CODELCO’S TROUBLED MINING PROJECT IN INTAG UNDER NEW SCRUTINY
For nearly 30 years, communities have worked to conserve, restore and defend the cloud forests of the Intag Valley in Ecuador, in what locals say is the longest continuous resistance movement against mining in Latin America.
The tropical Andes are considered the world’s most biodiverse hotspot, ranking first in plant, bird, mammal and amphibian diversity; however, less than 15% of Ecuador’s original cloud forests and only 4% of all forests in northwestern Ecuador remain.
Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, plans to open a mine in the Intag Valley that would destroy primary forest and lie within the buffer area of Cotacachi Cayapas Ecological Reserve — a plan that experts say would be ecologically devastating and not worth the cost.
Communities are using the presence of two threatened frog species — previously thought to be extinct — at the mining site to challenge the project under the “rights of nature,” Ecuador’s constitutional guarantee that natural ecosystems have the right to exist, thrive, and evolve.
When I think of the copper laying below Intag’s forests
When I think of the copper laying beneath Intag’s cloud forests the last thing I think about is clean energy for the poor of our planet. I know better. Rather, I think of death. I think of contamination of pristine rivers and streams with arsenic and lead that will last a thousand years. Of acid […]
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