The living forest, the rights of nature, and a message from the Ecuadorian Amazon to the modern world
By Liz Downes
On my first night in the forest, I couldn’t sleep. I lay flat on my back, tired yet wide awake, charged with energy. It was the early hour after midnight, pitch black except for the small gleaming lights caused by phosphorescent beetles flying and crawling in the roof of the hut. Earlier there had been a chorus of ‘wooop - wooop’ from tree frogs calling for mates; now only a solitary frog sounded off in a nearby tree, rhythmic as a metronome. Cicadas rang continuous; behind them the silence was wide, deep, profound.
This was not a silence for lack of noise, but a silence for lack of human noise. A rich silence made up of the breathing, birthing, interweaving, decaying, growing of millions of life forms. Life in a vast web that if lit up would look like a silicon chip, a power board darting with impulses of electrical energy, carrying enough information to power the world. Presences loomed beyond the edge of the thatch where I stared out into the deep night – the dense and listening forest, the living forest. It pulled my awareness out of my body, out of my feet. It shouted, in a million silent voices: Alive! Alive!
I found myself suddenly in anxiety. I tried to pull myself back in, but my mind, caught in the grandness of what had just taken me, spread further out. I was a tiny dot, a microscopic being on a map. All I knew of my location was that it was half an hour in a small plane from Puyo, the nearest town in Ecuador. We had flown over unbroken forest from horizon to horizon. But the forest continued further than that. It stretched across half a continent … the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of the earth, indomitable yet fragile, battering my consciousness with its grandness, its entangled fecundity, its seething cycles of life-eat-death-eat-life, its intangible yet suffocating feel of presence.
Faced with this, resistance is futile. Around me other humans slept; I sat up. I felt a familiar sensation in my body. It was a closing-down, a pull towards numbness, as I might feel in the face of too much intimacy or too much pain. The thought crossed my mind that I might never sleep in this forest, that I would stay awake until the end, until I flew out and surrounded myself with four walls, with a city.
What was my fear? To take in life? Yes! – somehow, in this encounter with the living forest, I was feeling myself threatened by it. I had to surrender, to take the forest in. Indeed, the vast ringing presence of trees from one end of a continent to the other was telling me so.
As I lay there slowly the fear softened, abated. I felt energy come through my body, felt the forest encircling, felt it talk in its million voices, felt myself expand, tentatively. Some time later I fell asleep. I came back to awareness at the crack of dawn, to the huge beating of wings as a flock of a hundred colourful parrots flew down the river, squabbling.
It is July 2016, and I am part of a group visiting a small community called Llamanchacocha, which is situated on the Cunambo River in eastern Ecuador, in the territory of the Sápara people - a tiny tribe of less than 600 members who are, by their own admission, facing cultural extinction. The visit is a rainforest immersion experience organized by the Pachamama Alliance, a global non-profit organization committed to building a just, sustainable world through its educational symposiums, courses and grassroots community support work.
We are camping at the site of the Naku project - a cultural and eco-tourism initiative launched by the community in 2015, with the goal of preserving and passing on the knowledge of the Sápara to the outside community. Funding for the initial building was initially advanced by a couple of NGOs, including the RUNA Foundation and the Pachamama Alliace, but Naku aims to generate most of its ongoing funding from visitors. The Sápara hope that they will in time attract up to 120 visitors a year to the site.
The camp is remote and simple. A short walk from the river, the site consists of four thatch huts with wooden floors and no walls, and a fifth half-finished. The central hut is a ceremonial hut – a beautiful circular structure with altar in the middle and hammocks around the edge. Two others are for sleeping, containing rows of mattresses surrounded by mosquito nets, and one is a large, well-furnished open kitchen and dining area. Around the huts are gardens – manioc, plantains, herbs and medicinal plants. It is a peaceful place,thrumming with life.
During our stay, our hosts are the Ushigua family. They join us daily and guide us in dream circles, cultural sharing, walks, river canoe expeditions, and sacred ceremony. Consistently, gently, several times a day, they reiterate some basic messages that they want us to absorb, to understand, and to take away with us when we go. Messages about the imminent threats to the communities where we were staying. Messages about the need to extend traditional knowledge outside of the village and the jungle. Messages about the rights of nature, about what this idea means to the Sápara, and about how we need to change our whole relationship to the natural world if we are to save it.
