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Claire and Alder discuss the factors that contribute to the success of an environmental movement in Ecuador. They explore issues such as international funding, group structures, and the role of government versus citizen participation and activism. They highlight the importance of horizontal movement structures and the challenges they face due to competition for limited resources. They also discuss the role of NGOs and the lack of government funding for environmental organizations. They mention the focus of foreign donors on biodiversity rather than local urban issues. They analyze the anti-mining movement in Andean Ecuador as a case study, emphasizing the cultural and political importance of water and the impact of mining on local communities. They mention the involvement of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador and the recognition of constitutional rights for Mother Earth. They also discuss the success story of the group DECOIN in the Intag Valley, where they organi Hello. I'm Claire. And this is Alder. And today we bring you along as we consider what makes an environmental movement successful through the lens of a fraught Ecuadorian history. We will be exploring issues of international funding and extractivism, group structures, and governmental involvement versus citizen participation and activism. We will each share a small case study that highlights an aspect of these issues and then discuss the greater impacts in contemporary Ecuador. Using the book Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador by Teresa Velasquez, I will be diving into some more information about government involvement in environmental activism and how this cross paths with citizen participation and then eventually citizen activism. So in Ecuador, the majority of the national environmental movements are horizontal, which means they don't have any clear power over each other. And horizontal movement structure is an important concept to understand. Basically, it just means that the people in the organizations and the organizations with each other have little superiority over each other. And there's equitable power and usually fund distribution. Claire and I will expand more on this in a minute. Although horizontal structures sounds pretty appealing, it's not often very successful. Lewis writes, the constraints to strong and continued horizontal networks revolve around competition for scarce resources. She continues, in this way, domestic networks may actually operate more like markets than like social movements. So she talks about how without competition for funds, it becomes a little bit stagnant and everyone doesn't have enough money to function. So in terms of Ecuadorian organizing, over half the organizations in Ecuador are NGOs, and they're pretty much equally local and non-local NGOs. In a survey run by Lewis, the Ecuadorian government appears as one of the least two common sources of funding. So of all the funding cited for these NGOs, the Ecuadorian government was at the very bottom. And this rhetoric of there not being enough government money or there only being government money is a very important one, because government money is not sustainable for these organizations to run. There's simply just not enough to go around, and Ecuador for a long time has not been prioritizing a lot of these environmental movements. So a lot of these organizations have been praised for, quote-unquote, creative funding initiatives, which also can get a little bit sketchy. And Lewis says, for groups doing urban projects, it is hard because there's only government money. It is hard to get resources for urban work. Now, to return to where government funding shows up in some organizations, it is often in these orgs called quasi-governmental orgs, especially FONAG, which is Fondo para la Protección del Agua, which is registered as a private nonprofit. It was established by the city, which means that it was funded by water bills, and it distributes funds to other watershed protection projects. But then it means that it's running off of people's taxes, and so it's less of an environmental movement in itself, but more of like a company. Another one that falls under this example is Vida para Quito, which was created by the municipality of Quito and City Water Company, and it does, quote-unquote, works that improve environmental health and the quality of life of the city and its inhabitants. Orgs like this have strong ties to government funding and has a mix of public and private funding. This apparent lack of government money does not reflect the citizens' priorities, however. In Quito, there has been a lot of graffiti in the late 90s related to environmental issues, and this one thing in particular appeared often, which is one car less. Oftentimes, the citizens focused on very material issues, such as air pollution and water pollution. A concern about this is that, as Louis says, foreign donors are more interested in protecting the, quote-unquote, global commons, which he means as in biodiversity, than they are in local city environments. Therefore, few NGOs work in this unfunded area. So a huge issue is that these vertical networks that are funded by outside sources focus on conservation of the jungle and cute animals and things that international people care about versus human or urban issues. So returning to the book Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador, a really important event that occurred in the late 90s was the beginning of the anti-mining protests, and this really brought forward the cultural politics of water and started to frame water as a commodity that could be fought over by citizens and government and extractors of resources. So in a town center in the late 90s, the indigenous farmers, called