Environmental Services in Ecuador: Extractive Development versus Intercultural Intervention

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Environmental Services in Ecuador: Extractive Development versus Intercultural Intervention

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John Stolle-McAllister*

Declaring that “the world has failed us,” on August 15, 2013 Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa announced the termination of the Yasuní-ITT plan, which would have perpetually protected that part of the Yasuní National Park, located in the Amazonian rain forest (see Figure 1), from oil exploitation in exchange for international donations to cover roughly half the estimated value of the oil that it is believed to contain. Despite delaying on several occasions the timeline for collecting funds and commitments, by the end of July 2013 donors had only paid 150 million dollars and promised another 150 million of the 3.5 billion demanded by the Ecuadorian Government. Correa indicated that oil exploration would begin almost immediately, because as president he had a moral obligation to exploit the country’s natural resources in order to finance ambitious efforts to end poverty, encourage development, and build modern transportation and communication infrastructure. The announcement was immediately followed by loud protests from the country’s ecological and Indigenous groups, citing, among other things, the need to combat global carbon pollution, to protect biodiversity, and to respect the constitutionally guaranteed rights of people living in the forests, some in voluntary isolation. While this debate may be the most dramatic and well-publicized ecological struggle in the country, it is also indicative of the deeper divides within Ecuador about how to meet the needs of its population. On the surface it would seem to pit the need for development and poverty reduction against the need for resource conservation and the ecological limits of growth. But this dispute also points to a more fundamental contradiction that many of the so-called new left governments in Latin America face: namely, the dependence on extractive models of development in order to pay for their infrastructure and redistributive programs, despite the fact that extractive economies rarely if ever lead to autonomous and sustainable development (Acosta 2009; Ortiz-T. 2011). The actors in these debates also reflect the substantial cultural divisions in countries like Ecuador, in which even progressive, left-leaning governments find themselves in intercultural disputes with Indigenous and Afrodescendent populations, which are often critical of their development policies.

*University of Maryland, Baltimore County, MD, USA. Email: [email protected]

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Figure 1. Ecuador and Yasuní National Park. Note: Map prepared by Carl Sack.

The country’s 2008 Constitution attempts to be both inclusive of the country’s diverse populations and protective of the environment, using Andean notions of Sumak Kawsay (living well) and Pachamama (the Andean concept of Nature and the Universe as a living being) in naming rights to the natural environment, opening public debate to the possibility of an inclusive nation, and different development policies. Correa has been a fierce critic of neoliberal development and positioned himself as a champion of 21st-century socialism. His success as president is due in large part to policies that have reorganized the state and provided economic support to (some of) the country’s poorest citizens. Many analysts, however, doubt his socialist credentials, placing him more in the progressive Catholic tradition, which is not necessarily anticapitalist, pro-feminist, or pro-environment (Becker 2011, 116–121). Perhaps not so surprisingly, therefore, his administration has aggressively pursued policies of natural resource extraction (oil and mining, in particular) and

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characterized opposition to those policies by environmental and Indigenous organizations as infantile leftism and nearly treasonous, obviously alienating constituencies that would seem to be natural allies (Burbach 2010).

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Intercultural Approaches to Environmental Problems? Environmental debates in Ecuador, as elsewhere, while shaped by scientific discourse, economic interests, and positions of power, are also fundamentally cultural conflicts informed by beliefs, values, and social practices. Since 2008, the Ecuadorian Government has promoted an environmental conservation program known as Socio Bosque/Socio Páramo (Forest/High Grassland Partners) that offers payments for such environmental services as forest and watershed conservation. The government sees this program as a way to preserve critical ecosystems and provide material support to some of the country’s most impoverished communities. The project is aligned with the UN’s REDD+ program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation “plus” conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks) and other market-based incentives to promote conservation, leading to vehement opposition from many environmental and Indigenous activists. At stake, however, is not just a policy disagreement but rather a more fundamental cultural rift between the continuities of modern and colonial discourses of development and an intercultural critique of that logic. Critics of the government’s ecological strategies argue that environmental and social problems cannot be resolved using the same logic that created those problems, suggesting instead that a more comprehensive change is required. They point to a dialog with Andean ways of knowing and a rejection of an exclusively modernist/developmentalist paradigm as necessary to transform the processes resulting in environmental destruction and social disintegration. The intercultural approach advocated by Indigenous activists and their allies offers a useful lens through which to analyze the environmental predicament. The logic of Western modernity has separated humanity from nature, leading to the latter serving as a seemingly infinite “basket of resources” (Gudynas 2005, 14). This perception has led to the systemic problems faced by contemporary civilization, characterized by the overexploitation of nonrenewable resources and the inability of natural systems to reproduce themselves, leading to climate change, water scarcity, and declining biodiversity. Similarly, Western modernity has systematically excluded other ways of thinking and being in the world, making viable alternatives difficult to propose. Developmentalist thinking posits that economic growth is the only solution to poverty and technological innovation the only way to avoid environmental catastrophe, despite the fact that those very logics have resulted in ever greater inequality and environmental destruction (Escobar 2010; Mignolo 2011). That is not to say, however, that simply rejecting “Western” epistemologies and practices in favor of Indigenous ones will provide the answers to environmental problems nor that such a shift is even possible. Rather, an intercultural dialog might provide other ways of solving environmental problems or adapting to inevitable

