Background
The jungle - la selva - has taken a curious place in the national psyche ever since the time of the conquistadors . The early explorers were drawn here by rumours of it as el pais de canela ("the land of cinnamon"), a place of abundant fruits and spices, and of El Dorado, the fabled "Golden Man", which convinced them that the region had staggering natural riches . But it was a kind of earthly paradise with a nightmarish twist, for the first visitors soon found it more of an impenetrable green hell, teeming with poisonous snakes and biting insects and were quickly discouraged from colonizing it. Even until the 1960s, most people, save for a sprinkling of missionaries and pioneers, kept away, leaving the forests and its inhabitants well alone. This all changed in the late 1960s following the discovery of large oil and gas reserves , now the country's most important source of wealth. The Oriente was divided into 20,000 hectare bloques (blocks) and distributed between the companies, who proceded to drill and blast in the search for black gold. Roads were laid, towns grew up virtually overnight, and large areas of rainforest were cleared. The region was transformed into a "productive" region, and colonists streamed in on the new roads, looking for jobs, levelling still more land for farms. The speed of the destruction was dramatic, and the Ecuadorian government, under widespread international pressure, began setting aside large tracts of forest as national parks and reserves ; the largest three - Sangay (largely in the Oriente, but with most of its visitable sites in the highlands - Cuyabeno and Yasuni , a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve - were created in 1979, and another three medium-sized parks, Antisana, Sumaco and Llanganates came in the mid-1990s. Even though there are more than 25,000 square kilometres of protected land in the Oriente - well over half of which is pristine Amazonian rainforest - conservationists are worried that the cash-strapped Ecuadorian government is unable (or unwilling) to make sure it stays that way. The task of balancing the needs of a faltering economy against the obligation to protect some of the most important forests on the planet has been among Ecuador's central problems for the past few decades. There are now reports of oil activity in five of the reserves - in Yasuni, as many as six different companies are known to be prospecting. While most people would concede that the oil industry has been very much a mixed blessing for the country, the indigenous peoples of the region - which include the Siona, Huaorani, Secoya, Achuar, Shuar, lowland Quichua, Cofan and Zaparo - have had the most to lose. Many groups, rejecting the Western way of life, have been driven into ever smaller, remoter territories where it becomes increasingly hard to support themselves by traditional means, their rivers and soil polluted from industrial waste, and their communities under mounting pressure to sell out to the oil industry, both culturally and territorially. In recent years, ecotourism has emerged as a great hope for some groups seeking to adapt to a life in which external influences are inevitable, bringing in badly needed income, strengthening the case for the conservation of the forests within an economic framework, and reasserting cultural identities.
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