debate in Copenhagen. Ecuador should naturally be at the forefront of this movement, which is why, in the lead-up to Copenhagen, activists around the world are looking to your country for inspiration.

What a shame it is that instead of seeing what I saw—a progressive government working with grassroots and indigenous movements to find solutions that reconcile economic justice with ecological imperatives and indigenous rights—these activists are instead seeing something all too familiar: a state seemingly using its power to weaken dissent. In this crucial time, we need Acción Ecológica more than ever, and we need it to be as strong and stable as possible.

Mr. President, I fully realize how difficult it is for an outsider to understand the complex internal forces shaping actions in another country. I may very well have misconstrued your government’s intentions, and if so, I am genuinely sorry. Still, I thought you would want to know how this action is being perceived by many outside Ecuador who are anxious to work with you in the run up to Copenhagen.

With great respect,

Naomi Klein

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In June 2007, Ecuador offered to avoid oil development in a tract of biodiverse rainforest if other nations and green groups were able to pony up $350 million a year for a decade. Reaction to the pay-to-protect idea was positive, but a twice-bumped-back deadline is coming up in Dec. 2008, and still no funding is in place. The oil field in question lies within Yasuni National Park, home to many endangered flora and fauna, and is officially designated as an "untouchable zone" that is supposed to be a safe haven for reclusive indigenous tribes. Says Huaorani tribe member Penti Baihua, "If the oil companies destroy all of the Yasuni, where will we live?"

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The Galapagos Islands are totally hot right now. To tourists, the island chain 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador offers stunning biodiversity (blue-footed boobies!) that infamously inspired Charles Darwin to write The Origin of Species. To residents, the tourism-driven economy offers high wages, top-notch public schools, and a dearth of violent crime. But as more and more humans show up -- the resident population has nearly doubled in the past decade to 30,000, while 180,000 tourists are expected to visit this year -- they bring with them alien species and increased pollution. In response to a 2007 United Nations listing of the Galapagos as a World Heritage Site in Danger, the government has taken some steps to regulate tourism, but has resisted a hard cap on visitors. It is, however, cracking down on citizens: This year, 1,000 folks without residency and work permits have been kicked off the islands, while 2,000 others have in effect been told they must leave within a year.

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Ecuador approved a new constitution this weekend that, among other things, grants inalienable rights to nature, the first such inclusion in a nation's constitution, according to Ecuadorian officials. "Nature ... where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community, or nationality will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature before the public bodies," the document says. The specific mention of evolution isn't accidental; besides being an activity nature arguably likes to do anyway, evolution as we know it has close ties to Ecuador's territory of the Galapagos Islands, where Charles Darwin formed his famous theory. Ecuador's constitution grants nature the right to "integral restoration" and says that the state "will promote respect toward all the elements that form an ecosystem" and that the state "will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems, or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles."

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Ecuador's environment will be given inalienable rights if residents of that country vote yes Sept. 28 on a referendum to overhaul the constitution. One of the draft document's 444 articles gives nature the right to "exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and its processes in evolution." The controversial constitution, which would greatly extend the power of leftist President Rafael Correa, would also give the state more control over Ecuador's mining and oil industries.

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Chevron is throwing a hissy fit over the Goldman Environmental Prize awarded to two Ecuadorian activists who want the oil company to clean up pollution in the Amazon rain forest. Texaco, which was acquired by Chevron in 2001, dumped 18.5 billion gallons of petrochemical waste in the Amazon between 1972 and 1992. Lawyer Pablo Fajardo and community organizer Luis Yanza won the Goldman Prize for spearheading a lawsuit against Chevron, saying it should be responsible for cleanup. But Chevron claims that a $40 million cleanup by Texaco in 1992 was sufficient. Chevron says through spokesfolks that the Goldman Foundation was "misled," that Fajardo and Yanza are "nothing but con men," and that "the only thing green they are interested in is money." The Goldman Foundation says its awards are thoroughly researched and fact-checked, and it continues to commend Yanza and Fajardo for taking on Big Oil.

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Ecuador offered to play "Let's Make a Deal" this week, suggesting that it could afford to keep a pristine area from oil drilling if developed nations and green groups ponied up some cold, hard cash. "We are willing to do this sacrifice, but not for free," said President Rafael Correa, who suggested that $350 million annually for 10 years would suffice. "This is an insignificant figure compared to what is spent on the Iraq war," Correa added. Zing! The $350 million figure is about half what the country expects could be profited from developing Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini, Ecuador's biggest oilfield. The ITT is partially within the 2.5-million-acre Yasuni National Park, an area home to indigenous people and so biodiverse that -- fun fact! -- there are nearly as many species of trees in 2.5 acres as in the entire U.S. and Canada combined. But developing the ITT could feed approximately 12 days of global oil consumption. So it's a tough call.

