Ecuador Called the World's Bluff, Will Drill in the Amazon

A scarlet macaw near Rio Tiputini in Yasuni National Park. Via Geoff Gallice/Flickr

"The world has failed us." With those words, Rafael Correa, Ecuador's president and the man who has been put in charge of two of the world's most magnificent and threatened environmental ecosystems, announced Thursday that he'd soon start the destruction of one of them. 

One of those places, the Galapagos Islands, is known throughout the world. The other, Yasuni National Park, located deep in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest, is less known, primarily because it has remained less touched by the modern world. 

But it's arguably more important. Yasuni is the most biodiverse places on Earth–the sheer numbers of species that live in one hectare there put North America to shame. We'll get to that in a second. What Yasuni also has, unfortunately for the flora, fauna, and indigenous people living there, is oil. A lot of oil.

Depending on who you ask, Correa was either an innovator or a hostage taker.

Six years ago, Correa had an idea. In return for the promise that Ecuador wouldn't disturb an area known as the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini field—a 4,000 square-mile sect of the Amazon that has roughly 800 million barrels of crude oil laying underneath it—he asked the world for $3.6 billion in donations, just a small percentage of the oil's $18 billion street value. 

Depending on who you ask, Correa was either an innovator or a hostage taker. With Thursday's announcement that Ecuador would soon begin drilling in the area, it appears he was the latter. Patricio Chavez, director of Amazonia por la Vida, an environmentalist group here, said Correa didn't give the international community much choice: "Pay or we drill."

Just $13 million was collected. (Another $103 million was promised.) Drill it is.

An independent report charted by the Ecuadorian government and published last year said that the Yasuni decision has an "important symbolic value, because its future represents the contradiction between maintaining Ecuador's most important heritage, its biodiversity and cultural wealth, and the extraction of fossil fuels, which has led its growth during the last four decades."