A Review of Reckoning with Harm:  The Toxic Relation of Oil in Amazonia

Reckoning with Harm: The Toxic Relation of Oil in Amazonia by Amelia M. Fiske (University of Texas Press, 2023)

In addition to reviewing related national and international literature, the author details her lengthy ethnography among highly opinionated individuals—oil developers and colonists—who contribute widely varied accounts of oil-related injuries and mental health problems among colonist familes who have been relatively uncared for since their early arrivals and amidst numerous oil company changes.  At such times, the Ecuadorian government prioritized national economic income. By contrast, though Fiske reviews long-term indigenous resident problems, she greatly details new colonist arrivals with neglected or misinterpreted emotional and physical injuries and mental illnesses while living poorly and laboring lands amidst oil development. She clearly adds numerous and varied “harms” due to “unchecked disposal of crude oil and production waters into waste pits and local waterways and their regular burning of crude by products.” While the study reviews regional land tenure problems for indigenous residents, it greatly details health problems linked to oil development among the newly arrived colonist living closer oil work.     

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ecuador’s roadless northeast Amazon region, historically occupied by environmentally well-adapted Cofan, Siona and Secoya Indigenous, began to experience oil entries. Texaco Oil, linked to Ecuador’s new oil company CEPE (Corporacion Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (later renamed PlusPetrol), began to open roads and explore for oil. At about the same time, amidst droughts in the densely populated southern Andean region, and unwillness of wealthy highland hacienda owners to subdivide their large estates,  the Ecuadorian government encouraged colonization into the “previously isolated” Oriente (Amazon) forest, simply labeling long-term Cofan, Siona and Secoya Indigenous lands as tierras baldias (open lands). Earlier, land-starved highland residents settled along existing roads in Ecuador’s forested north coastal region, Esmeraldas.  But, as northeast Amazon access opened along new oil roads, poor highlanders were encouraged to settle there. Later, Indigenous Shuar from southern Amazonian provinces and Kichwa families from upriver Napo areas began arriving in the region, leaving their earlier residence amidst increasing population, conflicts and violence.

Initially, the incoming oil development road created a centrally-located city, Lago Agrio, from which other exploratory roads and pipelines expanded widley across the region. Oil roads later crossed the Napo River from the port of Coca  and extended south into Huaorani territory.  Following the oil roads,  incoming Andean colonists and recent Amazonian indigenous arrivals were seen, by the government, as Ecuadorian residents occupying previously isolated and potentially contested national territory alongside Peru and Colombia. At the time, Indigenous hunting and fishing lands of the long-term resident Cofan, Secoya and Siona, who did not cluster along the new roads or oil sites, were not legally recognized. Areas adjacent to their gardens were labeled (or perhaps purposly “misunderstood”) by the government as uninhabited tierras baldias. Such land labeling was regionally common. In the 1970s, while I was researching among Kichwa to the central Amazon (Arajuno), highland colonists also began to enter and similarly claimed tierras baldias, hoping for roads accessing their cattle pastures, and later inviting oil development.  Though neither occurred, numerous forest areas were divided into 50-hectare lots, visibly claimed by clearing forests for cattle raising. Recently however, such land clearing in the region has ended. Equally importnt, local Amazonian Indigenous are organizing federations (e.g., PAKKIRU and ACIA) and seeking territorial rights that balance sustainable community land use amidst wide forest management.  Such minimally deforested Amazonian indigenous territories are now strongly encouraged globally to reduce global climate warming. Even earlier, environmentally sound land rights and claims, usually relatively distant from oil roads and well sites, were legally claimed and accepted for the Siona, Secoya, Cofan and Huaorani. Though numerous local oil development disputes have continued, many indigenous communal land holdings are now known and supported by national and international environmenal rights groups. 

By contrast, and well detailed by Fiske, the current lives and rights of the many poor, relatively landless colonists encouraged to enter Ecuador’s northern Amazon are relatively little known or defended by national or international human and environmental rights movements. Unfamiliar with dense forests, and somewhat fearful of wild forest animals, many colonists choose homes and farms along the oil development roads. With their close proximity to either active or abandoned oil sites, physical and mental health has become widley harmed. Fiske introduces the colonists concerns in the first pages, and later details them in each chapter. For example, there are mixed comments and concerns as they move away from the relatively densely populated oil center, Lago Agrio. One character,  Luz Maria’s and her spouse Wilmer (pseudonyms for protection) says,