Background story: Rights of nature, oil and the fight for survival
In 2015 the Kichwa people of the Sarayaku region in Ecuador, neighbours of the Sapara, made their presence at the United Nations Climate Summit with a traditional dugout canoe, which they marched down the street of Paris. They spoke about a project based on the idea of the 'Living Forest' - the principle that a forest can not be treated in terms of single areas, or species, or parts: it is a systemic whole, where each and every living thing is interconnected with each and every other living thing. You cannot remove or exploit or damage one part without affecting every other part. Therefore the 'Living Forest' must be globally recognised as sacred patrimony, intangible, worthy of protection in its entirety, in its own right.
Despite a global economic system based on privatising and exploiting nature, indigenous peoples throughout the world have maintained a culture of balanced relationships with all life. The indigenous peoples of Latin America have been promoting the rights of nature concept for some years - with some influential political results. In 2008, the government of Ecuador wrote a section into its constitution referring to nature more than just a commodity for economic growth or something factored into political debates, but as something that has its own intrinsic right to exist in a state of wellbeing.
The rights of nature law is part of a larger policy framework in Ecuador known as 'Buen Vivir' (or 'sumak kawsay' in Kichwa) outlining a transition towards wellbeing and harmony for humans, economy and environment. Ecuador's new policy direction kicked off the ratification of a similar policy and legal framework in Bolivia, which led to the 2011 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba. At this conference was presented the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. The global rights of nature movement was born.
This unprecedented policy direction in Ecuador has been possible because of the political strength of indigenous federations. However, there are complications. In spite of the constitutional change, and the subsequent rise of Ecuador in the eyes of the world as a green, progressive country, the reality of environmental and Indigenous rights within the country is very different, and the issues have to do with one thing: oil.
Ecuador is a developing country pulling itself out of poverty, and its economy is largely reliant upon oil - which currently represents about half of the country's GDP. Therefore it would not be a logical economic move (in the view of the government) to write a law that could jeopardise future oil explorations within the country. So the constitutional Rights of Nature laws were written with an all-too-common loophole. They apply only to what is above the ground.
Between 2010 and 2013, while the world clapped its hands and celebrated Ecuador as being the first country to include the rights of nature in its constitution, the government moved ahead and signed off on the 10th and 11th oil licensing rounds, which include 3.6 million hectares of land in 7 Indigenous nationalities across Eastern Ecuador. Communities were consulted in the process, but sporadically and selectively. Indigenous people found that their rights, once again, were being suppressed in favour of economic interests.
Between 2010 and 2013, while the world clapped its hands and celebrated Ecuador as being the first country to include the rights of nature in its constitution, the government moved ahead and signed off on the 10th and 11th oil licensing rounds, which include 3.6 million hectares of land in 7 Indigenous nationalities across Eastern Ecuador. Communities were consulted in the process, but sporadically and selectively. Indigenous people found that their rights, once again, were being suppressed in favour of economic interests.
Some Indigenous groups in Eastern Ecuador had already, by this point, been fighting oil for decades. They are the subject of horrifying reports and testimonies circulating outside of, and within, the country. Clean-ups that have never happened; rivers and lakes polluted beyond repair; dead fish and other wildlife; high rates of skin troubles, birth defects and cancer in communities. The environmental disaster caused by Texaco/Chevron in northeastern Ecuador between the 1960s and the 1990s was dubbed "the Amazon Chernobyl". Chevron is still refusing to clean up its mess. People whose territories are still intact, such as the Sapara, know what has happened to the people further up north. They know that their fight has only just begun.In recent history, some success has been achieved by mounting cases based on violations of free, prior and informed consent. In 2012 the Sarayaku Kichwa people, whose land neighbours that of the Sápara, won a case against the Ecuadorian Government at the Interamerican Court of Human Rights. They forced the state oil company Petroecuador to acknowledge that communities had not been adequately consulted for exploration operations, and to remove their machinery from the designated areas. The Sarayaku win represented a major threat to public relations for Petroecuador and the state. But as a result, it has become increasingly important that indigenous and activist groups fighting for human and nature rights are silenced, so as not to disrupt the progress of the 11th Oil Round and the critical economic plans resting on it.
