195
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_21
Chapter 21
The Yasuní Effect
21.1 The Great Bounty (Fig. 21.1)
Moving slowly by canoe through Ecuador’s Amazonian provinces of Napo and
Pastaza, and on into the heart of the country’s Yasuní National Park, a UNESCO
Biosphere Reserve since 1989, we are at once far more aware of and embarrassed
by our presence than ever. Ungainliness amid a splendor at once exhausting and
oppressive, fraught with tension where splendor gives way to so much that is out of
bounds, unimaginable. Whatever proof-of-concept might have served as some silly
human apotheosis across the span of time is now, instantly, rendered senseless.
Indeed, we stand out, we humans, in ways no less apparent than were we casting
shadows on some of the world’s largest sand dunes in the Rub’ al Khali. If we ever
belonged here the biopic prefigurements would have at once rejected almost everything—our attire, disposition, every version of heat, damp, and stinging nettle tolerance; re-molding the dumb clay of spoiled modernism, re-plastering the disputable
brain, re-attuning every nerve ending to comport with a new atlas of insect sex,
frenzies of pheromones, some hanging in the air for over 7 months, the shadow
worlds of green anacondas, velvet worms, crab spiders, bullet ants, feathered cicada,
narrow-mouthed and eyelash frogs, assassin bugs and stinky birds (Hoatzins). A
furious phalanx of mandible-flaunting army ants (Eciton burchellii), desperate to
have their way with every mottled patchwork of biomass, stampeding across the odd
naked footprint of a tapir, or jaguar; trigger-ecstatic traces and triumphs of life and
death cascading to right, to left, above and in the tiers and depths that defy delineation, with no obvious beginnings or ends.
Such sprawling sinkholes and battered but bedazzled, never-betrayed continuity,
of transitional life forms clinging and infiltrating, underlie every library of metaphors. Our Self and social mirrors, both, are obliterated entirely by forces that form
a through-story within all of the remaining neotropics, enveloping with the most
precocious of chemical elixirs, philosophical echo chambers collectively akin to No
Exit, once entered. The mind, countryside, and city minds, at least, are doomed in
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_21
Chapter 21
The Yasuní Effect
21.1 The Great Bounty (Fig. 21.1)
Moving slowly by canoe through Ecuador’s Amazonian provinces of Napo and
Pastaza, and on into the heart of the country’s Yasuní National Park, a UNESCO
Biosphere Reserve since 1989, we are at once far more aware of and embarrassed
by our presence than ever. Ungainliness amid a splendor at once exhausting and
oppressive, fraught with tension where splendor gives way to so much that is out of
bounds, unimaginable. Whatever proof-of-concept might have served as some silly
human apotheosis across the span of time is now, instantly, rendered senseless.
Indeed, we stand out, we humans, in ways no less apparent than were we casting
shadows on some of the world’s largest sand dunes in the Rub’ al Khali. If we ever
belonged here the biopic prefigurements would have at once rejected almost everything—our attire, disposition, every version of heat, damp, and stinging nettle tolerance; re-molding the dumb clay of spoiled modernism, re-plastering the disputable
brain, re-attuning every nerve ending to comport with a new atlas of insect sex,
frenzies of pheromones, some hanging in the air for over 7 months, the shadow
worlds of green anacondas, velvet worms, crab spiders, bullet ants, feathered cicada,
narrow-mouthed and eyelash frogs, assassin bugs and stinky birds (Hoatzins). A
furious phalanx of mandible-flaunting army ants (Eciton burchellii), desperate to
have their way with every mottled patchwork of biomass, stampeding across the odd
naked footprint of a tapir, or jaguar; trigger-ecstatic traces and triumphs of life and
death cascading to right, to left, above and in the tiers and depths that defy delineation, with no obvious beginnings or ends.
Such sprawling sinkholes and battered but bedazzled, never-betrayed continuity,
of transitional life forms clinging and infiltrating, underlie every library of metaphors. Our Self and social mirrors, both, are obliterated entirely by forces that form
a through-story within all of the remaining neotropics, enveloping with the most
precocious of chemical elixirs, philosophical echo chambers collectively akin to No
Exit, once entered. The mind, countryside, and city minds, at least, are doomed in