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climate changes by opening up closed logic circuits pertinent to what it means to be developed or how to best manage local issues. In other words, the stories that we tell about ourselves determine to a great extent the possibilities of how we act in the world. In the case of Ecuador, Indigenous and Afro-descendent populations have forced an uneven and open-ended discussion about cultural representation within the country, problematizing the acceptance of dominant, modernist interpretations of the nation (Kowii Maldonado 2011; Cruz Rodriguez 2013). Activists and intellectuals affiliated with these movements have insistently called for an intercultural process of dialog to move the country forward. They propose a radical cultural exchange, one not limited to just the sharing of physical space by different cultural groups, but also expressed through free, equal, and open sharing of knowledge and practices between those groups for their mutual benefit (Salazar Medina 2011, 116). As a process initiated by Indigenous and other marginalized groups, it has as a goal the reformulation of those structures that have historically marginalized Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples. Since interculturality seeks out mutual, dialogical relationships, groups, and individuals must confront not only personal inequalities and prejudices, but also the social structures that construct and reproduce them. Such a reflection requires not only a repudiation of those structures, but also the creativity and insight garnered from dialog and debate between different cultural perspectives and experiences. This dialog does not seek the fusion or mixture of cultures nor the incorporation of one into another, but rather is a process that allows for new visions, structures, and relationships, ideally leading to the foundation of a new society. Interculturality, like the concept of culture itself, needs to be understood as a process through which shared meaning is created and social organizations constructed and reproduced, and as such it is not necessarily a goal to be achieved, but rather a means through which concrete projects can be articulated and realized. Catherine Walsh (2009) argues that rather than thinking of intercultural as an adjective to describe some definitive end (such as intercultural education or an intercultural state), it might be more effective to consider it a verb—to interculturalize education or to interculturalize the state. The goal of interculturality is to destabilize elite social constructions in an attempt to break up the subordinate/dominant order that has led to hierarchies among different ethnic groups (55). This process, therefore, is not reducible to a mixture of cultures to provide for the best possible world, but rather is a dynamic process of debate, dialog, and (sometimes) conflict aimed at decolonizing contemporary structures and creating new ones. The destabilization of dominant ways of thinking serves as a basis for opening up dialog about the profound disputes involving environmental policies in Ecuador, but which also facilitates the formulation of alternatives to the paradigm of limitless growth. Debates about environmental sustainability often become polarized as development versus environment and state needs versus local autonomy.

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An intercultural approach to environmental practices, however, would not immediately discard either side of the debate, but rather would look toward developing from the bottom-up such policies and practices that would make use of knowledge provided through different cultural matrices to find more sustainable solutions for local communities as well as pressing national issues. Instead of seeing environmental degradation as an unfortunate but necessary step toward development, the argument could be shifted toward seeing environmental protection as a part of larger schemes of community and national sustainable living. The disputes around the state’s Socio Bosque/Socio Páramo program serve to illustrate the cultural and epistemic roots of environmental debates in the country.

