road trip: toxic tour of ecuador, 2009

Over three decades of oil drilling in the Ecuadorean Amazon, Chevron dumped more that 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into the rainforest, leaving local people suffering a wave of cancers, miscarriages, and birth defects. Now with the support of an international campaign for justice, the communities affected by Chevron’s negligence are holding one of the world’s largest oil companies to account.

Here are some of my photos from two trips to ride on the Toxic Tour bus with friends and the staff of Amazon Watch. Some of the photos got enhanced by this artist to more accurately convey the forces swirling around the struggle for the rights of ecosystems and the collective rights of Ecuador’s Indigenous peoples versus those who would exploit them.

Download Christy’s Road Trip: Toxic Tour of Ecuador, 2009 (PDF, 3 MB)

Download The True Cost of Chevron by Antonia Juhasz (PDF, 4 MB)

View from the Lodge

Oil Pond

Oil requires huge quantities of water which become toxic waste. Texaco chose to leave the waste in shallow pools which they hoped would fill up with leaves and disappear.

Private Property Water

Cattle share the river with a vast infrastructure of pipelines

The Rio Napo is part of a giant floodplain which nurtures a complex riparian structure of life. In the course of regular flooding, waste and residue are is broadcast to settle into river and soil strata.

Moth on Flare

Innumerable populations of insects and birds are incinerated when drawn to methane flares burning day and night, thus countless living creatures are removed from the cycle of pollination crucial for the maintenance of diversity.

Pipe Over Stream

To keep costs to a bare minimum, Chevron/Texaco admits that it systematically dumped into the Amazon waterways, 18 billion gallons of toxic waste in an area which is home to 6 indigenous peoples groups.

Ecuador Road Trip

Pipes Over Stream

By running away from the true cost of cleanup, Chevron/Texaco acknowledges that injury caused by oil exploration to the rainforest and its inhabitants is irreversible.

Simplified Truck

In the later 1970s, the early days of rainforest drilling, oil residue was sprayed on dirt roads where residents walk, farm, and live. People were told it was healthy.

Inn Bed with the Government

Ficticious hotel for drillers.

Oil Pond

Oil Drop

Indigenous communities have been driven away from their homelands by pollution and the clearing of forests. Burgeoning oil towns have sprung up on the edges of jungle oil blocks.

Swamped

This Used to Be Rainforest

This Was Rain Forest

Pipes Through Yard 1

Pipes Through Yard 2

Everywhere in the region pipes are close to the surface, like exposed veins. People drive over them in the driveway, dry their laundry on them, use them for seating.

Pipes Through Yard 3

Everywhere in the region pipes are close to the surface, like exposed veins. People drive over them in the driveway, dry their laundry on them, use them for seating.

Hut in Oil Slick

For indigenous peoples, there is no separation between human communities and the natural world environment, they are interdependently linked.

Cocoons from a butterfly farm, a sustainable export product from the rainforest

We slumber in a cocoon of denial.

Oil Slick

The Amazon basin bypassed by the great glaciers offered refuge to diverse populations of wildlife, but today shares the forest with billions of barrels of crude petroleum, an easy reach through fragile soil.