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We don't often hear about the oil that comes from South America because it tends to be overshadowed by headlines from the Middle East. Countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador are just a few of the nations that have become central to the world's perpetually expanding petrol market. However, their clout has not come without a price. Settled within a delicate landscape teeming with life, companies such as ChevronTexaco have caused an epidemic of health concerns and environmental damage in their search for black gold. The company alone has dumped the equivalent volume of about eight Exxon Valdezes of crude oil and associated wastes into unlined open-air pits and waters in El Oriente during excavation alone, and the extraction has swelled the effects even further - almost all men, women and children in the area are almost guaranteed to develop cancer or to become sterile. Privy to the situation since he was a child, activist and Founder of Gaia Certified David Poitz has dedicated his life to educating the public on the tragic situation that has been echoing across the Amazon for decades. Inhabitat writer Daniel Rejto shares his experience on one of David Poitz's "Toxi-Tours" as they navigate the manmade destruction of the Ecuador's Amazon rainforest due to the oil industry. Read on for Daniel's eye-opening essay, "Powerless in a Needy Land."

 

The Ecuadorian sun shone through the leafy greenery, casting intricate shadows upon a group of twelve college students and beating down upon their necks. David Poritz, the group’s leader, walked through the underbrush to the edge of a lake and jabbed his machete into the water’s black surface. When he pulled it out, instead of being wet, it was darkened. The black skin floating on top of the lake had congealed and clung to the blade, dripping oil and petroleum waste onto the soil.

Only fifty feet away from the waste pit, through a small patch of forest lived the owner of the land, a one-time cacao farmer. His house sat on a plot of oil-contaminated land between the waste pit and a dusty road that ran through the Amazon. David, unshaven, but dressed in a clean white v-neck watched with the students as the man’s four children played outside barefoot. The cacao trees around them had long since grown disheveled and shriveled up. Some of the students wondered why these people didn’t leave. It was a dangerous place to live.

David, a college freshman, had taken the group of Brown University students to Ecuador, to this man’s land, to show them exactly this situation: the widespread and destructive oil pollution in the Amazon. He hoped that directly educating them about the country’s environmental issues would create a movement of Ecuadorian activism at Brown.

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