campesinos, held a spiritual and cultural gathering to gain the attention of other citizens, Catholic farmers, the government, and anyone who had just been relatively ambivalent towards these issues prior to this. They chanted, Vamos Pueblo Carajo, El Pueblo No Se Rinde Carajo, which means let's go, damn it. The people never give up, damn it. And they marched in opposition of proposed mining law, which was drafted by the ruling party, which at that time was led by President Rafael Correa. Now it's important to understand why this was proposed. The Correa administration in 2007 led an anti-neoliberal agenda, and their efforts to recover national sovereignty and U.S. imperialism and promote social welfare were high on their list of priorities. They wanted to end, in particular, foreign domination of underground mineral resources, especially things like gold and coal. This proposal would establish a state mining company, so for the first time, an Ecuadorian-run mining company, which they said would increase state profit-sharing with foreign mining corporations. The people that lived in these areas were very concerned about how this would affect their natural resources that they relied on every day for life, such as clean water. The president argued that mining was necessary for social welfare programs to fund them, and the Campesinos believed that, quote, they would pay the price in the form of reduced water quality and quantity and resulting detrimental impacts on their health and livelihoods. So they did not buy the claim that the money coming in from these mining projects would in any way equal out the harm that they would cause. Following this, there was decades of conflict around especially the extraction of gold by both Ecuadorian and international corporations, because gold was often found in and around water sources that indigenous people relied on. Now, a big player of the dramatic uprising and marches that occurred in the 1990s was the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, and they made some big moves crossing cultural boundaries in Ecuador, including involving Catholic priests and other people that originally had been relatively ambivalent to these issues, and water became venerated under Catholicism as a very important life force. Following these protests, Ecuador made a dramatic historical claim, which is in 2008, they recognized constitutional rights of Pachamama, which is Mother Earth. The Cudaya political party, even after trying to establish these mining corporations, bent to the demands of indigenous environmental activists and made this groundbreaking decision. So today, I will be talking about the group DECOIN. DECOIN stands for Defense and Ecological Conservation of Intag, as my sort of case study, and most of my information will be drawn from the book, Ecuador's Environmental Revolutions, Eco-Imperialists, Eco-Dependents, and Eco-Resisters by Tammy L. Lewis. So the story I'm going to talk about takes place in the Intag Valley, which is located in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador. Now, this is a very biodiverse location, home to cloud forests, home to a little animal called the Olinguito, lots of different things like that. In the 90s, the government, the Ecuadorian government, made a deal with a group called Bishi Metals, which is a Japanese company, allowing them to explore for metals in the Intag Valley, and if they were able to find some, they would then be allowed to mine. A priest and a landowner in Intag discovered this plan, which had not originally been made transparent to the local villagers, and they started organizing efforts against it, because they understood that mining was not something that would be good for their town. Now, unfortunately, Bishi Metals did find a large copper deposit, and so in their plans to begin mining, they published an environmental impact report that was, again, not made available to citizens, and within this environmental impact report, something that was really important was that they concluded that four different communities would be forced to relocate as a result of the mining that they would have to do. So, obviously, this is not ideal, and once again, the citizens were able to find out about this and, again, be able to organize efforts. So, in this case, they really began to protest and ultimately burned down the Bishi Metals mining camp that they had set up, which ended up forcing Bishi Metals to leave Ecuador, and they were unable to continue their mining plan. Partially, this is due to the group DECOIN, which did form in 1995. Bishi Metals left Ecuador in 1997, so there is some overlap there, but DECOIN really started doing some good work in the aftermath, and they had two sort of central goals they talk about. So, the first was to create job alternatives to mining, because they talk about how mining pits brother against brother as people try to figure out what jobs they can get. So, they created a woman's craft shop and a coffee cooperative to bring jobs into this town, again, as an alternative to mining, and a quote that I have from a town member is, INTAG stands out because we said no to mining, but we also said no to mining, and we want this, and we were able to generate this with the coffee and the tourism, and now the women's group making soaps, and so forth, and so on. So, we played a part in this alternative development. So, they had the women's group, the coffee shop, and they also sort of started running ecotourism for their area, and again, this alternative development is really important because it creates more than just, no, we don't want mining. It creates, yes, we want this, and we can do this on our own, and we're going to do this as a town, and their second main goal is to raise environmental consciousness so that they can create a base