Development as Path to Sustainability The 2008 Constitution grants rights to nature and identifies Sumak Kawsay as the foundation upon which development in Ecuador ought to be elaborated. President Correa championed the Constitution, radical environmental organizations fought hard for the rights of nature to be included, and Sumak Kawsay is an Andean ideal for harmonious living. Correa and activists to his left, however, have fought bitterly over what these terms mean and how they ought to be implemented, demonstrating not only honest differences of opinion, but also the cultural clashes inherent in the intercultural processes unleashed by the Indigenous movements. What is at stake are not just particular conservation policies but also highly contested cultural differences, with implications about the creation and maintenance of a national identity and the dislocation of modernity’s preeminence in dictating the terms of development. The cultural logic that dominates official thought and policy around environmental issues today is clearly modernity/liberalism. Arturo Escobar (1995, 2010) argues that under this model, the environment is seen primarily as a resource to be exploited for the nation’s and the world’s development, and that the model itself furnishes a cultural discourse that posits the unfettered growth of capitalist economies as the apex of human civilization. This developmentalism, particularly as practiced in the post-World War II era looks for the betterment (according to norms of industrialized elites) of the “Third World” through its ever-tighter integration into the world capitalist system, without much consideration of the long-term consequences of industrialization, resource extraction, and monoculturalism, nor certainly of non-Western thought or social practices. Even among capitalist development policy-makers, however, there is now a growing awareness that natural resources are finite and that the environment provides certain “services” for human populations, such as regulating water supplies, sequestering carbon and preserving biodiversity. Under neoliberal logic, all of these services create value, and the marketplace is the ideal mechanism for accurately assessing and capturing that value.

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theoretically, markets for environmental goods and services have as their objective internalizing the externalities that conventional markets do not capture, and thus obtaining a more pertinent price that reflects their true scarcity, and the costs and the benefits of its utilization. (31)

Although the exact functioning of those markets is still not clear, corporations like Dow Chemical, and some of the bigger nongovernment environmental organizations like the Nature Conservancy, have sought out joint projects to valuate environmental services with the hope of being able to exploit those values (Walsh 2011). While market environmentalists see nature as providing human civilization with many benefits, the ones most likely to be in highest demand as environmental services are watershed protection, which can be assigned a monetary value as water is used in every aspect of human production and reproduction, sequestering carbon, protection of biodiversity, and scenic beauty. In all of these cases an outside entity, be it a state, nongovernmental organization (NGO), or a corporation must be willing to pay individuals and communities to maintain and/or improve the integrity of the environmental service being provided by their territory. In some cases, this means paying people to do nothing to their lands. The logic behind paying for environmental services is that it corrects distortions in the prices of many consumer goods and services, which often do not reflect the external costs of resource depletion and environmental damage caused by their production. As natural resources are depleted, watersheds degraded, and carbon emissions become unsustainable, some investors believe that markets will develop for these services. If, for example, water is needed for agricultural production or soft drink bottling, but local aquifers are in decline, it is not charity to pay people to further protect their lands in watersheds, but rather it is a cost associated with production. Likewise, if enforceable international agreements over carbon emissions are ever signed, being able to show that one is sequestering carbon becomes a valuable commodity on the international market, and it would be in the interest of investors to buy these carbon rights through long-term contracts with local communities to preserve forests. Although selling environmental services is not without its critics (see below), it does present a potentially innovative path of development for President Rafael Correa, who has made poverty reduction and social inclusion the cornerstones of his policies. His anti-neoliberal positions have led to conflicts with the USA, the International Monetary Fund, and other promoters of orthodox development strategies. He has dedicated great quantities of both financial and symbolic capital to providing economic support to the country’s most vulnerable populations and to infrastructure development throughout the country. The irony, however, is that the construction of the populist state is financed mostly through natural resource extraction, primarily oil, which is, of course, highly dependent on

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the very market-oriented capitalist system against which Correa asserts that he is fighting. Given the logic of the world economic system, leaders of countries like Ecuador often lament that there is no alternative to extractive development and that at least, unlike previous eras, progressive governments’ neo-extractivist policies are returning financial resources to the country as a whole, and not just tiny elites. When it comes to environmental protection and conservation, therefore, what options does a relatively poor, but politically and economically progressive state have? The answer, perhaps not ironically, lies in the market solutions being promoted by the UN through REDD+, which is a set of “policies, institutional reforms, and programs that provide developing countries with monetary incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance economic growth by halting or preventing the destruction of their forests” (de Koning et al. 2011, 533). This initiative seeks a meaningful impact on global environmental health by identifying mechanisms to financially reward countries for reducing emissions. Part of that effort involves identifying areas for conservation and measuring the impact that conservation of those areas has in reducing emissions and sequestering carbon. This effort is made particularly difficult by extractive industries, unclear land tenure systems, and by the pressures that poor communities frequently place on forests and other ecosystems to provide not only for their own subsistence, but also, increasingly, to participate in national and transnational economic transactions. Providing economic incentives for not exploiting or degrading those ecosystems becomes essential, then, to the potential success of the proposal. There are two plausible sources for financing REDD initiatives. One is a stilldeveloping carbon market under which private interests would invest in carbon offsets being provided primarily by countries and communities in the global South. The other possibility is a governmental scheme where under richer countries make contributions to poorer countries in return for guarantees of forest and other carbon protection and enhancement projects, to begin repaying the global North’s environmental debt (Parker et al. 2009, 26). In the case of Ecuador, one of the key programs that the Correa Government has devised to position itself to take advantage of incentives generated through REDD+ is the Socio Bosque program begun in 2008 to protect lowland forests, and the Socio Páramo in 2010 to protect highland areas. These programs seek to provide a concrete framework through which the Ecuadorian Government can demonstrate its readiness to move ahead with the documentation and on-the-ground commitments required for participation in REDD+, and for securing potential financial benefits. As part of that process, the Socio programs have two fundamental goals within Ecuador: protection and conservation of environmentally sensitive areas and alleviation of poverty. To meet these goals, the state enters into renewable twenty-year contracts with communities and individual families, paying them to protect the environmental

