2013 Recap: Turtles, rangers and our MacArthur award!

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2013 has been a year of many challenges for Cofan Survival Fund, but we've faced them with determination, never "dándonos por vencidos," or giving up. Here are a few highlights of our accomplishments this past year:

Fundación Sobrevivencia Cofán was one of only 13 nonprofit organizations around the world to win this year’s MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions! The award recognizes exceptional grantees who have demonstrated creativity and impact, and invests in their long-term sustainability with one-time grants.

As a way to make the Charapa Turtle Project sustainable, FSC created a business plan that would make half of the year's turtles available to be purchased in local and international markets and used to repopulate other Amazon rivers.

September 2013 marked the 10th anniversary of the Cofan Ranger Program. In a world where the destruction of our remaining wilderness areas approaches 2% per year, and where even the Ecuadorian National Park System has lost over 15% of its pristine areas during the past ten years, our rangers have accomplished the incredible feat of ZERO DEFORESTATION in over 1,000,000 acres of forest during the same time period. That is an area the size of the entire state of Delaware.

We understand that only reading about a vast, biodiverse forest is not enough, so please enjoy  this video  about Cofan territory, which will take you on a visual journey through the windswept highlands, misty cloud forests and tropical jungles, not to mention the endangered plants and animals found within, that Cofan Survival Fund has played a major role in protecting for almost 15 years.

Today, we are facing even greater threats than ever before. Government policies promote large-scale infrastructure projects, including huge pit-mining operations, mega hydroelectric projects, and intense exploration and exploitation of petroleum reserves. Colonists continue to view our territories as empty lands not being “used,”and which should be opened to them to exploit and destroy. And while understanding and support for the intact forest as a source of environmental services is on the increase within Ecuador, short-term economic interests continue to exert pressure with little concern for future impacts.

We know how many organizations are asking for your donations right now, and each and every one tells you how important your donation is to them. We are a small organization that puts our programs first when it comes to funding. Without outside support, we will not be able to continue our work, and Cofan forests will begin to disappear along with the other forests of Ecuador and Amazonía as a whole…

You can be part of the solution. Don’t think of yourself as too far away to be concerned. Together, we can ensure that at least this million acres of forest continues to provide carbon sequestration, watershed protection, biodiversity protection and erosion control for all of our futures.

Why should you support the Cofan?

Why should you support the Cofan?

With the holiday season almost upon us, we at Cofan Survival Fund are reaching out to our supporters and asking for their help to keep our organization going.

We started formal Cofan conservation activities with almost nothing in the late 1980s, and spent several years doing the best we could with the funds we could access from ecotourism, village collections and the like. As threats escalated and pressures increased, we formalized Cofan Survival Fund in 1999, learned how to access more funding and gratefully accepted help from others outside the immediate Cofan sphere. With this, we became far more effective both in protecting our forests and culture and making a difference for the world.

As funding has become harder for us to access, we have had to make difficult decisions about what to cut and what we can most easily afford to lose, both internally as an indigenous people and as caretakers of a global heritage.But the bottom line is, we can't afford to stop doing what we are doing: we MUST adjust and figure out how to make do. What makes us different from the average NGO is that we don't have the option to quit. We're in this because it means survival for our people, our culture, our forests and our future. I am convinced that it is also an important part of the answer for survival of the globe as we face climate change, water shortages, extreme weather emergencies and the like, and that our contribution to our planet’s sustainability is very important. But as the Cofan, we don't have the luxury of ending conservation activities because we don't have enough funding.

So, we will continue to field as many Cofan rangers as we can afford to protect the most vulnerable locations in the best possible manner we can afford. We will continue collecting Charapa turtle eggs, caring for babies and releasing them into the wild. We will continue sending as many young Cofans as we can to quality schools and universities so they can grow up and take leadership roles for the Cofan Nation.

I want to encourage each of you to be part of the solution. Don’t think of yourself as too far away to be concerned. Take a look at this video to see exactly what your gift will help protect.

Please, become a partner with the Cofan in our mission to save one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet. Make a tax-deductible donation today!

Take care, and thanks for your support!

-Randy

How to make a Cofán backpack

Watch Carlos as he shows us how they use a leaf from a certain palm in Cofán territory in Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve in the Ecuadorian Amazon to make a comfortable (really, it is!) backpack. The Cofán use these packs when they need to carry heavier loads, and they can also be lined with bigger leaves on the inside so they are able to carry smaller things. The strap goes either across your forehead or your collarbone, and they last about a week. Talk about being green!

