Ecuador

Corrupt and Ineffective Development Investment

By Bruce Rich / On April 12th, 2016

After some seven decades of mixed results in development assistance, there is a growing consensus that the greatest challenge is governance—in both the recipient and the donor countries.

Wealthy Investors vs. the Land, Livelihoods, and Locals

By Michael Kugelman / On April 7th, 2016

Whenever we hear about stories like these, stories of such immense exploitation and predation, there is a tendency to think: How can this happen? How can obscenely rich investors run roughshod over the land, livelihoods, and rights of impoverished local communities, and with utterly no consequences?

Magical Thinking is Not Conservation

By Meghan Bartels / On March 10th, 2015

Post by David Johns, contributor to Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth. When humans started to farm 12,000 years ago, they began to change the earth in basic ways, pushing aside other species to make room for themselves and those they favored, killing creatures they didn’t want and domesticating others, altering soils and water courses to suit themselves, and generally replacing ecological complexity with simplified landscapes. In seeking to dominate and control patches of the world—and today, th

A Stone in the Shoe

By Kennedy Warne / On April 12th, 2011

Opposition to shrimp aquaculture in Ecuador has been growing as coastal mangrove dwellers find their voice and harden their resolve to fight for the preservation of the forests that sustain them. Some of the more outspoken opponents of shrimp farming have had their lives threatened. I met one such champion of the mangroves, who had been in hiding with his family for a month. Here is the blog post I wrote after talking to him. . .

The Cockle Collectors

By Kennedy Warne / On April 7th, 2011

In the Esmeraldas region of northern Ecuador a large mangrove reserve has been created, within which several villages have custodianship of the forests. Here traditional ways of mangrove-dependent fishing continue, including picking cockles from the mud around the mangrove roots.