Lessons from 30 years of successfully fending off mines in an Ecuadorian cloud forest

Lessons from 30 years of successfully fending off mines in an Ecuadorian cloud forest

Carlos Zorrilla has been living in an Ecuadorian cloud forest since the 1970s, and his last 30 years there have been spent fighting mining companies seeking to extract its large copper deposits. He and his community have successfully fought such proposals by multiple firms in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but sometimes at great personal risk, he tells Mongabay's podcast.

While his organization, Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag (DECOIN), and allies in the local community notched a major victory against mining there in a 2023 court case, he explains they're still not out of the proverbial woods.

"Every day, I have to think about mining [and] I'm not exaggerating, my life now revolves around mining. Even though we won a case, I know they're going to come back because the copper's there, and there's a lot of demand for copper."

His advice to anyone who wants to protect their community from mining is to go on the offensive, early and aggressively, comparing the strategy to how one might view treating cancer.

"You have to think of it like a cancer, that you need to treat it immediately and you need to look for signs that your body, in this case, your community, is sick," Zorrilla says.

Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.

Please send questions, feedback or comments to podcast[at]mongabay[dot]com.

Banner image: Carlos Zorrilla in the DECOIN office in Apuela, Ecuador. Photo by Romi Castagnino.

-----

Timecodes

(00:00) A victory for Intag Valley

(07:19) The influence of 'rights of nature' laws

(09:57) The return of vulnerable fauna

(15:56) Reprieve is only temporary

(22:02) Mining companies omit important information

(25:07) 'How to stop' mining before it starts

(30:52) "Every day, I have to think about mining"

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(360)

A 'coalition of the willing' to urge the world to drop fossil fuels

A 'coalition of the willing' to urge the world to drop fossil fuels

A group of 57 nations mostly from the Global South, describing themselves as "coalition of the willing" intent on making the Transition Away From Fossil Fuels, or TAFF, convened in the Colombian city ...

2 Jun 33min

Australia claims it's 'on track' to meet its environment targets. Scientists disagree

Australia claims it's 'on track' to meet its environment targets. Scientists disagree

Australia is one of 17 "megadiverse" countries that account for 70% of Earth's biodiversity. However, Australia is unique in having the highest mammalian extinction rate in the world. That makes cons...

26 Mai 42min

The world must address pandemic threats urgently, says former CDC officer

The world must address pandemic threats urgently, says former CDC officer

"[The]cruel irony here [is] that the world cannot get its act together to address these threats … people are dying, animals are suffering, we're losing rainforest … these are all interconnected threat...

19 Mai 35min

Protest works, but it needs your help now more than ever, veteran activists say

Protest works, but it needs your help now more than ever, veteran activists say

"We are experiencing what some people call sort of a shutdown of the public square in the United States and around the world," says veteran environmental activist André Carothers. Along with the forme...

12 Mai 51min

A new Netflix documentary captures rare mountain gorilla behavior

A new Netflix documentary captures rare mountain gorilla behavior

"That might be something that you see in a decade, not in two years of filming," Tara Stoinksi, CEO of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, tells me. The behavior she's referring to occurs in mountain gorill...

5 Mai 38min

Centering an Indigenous approach to forestry through reciprocity, not extraction

Centering an Indigenous approach to forestry through reciprocity, not extraction

Forester and scientist Suzanne Simard is well known for her landmark 1997 paper, which demonstrated that two distinct species of trees could share resources. At the time, it turned traditional Western...

28 Apr 41min

Across oceans, seabird flyways gain recognition — and a chance at protection

Across oceans, seabird flyways gain recognition — and a chance at protection

The routes taken by migratory birds, known as flyways, often cross vast expanses of ocean. Six of these marine flyways have now been formally recognized by the U.N.'s Convention on Migratory Species,...

21 Apr 28min

The coyotes next door: What we get wrong about America's 'song dog'

The coyotes next door: What we get wrong about America's 'song dog'

Coyotes are now present in almost every major urban-metropolitan area in the United States, yet conflicts between the canines and humans are exceptionally low. Between 1960 and 2006, only 146 docume...

14 Apr 44min

Populært innen Vitenskap

fastlegen
tingenes-tilstand
jss
rekommandert
liberal-halvtime
sinnsyn
forskningno
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
villmarksliv
kvinnehelsepodden
tidlose-historier
rss-paradigmepodden
rss-zahid-ali-hjelper-deg
rss-overskuddsliv
dekodet-2
rss-rekommandert
hva-er-greia-med
rss-inn-til-kjernen-med-sunniva-rose
abels-tarn
nevropodden