Dr. Michael Melampy
Northeast Ohio Sierra Club Rainforest Committee
Back in the 1980’s rainforest conservation was a cause célèbre. Ranchers in Brazil were burning and clearing the Amazonian forests, which caught our attention for a while. Madonna, the Grateful Dead, Sting and others hosted concerts to benefit rainforest conservation. Since then rainforest conservation has slid out of our collective attention. We are increasingly distracted by wars in Europe and the Middle East and our own political chaos. Nevertheless, rainforests remain important, vital parts of our global environment and should merit our continued attention. Rainforests in South America, Africa and Asia absorb much of the carbon dioxide that we continue to emit at an alarming rate and they still harbor most of the world’s biodiversity. Huge challenges continue to make the conservation of these forests difficult. The NEO Sierra Club Rainforest Committee has dealt with some of these challenges by assisting a grassroots environmental organization in Ecuador. What follows is a brief description of those challenges and a call to action.
Ecuador is a small country, about the size of Colorado, that straddles the equator on South America’s Pacific coast. It is extremely rich in biodiversity. In fact, according to Conservation International, Ecuador may have the highest density of species in the world. That incredible biodiversity is due in large part to Ecuador’s amazing topography. It is possible to travel overland from Ecuador’s coast and reach an elevation 5000 m above sea level in a single day. This sharp elevational gradient creates rapid temperature and rainfall changes over short distances, which in turn generates an immense number of different habitats packed into a small area. If we are concerned about protecting biodiversity then we should be concerned about what happens to Ecuador’s natural areas.
Despite its incredible natural beauty, Ecuador has languished in relative obscurity. Its big tourist attraction is the Galapagos Islands, but few visitors to the Galapagos spend much time on the mainland. Consequently, there is little awareness concerning what happens to Ecuador’s forests. Ecuador has a system of parks and reserves but these rarely are given much protection. The extraction and sale of natural resources such as oil, minerals, and timber have always been given priority over conservation. A good case in point can be found in the Intag region of northwestern Ecuador.
Intag is a rural, mountainous region of small farms and extensive forested areas. In the early 1990s, a group of Intag residents became concerned about the forests due to the activities of mining companies. A Japanese company, Bishimetals, discovered a large copper deposit under an area that had been declared a community forest reserve. The area is close to the small village of Junin and is called the Junin Community Forest Reserve. The Japanese company wanted permission to create an open-pit copper mine in the forest reserve. DECOIN, or Defensa y Conservacion Ecologica de Intag, a local environmental group, organized opposition to the mining project and was successful in convincing the Bishimetals to leave. But the copper was still there and others wanted it.
A Canadian company, Ascendant Copper, purchased the rights to mine the Junin deposit and employed paramilitary forces to gain entry into the reserve. Their illegal tactics gained widespread condemnation, forcing the government to rescind their mining concession. Ascendant then sued Ecuador in an international arbitration court and won a $24 million dollar settlement despite the company’s record of human rights violations. The copper stayed in the ground but Ecuador became $24 million poorer.
After Ascendant left Ecuador, Ecuador’s government did not give up on mining the copper at Junin. Instead, it partnered with CODELCO, a Chilean mining company that is one of the largest in the world. This time the government used security forces to secure access to the Junin reserve and allow CODELCO to do exploratory drilling. The drilling confirmed the presence of a large amount of copper, and the company intended to proceed with the development of a mine. However, DECOIN, with help from conservationists around the world, sued the government and CODELCO for breach of the rights of nature provision in Ecuador’s constitution.
The rights of nature provision prohibits any action that would destroy habitat vital to the continued existence of a species, similar to our Endangered Species Act. Biologists hired by the plaintiffs had discovered two species of frogs, the Longnose Harlequin Frog (Atelopus longirostris) and the Intag Resistance Rocket Frog (Rana cohete resistencia), that were thought to be extinct (the harlequin frog) or were new to science (the resistance frog). Both were known only in the Junin reserve. Any mining, particularly open pit mining, would jeopardize the frogs. So, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and prohibited further mining activity. Sadly, the court’s decision is not the end of the story.
The current Ecuadorian president, Daniel Noboa, is very much in favor of mining. His family is one of the wealthiest in Ecuador, primarily due to their banana export business. Noboa takes a very transactional approach to governance, much like our own president is doing in the US. Noboa sees natural resources as something to be extracted and sold. So, he has entered into an agreement with the Chinese government to pursue mining interests largely focused on copper and gold. Junin has not been targeted yet but it is hard to imagine that another attempt to extract its copper will not be undertaken.
In anticipation of this, DECOIN has organized surveys of different groups of organizations, for example, amphibians, birds, mammals and flowering plants, to strengthen their argument that Junin merits protection under the rights of nature provision. Already they have documented the presence of jaguars, mountain lions, Andean bears, tayras and many bird and amphibian species.
So far, the data indicate that the Junin forest is reasonably intact in an ecological sense and does merit protection. We will see what the courts say. DECOIN has shown that well organized opposition to mining can succeed, at least in the short run. But DECOIN has very limited financial resources compared to the governments of Ecuador and China, and money matters in a world that is increasingly dominated by billionaires who are scrambling to find more minerals to sustain our collective appetite for new technological devices.
Nevertheless, we can help. For more details about DECOIN’s accomplishments and how you can support their work, go to the DECOIN website.