More than half of the Ecuadorian Amazon has been marked for oil drilling, overlapping with Indigenous territories and areas of high biodiversity. The ecological and cultural impacts of oil extraction are well documented, and have fuelled some of Latin America’s most prominent environmental movements. Yet at the local level, extraction is not always met with resistance.
My research investigates why Quichua communities living along the lower Napo river in the Ecuadorian Amazon accepted oil extraction despite its expected environmental consequences such as river pollution, deforestation and habitat loss.