The air is fresco, and life is not as loud and chaotic as it is in the city. On the other hand, we are living closer to danger, and everything here is contaminated.”  Her son became ill, suffering from ongoing headaches and stomach pain, she sent Wilmer to talk to PetroEcuador workmen who maintained the well and the gas flare diretly in front of their house. Wilmer asked them to stop running the gas flare temporarily, at least during the remainder of Luz’s pregancy. Nonetheless, the company continued its operations. The gas was biting, she recalled, just flowing out of the flare. Wilmer interjected, describing how some days the flare would go out on its own and the gas would leak, hanging low over the platform and, as such, saturating the air. Instead of waiting for the company workers to arrive, he had improvised a method to reignite it with a lit stick. The fumes of a functioning flare were preferable to the slow intoxication of leaking gas.

What is startling in such sad accounts is how close to oil development many colonists chose to live. Most chapters thus expand the colonists’ multiple meanings of “harm” by including varied physical or mental suffering, clearly influenced by proximity to oil development by various companies. By contrast, the author’s many conversations with government workers and oil technicians illustrate how the widespread term, “harm,”is voided by oil technicians who purposly use various, milder terms to describe colonists’ health conditions, often declared unrelated to local oil.

Fiske’ s focused and detailed ethnography encourages clear local communication, understanding, and support. By contrast, a related and famous regional legal case—Aguinda vs. Texaco—drew much global environmental, legal, and press attention. It was demanding but producing no local benefit.  In 1993 New York lawyers filed a case on behalf of an estimated 60,000 local residents, suing Chevron $9.5 billion for property damage and personal injuries. The interests were laudatory.  However, the charges focused exclusively on Chevron (Texaco’s new owner in Ecuador) and were unaccepted because the case excluded the linked Ecuadorian oil company Petroecuador. Though the case made international news, received much support, opened controversy nationally and internationally, it endured in U.S., Ecuadorian, and international courts for years as charges were challenged and reversed. Large payments were mutually demanded, but economic support for local people and their oil-related problems did not occur as the cases became lengthy international disputes. Eventually payments were demanded from nation to nation. Little was done to support the local claimants. Interestingly, in those years, as I talked with Kichwa and Shuar in Ecuador’s central and southern forest region, many strongly opposed oil development, they did not rally their ethnic federations in support of on-going legal cases or later court decisions. They simply, and quite accurately, saw the cases as “government vs. oil company,” with little-expected local economic return.

By contrast, Fiske’s most illustrative and often cited oil site, Aguarico-4, is now a highly visible, even though currently inactive, wellsite. It was frequently visited by Fiske as well as curious national and international outsiders, led and lectured to either by highly critical local colonists or defensive oil company technicians. Many old illnesses are often and simply identified by the oil industry or government health workers as unrelated to current oil work. By contrast, local resident speakers often, and dramatically, use wooden sticks to penetrate soils and stir water holes, or dip their hands into moist local holes and emerge them with thick black oil covering.  They use such displays to clearly illustrate many common, long-term, and varied personal dangers caused by close oil contact. And they also detail long-term harms produced after oil mistakenly flows into nearby rivers, ponds, or wells. Throughout the book, as chapters detail contrasting views of colonists and oil industry representatives, the need for colonist support is clear.  

Also, by combining local Ecuadorian colonist concerns with comparative international studies, Fiske details a wide global variety of peoples who have experienced and opposed similar, clear, and harmful economic and health impacts amidst oil development, and also linking oil contact to agricultural damage and animal deaths. Many such illnesses or injuries have been claimed in Ecuador but dismissed earlier by varied corporate technicians who argue that illnesses were due to earlier or other oil company practices. With colonist life and problems close to oil wells rarely detailed in Amazonian studies, Fiske’s ethnography clearly introduces their problems and encourages support. 

In sum, Amelia Fiske’s historic and ethnographic study includes oil harms to local indigenous forest residents but clearly introduces and details many colonists’ poorly-known lives…many with critical local and long-term health suffering, amidst defensive corporate explanations.  As with the broad human rights demands now linked to forested Amazonian Indigenous groups, many poor and recent colonists deserve similar international support.  

Ted Macdonald is a Lecturer in Social Studies and Faculty Affiliate at DRCLAS, Harvard University. He has worked directly on Latin American Indigenous rights issues and cases since 1980. Currently and in collaboration with Kichwa Indian community leaders, he is preparing an ethnographic history of territorial rights and self-determination in the Ecuadorian Amazon.