197
like hair’—‘beautiful Lepidoptera…’ until he was barely within the realm of words,
‘-Silence-.’ And finally exclaimed, quietly to himself… ‘-Hosannah-.’”
1
Of course,
he was wearing boots, and had a cutlass and other English essentials.
In early 2007, the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, pledged to protect the
biologically profuse portions of northeastern Ecuador’s Amazon
2
. It was known as
the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) Initiative, and for Correa, and environmentalists throughout the world, the ITT seemed like the dream materialized.
Moreover, Correa had obtained his Ph.D. in economics from the University of
Illinois and seemed deeply committed to the ideal of neutralizing the temptation to
drill for oil
3
.
One group of researchers declared that “keeping the northwestern Amazon—
home to the Basin’s highest biodiversity and the region least vulnerable to climatic
drying—largely intact as a biological refuge is a global conservation priority of the
first order. If the world’s most diverse forests cannot be protected in Yasuní, it seems
unlikely that they can be protected anywhere else”
4
.
Alas, by August of 2013, the vision had been abandoned
5
. Like other economic
theories, human reality had yet again proved too massively unified an international
force to withstand even a single instance of altruism at the national level, of just one
country’s president stepping beyond the capitalistic paradigm of brute force and
blunt domestic policy. This was the late biologist Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the
Commons” scenario writ large
6
. It also corresponded with the Nobel Prize-winning
1 See Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent – The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from
Darwin’s Lost Notebooks, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Little, Brown And Company, Boston, 2006,
p. 62.
2 https://web.archive.org/web/20120415204628/http://í-itt.gob.ec/preguntas-y-respuestas/losbeneficios/See also, http://www.sosYasuni.org/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article
&id=177&catid=1&Itemid=34, Accessed April 11, 2019.
3 “Ecuador’s Yasuni-ITT Initiative: Avoiding emissions by keeping petroleum underground,”
Carlos Larrea, Lavinia Warnars, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esd.2009.08.003, Energy for Sustainable
Development, Volume 13, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 219–223, ScienceDirect, Elsevier,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0973082609000581; See also, Ecuador’s
Yasuní-ITT Initiative: The old and new values of petroleum Laura Rival ODID, Available online 9
October 2010, Ecological Economics 70 (2010) 358–365, http://www.loisellelab.org/wp-content/
uploads/2015/08/Rival-et-al.-2010.pdf, Accessed April 11, 2019.
4 See PLoS One. 2010; 5(1): e8767,Published online 2010 Jan 19. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.
pone.0008767, PMCID: PMC2808245, PMID: 20098736, Global Conservation Significance of
Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, Margot S. Bass, Matt Finer, Clinton N. Jenkins, Holger
Kreft, Diego F. Cisneros-Heredia, Shawn F. McCracken, Nigel C. A. Pitman, Peter
H. English,
1 Kelly Swing, Gorky Villa, Anthony Di Fiore, Christian C. Voigt, and Thomas
H. Kunz Andy Hector, Editor, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2808245/.
Accessed April 11, 2019.
5 See “Ecuador approves Yasuni park oil drilling in Amazon rainforest,” BBC News, 21 August
2013.
6 See Hardin, G (1968). “The Tragedy of the Commons”. Science. 162 (3859): 1243–1248. Bibco
de:1968Sci...162.1243H.
21.1 The Great Bounty
like hair’—‘beautiful Lepidoptera…’ until he was barely within the realm of words,
‘-Silence-.’ And finally exclaimed, quietly to himself… ‘-Hosannah-.’”
1
Of course,
he was wearing boots, and had a cutlass and other English essentials.
In early 2007, the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, pledged to protect the
biologically profuse portions of northeastern Ecuador’s Amazon
2
. It was known as
the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) Initiative, and for Correa, and environmentalists throughout the world, the ITT seemed like the dream materialized.
Moreover, Correa had obtained his Ph.D. in economics from the University of
Illinois and seemed deeply committed to the ideal of neutralizing the temptation to
drill for oil
3
.
One group of researchers declared that “keeping the northwestern Amazon—
home to the Basin’s highest biodiversity and the region least vulnerable to climatic
drying—largely intact as a biological refuge is a global conservation priority of the
first order. If the world’s most diverse forests cannot be protected in Yasuní, it seems
unlikely that they can be protected anywhere else”
4
.
Alas, by August of 2013, the vision had been abandoned
5
. Like other economic
theories, human reality had yet again proved too massively unified an international
force to withstand even a single instance of altruism at the national level, of just one
country’s president stepping beyond the capitalistic paradigm of brute force and
blunt domestic policy. This was the late biologist Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the
Commons” scenario writ large
6
. It also corresponded with the Nobel Prize-winning
1 See Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent – The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from
Darwin’s Lost Notebooks, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Little, Brown And Company, Boston, 2006,
p. 62.
2 https://web.archive.org/web/20120415204628/http://í-itt.gob.ec/preguntas-y-respuestas/losbeneficios/See also, http://www.sosYasuni.org/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article
&id=177&catid=1&Itemid=34, Accessed April 11, 2019.
3 “Ecuador’s Yasuni-ITT Initiative: Avoiding emissions by keeping petroleum underground,”
Carlos Larrea, Lavinia Warnars, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esd.2009.08.003, Energy for Sustainable
Development, Volume 13, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 219–223, ScienceDirect, Elsevier,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0973082609000581; See also, Ecuador’s
Yasuní-ITT Initiative: The old and new values of petroleum Laura Rival ODID, Available online 9
October 2010, Ecological Economics 70 (2010) 358–365, http://www.loisellelab.org/wp-content/
uploads/2015/08/Rival-et-al.-2010.pdf, Accessed April 11, 2019.
4 See PLoS One. 2010; 5(1): e8767,Published online 2010 Jan 19. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.
pone.0008767, PMCID: PMC2808245, PMID: 20098736, Global Conservation Significance of
Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, Margot S. Bass, Matt Finer, Clinton N. Jenkins, Holger
Kreft, Diego F. Cisneros-Heredia, Shawn F. McCracken, Nigel C. A. Pitman, Peter
H. English,
1 Kelly Swing, Gorky Villa, Anthony Di Fiore, Christian C. Voigt, and Thomas
H. Kunz Andy Hector, Editor, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2808245/.
Accessed April 11, 2019.
5 See “Ecuador approves Yasuni park oil drilling in Amazon rainforest,” BBC News, 21 August
2013.
6 See Hardin, G (1968). “The Tragedy of the Commons”. Science. 162 (3859): 1243–1248. Bibco
de:1968Sci...162.1243H.
21.1 The Great Bounty