Fourteen-year-old Leonela Moncayo gets angry when she talks about the gas flares burning near her home. She grew up on the outskirts of Lago Agrio, a city on the edge of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest, at the heart of its oil industry, where patches of tropical forest canopy are interspersed with oil wells spewing huge flames of fossil gas.
For Moncayo, these gas flares have meant disease and death for many in her community, which is why she and other schoolgirls have been leading the fight to have them turned off.
