Toxic Lands, Toxic Politics: Healing in the Amazon
In 2019, I travelled to the Ecuadorian Amazon to work with a collective in remediating toxic oil spills caused by Chevron-Texaco on Indigenous lands. We utilised mycelium—the vegetative body of the mushroom, which led me to my current work of healing Earth with Earth. What is “harmony” but the recognition of a multi-species timeline at work? What does it mean to place something back into cycle?
How do we understand the healing of the Earth as the healing of our own selves, in which communities—individual—planet, work as one? This work is part of a larger contemplation of what it means to ‘return to the soil’. It’s a call for a ‘return’ where soil becomes a revolutionary platform and a utopian space in which the possibility of a new world exists. If we return to soil in a different way, as a community of farmers; architects; artists and multi-species beings—then what could a new world look like? What could our conception of justice and equality look like?
“I don’t know what to think about justice, but I know that what is happening now is a planetary damage. This isn’t just about the Amazon, but about the planet reclaiming its rights—all over the world. We can’t sit by while these large corporations defend economy instead of defending life.”
- Donald Moncoya, Ecuadorian Farmer and Activist who has devoted his life to fighting these neoliberal corporations
These were the words uttered to me on August 13th at 5:28pm as I sat opposite a man named Donald Moncayo in a small village of the Ecuadorian Amazonian Rainforest called Lago Agrío. Donald is an Ecuadorian farmer who currently conducts “Toxic Tours” which excavates the polluted oil pits and environmental damage left behind by Chevron-Texaco. These pits exist throughout the landscape as envenomed lacerations or open wounds of toxic marinades within Earth’s Lungs. Donald has devoted his life not just to the reparations of the Amazonian Ecuadorian communities in the court of law, but to share his story and those of his people as a knowledge holder of these lands. From 8am in the morning to 5pm in the afternoon Donald and I drove through Lago Agrío, Sacho City, and Shushufindi on a tour likened to Dante’s Inferno, circling through the various layers of hell as we cruised the very same roads once created by the Chevron-Texaco company. As a visitor who came to implement and assist in both fieldwork and a bioremedial project, Donald showed me the importance of seeing the damage before I could even imagine the remediation. He displayed to me a scale of disaster speculative by nature that acts as prophecy when it comes to the collaboration of large corporations and governmental powers. What is at stake in this current era of the neoliberal anthropocene is life in all its forms. Violence, in all of its totality, as an accelerated immediacy and slow toxicity, demonstrates that life is invariably connected. Violence, when observed, shows us the slow reverberations of cause and effect. To lash at the earth, slice her open and pour poisons into her wounds marks a violent attack on the soil; a killing of the ecological food chain dependent upon that particular location; an assault against the right to life for people, particularly indigenous peoples within the area who can no longer drink the water, grow food or have livestock as a means of sustainable living; and an immense burden now placed on generations to come who will not only have to deal with the physical damage but the emotional agonies of trauma replicating throughout time.
Unravelling the Oil Spill
In the midst of the year 1964, a discovery was made in Lago Agrío, a province of Sucumbíos Ecuador by Texaco Petroleum Company who, invited by the Ecuadorian government, began exploring for oil in an area once inhabited by indigenous peoples. The history of petroleum development in Ecuador dates back to “1878 when Ecuador’s National Assembly decreed exclusive rights to M. G. Mier and Company for the extraction of petroleum, tar, kerosene and other bituminous substances in the Santa Elena Peninsula” (Jacques 2012). Central to the government’s actions at the time was a persistent desire to strengthen the economy “by developing the petroleum, fishing and agricultural sectors, and to resolve a long-standing border dispute with Peru involving the Oriente region” (Hiraoka and Yamamoto 1980, 423). Development of the petroleum resources was just one of the ways the government could secure its claim in the Oriente, as well as to create various forms of colonialism in what I believe can now be called the neoliberal anthropocentric era. The term ‘Anthropocene’ is one that gets thrown around quite often. For clarity’s sake the definition I am using is the Anthropocene as an epoch, a moment in time in which humans dominate, exert energy and cause damage at a pace quicker than the Earth’s ability to rehabilitate. The Anthropocene marks a motive, a curiosity with malintent, for the service of only one kingdom. Both the curiosity and ferocious lust for control led to a pavement of environmental violence which was further established on the day of March 29th, 1967 when the first oil drill was made called ‘Lago 1’ located near the airport in Lago Agrío. One could best describe this moment as the first wound ripe for corporate infection where the discovery of oil marked a change of direction for both Chevron-Texaco and the State of Ecuador who initiated a contract linguistically highlighting the shift from the excavation of oil to the very intentional and pointed violence of extraction.
Extraction evolved not just into a form of drilling but an entire infrastructure because if the oil company had to drill that meant it had to drill deep inside the earth where these resources were prevalent. This entailed the clearing and making of roads and accessways throughout the Amazonian Rainforest as well as its residing indigenous communities. The accessways opened an access point into ecocide and terror implemented upon Earth as well as its bi-product, femicide, which often accompanies this type of violence. There’s no way of tip-toeing around the intense fact that current economic models facilitate both global unsustainable consumption and a mentality of violence that circumambulates into households penetrative of the female body. Toxic lanscapes are often coupled with toxic politics and the assault against women that took place by the associates of Chevron-Texaco now circumambulates today where the violence against women is a massive problem in the oil towns of Lago Agrío, Sacho City and Shushufindi. What truly remains lost is the wisdom of the elders who once taught against this type of toxicity and promoted an internal harmony now lost at the pavement of corporate roads.