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services in their territories (Celi 2012). Specifically, de Koning et al. (2011) note that these

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conservation agreements are a transparent, voluntary, and participatory alliance, in which the owners or administrators of a resource agree to protect the natural value of an area in exchange for direct, ongoing, and structured economic incentives to offset the costs of conservation. In particular, the agreements specify a mutually agreed [upon] set of conservation actions, benefits, and criteria for monitoring to ensure transparent provision and fair distribution of benefits based on conservation performance. (532)

Landholders agree to maintain the integrity of their environmental services, which is subject to monitoring and verification by the Ministry of the Environment, and in return they are granted funds, depending on the size of the territory they put into conservancy, which they must invest in “a social investment plan.” It is hoped that this arrangement serves to both guarantee the stability of the environmental services in question, while at the same time providing generally poor families and communities with economic resources for small projects. It is important to note that communities do not simply receive a cash payment, but they must use those funds on projects agreed to by the government and decided in a transparent manner within the community. According to the Ministry of the Environment, by mid-2014, the program had signed 2514 contracts, enrolling more than 171,000 beneficiaries, over 1,400,000 hectares of land, and was investing over 9.124 million dollars annually on community development projects (Ministerio del Ambiente del Ecuador 2015). This program, therefore, seeks to operationalize the constitutional call for Sumak Kawsay, or living well, by simultaneously promoting environmental sustainability and directly alleviating poverty. First, in their study of Socio Bosque, de Koning et al. (2011, 538) found that the initiative has been successful, because of its transparency, its willingness to forge alliances with a broad range of local and regional organizations, and the political window opened by the Correa administration’s strong backing of the program as part of the nation’s re-founding in the 2008 Constitution. One of the elements that sets Socio Bosque off from other pay-forservice schemes is that the money delivered to the recipients is contingent on local development projects, which illustrates the Correa administration’s vision of sustainable development and social inclusion by ensuring that productive funding directly benefits those carrying out the conservation work. Second, the program positions Ecuador to participate in transnational development initiatives by being compliant with REDD+. As de Koning et al. note, “REDD+ can also be a possible contribution to the financial sustainability of Socio Bosque, either through international cooperation for REDD+ or through future voluntary or compliance carbon markets” (de Koning et al. 2011, 540). By participating in the valuing and marketing of environmental services, the Correa administration hopes to both protect critical

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environmental spaces and provide sustainable support for development projects by depending on state-facilitated market mechanisms.

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Delinking from Development While at some level this program represents a positive contribution toward solving the entrenched problems of rural poverty and resource conservation, and creates a source of external funding, it is not without its critics. An alliance of grassroots environmental organizations, notably Acción Ecológica (Ecological Action) and Indigenous organizations affiliated with the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador— CONAIE) aim for more radical solutions to ecological problems and cite Socio Bosque/Socio Páramo’s integration into REDD+ as an obstacle to the fundamental changes needed in both environmental policies and intercultural relations that will lead to a more sustainable society. A critique of Socio Bosque/Socio Páramo and of REDD+ comes from their formulation of the functions and cycles of nature as services that can be mediated by markets, without questioning capitalist development as a fundamental driver of environmental degradation. Market environmentalism springs out of a worldview in which resources, humans, and nature form interrelated but discrete systems, and in which everything is ultimately a commodity (Gilberston 2011; Moreano Venegas 2012). In his critique of “Green Capitalism,” Camilo Moreno (2013) argues that the commodification of environmental functions is the only logical step for finance capital to take in order to preserve its model of accumulation in the face of its current crisis, and is dependent on the very degradation of resources that it purports to be saving. The scarcer clean water, clean air, or carbon stocks are, the higher their value. In order for investors to profit from these services, they must be appropriated from their current beneficiaries by being turned into private property subject to the rules of the marketplace. These “things” now transition from communal rights into commodities that can be bought and sold: Under this logic, environmental and climate policies are no longer based in human and collective rights, but rather citizens are considered, above all else, as consumers, and the right to pollute and degrade the environment becomes another commodity. In this way rights become another branch of provision of “services” through the market. (Moreno 2013, 74)

