Heading to the Amazon: Oil, Orchids, and Freddy

Our guide Freddy was from Coca, one of eight children in a family indigenous to the region, and he talked about the oil industry with the measured complexity of someone whose community has had the full and contradictory experience of it: the employment it brought, the infrastructure it funded, the environmental damage it produced. Texaco, later acquired by Chevron, operated in the Ecuadorian Amazon from 1964 to 1992, extracting oil under a concession arrangement with the Ecuadorian government that left behind, when the company withdrew, around 1,000 open waste pits, 18 billion gallons of produced water discharged into streams and rivers, and an oil contamination problem whose scale the company and the Ecuadorian government then spent the next several decades arguing about in courts on three continents. The legal case, filed by indigenous communities against Chevron, became one of the longest and most contested environmental liability disputes in history, running through Ecuadorian, American, and international arbitration in a sequence of rulings that contradicted each other sufficiently to produce a situation where the company was simultaneously under a nine-billion-dollar Ecuadorian judgment it refused to pay and an American court ruling that the judgment had been obtained through corruption. The rainforest remained contaminated while the lawyers continued.

Freddy did not present this as a simple story of corporate villains and innocent nature, because it isn’t. The oil money built the schools and the hospital and paved the roads that made the development of the region possible, and the region needed development in ways that the environmental argument sometimes flattens into an uncomplicated picture of untouched nature that should have been left alone. The people who lived in the Amazon before the oil companies arrived were not living in a pristine state of nature outside of history. They had their own politics, their own territorial disputes, their own relationships with the resources around them. What the oil brought was a different scale of extraction and a different set of external interests, neither of which is the same as saying nothing should have changed.

The airport had given us a close call that morning. Traffic in Quito at rush hour being what it is, the taxi took the back roads through the city, which turned out to contain most of the rest of Quito’s traffic also taking the back roads, and the driver’s determination to get us there on time produced a series of driving decisions that I would not classify as orthodox but which were effective. We ran to check-in. The attendant looked at us with the expression of someone who has processed many last-minute arrivals and has formed an unfavourable opinion of the category as a whole. We made it. The plane made several passes over the rainforest on its approach to Coca, and the green below was so dense and so continuous that the individual trees were invisible, the whole thing resolving into a texture rather than a collection of objects.

Freddy met us at arrivals. The motorised canoe was at the dock. Life jackets on, ponchos at the ready, heading east on the Napo river toward five days in the forest. The oil platforms were visible from the river as we left town, the flares burning off the associated gas in the orange light of the late afternoon, above a forest that, from the water at least, looked as though nothing had happened to it at all.