Like many developing nations before it, Ecuador’s forested lands gave way to forms of land-use needed to support the growing population. As the government fell further and further into a capitalist hunger, what arose was a distinction between nature and society which further perpetuated a threshold upon which polarities in opposition were defined. Architect and theorist Paulo Tavares discusses the critical spatial metamorphoses currently taking place and unfolding in the Amazon as we speak. He states that “forests [are seen as] the outside, the negation, or the enemy of the space of the civic [...] In the western imagination, the space of the social par excellence is the city, and the forest stands to the city in a relation of fundamental opposition” (Tavares 2016). Through the creation of distinction between the forest and the city, nature and man, there is a disconnection of worlds established which touches upon an origin of violence. The term ‘origin’ is of interest here because in order to consider the ecological disaster of an oil spill an act of violence, we must go back even further into the violent imaginative which marks a conceptual and colonial turn into modernity where the state of nature; morally, politically and legally, becomes reshaped. Before a toxic land can arise, a toxic mindset must proliferate. The colonial imaginative is an ideological state of being in which scale, scalability and a particular type of human benefit are at the forefront of a condition that has been continuously playing itself out in the world. Eyal Weizman, in his essay ‘Are they human’, tracks this shift that he believes first occurred in the 17th and 18th century as he states “the great forests largely turned into cropland and fuel prior to wood’s replacement with coal as Europe’s main source of energy, and the colonial economy’s appetite for ships finished off the rest, with merchant ships and gunboats requiring between 4–6,000 mature oaks—several hectares of forest—each” (Weizman 2016). The ideological shift occurs when the “forest” becomes a malleable conceptual framework embodied in the architectural sense for European colonizers to sail across the Americas with the same colonial imaginative that exploited its trees — to exploit other people.
Soil as a Multi-species Being
Within this work, the mushroom was utilised as a means of repairing, or returning, the soil to its previous state before the oil spills. This meant contemplating a way in which “oil” or the hydrocarbon molecule could be removed from the soil without any performative, large, or expensive governmental infrastructure, thus asking the questions—what is soil and how does it work? What are the communities of soil (human and non-human) that create it and how do they each contribute to its life cycle or circularity?
Mushroom Ecology
Mushroom organisms are pivotal members of the soil biome. The mushroom itself is the fruiting body of the organism — this is what we see in an enchanted moment of perusing or foraging forest floors. The vegetative body of the fungus lies beneath the forest, hidden deep within soil, one cell wall thick and is essentially a web of cells and thread-like, stringing branches known as “hyphae” that interlace en-masse to form what is known as “mycelium”. Mycelium is where the “work” takes place — it unlocks nutrient sources stored within plants through the release of specific enzymes and acids that feed the fungus, excrete organic matter back into the soil, release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, and link the roots of different plants underground allowing them to communicate. In fact, mycelium is colloquially nicknamed “Earth’s natural internet” as they not only connect organisms of the forest to one another, but they allow for an infrastructure where the sharing of resources can take place. ‘Adult’ trees, for example, share sugars with younger trees, sick trees can send their remaining resources back into the network for others and communication can be accessed when dangers like insect infestation arises (Peck 1987). In fact, Robert McFarlane writes — “The relationship between these mycorrhizal fungi and the plants they connect is now known to be ancient (around four hundred and fifty million years old) and largely one of mutualism—a subset of symbiosis in which both organisms benefit from their association. In the case of mycorrhizae, the fungi siphon off food from the trees, taking some of the carbon-rich sugar that they produce during photosynthesis. The plants, in turn, obtain nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi have acquired from the soil, by means of enzymes that the trees do not possess” (McFarlane 2017). The mushroom and its mycelial network are cooperative, supportive, and in constant dialogue with the environment — reacting to and governing the eccentric flow of mass nutrients cyclically running through the food chain.
Through the mushroom, the once barren terrain invites an ecological footprint of interlacing pathways that cooperate and cohabitate with one another (Ibid., 56). The near-lifeless landscape becomes a flourishing oasis, and in the words of Anna Tsing this can be understood as a “pericapitalist” space — “pericapitalist economic forms can be sites for rethinking the unquestioned authority of capitalism in our lives. At the very least, diversity offers a chance for multiple ways forward — not just one” (Tsing 2017, 65). Multiple ways forward call for multiple ways of existing which deter from capitalistic power formations that create and standardize life through methods of scalability.
Capitalist society depends upon scalability for smooth expansion. Historically speaking, scalability is the logic of plantation systems where alienation and isolation allowed for slaves and crops to be “self-contained, and thus standardizable as abstract labour” (Tsing 2017, 38). Without the smooth expansion that allowed for plantations — the evolution of the factory from its roots in slavery to industrialization to what’s now known as neoliberalism would have seen no growth, commodification, or surplus value extracted from production. Scalability requires that project elements be oblivious to indeterminacies of encounter and banish meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things.
