environmental science
The Sav v y Peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon: Adapting to a Globalized Economy
By Renna Voss Figure 1. Ecuadorian Amazon Rainforest
Photo by Neil Palmer/CIAT. [CC-BY-SA 2.0]
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s a historical continuity, the success of colonialism is founded upon the displacement, exploitation, and even eradication of Indigenous populations. This concept is quite familiar to a highly colonized North America. People often remember North American colonialism as a blip in history, forgetting about the Indigenous populations that still exist in their limited territory, adapting to their neocolonial surroundings while maintaining the strength of their own cultures. In the biodiverse Amazon Basin, oil and natural resource extraction constantly threaten the ecosystem and its already displaced inhabitants (Figure 1). Primarily, deforestation augments the effects of pollution, worsens erosion, and causes habitat loss for rainforest animals and plants. Indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin respect their lands, preserving the biodiverse ecosystems and preventing further encroachments from exploitative economic bosses. One scholar who studies this phenomenon is Clark Gray, an associate Geography professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and researcher in environment and population geography (Figure 2). He, along with fellow researcher Richard Bilsborrow, explores the relationship
between Indigenous groups who inhabit the Ecuadorian Amazon and their surrounding colonial market economies. Their research can be found in their study entitled Stability and Change Within Indigenous Land Use in the Ecuadorian Amazon.š The resulting data collection suggests that the studied Indigenous groups generally adapt to growing global markets, but each Indigenous group adapts differently, and to its own extent. This display of adaptation raises crucial questions regarding the future of these groups and their potential further adjustments. The existing environmental impacts of market economies on Indig-
Dr. Clark Gray
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enous lands also raise the question of whether colonial peoples have any responsibility to defend Indigenous lands from environment-degrading economic influence. The study by Gray and Bilsborrow offers remarkably unique data because researchers conducted it over a tenyear time period. This was necessary for the examination of long-term changes in Indigenous land use in the Amazon Basin. This method of field research is conducive to the observation of gradual changes that impact underrepresented populations. Indigenous groups make up 20 percent of the population of Ecuador, but 90 percent of them live in the Andes while 10 percent live in the Amazon.² Thus, only 2 percent of the Ecuadorian population are Indigenous people residing in the Amazon. This relatively small, but valuable group of humans was seldom studied with long-term consideration prior to this research. In Dr. Gray’s study, 32 Indigenous communities, representing 5 ethnicities, participated in interview-style data collection in up to 22 households per community. Interviewers used identical questionnaires in 2001 and 2012, asking heads of households about their land ownership,
