For more than a year the Rainforest Information Centre (RIC) has been struggling to prevent mining at our beloved Los Cedros Biological Reserve: In June of 2016 we found out that a mining concession had been surreptitiously handed to a Canadian mining company, although this was not announced by the Ecuadorean government until August of this year.
Realizing this was part of a much larger problem, RIC started collaborating with Ecuadorean researchers a few months ago: together, we have learned that our 7000-acre reserve was just one of 39 Bosques Protectores (protected forests) covering more than ¾ of a million hectares, plus a million hectares of indigenous territories, secretly conceded to mining companies from Australia, Canada, China, and Chile.
We’ve been working alongside Ecuadorian civil society and a new coalition of environmental NGO’S and local governments have begun petitioning the Ecuadorian government to rescind these concessions. We are proud to be an international collaborator, using our network of supporters to bring exposure, financial and technical support to Ecuadorians fighting to save their communities and ecology.
To find out more, please sign our PETITION supporting their protest and, if you can do so, contribute to the CROWDFUND supporting the campaign to protect these priceless areas.
Ecuador has the highest biodiversity per square kilometer of any nation.
Most of the threatened Bosques Protectores are within the Tropical Andes Biological Hotspot; the most biodiverse of the world’s 36 Biodiversity Hotspots.
For the Earth
John Seed
Feature Image: Waterfall at Reserva Los Cedros, a Bosque Protector threatened by recent mining concessions. Photo: Andreas Kay
This is horrendous! Can’t these people see what they’re doing to the land? In the end, they’ll have to pay dearly just as we all will.