In January 2016, blocks 79 and 83 of the 11th Round, which include the entire Sápara territory, were sold to a Chinese company called Andes Petroleum. Exploration began weeks later, in March. That same month, hundreds of people from five indigenous nationalities, including the Sápara, came together in a special assembly to defend their territory from oil, mining, logging and destructive dams - and, in general, the commodification of nature. The group released a declaration declaring null and void all agreements that the government had reached without consulting them through the official indigenous leadership structures. They vowed that they would die defending their land.
Following the sale of the Sápara lands to China, Gloria Ushigua, president of the Sapara Women’s Association of Ecuador (ASHIÑWA) wrote a plea to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples for investigation and verification of several ‘crimes being committed against the Sápara Nation’, including falsification of public documents with the goal of obtaining illegal permission for oil exploitation, 'contempt for the indigenous sentence and the usurpation of titles ... and criminalization of leaders who are defending rights and territories'. She ended with a final request that: ‘ ... you make the appropriate recommendations to guarantee the Rights of Nature and our rights as the Sápara Nation’.
Because of the extreme vulnerability of their culture (only six people now speak the original language), the Sápara were in 1999 recognized by UNESCO with Intangible Cultural Heritage status. Sápara leaders have been outspoken in international conference, alerting outsiders to their predicament, their heritage status, and the need to recognize Ecuadorian Rights of Nature policies as well as international human rights law.
In the face of the seemingly inexorable progress of the 11th Oil Round, the Sapara are now following the example of their neighbours, the Sarayaku Kichwa and the Achuar, in mounting a different kind of defence: to share their culture and intangible heritage with the outside world, so that if the oil comes and all is lost in the territory, the culture will still exist in the hearts and minds of people in the world.
The Sápara hope that the values and understandings they hold – a spiritual interconnectedness with the life of the forest, an ethic of ‘use only what you need’, a knowing of the intrinsic rights and importance of non-human living things - will serve the rest of the world in creating a harmonious and sustainable future.
The Sápara hope that the values and understandings they hold – a spiritual interconnectedness with the life of the forest, an ethic of ‘use only what you need’, a knowing of the intrinsic rights and importance of non-human living things - will serve the rest of the world in creating a harmonious and sustainable future.
"You need to change the dream of the modern world."
The Sápara, like other Amazonian peoples, place great value upon messages from their dreams. Dreams are the mode of transmission of information from the spirit world, of the voices of all the spirits of the forest. As such, correct interpretation is essential for survival. During our stay, the Sápara express the concept of the rights of nature to us in terms of spiritual knowledge gained through their dreams - their visions of interconnectedness with the spirit-realms of the forest.
When we talk about the rights of nature, most people don’t include in this another set of rights – the rights of spirit. All the forest here is living spirits. When you come here be aware that you don’t just breathe the clean air – be aware, also, of all the spirits around. The petroleum under the ground has a spirit. It is connected to everything above the ground. If you take the petroleum out this impacts on all the other spirits, the balance of everything, all the forest. We are almost disappeared, but this message is our gift for everyone to learn and understand. - Manari Ushigua, talking to us at the campfire.
The Sápara give us basic guidance on how to dream well, so that messages can come to us from nature, from the spirit world, while we stay at the camp.
Before you go to sleep, empty all thoughts out of your head and set the question: why am I here? Who am I? Feel the question in your whole body, your heart. Ask for a dream that can show you an answer to this question.
On the second night of our stay, I dream that I have just discovered I can move objects by telekinesis, purely with my thoughts. The more I practice, the easier it becomes. I realize that not only can I change the position of objects, but that maybe I can also change negative aspects of my reality into positive aspects – for example, heal my digestive problems. At this point I am lucid dreaming: I am aware of myself and my thoughts within the dream, and am analyzing my feelings. I feel a sense of great responsibility, related to the strength of my mind; along with this I feel fear, caution. I need to be very careful to move my thoughts in the right direction, otherwise I could create unwanted consequences.
