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THE RAINFORESTS OF THE ECUADORIAN AMAZON are rich in biodiversity, home to numerous indigenous groups and replete with oil. This has made for a complex and destructive mix since the beginning of Ecuador's oil boom in the early 1970s.
In the northern Ecuadorian Amazon, an unprecedented lawsuit is unfolding as indigenous groups and rainforest residents are suing the oil giant ChevronTexaco for 20 years of contamination. In the southern Ecuadorian Amazon, the indigenous people of Sarayaku are in the midst of a seven-year, and thus far successful, campaign to keep multinational oil companies off their lands.
And in the middle of the Ecuadorian Amazon sits a place called Yasuní National Park. Yasuní is home to the most biodiverse forest known on earth, and is the ancestral territory of the Huaorani, an indigenous group with the reputation as the fiercest warriors in all of Ecuador. In recognition of its biodiversity and cultural heritage, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) formally designated Yasuní National Park a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1989.
The future of Yasuni National Park, however, is very much in doubt. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) views the huge oil reserves under Yasuni as Ecuador's best chance to pay off its enormous foreign debt.
A cluster of major oil projects now threatens the park and the cultural heritage of the Huaorani, and if the IMF has its way, the vast majority of the oil revenue will not even be used for much needed social and environmental spending within the poverty-stricken country.
A UNIQUE TERRITORY
Located in the northwest Amazon, where the Amazon rainforest, the Andes Mountains and the Equator converge, Yasuní is home to extraordinary levels of biodiversity.
"Yasuní may well be the single most biodiverse forest on earth," state some of the world's leading biologists, including Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson and Stuart Pimm, in a February 2005 letter to the president of Ecuador.
According to a November 2004 report by 50 top tropical scientists with research experience in Yasuní (dubbed the Scientists Concerned for Yasuní), Yasuní supports a large stretch of the world's most diverse tree community, the highest known insect diversity in the world, record levels of bird and amphibian species, a remarkable 11 primate species, 23 globally threatened...