Former Minister for the Environment, Edgar Isch (2012), argues that capitalist discourse posits that nature contains resources and that neoliberal actors have invented the concept of “environmental services.” Environmental services, however: do not exist as such in nature. There are functions that ecosystems and the species that live within them, carry out, but not services, which are a necessary theoretical

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construction to create a market in which pseudo-commodities, like water or carbon atoms, are bought and sold. Let’s give a very simple example that might help: friendship has functions, friendship provides self-esteem, friendship lends support, friendship socializes, friendship carries out a series of functions. A good neoliberal one of these days is going to say: “Wait a minute, don’t talk to me about the functions of friendship, but rather the ‘services’ of friendship and begin to charge for them.” (2012, 55)

Isch criticizes “market environmentalism,” noting that the trend in environmental policies throughout Latin America has been to commodify parts of nature, now not only minerals and other products, but also the processes of natural and social reproduction (water, carbon sequestration, biodiversity), which in turn leads to greater control by elites and the further alienation of people to the rights of their natural surroundings and the environmental functions necessary to their survival. This alienation not only creates more hardship for the population in general, but ideologically it reinforces the separation of human beings from nature posited by modernity and developmental discourses. Yvonne Yanez, of Acción Ecológica, likewise takes issue with commodification of nature as part of the dominant discourse that has steadily eroded not only environmental conditions, but also community ties: It is just like in the 80s and 90s, when there were rights, rights to education, to health, but they were converted into services in order to privatize them. The same thing is happening with the functions of nature, the carbon cycle and all that implies with services—that they can be privatized and converted into commodities, so it is a lie that environmental services have always existed. No, they were converted into services. Then, payment for environmental services. No, then valorization, because it is a neoliberal logic, you construct the commodity, you give it a price, you legalize it as private property and then you control, sell, buy, accumulate, in other words the buying/selling of this environmental service.… The payment for environmental services is sold as a hegemonic discourse of how it is now time that the communities, who have always conserved their forests, how they should now get paid. Or that the organizations or the communities or whoever is conserving water, that they pay them for the environmental service. So, if you start from this being a neoliberal logic that commercializes nature, then you are also taking away collective rights to your territories and [effect] a loss of state sovereignty over your national patrimony. (Interview, Quito, August 26, 2011)

Converting the functions of nature into services, therefore, not only changes the relationships that many communities have developed with nature but also represents a neoliberal logic that seeks to convert rights into commodities and citizens into individual consumers. Yanez is also particularly wary that state and corporate elites seem to be showing a sudden concern for marginalized communities by arguing that they should be paid for maintaining certain environmental services when that has always been a part of their collective life. While she is certainly not against poor

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communities receiving support, her concern here is that paying for environmental services fundamentally and cynically changes social relationships, converting Indigenous and other campesino communities into providers of services and one more element of production in the neoliberal economic machine. While many large environmental NGOs, such as World Wildlife Federation and Conservation International, are working with REDD initiatives, believing that market solutions and technological advances in monitoring and measuring ecosystem conservation are the best way to simultaneously mitigate global climate change and alleviate poverty, many other NGOs such as Greenpeace, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and the World Rainforest Movement see REDD as a “false solution to climate change” (Carrere 2011, 55). While not opposed to providing resources for communities to find an alternative to resource exploitation, one of their concerns about REDD pertains to the financing of those projects. Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network notes that money for REDD initiatives would come from the industrialized north “looking for more pollution licenses to enable them to delay action on climate change” (Goldtooth 2011, 14). Buying pollution licenses, or carbon offsets, allows emitters of carbon to avoid changing their behavior and puts the onus of global environmental protection on poor countries and poor communities. Global climate change cannot be slowed down simply by not destroying existing “carbon stocks,” but is dependent on reducing overall emission of global warming pollutants. As Yvonne Yanez explains: if some company wants to build a golf course in Florida, they can buy the carbon offsets by paying someone here not to destroy their forest or grasslands, which they were not doing anyway, and then drain the swamp in Florida. It does nothing to mitigate global warming and it allows this company to destroy critical wetlands in the United States. (Interview, Quito, August 26, 2011)