The morning after this dream, I share it in the dream circle held at the ceremonial hut. After each person shared, our two guides Manari and Francisco confer together in Kichwa, relay their interpretation in Spanish to Julian, our Pachamama group guide, who finally speaks it out for us in English. The final message seems to suggest that we create the reality of the world we live in, for better or for worse:
We have the ability to move things in the spirit world, and this affects the material world because spirit changes matter. We create and change realities by working in the spirit realm. Our mind needs to be strong to do this in the right way. If we are not strong, or if we are ignorant, we create problems and conflicts.
The understanding that our sleeping and waking dreams are connected to the manifestation of our reality is not unique to the Sápara. It is shared by other indigenous peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon and around the world. For the Sápara, it is a key part of the message they want to convey to the Western world: understand your dreams and understand how and why you have created a reality that is so disconnected from nature.
Our dreams can tell us where we have gone wrong, but more importantly, they can tell us how to find our way back to harmony – with each other, within our communities and with our environment. As spoken by leaders of the Achuar people, whose territory borders with the Sápara land, to Lynne and Bill Twist, founders of the Pachamama Alliance in 1995: To stop the destruction of all life, you need to change the dream of the modern world.
In other words, we create our world according to unexamined assumptions that lie hidden in the shadows until we become aware that we can change them. We can either be coming from assumptions that we are superior to all other species - that more is better, that money is the bottom line, that resources are infinite – or we can come from an understanding that we are connected to all of life, and so need to act responsibly.
For the Sápara, the correct interpretation of dreams and visions requires an alignment of thinking, a focus of mind, a directed awareness of what is happening at conscious and unconscious levels within ourselves. When more focus is needed, plant medicines are used.
Each individual plant has its own voice. We can learn to hear the voices of the plants, they will tell us what medicine they provide, what they are to be used for. We take the iyauna, and the different plant spirits will come and speak to us, through the iyauna.
The plant medicine iyauna is more commonly known by its Peruvian Kichwa name, ayahuasca. As for many other Amazonian peoples, ayahuasca plays a central role in Sápara spiritual life. A powerful hallucinogenic prepared from the leaves of two different vines, it is used ceremonially to sharpen the connection to spirit, to receive messages and guidance that augment those received in dreams, and for healing.
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| Ayahuasca vine (banisteriopsis caapi) |
The world has only one spirit. But the mind separates it into two spirits, we can call these good and bad, or light and dark. The mind can create bad things, fear based thoughts, these suck energy out of you. But we can align the mind in the heart, and there we contact the sámaru, the one spirit of everything. Sámaru is based in the heart. When we do ceremony or healing, we try to invoke always a neutral positive energy, that is the one spirit of the world, sámaru. This energy does not support conflict or harm; it only works in neutral, harmonious places, and it works through the heart.
-Manari Ushigua.
Sacred ceremony is created for us on the last night of our visit. I lie in a hammock and allowed the gentle chanting and the sound of leaves and frogs and cicadas to wash over me and take me to a placed where I truly felt connected with the forest. On the first night I had not been able to sleep because of the bigness of the forest; now, held safely in ceremony, I can invite it in more easily. The gentle, haunting song seems to filter through the trees all around, and it sinks into the recesses of my brain, and remains there for days.
The following morning, still with the chanting in my head, I feel extraordinarily clear and open and peaceful. I walk down to the river, to where the canoes are moored, and create my own song, as I don't know the words to Manari’s. I let my voice meld with the flow of the water, and I feel that perhaps I am beginning to understand something of what the Sápara have been saying to us for five days:
You need to feel the connection to the web of life here. It’s something you have to know in your heart. Then you’ll never forget and you will always be connected, even when you go home to your own countries.
The rain comes suddenly here. One moment the sun is blazing down; the next, there is a sudden chill, a rumble of thunder sounds overhead, and one hears a noise like a great long distant ocean wave approaching. As it sweeps towards the camp you realise that the sound is that of the rain-front pouring onto the canopy. The next second, it is here: people dive for cover, the air is filled with water, streaming off the roof, cutting off visibility. One of the Naku staff runs with a spade to fix one of the drainage ditches before it overflows into the kitchen; a leak is sprung in the thatch roof near my bed, and another Sapara frisbees a container through the rain from the kitchen, and I place it under the leak; water slams into the bottom of the container and is propelled straight out with its own weight and force, spreading over the wooden floor. Ten minutes later, the rain suddenly and completely ceases. Cicadas tentatively begin to sing; the sun pops out of the clouds and blazes once more onto the camp, which is now full of steaming puddles. 
