The Nightmare of Deforestation, Oil, and Toucans

I just have to write down this one dream because it left me feeling quite unsettled this morning.

I dreamt that my colleagues, some friends, and I went on a brief trip to some very remote part of the jungle. It wasn't too remote in the sense that you had to get there by airplane, but there was a road, that once you walked a bit off the pavement, you could see the most beautiful primary forest. It was a preserve of some kind and I was here with these people specifically with the purpose of enjoying it's rare beauty.

We all stayed in a hostel (kind of ironic) and woke up the next day to go get bus tickets back to Quito. I decided to go for a run down the road to buy the group tickets. It was easy at first, I was running with great ease and speed, but then I came upon the choking traffic of dump trucks, logging trucks, and oil rigs whose exhaust affected me so much that I nearly passed out and almost got hit by a truck. I finally reached the place to buy tickets (which looked a lot like the main street for this suburb of Quito called Cumbayá). I had to search for the tickets in between music records (curiously, I found the tickets in an album recorded with John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders called "Meditations" which in real life, I've been listening to). I run back to the people in the hostel and we all decide to walk to the bus station, which is probably a mile away from the hostel. The group sort of separates, and I'm walking with an unfamiliar person when we come upon this beautiful little plot of semi-deforested land. We are sad, but all of the sudden we see that there are two beautiful toucans and two puffins (totally not found in the Amazon, but whatever). They are sitting there, disaffected by the seemingly recent absence of trees. It was almost as if they were saying: "so what if our trees were cut down, we are still beautiful." I continued to walk with the stranger and we finally caught up with the rest of the group, still somewhat reeling from the beautiful and extremely rare sight we had stumbled upon (where I work in the jungle, you don't see toucans because they have gone so deep into the jungle. Someone told me that dreaming of toucans is a sign that some very positive change will happen, usually having to do with the heart).

The group is walking when suddenly the road forks off and ends in a chain-link fence with barbed wire. We continue along the non-fenced-in path and realize we are lost. The path ends and the view at the end of it is terrifying. We are standing on a small mountain (el monte) and overlook what should be beautiful and untouched primary forest. As we look down into the valley, we see bubbling pits and men digging with machines to create new ones. Illegal oil excavation and extraction. We realize that these men are "oil poachers" (that's what we called them in the dream) and if they realized a bunch of environmentally-conscious Ecuadorians and gringos were watching them, they would probably shoot us on the spot. We keep walking until we reach another dead end with yet another group of oil poachers. This happens several times until we reach a different fork in the road, where there are a bunch of gringo children playing with a piñata and having a picnic with their wealthy parents. By this time we are exhausted and fearing for our lives, so seeing these people brings us great relief. Two little girls run up to us and we ask for help. In their seemingly unaware and naive state, they point us to another path that will get us back on the road. It is blocked and we must climb over the tall barbed wire fence. When it is my turn, I almost cross it, when suddenly a gigantic purple and venomous centipede jumps out at the place where I am putting my leg and I narrowly escape a very sad ending.

We make it back to the bus station, silenced by the shock of seeing so many oil poachers. I just kept thinking: "what the hell do we do about what we just saw?" This was a place that was supposed to be legally protected by the government as un-excavatable territory, and yet, it was clearly being destroyed. I think it has to do with an underlying fear that once this road called the Trans-Cutucu comes into Achuar territory (an area that has decidedly kept out oil excavation and extraction) and very very close to the communities I work in, people are going to have to think of new ways to prevent "oil poaching" from happening, and to not get blinded by the short-term wealth that comes along with deforestation and oil extraction. Ugh. What a curious way to start wednesday.