In other words, obligatory carbon markets might make polluting somewhat more expensive, which in theory could dissuade some investment in carbon producing activities, but it does not address the main problem of cutting emissions to begin with. Instead, it puts the burden of mitigating carbon emissions on those communities that have done the least to create the problem. The second objection to this market approach is that in all probability it will lead to speculation, put less well-off communities at a disadvantage and open them to exploitation. Volunteer assistance only goes so far, and if the point is to create a market for carbon pollution, then it is also logical to assume that finance markets will inevitably become interested in those commodities. In order for carbon rights to be traded in the open market, investors need to have clear guarantees that their investments are being protected under enforceable contracts, meaning that the individuals and communities living on those lands, who have sold their environmental services, will increasingly lose control not only of their rights to use their the land, but will also see minimal benefit from any value added onto their original

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contracts. It is reasonable to imagine the kinds of speculative bubbles that have caused enormous damage to the global economy developing around carbon bonds or other environmental services. Furthermore, as these services become increasingly valuable assets to investors, a greater incentive will emerge to defraud and exploit local communities. Indeed, a growing number of cases of this behavior are already being documented in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (Goldtooth 2011). Finally, REDD/REDD+ has been established specifically to prevent future deforestation and the future loss of “carbon stock,” which ironically leads to both a perverse incentive to increase deforestation now in order to prove future restraint, and to favoring large companies already involved in massive ecosystem destruction (Gilberston 2011, 26). In order for REDD+ to function, there needs to be exact measurements of how much deforestation is to be avoided, and, therefore, countries with low current levels of deforestation would be incentivized “to cut more trees now in order to be able to claim later that they are sharply reducing deforestation and thus deserve more REDD/REDD+ finance” (Goldtooth 2011, 18). Yvonne Yanez echoes this sentiment: You have to say, “I am going to deforest. I would have deforested a million hectares, but instead I will only deforest 100,000. Since it would have been in my plans to deforest a million, you give me money for certificates of avoided emissions for these 900 thousand hectares that now I am not going to deforest.” But Indigenous communities are never going to say this. They are never going to say, “we are going to do away with our territories.” No. The only ones that are going to say this are timber companies. (Interview, Quito, August 26, 2011)

Instead of providing funding and support for sustainable practices, the need to commercialize the environmental services under REDD will lead to a situation in which the “deforesters” are rewarded, because they can claim that they would have deforested more territory than they actually have. But in order to prove that they would have deforested, they must have a program of deforestation in place, thus providing the incentive for REDD financing to halt deforestation. The people who are actively destroying their ecosystems are generally not the people who have lived there and cared for them for generations, but rather are corporations extracting natural resources from the area, meaning that in the long run it is unlikely that local communities will benefit from REDD, which will not pay them to not destroy something they were not planning to destroy (Moreano Venegas 2012). These anticapitalist and anticolonial discourses from environmental organizations dovetail with Indigenous discourses about the environment and about local power and autonomy in relationship to the national state. Latin America’s Indigenous movements have been at the forefront not only in advocating rights for their peoples, but as protagonists in what former CONAIE President Humberto Cholango (2012, 76) characterizes as a “confrontation of civilizations.” While this civilizational conflict has certainly been played out in Indigenous politics throughout the region and is the

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basis for intercultural thinking and practices, it plays a particularly important role in defining environmental discourses. Ecuador’s Indigenous movement has been at the forefront of anti-neoliberal organizing, and criticizing the whole-scale environmental degradation caused by that development model. Second, Indigenous discourse often connects Indigenous peoples and their cultures to their natural environment, pointing out that it is frequently their territories, and hence their communities, that suffer the brunt of extractive industries. Finally, community and collectivity as opposed to the individualism of liberal modernity are central elements in Indigenous identity discourses. Seeing that environmental crises require collective action, Indigenous organizations position themselves as already practicing the kinds of social and political behavior needed to create a more sustainable society. To avoid either idealizing or discounting Indigenous environmental discourse, it is important to remember that these are discourses, sets of ideas, and narratives that create meaning and help to orient actions. With that in mind, Indigenous activists often discuss the proximity of their cultures to nature. In part, this comes from the obvious connections of rural people to their lands and their knowledge of natural systems, properties of plants, and means of caring for animals. Marco Pichisaca and Cesario Guaman, Kichwa leaders from Cañar, for instance, write: we would like to propose that our concept of what natural resources are, like our Andean culture, is life, is holistic, is agrocentric, is totalizing, that it conceives that all that exists is interrelated, that nothing and nobody can live and exist alone and isolated, that the world is like a living being, in that everything is interrelated in a collectivity made up of the human community, nature and the deities; in the same way our people consider the páramo, Urko, Uksha pamba [Mountain, High Grasslands], like a living being, highly sensitive, capable of responding positively to good treatment, therefore transformable, but also capable of responding ferociously toward an aggression. (Pichisaca and Guaman 2011, 178)

