Yasuni National Park- An Oil Field?

ThylacineAlive

ThylacineAlive

Well-Known Member
10+ year member
Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, has decided to closed down the great Yasuni National Park, the most biologically diverse area in the Western Hemisphere and home to 43 endemic Vertebrates and two indigenous tribal nations, and abandon the country's attempt to save the rainforest and not exploit the area's oil reserves in order to open up the area for oil drilling!

Ecuador approves Yasuni national park oil drilling in Amazon rainforest | World news | theguardian.com

Protection of Yasuni National Park is a joint responsibility

I was pretty shocked when I saw that this news had not reached ZooChat yet.

I know most of you don't think they work, but I'm thinking about starting a petition on Change.org and Avaaz.org to try and save this national park.

~Thylo:cool:
 
An absolute disaster. Oil has changed a great deal of the Ecuadorian Amazon. When I visited in 2006 we were extraordinarily lucky to see neotropical otter and saddleback tamarins because the few remaining easily accessible sights are so heavily disturbed. There are growing threats to remote regions (as well as existing troubles), and it's very saddening to hear about Yasuni.
Thanks for sharing this horrid news.
 
It seems many people are very angered by this news, many in Ecuador itself. Do you think Yasuni can still be saved? Even if it isn't for the wildlife, I wonder if the presence of the two indigenous tribes may be able to rouse enough support to save the park.

~Thylo:cool:
 
Hopefully this will get a few billionaire donors off their butts.

Ultimately though, it's going to be your generation and the people after you who are going to decide if this happens or not, Thylo. Do you have any friends that care about this stuff? Maybe you can organize some kind of petition drive or something. I'm sure that the Rainforest Action Network and other organizations are looking for all of the help that they can get.
 
DavidBrown said:
Hopefully this will get a few billionaire donors off their butts.

Ultimately though, it's going to be your generation and the people after you who are going to decide if this happens or not, Thylo. Do you have any friends that care about this stuff? Maybe you can organize some kind of petition drive or something. I'm sure that the Rainforest Action Network and other organizations are looking for all of the help that they can get.
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Indeed. Unfortunately, many of the people that I know don't give a damn about the environment or about anything really. My friends are more conscious but I don't really know anyone like me personally.

~Thylo:cool:
 
ThylacineAlive said:
Indeed. Unfortunately, many of the people that I know don't give a damn about the environment or about anything really. My friends are more conscious but I don't really know anyone like me personally.

~Thylo:cool:
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Well, fortunately there is you, and you can make a real difference by sharing your environmental knowledge and concerns with the people around you. Some of them will care about it. I know that isn't much comfort, but it is real good that you can do.
 
DavidBrown said:
Well, fortunately there is you, and you can make a real difference by sharing your environmental knowledge and concerns with the people around you. Some of them will care about it. I know that isn't much comfort, but it is real good that you can do.
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Thanks.:) I do my part, picking up garbage on the side of the road or in the woods when I find it and stuff like that.

~Thylo:cool:
 
Estimado thylo,
Yes, it is still time to fight back and defend the yausni park, its wildlife and uncontacted tribal people. Go to www.sosyasuni/org/en/ and send Presidente Correa a petition. you may also google sosyasuni . Latin american politicians are sensitive to external criticism.
 
carlos77 said:
Estimado thylo,
Yes, it is still time to fight back and defend the yausni park, its wildlife and uncontacted tribal people. Go to www.sosyasuni/org/en/ and send Presidente Correa a petition. you may also google sosyasuni . Latin american politicians are sensitive to external criticism.
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Thank you! I'm not finding the petition on that site unfortunately. I emailed the link to my parents and Grandmother the mean time so they have the link.

~Thylo:cool:
 
carlos77 said:
Estimado thylo,
Yes, it is still time to fight back and defend the yausni park, its wildlife and uncontacted tribal people. Go to www.sosyasuni/org/en/ and send Presidente Correa a petition. you may also google sosyasuni . Latin american politicians are sensitive to external criticism.
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Thanks for the link carlos; I will sign also.
 
I signed the petition on the link Cartas al Presidente at sosyasuni. You have to look for it. I suppose you can find it with the english translation.
 
carlos77 said:
I signed the petition on the link Cartas al Presidente at sosyasuni. You have to look for it. I suppose you can find it with the english translation.
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I did. Here's the link I got: SOS Yasuni - Home

I have found the petition however, and, as I suspected, it was right in front of me.:rolleyes:

EDIT: Signed.:)

I still might make my petitions on Change.org and Avaaz.org as it seems they get out to a larger audience.

~Thylo:cool:
 
Whereas I will sign the petition and know these work!

I have to get it off my chest that a few years back this same very President made a plea to the conservation fraternity and Western donor nations to free up cash/funding for making the Yasuni NP OIL FREE. Despite numerous pleas / attempts the Western world has not come up with the cash thru the REDD programme or any other funding facility and remained completely silent on the issue of REDD or its potential.

We spend trillions of dollars on advanced arms and fighting the drugs trade, yet the environment remains on the backburner when money needs to be forthcoming and for what it is worth it is the place we live on we are talking about!

I can only say this: when someone's / country's property is ransacked we call it vandalism / act of aggression/war, when we destroy the environment we call it progress!
 
if people follow the local Ecuadorian media, they'll see that the lack of donors to a large extent was a bad excuse, and that so many "roadblocks" were put in the way that it simply was impossible to achieve (e.g. "you pay the money, but we want 100% control over those money, no matter what happens"). The direction was reasonably clear early on. So, no doubt the wealthy countries of the world have a share of the blame, but in this case at least an equal part of the blame lies at Correa and friends. There are numerous other cases where the blame is less equal, e.g. some of the oil drilling in nearby northern Peru.

Two additional things are also reasonably clear at this point: 1) It may well be the governement run Petroecuador that does the drilling in Yasuni and their environmental record is terrible, even for an oil company. 2) The only thing that can stop this is local opposition, which is building, but I'm not optimistic.

Admittedly I was more optimistic about the Amazon ten years ago. Since then we've had an oil drilling surge in the western Amazon, a big increase in soybean plantations in the southern Amazon and new laws in Brazil that essentially legalize much of the deforestation that was illegal before :(
 
@condor, I am the last one to say President Correa is blemish-free.

He is a liberal/conservative and his policies on the environment do stink. In the past their ilk has been responsible for the large scale destruction by oil exploration in the Amazon. Further their record on indigenous Indian tribes is not exemplary either.
 
I read about this a few months ago in a National Geographic article (see here: Yasuni National Park - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine).

What I found to be most interesting was this paragraph:

"In a proposal first put forward in 2007, President Rafael Correa has offered to leave indefinitely untouched an estimated 850 million barrels of oil inside Yasuní’s northeastern corner in a tract known as the ITT Block (named for the three oil fields it contains: Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini). As payment for preserving the wilderness and preventing an estimated 410 million metric tons of fossil fuel-generated carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere, Correa has asked the world to ante up in the fight against global warming. He is seeking $3.6 billion in compensation, roughly half of what Ecuador would have realized in revenues from exploiting the resource at 2007 prices. The money would be used, he says, to finance alternative energy and community development projects."
 
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