Amazon Stranger: A Rainforest Chief Battles Big Oil

Rating:
Summary: vivid, fascinating, heartbreaking and hopeful
Review: This book is at once an adventure story, a profile of a fascinating individual, a heartbreaking account of one of the greatest environmental crimes taking place in the world today (the destruction by oil companies of one of the world's richest ecosystems, Ecuador and Colombia containing the greatest biodiversity of the entire Amazon Basin) and a David-and-Goliath story of a tiny Amazonian tribe, the Cofan, battling for survival against multinational corporations. As all of those things, it bears comparison with Joe Kane's "Savages," but the Cofan have already dealt with much more destruction than have the Waorani, and this book spends more time on first-hand descriptions of both the riches of the Ecuadorian rain forest and the consequences of oil exploration. (I would recommend this book not only to activists who are trying to save the Amazon, but also to those who are working to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil exploitation, to explode to smithereens the notion that oil exploitation would not devastate the ecology there.)

The editorial reviews here cover just about everything else I would say about this book, so I won't repeat their comments, just direct the reader to them.

...One factual error this book makes repeatedly that I would like to correct: although they speak the same language as the Indians of the Andean highlands, and although they expanded northward into Cofan territory relatively recently, the Amazonian Quichua are NOT migrants from the highlands and NOT newcomers to the rainforest. They are true Amazonian people, distinct syncretic cultures created from the remnants of various destroyed Amazonian tribes who blended together and adopted their lingua franca (Quichua) as their first language. Though the Amazonian Quichua have been influenced (=weakened) by missionaries for much longer than the Cofan, their roots in the rainforest are every bit as deep.