This type of worldview enters into relatively easy dialog with the radical environmental stances analyzed above. If part of the problem with programs like REDD and Socio Bosque is their determination to commodify natural resources, then an alternative can be found in a perception of the world not as resources, but as holistic, interconnected being. Roberto Tocagón, a Kayambi community leader from Otavalo, who has been a key architect in conserving the páramo region of Mojanda—without participating in Socio Páramo—explains: For us, for the Indigenous peoples, Pachamama is a living being, she is living just like us. That is why she is growing life, even the plants, the animals, us, the people, just everything is alive.… And that is why we say that when we go to plant in the basins, we have a beautiful experience. When we go to plant, first, we ask an older person, be it a man or a woman, to ask Pachamama for us for this

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This systemic view locates human beings as part of nature, and not separate from it, and constitutes departure from modern/liberal understandings of that relationship. It would be difficult to characterize water as an environmental service in this logic, because selling it would be akin to selling off part of oneself. This standpoint, of course, does not mean that no Indigenous people ever sell commodities in their territory or are somehow naturally better stewards of the environment. Rather, it provides a profoundly different framework from which to think about what one should and should not do with resources under one’s control, or if one should even consider water, trees, animals as resources at all. In many Indigenous communities, particularly among older people, there is a sense that humans have a responsibility to give back to nature, or to Pachamama, even as we take from her. We (humans and the rest of nature) are interdependent and inseparable parts of the same system. There has been much discussion and appropriation of the Andean concept of Sumak Kawsay in Ecuador, particularly as the concept was adopted by the 2008 Constitution to serve as the foundation for national development strategies (Acosta and Martínez 2009; CONAIE 2010; Torres 2011). A common trope in Indigenous discourse about environmental conservation is one of already being good stewards of the environment and of having been that way for thousands of years. The lands that are least deforested and the páramos that are least damaged are in the hands of Indigenous communities, and as they are dependent on those lands, it is unlikely they would destroy them for purely extractive economic gain. Sumak Kawsay, while encompassing notions of what in Western discourse would be considered sustainable development, also refers to harmonious living not just between humans and nature, but also between different communities, community members, and families. In this type of harmony—an ideal and not necessarily a realizable goal—extractive industries are disruptive not only because they destroy nature but also because they alter other relationships, effecting imbalances, and absences. This conception of the good life is very different than the vision promoted by modernity/liberalism that advocates continuous individual advancement regardless of the collateral damage to those other kinds of relationships. As Blanca Chancoso (2013), an historic leader of the Indigenous movement, has argued, “We’re not against development; we just don’t want development at the expense of anyone else.” This decolonial discourse about human/nature relationships is also tied to political debates surrounding the organization of a plurinational state. One of the key demands of the past generation of the Indigenous movement has been political

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autonomy. In some areas of Ecuador, particularly the Amazon, autonomy and territory can be relatively easily connected; in other areas, such as the Andes, where there is often a great deal of ethnic mixing in territories, debates about political autonomy and power are more complex. Nevertheless, the rights to control collective natural resources and to utilize and develop local mechanisms of decision-making go to the heart of the tension over environmental services initiatives. José Rivadeneira, director of the Ecuadorian Coordinator of Agroecology, observes that in CONAIE, especially in the Sierra, there is a very strong opposition to Socio Páramo and Socio Bosque. Why? Because these communities are trying to … assert that they can be in a sense the administration of their territory as a people. When they come into disagreements with state programs, they are very mistrustful. So, conflict occurs when a development model is established, and the communities feel that they are still not fully integrated into the state as participants; where they are really represented in a plurinational state. (Interview, Quito, September 20, 2011)

By signing long-term contracts with the state, Indigenous communities are not only compromising their philosophical principles about their relationships with nature but also, in a sense, voluntarily giving up their rights to local autonomy. Once they agree not to develop their lands in particular ways, they forgo the option of changing their minds. The program contracts are valid for twenty years, which means that one generation is making a binding agreement on the following one, disallowing the collective decision-making processes that have often characterized these communities. The problem arises, therefore, from the continuation of a political culture derived from authoritarian, colonial models of governance that have shaped modern capitalist development in Ecuador. While strides have been made to create a more inclusive political system, the dominant mode of expropriation of natural resources and accumulation of wealth remains largely unchanged, resulting from only a partial dialog of differences, and the pressures of elites to conform to the rules of the game of international commerce and economic development. Because the national state has effectively appropriated the language and positions of progressive and minority groups, alternative proposals for development or for the definition of living well have limited political space and remain marginalized from national-level policymaking decisions.