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At a ChevronTexaco shareholder meeting today in California, Amazonian community leaders, celebrities, and activists will confront company officials, focusing attention anew on Texaco's messy legacy in Ecuador. Twenty years of oil exploration in the nation left much of the western edge of the Amazon rainforest in ecological ruin and many villagers with unusually high rates of illness. Though Texaco fled Ecuador back in 1992, its joint venture with the nation's state oil company left behind some 600 unlined open sludge pits, compromised or destroyed about 2.5 million acres of rainforest, and released an estimated 20 billion gallons of wastewater directly into waterways. For its part, ChevronTexaco says it took care of the contamination in 1995 when it paid $40 million in cleanup costs to the Ecuadorian government. But locals and enviros estimate that a thorough cleanup would run about $6 billion, precisely what activists are seeking in cases winding through U.S. and Ecuadorian courts.

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The Galapagos Islands are iconic for biologists and conservationists, home to a dizzying array of rare and endangered species that inspired Charles Darwin's seminal work on evolution. Today, the entire marine ecosystem surrounding the islands may be in jeopardy. The militant fishing unions that hold sway over the administration of Ecuadorian President Lucio Gutierrez are asking him to permit longline fishing throughout the Galapagos Marine Reserve, an internationally protected area since 1986. Longline fishing involves laying lines that are miles long, strung with hundreds of thousands of baited hooks. In some cases up to 80 percent of the resulting catch consists of dolphins, sea turtles, sea birds, sea lions, and other (tourist-attracting) marine animals. The situation is sufficiently alarming that UNESCO is sending a delegation to the islands in April and may add them to its "danger list" of ecosystems in immediate peril.

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The world's cloud forests, which strip moisture from clouds and supply millions of poor people in developing nations with fresh water, are in danger of being wiped out by climate change, claims a report released Monday by the U.N. and the World Conservation Union at the Convention on Biological Diversity in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Cloud forests are a source of water for the capital cities of Ecuador, Mexico, and Tanzania, as well as numerous other spots throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They also provide a home to hundreds of species found nowhere else on the planet. Cloud forests are particularly sensitive to climate change, but are also threatened by logging, agriculture, and construction.

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Development, Tradition on Opposite Sides in South American Energy Battles

Given its vast reserves of oil and natural gas, the Amazon basin should be heaven for extractive industries. Instead, the people who make their home in the basin are trying to make life hell for energy companies. Over the years, Amazon natives have become both more sophisticated and more forceful in efforts to protect their pristine homeland -- efforts that include everything from protests and lawsuits to vandalism and kidnappings. At issue is the struggle to balance national growth with traditional culture, and the stakes could scarcely be higher: millennia-old ways of life on the one hand, and South America's future role in the international economy on the other. A short list of proposed projects in the region includes 800 miles of pipeline in Peru, a $1 billion project to pipe gas through the rainforest in Brazil, and an all-out effort by Ecuador to tap as many of its 4.6 billion barrels of oil as possible.

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ChevronTexaco Faces Oil Pollution Trial in Ecuador

One of the biggest oil pollution trials in history will get underway tomorrow in Ecuador, pitting oil giant ChevronTexaco against 30,000 residents of the Amazon rainforest who charge that a Texaco subsidiary dumped huge amounts of oily waste in their homeland from 1971 to 1992. The Ecuadorians say the company's pollution caused cancer, skin diseases, and other ailments and contributed to destruction of a biologically diverse area that's home to indigenous communities and peasant settlers. Texaco dumped oil wastes into hundreds of unlined pits in the region during the '70s and '80s and maintains that this was a generally accepted operating practice. An Ecuadorian court will determine whether ChevronTexaco has to clean up the pits and contaminated swamps and rivers, and the court's ruling will be enforceable in the U.S. Some say the case could change how multinational corporations do business throughout Latin America.

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In 1992, Texaco called an end to almost three decades of oil drilling in Ecuador -- and left behind a legacy of miles of pipelines and 20 billion gallons of toxic waste that destroyed the rainforest, fouled waterways, and exposed residents to cancer-causing pollutants. Now, 30,000 jungle residents of Ecuador and Peru whose environment was permanently despoiled are suing ChevronTexaco for $1 billion. The road to court was a long one, with the parties spending a decade arguing over venue alone. The case will be heard in Ecuador, but last year, a New York federal judge reached a landmark conclusion that any financial penalty imposed in Ecuador would be upheld in the U.S., making it the first time a foreign judgment on an environmental case will be enforceable in the U.S. Last year, ChevronTexaco, the world's second-largest oil company, took in $99 billion in revenues.

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After forcing a mining operation to leave town in 1997, the 46 families of Junin, a remote village in northern Ecuador, decided to have a go at ecotourism to protect the rainforest around them -- and to earn a living. But now a growing number of the residents are questioning that choice. The paradise of orchids, hummingbirds, and jaguars is no consolation to residents who aren't happy about the village's continued lack of electricity, telephones, running water, and paved roads. Only about three families are able to earn a living through ecotourism, while the rest are subsistence farmers. "The ecologists love the nature here and they love the fact that it's so remote," said resident Tarquino Vallejos. "But the fact is that not one child in the community can go to secondary school. We don't have a school past sixth grade, and nobody here has enough money to send their child to another city." Some villagers feel mining might now be a better alternative.

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