In one such rain-break, just before dinner, I sit in conversation with Jacob, a San Franciscan who is working for Naku, setting up their website and creating video footage with the children and youth for promotion of the project. I ask him: how likely do you think it is that the community will avert its threats and continue into the future? He says to me, ‘I think the community will continue – but maybe not in the form that we hope for.’
Over the course of the six days, it is reflected to us that it is likely the Sápara as a culture will disappear.
If the oil comes, the community might remain in physical form, but it will no longer be Sápara – development will bring roads, outside influences, the young people will go away or work for the oil companies, marry into Kichwa and other tribes, travel to other parts of the world and not come back; the rivers will be contaminated, we won’t be able to hunt, live our traditional life, we will become like the rest of the world. This is already happening.
If the community is to continue, say Manari’s family, it will be because we have made an effort to preserve our traditional knowledge, that of the spirit world and of the plant medicines, and to share this knowledge with the outside world. This is why the Naku project is so important.
The Sápara community is not just here; there is a wider world community, a wider family. When you come in here and learn about our culture, you become Sápara. And you take our knowledge away and share it with your families, your loved ones, and then maybe they will want to come here and learn too.
And the wisdom keepers, those who have the knowledge of the plant and spirit worlds, they might die, but they don’t go far away. They are present in spirit. We learn from them, our ancestors, all the time. By listening to the ancestors, this is how you can help protect our community, help save the earth, from where you are.
And the wisdom keepers, those who have the knowledge of the plant and spirit worlds, they might die, but they don’t go far away. They are present in spirit. We learn from them, our ancestors, all the time. By listening to the ancestors, this is how you can help protect our community, help save the earth, from where you are.
On the sixth day, at the very end of our visit, we participate in a cultural exchange and farewell ceremony. We sing ‘Amazing Grace’ and by the third verse the Sápara audience are laughing at us and clapping for us to shut up. The New Zealand haka goes down a little better. Then the Sápara involve us in men’s and women’s dances and a hilarious sort of chicken dance which culminates in lumps of chicha (fermented corn beer) being stuffed into all of our mouths by the women. After this, gifts are exchanged, and the president of the Llamanchacocha community, Maria-Elena, comes forwards with a final plea.
We have been fighting for years to tell the Ecuadorian president not to let our land be sold for oil drilling. He hasn’t listened to us. He has sold our land to the Chinese company and they want to start explorations. We have to stop them. The oil will destroy our culture. We can’t have the oil here. We are fighting, and we’re going to keep fighting.
We thank you so much for coming here, you have given life to our community. We’d like you to feel welcome to come back any time, bring your family, your loved ones here. We need everyone to know that this community has to be protected from the oil, that we need to stay strong.
We thank you so much for coming here, you have given life to our community. We’d like you to feel welcome to come back any time, bring your family, your loved ones here. We need everyone to know that this community has to be protected from the oil, that we need to stay strong.
Conclusion
This article is my response to the Ushigua family's request. I have named it ‘Gift of the Sápara’ because of what I felt I received from my visit to this remote community: a deep, tangible feeling of love for the rainforest, transmitted directly from the hearts of the people who live there.
Naku's aim is to make money for the community, employ young people that would otherwise leave for the city, and assist the Sapara to survive annihilation. But on top of this, the Sapara opened their hearts to us, made us part of their family, and shared because they wanted to share.
There is a reciprocity to it. The Sápara realize that unless we, as outsiders, get a tangible, real, deep experience of their culture, visiting the community will not help us save the planet ... and it will not help them fight the oil companies. They want us to go away with good feelings, strong feelings, that will empower us to speak their message with force and conviction to our governments, our communities, our organisations. They want us to be message-spreaders.
Naku's aim is to make money for the community, employ young people that would otherwise leave for the city, and assist the Sapara to survive annihilation. But on top of this, the Sapara opened their hearts to us, made us part of their family, and shared because they wanted to share.
If we are empowered to go and speak from the heart, with conviction, then there is a greater chance that our organisations are moved to join forces and help the Sápara. Right now, they need all the help they can get. And, given the critical state of the world in these times, we need help too.