Conclusions The ways in which environmental issues and conflicts are talked about and debated in Ecuador are produced not only by generalized discourses about development and conservation, but also come from the particular political and social relationships in which they are embedded. In the case of Ecuador, the collapse of the traditional political party system after the return to democracy, coupled with the

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surge of mobilization by Indigenous and other marginalized groups through the 1990s and early 2000s, resulted in the presidency of Rafael Correa and the demand for the re-founding of the nation-state along more egalitarian and socially inclusive frameworks (Paz and Cepeda 2009). Once in office, Correa and his backers faced stark choices. In order to alleviate poverty and create the groundwork for a more just society, they looked essentially to a capitalist model of development, albeit with fairer distribution and closer state control, arguing that there really are no alternatives to extractive development for a country like Ecuador (Gudynas 2013). Capitalist development demands maximizing profits from available resources, leading the Correa Government to push to further exploit oil and mineral wealth, arguing that to leave that wealth in the ground would be a betrayal of the Ecuadorian people. It is a continuation of modern and colonial conceptions of the maximization of natural resource depletion. In fact, the Correa Government often accuses its environmentalist and Indigenous opponents of trying to sabotage development or of being engaged in a power grab at the expense of the country’s most vulnerable sectors, resulting in increasingly severe repression of these activists. This strategy has led to numerous confrontations with local (usually Indigenous) communities, who believe that the state is infringing on their territories and their aspirations for autonomy. Even seemingly environmentally progressive initiatives such as Socio Bosque/Socio Páramo are viewed with suspicion and resisted because of their connections to neoliberal and capitalist market solutions. The Indigenous and environmental movements are not only disagreeing with particular policies but rather are making a very different cultural argument that directly challenges the state’s hegemonic discourse. Believing that the limitless growth upon which capitalism is founded, as well as modernity’s separation of human beings from nature, are unsustainable, they argue not only for better environmental policies, but a completely different way of being in and understanding of the world. At the beginning of this article I referenced Correa’s contention that “the world has failed us” in regard to conserving Yasuní-ITT. While that may be true, Correa has in turn failed the democratic aspirations of those who disagree with him on environmental and autonomy matters by criminalizing dissent and demonizing opponents. In 2013 and 2014, in response to the situation in Yasuní, environmental organizations formed a broad-based coalition, “Yasunidos,” to place on a national referendum the matter of leaving Yasuní’s oil in the ground forever. Leaders of this movement believed that a substantial majority of Ecuadorians favored this position, as it would avoid putting millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and would protect the rights of forest peoples living in voluntary isolation. The Correa administration, however, derided these constitutionally protected rights and claimed that the referendum was an attempt by environmental elites to maintain poverty in Ecuador by depriving the country of the wealth of the region’s

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oilfields. The government actively campaigned against the referendum in the press and the courts. In a particularly egregious attempt to persuade citizens, it obligated public schools to give one-sided presentations on the matter and pressured parents to sign petitions in favor of drilling in Yasuní, in an attempt to demonstrate support for the government’s position and to confuse the legally binding petition drive of Yasunidos. After signatures were gathered for the referendum, the official counting was subverted through a number of irregularities, including chain of custody problems, entire sheets being disqualified for one irregular signature, and an overall lack of transparency and oversight from civil society shrouded the actual counting process. In the end, the National Electoral Council denied Yasunido’s petition for a referendum, by rejecting 239,342 of the 599,103 signatures presented, suggesting instead that Yasuni activists had attempted to commit a massive fraud (“Yasunidos no alcanza firmas” 2014). This active opposition to environmental initiatives and the positioning of activists as enemies of the state demonstrates that the colonial/developmentalist logic which continues to drive political elites in Ecuador displaces meaningful consideration of other discourses or modes of social organization. Arguing against the commodification of nature and for a fundamentally different way of organizing the production, circulation, and consumption of material goods is not simply a policy difference, but rather a threat to the very foundations of modern society, and would explain, at least in part, the harshness with which the state deals with proponents of such alternatives.

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