that really understands their efforts. So, this specifically includes water rights, and one example that they talk about, that Lewis talks about in the book, is that Decoyne was buying up a bunch of the land where the copper fields were and selling it back to the town to create community watersheds. So, now that they were able to manage their water, they were able to clearly see cleaner water, healthier citizens, and they're more invested in what's going on. A base that understands why they're protecting the water, that understands why they're protecting the forest, is much more committed to the cause rather than a group that is not able to fully understand. So, a big part of their activism was that education that they were able to bring. So, Ecuador at this time was in a really difficult financial situation, and due to this, they basically passed off their fund management to the World Bank. So, the World Bank was doing a lot of different things to try to help Ecuador get back up to a more financially stable place, and because it is the World Bank and not the, like, Ecuador National Bank, they have sort of a different stake in what's going on and might not be as willing to think about those human or urban issues, sort of like Alder was talking about. So, as an example, the World Bank ends up selling the Bishi Metals Company project to a new group called Ascendant Copper, which is a Canadian company. And Ascendant comes out really strong when they come to INTAG. They are working with the police to arrest a bunch of local activists. They're issuing death threats. They're gassing the local communities. They really are pushing their way in there, and they begin to do their projects. But, of course, DECOIN has been working, and they've been building their base, so there are strong, resistant efforts. And in 2005, they end up burning the camp to the ground again, and they sort of just use their bodies as a physical block against paramilitary efforts to bring the site back into the hands of Ascendant Copper. And in 2005, DECOIN once again burned the camp to the ground and sort of used their own bodies to keep the paramilitary groups that were actively trying to regain access to the Ascendant Camp out and, again, forced this group to leave Ecuador. And so, partially why this is important is we can think about that sort of theme of funding and international funding and extractivism. And so, again, like Aldo was saying, these international groups are much more likely to fund the NGOs that focus on biodiversity, that focus on the animals like the Olanguito, which is found in INTAG, whereas they are much less likely to think about sort of what are called brown issues, like water cleanliness and mining in towns and the way that that impacts people's livelihoods. And so, in this book by Tammy Lewis, she talks a lot about different types of environmentalist responses. And so, one type of response is that eco-dependence, and eco-dependence really works closely with these NGOs and with international aid groups. And so, they really rely on funding. And ultimately, a lot of the time, they have to shift their focus or their agenda due to where the money is coming from. Whereas at the end of the book, Tammy Lewis talks a lot about sort of the eco-resisters who are able to just operate sort of outside of funding. And so, DECOIN is a really good example of eco-resisters. They are not internationally funded. Rather, they are often funded by some of these NGOs within Ecuador. That's sort of how they purchase the land where the copper fields are. And so, I just have this really nice sort of synthesizing sentence from Tammy Lewis that says, unlike eco-dependent groups whose staffs were dependent on foreign funding, the activists in DECOIN and other eco-resister groups continued their work despite the transnational funding bust since they were not reliant on funding. Power structures and financial impact plays a large role in both of these case studies. A common theme between the two is that not only can money dictate the outcome of an activist effort, but it can also determine what areas and issues organizations and corporations put their time and resources into. So, not only is it common that a more well-funded issue like protecting wild lands end up being more successful than attempting to clean city water, but funding may dictate what actions exist at all. Returning to the theme of organizational structure, we'd like to reflect on Maurice Rafael Magana's work and cartographies of youth resistance. He bases his exploration of organizing structure in Oaxaca, in which he describes how the youth activists participated in a horizontal structure, meaning all the activists played an equally important role in their groups without one designated leader. The older activists tended to participate in vertical structures, which is the opposite of this. Although I mentioned earlier that horizontalism hasn't been very successful in the broader Ecuadorian movements, according to Tammy Lewis, on the smaller, more radical scale, it did seem to work well. Through our exploration, we found that verticalism exists in the transnational investment-based NGOs and horizontalism is present in the national efforts, so sort of between the eco-dependents and the eco-resisters that I talked about earlier. And this leads to differences in the actions that a movement has the resources to take, with benefits and downfalls of each approach. Between government involvement, civilian activism, international investors, and engagement from both local and global NGOs, Ecuador has a complicated history with environmental activism. While protection of biodiversity and wild lands is extremely valuable, we hope to stress the importance of environmental activism that uplifts and supports humans as well. Thank you for listening.