How a constitutional clause saved a slice of Ecuador's breathtaking rainforest

Spellbinding beauty

Few people have heard of Yasuní beyond Latin America.

I would never have heard of it myself, had I not moved there for a year to teach English. Based in Quito, I made as many trips into the interior as I could manage, on weekends and over school holidays.

Ecuador may be small on the map, but it is blessed with stunning scenery on a scale, and of a variety, that leaves any visitor spellbound. Vast Andean vistas, an avenue of volcanoes, cloud forests, the weirdness of the fauna in the Galapagos, and tropical beaches. And, in addition to all of this, the depths of its equatorial rainforest.

In 2006, with the oil companies yet to arrive, I took the bus from the capital to Yasuní National Park. At the time I was unaware of just how important my destination was.

UNESCO recognises the park as a World Biosphere Reserve. It is said that there are more tree species in a single hectare than in the whole of North America. The same area can contain up to 100,000 species of insect.

Despite covering less than 0.15% of the Amazon Basin, Yasuní is home to approximately one-third of its amphibian and reptile species. The park also harbours high levels of fish diversity with 382 known species, piranhas among them.

Yasuní is also home to at least 596 bird species, which comprises one-third of the total native bird species in the Amazon. One such bird has claws on its wings like a living fossil. Another, which stayed by our huts through the early evenings, has a call so mournful it can make a grown man cry.

Monkeys, sloths, and jaguars all frequent the reserve. Many of these creatures are elusive. The forest is so thick, it is sometimes hard to believe the sheer numbers of its inhabitants.

Even by Amazonian standards, then, I was about to enter a region of exceptional biodiversity, possibly the nearest to a surviving scrap of Eden anywhere on the face of the planet. The Wikipedia entry calls it 'arguably the most biologically diverse spot on Earth.'

A snake in paradise

Descending from Quito, my bus passed quickly through every imaginable landscape. As we left the mountains, the ground flattened. The road became increasingly uneven. Then a pipeline appeared on the left. This was a vast structure, raised in places on metallic stilts or supine on the roadside, stretching for miles.

All of a sudden, the pipe veered off out of sight. It was the last one saw of this snake in paradise, introduced by the fossil fuel industry.

A few miles on, and we approached a spot on the riverbank where a boat was due to collect us. As dusk fell, a pair of brightly-coloured macaws flew slowly overhead, their feathers catching the rays of the setting sun. They rasped at each other as they went.

Reptilian eyes gazed back at us from the surface of the dark river – caimans, small members of the alligator family – and, as the river grew darker still, a multitude of caiman eyes reflected back the lamps on our boat.

Over the next few days, we learned a lot about the local fauna and flora. We were told cures could be found in the plants there for just about any ailment. One fruit was even said to be a natural contraceptive. The commercial possibilities made this more tempting than any apple, but – fortunately for my immortal soul – I was never able to discover its scientific name.

The scenery was not always hemmed in by vegetation. At points, the rivers opened out into vast lakes where the trees stood up to their waists in water. We saw schools of piranhas under the boat. A sloth was sleeping in a treetop, unflustered by an obstreperous toucan.

The forest was a cacophony by day. Occasionally you would glimpse a troop of noisy monkeys. Then, just to prove you were in Eden, you'd see an anaconda, long and plump as a coiled pipeline, basking on a rock. 

I don't think anyone would say the most biodiverse spot on the planet is easy to visit. There were times when I was walking through the forest, during yet another deluge, when I longed for some cityscape instead — and a coffee house, any coffee house. For some reason, I kept fantasising about Manhattan, though I'd never been there.

You get drenched repeatedly, your feet sweat in your boots, everything is sharp underfoot, on your arms and legs, and a great many of the 100,000 species of insect per hectare are intent on tormenting you.

Yet there are moments of utterly bewitching beauty. I recall one afternoon in particular after we'd visited a hut and eaten the local food, when we were idle for an hour or so.

Down on a wide strand of beach near the river – while the local children swam, oblivious to the piranhas – a legion of butterflies had settled on the bank. They were licking the minerals off the surface.

At moments like that, Manhattan has no allure. All you want is to revert to the life of the indigenous tribes, in search of primordial simplicity.

The park is big enough, after all, to contain two uncontacted tribes who have resisted assimilation into the modern world. They only number in their hundreds, but the preservation of their way of life was also part of the decision voters took in the referendum. 

Some years after my return to England, I learnt that the president at that time, Rafael Correa, had declared his scheme a dud.

Correa had tried to get rich countries and individuals to compensate Ecuador for leaving its oil reserves underground. Soon afterwards, the dirty, destructive business of drilling for oil in an Amazonian landscape began.

Dismayed, I contacted Sir David Attenborough, who wrote back in support. I also contacted the pope, himself a South American and a declared environmentalist, but this time I only received an earnest reply from a priest. Apart from Sir David, of course, no one had heard of Yasuní.

The feeling of helplessness, and of being so far away, was demoralising. Later, with the prospect of Bolsonaro rampaging through the Amazon, I began to lose hope. The Amazon was burning and there seemed little an idealistic Englishman could do about it.

Now, wonderfully, the Ecuadorian people have voted to end the environmental destruction. In Brazil, moreover, Lula is back in power. Destruction of the forests has begun to ease off.

Scorching heatwaves and flash floods have brought home to us all the dangers of rampant consumption and damage to the environment. Maybe it's time I wrote a second letter to the pontiff. This time, there's every chance Francis himself will get back to me.