Here is the finished product:

backpack

18-year anniversary of battling Chevron

November 3rd, 2011, marked the 18th year in which the Cofán have been fighting Chevron, on a legal battleground, for the legacy of contamination the oil company left in its wake since Texaco started operations in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1960s. Amazon Watch's Mitch Anderson went to the Cofán community Dureno recently and wrote about his experience on the NGO's blog, and also recorded the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6qY8mq1WRc&feature=player_embedded#!

"Lago Agrio, Ecuador – The sprawl of scorched pavement and crumbling cement buildings in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. This city, once a small oil boom town founded by Texaco in the late 1960s (and given, appropriately, the name "Sour Lake" after Texaco's hometown in Texas) is now a bewildering and feverish mess of oil workers, drug-traffickers, street children, shop owners, impoverished farmers, and indigenous people stripped of their ancestral territory and forced to survive, as the Cofán people say, in the kokama kuri sindipa ande (the white man's world of money).

Just several days ago, at the edge of the pavement on the outskirts of the city, where the Cofán people have recovered (yes, purchased) a narrow tract of their ancestral territory, I spent the afternoon with Marina Aguinda Lucitante, an elder of the tribe. She was born along the banks of the Agua Rico river. She was married at a young age to a Cofán Shaman, Guillermo Quenama, who died, she says, "because the oil company poisoned him with alcohol." She remembers when the forest was filled with animals. And she remembers when the river ran black with crude oil. She seems to remember everything – and all of her memories are divided: Life before the oil company and life after the oil company.

It has been nearly 50 years since Texaco began oil operations here in the northeastern Ecuadorian Amazon. Nearly 50 years since the death of Marina's husband, Guillermo Quenama. And over that time, the impacts of Texaco's (now Chevron's) reckless pump and dump oil operations have been well documented. The abandoned oil pits littered throughout the rainforest, the billions of gallons of toxic wastewater dumped into rivers and streams, the felled primary forest, the noxious gases rising into the sky from 24 hour-a-day flaring, the crude oil sprayed on the roads, the towering black plumes of smoke from spilt and burning crude, the resultant public health crisis racking indigenous and mestizo farmer communities, including cancer, spontaneous miscarriages, and birth defects.

But what has not been documented – what cannot possibly be understood by anyone who has not been here to endure the last 50 years of oil operations – is how the oil conquest has affected the spiritual life, the inner world, of those who live here.

Today, which marks the 18th anniversary of the monumental legal struggle against Chevron for massive environmental crimes in the Amazon rainforest, Marina has asked me to share with the world a song that she has been carrying within her for these last 50 years. Marina is one of the last Cofán women who remember how to sing in the way of her ancestors. This is her song."

Taking inventory, Amazon-style

Hola! In 2008, scientists from the Field Museum of Chicago came to Ecuador to carry out a Rapid Biological Inventory in the Cuyabeno region of Ecuador and the Gueppi region of Peru. The goal of these inventories, both biological and social, "is to catalyze effective action for conservation in threatened regions of high biological diversity and uniqueness." These inventories don't try to produce an exhaustive list of species, but they identify important biological communities in the site and determine if these communities are significant in a regional or global context.

After the results were in, the scientists found a "spectacular" amount of biodiversity in this region, among which were 13 species of plants and fish in Ecuador completely new to science. And in only one month! Imagine what other surprises are hidden in the rainforest!

Here is the first in a series of videos about the RBI #20

To see more videos, visit the Field Museum's YouTube site.

To read more about the RBIs, please visit the Field Museum's website.

Gente Invisible de la Selva

Please check out Xavier Méndez and Andrés Viera's documentary on the Cofán, Gente Invisible de la Selva (Invisible People of the Jungle). The documentary follows Isidro Lucitante, a Cofán who lives close to the point where the Bermejo and San Miguel rivers come together, close to the Ecuador-Colombia border, on a journey through the Cofán culture, their myths, way of life and socio-environmental problems they encounter living in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Junto a Isidro Lucitante, Cofán que vive cerca de la unión de los ríos Bermejo y San Miguel (frontera Ecuador-Colombia), emprenderemos un viaje por la cultura cofán, sus mitos, su forma de vida y los problemas socio-ambientales que viven en la Amazonía ecuatoriana.

Enjoy Part 1 and Part 2 of Isidro's journey.