Trash Yosemite! Contaminate the Lake District! Crush Uluru! Kill the Tiger! You don’t hear this kind of thing every day of the week, but it’s just what’s being proposed (only worse) for the people and bio-reserve of the Yasuní National Park in Ecuador, at the headwaters of what remains of the world’s greatest rainforest. It is hard to think of anywhere on earth where the environmental catastrophe that accompanies the production of oil would be more complete.
In 1967 Texaco discovered large reserves of oil some distance north and west of the Yasuní National Park, on the border with Colombia. With the completion of a pipeline to the coast in 1972, the large-scale export of crude oil from Ecuador – mostly to the US – began.
