Prosa und Lyrik

Nina Amarun is a community located in the midst of the Amazon rainforest. In the deep west of Ecuador, reachable by a three day canoe ride down the river Curaray. No electricity, no signal. Everything is dyed in various shade of green. Animals hide in the dense forest but are always present with their sounds and singings.

Nina Amarun is an intentional community. The current inhabitants lived in the city at the rainforests margin before. With no exception, life was hard. As descendants from indigenous peoples, they felt stigmatised and marginalised until today. Being dependent on cash-income, they had no other choice but to work in low paid jobs as other sources of income were hard to find. And still, the money was barely enough to support a family. So they made a choice. Moving back to the deep rainforest, living from hunting, fishing and self-subsistent agriculture seemed the better option than struggling in the city. With no savings but menpower alone, they founded the community on the territory of their ancestors. Any sign of former settlement already vanished in the deep green. It was a start from zero. The community did develop rules and regulations on where and what to hunt in order not to harm the self-perpetuating system of the forest they live in. They decided to live after the concept of development in terms of the Buen Vivir. They made they right decision, they feel. Escaping the so called developed and modern world. Which proved to have nothing appealing to offer to them. It seem, though, to be an escape on time.

But modernity is catching up. The community is interwoven in the global hunger for energy and the ongoing quest for oil. The territory around Nina Amarun has not yet been mapped.  No one knows when government envoys will be coming down the river, entering their land. On the search for the key commodity Oil. With machines and modern technology to map the oil reserves in the ground. They will come. One day, the children will be running to the shore to see who is driving by on their motor driven boats.  From then on, they will be a part in the ever-escalating resource exploration and exploitation chain. In a globalised world, with a naturalised hegemony of a certain economic conception. It is exactly this hunger for energy that is driving climate change.

During the time of my stay in the village, fruit was rare. I was surprised, assuming that I arrived a biodiversity hotspot with an abundance of fruit and vegetables. Floods destroyed the grand part of the fruit garden which are located just beside the river. Such floods are uncommon. Why are the flood rates increasing dramatically? These climate extremes happen within global change. With the Global North as main causer, its impacts are felt in an Ecuadorian rainforest community.

Tito Merino, one of the founders of the community, a man fully aware of the global net his community is involved in, feels how dangerously close to the edge Nina Amarun is. Whereas others will profit from resources found in the Amazon, the community Nina Amarun will get nothing in return when satisfying the world's energy hunger. They will have to drink from polluted rivers. And will most likely lose their rights to the territory they live on. This case is an example, on how power relations and processes occur at nested scales. Any change in the global web of human-environment linkages reverberates through the system as a whole.

Tito has not yet lost hope. There must be a way that the local communities living with the forest, the guardians of the green lungs of the globe, are heard. That they become a very own powerful stakeholders within the modern colonial world system. He believes to find the solution in global networks and movements, carried by the Global South itself. There needs to be a transition that occurs on all levels. The Global North also has to play its part in it. Each and everyone of us has to. Starting simple, by changing lifestyle patterns of consumption up to entering the global arena, when advocation the local communities rights.