Chapter 4: Origins, 1978 to 1987

Summary:

Tammy Lewis organizes this chapter in chronological order. She starts off in the 1970s,

ending in the late 1980s. The real monumental point in this time period was the found of the

organizations of Fundacion Natura and Accion Ecologica. This movement split into two

“dominant camps”. The first camp became very professional, many times working with

international supporters. This camp could be considered as an ecodependent organization. The

second camp took a drastically different direction. They became hugely into fighting against

extractive development. Instead of working with transnational groups, like their original

counterpart, they fight against them. This camp would be considered an ecoresister. As these

two important environmental groups were growing, there was a powerful neoliberal agenda

that was coming to rise. The agenda was to provide a core understanding of the state’s weak

role in environmental management.

Fundacion Natura started out very small. Fundacion Natura began when some

university-educated scientists and “self-proclaimed nature lovers” came together in Quito in

1978 to register their new group with the state as a nonprofit (sin fines de lucro). As most

environmental groups do, especially during the beginning, their main focus was the

conservation of species and ecosystems. The start of this organization was very pure, it was

based out of a group of educated people who just wanted to raise consciousness in the nation

about the environment and educate citizens. They found the best way to do this was make their

television nature show called “Education for Nature” which was sponsored by Ecuadorian
businesses. This show ended up being very big hit. Naively, Natura believed at the time that the

best way to be a successful group and to be positively impactful on the government was to

work within, create working relationships with institutions of power, specifically industry an

government. The USAID was the first transnational organization to provided funding to Natura.

Between the years of 1980 and 1987, Natura received three grants from the USAID for

environmental education projects. Surprisingly, Natura was the only environmental

organization in the nation up until the mid-1980s. A much more radical group, the Society for

the Defense of Nature, SODENA, was introduced in 1985. Despite being founded partly by a

group of biologists, their main approach was to work within the social infrastructure. Their main

goal was to focus on projects related to mining, oil, mangroves, and forests. The subgroup that

supported SODENA, Accion Ecologica (AE), is a generally all women group normally nearly just

as radical as SODENA. The organization AE has fought, and still fights, the government and the

industry’s development plan.

The biggest differences between Fundacion Natura and AE, are that Natura looked for

solutions within the system, normally looking to implement environmental policies that would

promise cooperation and compromise. Natura was considered a conservative organization,

their approach was not radical at all. AE was very different in the sense that they sought change

through human-environmental interactions. Rather than working within, they strongly believed

in demanding radical change in the way the nation works. Another national-level organization

in 1978 that was discovered, was the Charles Darwin Research Foundation. This organization

obviously focused it’s work in the Galapagos, having existed since 1964 on Santa Cruz. It is

registered as an international nonprofit association in Belgium.

 The year of 1987 marked the end of this era. Three things happened at the end of this

year, a national environmental congress was held, and environmental umbrella group was

formed, and a large influx of international funds were generated for conservation through the

first debt-for-nature swap of the nation. Although the debt-for-nature swaps were not perfect,

they were essential to the growth of the Ecuadorian economic state. Ecuador was heavily

indebted to foreign governments, this swap lightened the weight of this debt for them. In

addition, Ecuador was on international conservationists’ radar because of the high biodiversity

present. The first swap, and the formation of CEDENMA combined are what made 1987 a

pivotal year in economic and environmental strides in the nation. The formations of the

organizations were important especially during the military government that ruled during the

oil boom in the 1970s. Having a few strong environmental organizations in place already

definitely took a load off the nation between the huge amount of change that the nation took

on until the early 2000s.

Review:

It seems to me that the era occurring between the years of 1978 and 1987 were

incredibly crucial for the state, and set the stage for economic and environmental policies in the

future, as well as transnational involvement. The direct definition of a debt for nature swap is

“an arrangement by which an indebted developing country undertakes, in exchange for

cancellation of a portion of its foreign debt, to establish local currency funds to be used to

finance a conservation program” (Glossary of Environment Statistics, 2001). It’s interesting how

there can be many downsides to a debt-for-nature swap, since the discovery of this way of

securing the state economically and environmentally has taken wind in other nations. The US
passed a bill that allowed these swaps as a trade for money that owed to the US in Africa, Asia,

and Southesast Asia. If it wasn’t for South America starting off the first few swaps, there would

be no launch of these sort of important debt-for-swaps anywhere.

Sources

(2001). Debt-for-nature-swap. OECD. Retrieved from:

https://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=557

Mawson, Sven. Debt-For-Nature: Past and Future. Stanford Web. Retrieved from:

https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/trade_environment/photo/hdebt.html