The principle of empowerment is simple: We want to protect that with which we fall in love. The rainforest simply does not make sense unless you feel connected to it at an intrinsic level. The rights of nature is not an intellectual concept. It is an ethical idea rooted in an understanding of nature as a personhood, with intrinsic rights to exist and be healthy.
For many indigenous people, all living things have spirits, as do rivers, rocks, mountains, gold, oil. The idea of spirits gives personhood to things. One relates to the tree, the rock, the water, as a brother or sister, grandmother, grandfather – not as an inanimate object to be exploited.
While spiritual language might be unpopular in the discourses of international development and economics, the Sápara stressed to us that it is very important the modern world begins to see things in spiritual terms. This puts us in a position of relationship with nature, not towards nature. From this position, we cannot harm. We can only protect. This is our leverage, in moving forth to create the world we want for future generations.
For many indigenous people, all living things have spirits, as do rivers, rocks, mountains, gold, oil. The idea of spirits gives personhood to things. One relates to the tree, the rock, the water, as a brother or sister, grandmother, grandfather – not as an inanimate object to be exploited.
While spiritual language might be unpopular in the discourses of international development and economics, the Sápara stressed to us that it is very important the modern world begins to see things in spiritual terms. This puts us in a position of relationship with nature, not towards nature. From this position, we cannot harm. We can only protect. This is our leverage, in moving forth to create the world we want for future generations.
References and links
This blog, and a short audio version of it, was presented at the 2016 Earth Arts festival in Melbourne, Australia, an event tied to the Australian Rights of Nature movement and organised by Australian Earth Laws Alliance (AELA). Permission was given by the Sápara for me to share their message at this event, and I hope I have done so respectfully.
Italicised sections are not word-for-word quotes, but are translations of notes I made while Sapara leaders on the Naku project spoke to us - at the campfire, at dream sharing circles, at the dining table, and in the welcome and goodbye ceremonies.
I want to extend a special acknowledgement to the Pachamama Alliance for providing these journeys into the heart of the rainforest, in order to educate and 'change the dream of the modern world' while giving solid, grassroots support to Indigenous communities.
Web
links
About
the history of oil contamination in the Ecuadorian Oriente and the ‘Amazon
Chernobyl’: http://chevrontoxico.com/about/rainforest-chernobyl/
About
the 11th Oil Round and beginning of explorations in the Yasuni ITT
area: http://amazonwatch.org/news/2016/0908-ecuador-begins-drilling-for-oil-in-pristine-corner-of-amazon
Detailed
report on the 11th Oil Round (In Spanish): Mazabanda C, 2013, Consulta previa en la Décimo Primera Ronda Petrolera: ¿Participación masiva de la ciudadanía? http://amazonwatch.org/assets/files/2013-07-consulta-previa-en-la-11a-ronda.pdf
About
indigenous women in Ecuador speaking out at international forums: https://ramumine.wordpress.com/2016/05/14/indigenous-women-speak-out-against-extractive-industries-in-the-amazon/
About
tangible cultural heritage: http://en.unesco.org/fellowships/keizo-obuchi/summary-research-carried-out/intangible-cultural-heritage-and-tourism-experience-s%C3%A1para-people
Gloria
Ushigua (Sapara Women’s Association of Ecuador - ASHIÑWAKA) letter to UN
Special Rapporteur, 2016: http://amazonwatch.org/assets/files/2014-sapara-letter-to-un.pdf
Gloria
Ushigua (Sapara Women’s Association of Ecuador - ASHIÑWAKA) and Alicia Cahuiya
(Waorani Nation of Ecuador - NAWE): Letter
to Chinese Mission, 2016: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/50ec44f5e4b050fcaabb6e6f/t/57334b1ecf80a12c16fa60d0/1462979358165/Englsih_Carta.Rep%2BChina.%2BEsp-Final.pdf
About
Sarayaku victory at Interamerican Court of Human Rights, 2012: https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/confirming-rights-inter-american-court-ruling-marks-key
About
Sarayaku victory and FPIC:
About
the indigenous women’s march against extractive industries in March 2016:
History
and information regarding the Naku project (RUNA Foundation):
Amazon
Watch video on Naku project:
Journeys
to Naku and support of the Sápara and other Indigenous Peoples of Ecuador:
Pachamama
Alliance www.pachamama.org
