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.

Friday Foto

Park guard station at Gueppi

Cofan rangers analyze a water sample at the Gueppi ranger station in the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve in the Ecuadorian Amazon. / Guardaparques cofanes analizan una muestra de agua en la estación Gueppi en la Reserva Cuyabeno.

Northeastern Ecuador’s forests have some of the world’s highest species counts for plants and animals, are at the heart of the tropical Andes “hotspot” zone and are instrumental in Ecuador’s status as a mega-diverse country. However, their conservation presents a major challenge. Mining, petroleum exploitation, lumber extraction, mega-infrastructure projects and colonization are major threats, and even within national parks, agricultural expansion continues with little control.

A notable exception is forest within Cofan ancestral territory (CAT). CAT covers about 430,000 hectares (1 million acres) of some of the richest, best-conserved forests in Ecuador ranging from Andean highlands to cloud forest to tropical rainforest.

As a first line of defense, FSC trained and fielded a professional, effective force of Cofan rangers in 2003. This group, 60 members at full capacity, carry out on-the-ground protection and management of Cofan lands to ensure territorial security and zero deforestation. The Cofan Ranger Program (CRP) has trained over 100 Cofan men and women in the protection and management of Cofan territories, as well as people from other indigenous and non-indigenous groups.

ESPAÑOL

Los bosques del noreste del Ecuador tienen algunas de las cifras más altas del mundo de especies de plantas y animales, están en el corazón del "hotspot" andino tropical y son escenciales para la designación de "país mega-diverso" para Ecuador. Sin embargo, su conservación es un gran reto. La minería, explotación petrolera, extracción de madera, proyectos de mega-infraestructura y colonización son amenazas importantes, y incluso dentro de las reservas nacionales, la expansión agrícola sigue con poco control.

Una excepción importante es el bosque dentro del territorio ancestral cofán (TAC). TAC cubre alrededor de 430.000 hectáreas de bosques bien conservados y muy biodiversos en Ecuador, desde páramos andinos hasta bosque nublado y bosque tropical.

Como una defensa para este territorio, FSC entrenó y un grupo de guardaparques cofanes profesionales y eficaces en el 2003. Este grupo, 60 miembros en total, realizan la protección y manejo de tierras cofanes para asegurar seguridad territorial y cero deforestación. El Programa de Guardaparques Cofanes ha entrenado más de 100 hombres y mujeres cofanes en la protección y manejo de territorio cofán, además de personas de otras comunidades indígenas y no-indígenas.

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

Randy Borman to speak in San Francisco

Randy with members of the Cofan community of Zábalo

Randy Borman was born only months before his parents, missionaries and linguists, ventured into the Ecuadorian rainforest to live among the Cofán natives. This set in motion a life that, over five decades, has helped shaped the Cofán community into a model for success in the struggle for biodiversity conservation and indigenous land rights.

Borman and the Fundación Sobrevivencia Cofán are fighting hard to save the rainforest and their culture. Watch his recent TED talk here.

On the eve of Nov. 25th, Randy will speak in San Francisco about the Cofán's rich culture and their ongoing battle to preserve it, then open to a Q&A discussion (Randy is perfectly trilingual: English/Spanish/Cofán). With an encyclopedic knowledge of Amazonian culture, ecology and Ecuadorian political landscape, Borman is a pioneer of the Save the Rainforest movement and one of the most fascinating humans you are likely ever to meet. Please come, bring a friend, and help us spread the word!

WHERE: Activate McCoppin. McCoppin Street and Valencia Street, San Francisco, California.

WHEN: Monday, November 25

TIME: 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm

We've been busy! Cofan ranger course, GIN conference keynote speech, turtle news and more!

The end of September/October has been a busy time for Cofan Survival Fund! Read on for a roundup of some of the projects we have been working on this year:

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Cofan Ranger Program

First up is the Cofan Ranger training course. In September Cofan Survival Fund carried out a 2-week Cofan ranger training course with support from the Institute for Conservation and Environmental Training (ICCA in Spanish). Ten experienced Cofan rangers, four women and six men who have been working as rangers for years, came to the FSC office in Quito.

This course, funded by USAID, was a refresher for these experienced rangers, and topics covered GPS use, environmental law, professional ethics and first aid among others, and also focused on the implementation of a new control and monitoring tool from the Escuela Latinoamericana de Áreas Protegidas de Costa Rica (ELAP). This tool is a way for Cofan rangers to systematize, organize and generate products from activities that Cofan rangers, FSC and FEINCE carry out in protected areas. This tool will make it easier for Cofan rangers to manage and present the data they collect in the field and organize and report on their field activities. The rangers left Quito anxious to try out their new knowledge and ELAP tool in the field.

Randy at the Global Issues Network Conference

Randy was invited to participate in the Global Issues Network (GIN) 2013 Conference, which this year was held in Quito at the American School from October 18th to the 20th. GIN Conferences empower young people to develop sustainable solutions to address global problems and to implement their ideas with the support of the network. The key ideas are based on the book, High Noon- 20 Global Problems, 20 years to Solve Them by Jean Francois Rischard. Hundreds of high school students from around the world converged on Quito to attend the conference.

One theme students can choose to focus on is “Sharing our planet: Issues involving the global commons,” and centers on global warming, biodiversity and ecosystem losses, and deforestation, so Cofan Survival Fund fit right in! Randy was one of several keynote speakers, and also conducted a workshop entitled “How to save the rainforest: An indigenous community’s struggle against destruction and the conservation model that emerged” about carbon footprints, how the Cofan rangers stop deforestation and help reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and how all of us can do our part to lower our own carbon footprints. Cofan Survival Fund also set up a table at the conference’s NGO fair. 

Socio Bosque (Forest Partner)

Another project we have been working hard on is applying for more Cofan territory to be included in the Socio Bosque Program. The Socio Bosque Program is a government initiative that pays landowners for maintaining their forest intact through 20-year contracts. Cofan Survival Fund has already successfully gotten three Cofan territories contracts in this initiative: Rio Cofanes Territory, Zábalo and Dureno. We have been working to include the Cofan Bermejo Reserve, the Cofan-managed zone of the Cayambe Coca Reserve, and the Sinangoe community.For the last two rounds in May and October of this year, for reasons outside our control (which were very frustrating) we were unable to include more Cofan territories in the initiative. This would have meant almost 150,000 hectares would have been earning funds for their environmental services, which would have gone to the Cofan for conservation and development projects.

We were pretty disappointed when we found out that our three applications couldn’t be approved…but, seemingly out of nowhere Socio Bosque officials contacted us to submit paperwork for an additional 40,000 hectares of the Zábalo territory to be included! This would raise Zábalo's annual budget to almost $120,000 total, a significant sum which would cover pretty much all of our control and vigilance activities in addition to providing administrative and community development funds for the community, essentially making Zábalo autonomous in protecting its territories. So, currently we're waiting to hear official word if our application was approved or rejected.

The Charapa Project

In our last update about the Charapa Project we told you about the $20,000 grant we got from Petroamazonas to support the project and the business plan we turned in to the Ministry of Environment to be able to sell part of the Charapa harvest, funds which would finance the project.Well, we have gotten another, smaller grant from Petroamazonas that was given directly to the Zábalo community to finance the upcoming harvest, specifically the bonus that will be given to the families who will find and monitor the turtle nests. This will be enough for about 10,000 baby turtles.

We still don’t have the permit to be able to commercialize a part of the Charapa harvest, but it hasn’t been rejected yet, so that’s good news. Stay tuned for future updates!

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."

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.