From Eden to “Modernisation”: Ecuador at the Crossroads of Nature and Debt“

Photograph by Kevin Schafer

ECHOES OF THE AMAZON PINK DOLPHIN

29/7/2025

Editorial Comment

This chronicle adopts an unconventional voice: Vida, a hummingbird whose presence threads together forest, river, and marble hall. Through Vida’s eyes, factual events — ministerial decrees, IMF agreements, and new laws targeting civil society — are witnessed not only as policy but as living memory of the Amazon itself.

By blending reportage with lyrical observation, this work seeks to honour two truths: the measurable facts of environmental and democratic crisis, and the intangible realities felt by those who inhabit the forest. In the Amazon, life and politics are inseparable; to speak of one without the other is to speak incompletely.

Abstract

“No people can be free so long as their destiny is defined by others.” — Archie Mafeje

The reforms signed by President Daniel Noboa in July 2025 merge Ecuador’s environmental mandate under its extractive ministries — a shift framed as “modernisation” but carrying profound implications for the Amazon, the Galápagos, and the nation’s constitutional legacy. In the same week, the government announced an urgent law to regulate and potentially dissolve civil society organisations, linking them — without presenting evidence — to illegal mining and “subversive activities.” 

Through the eyes of Vida the hummingbird, this chronicle explores the ecological, social, and democratic stakes: from biodiversity unmatched on Earth to IMF negotiations that tether Ecuador’s future to familiar cycles of austerity. It asks whether a nation so rich in life will continue to measure itself in barrels and tonnes — or dare to choose a path beyond extractivism, a future rooted in life itself.

Vida, the Hummingbird

Vida, the hummingbird, is no larger than a heartbeat in flight, his wings a rapid blur that hums at the edge of hearing. In sunlight his feathers flash emerald and violet; at dusk, they soften to the colour of rain‑soaked moss. He darts between bromeliads and river spray, hovering in impossible stillness before vanishing into the canopy. Presidents and ministers seldom notice him, yet he has hovered over every clearing and every signing table, carrying memory between the Amazon and the Galápagos, between the forest floor and the marble halls of Quito. It is Vida who bears witness to what follows.

From Eden to “Modernisation”

In The Quiet Dispossession of Eden, Vida warned of a law that would unravel Ecuador’s sacred territories — a prophecy whispered from the cliffs of the Galápagos and carried inland on Pacific winds to the headwaters of the Amazon Basin, which release nearly a fifth of the planet’s fresh water each day. Many dismissed it as poetic exaggeration; today it reads as foreknowledge.

On 24 July 2025, President Daniel Noboa signed decrees that do not merely rearrange ministries or tidy bureaucratic charts. They rewrite Ecuador’s covenant with its forests, rivers, and peoples — shifting centuries of guardianship into the ledgers of extractive mandate.

The Decrees Announced: Ecuador’s State Rewritten

The signing came without ceremony in the muted halls of Carondelet Palace. By noon, the measures were public; by dusk, they carried the force of law. Framed as part of an “urgent modernisation plan,” Executive Decree No. 257 and its related orders mark the most sweeping restructuring of the Ecuadorian State since the 1998 constitutional reforms:

·       Ministries reduced from twenty to fourteen; secretariats from nine to three.

·       The Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition placed under the Ministry of Energy and Mines — collapsing guardianship of rivers, forests, and climate policy into the same office charged with licensing their extraction.

·       The Ministry of Women and Human Rights merged into Government; Culture and Heritage folded into Education — dissolving dedicated oversight for vulnerable groups and cultural patrimony.

·       Under Article 140 of the Constitution, the reforms bypassed extended legislative debate, leaving civil society just five working days to respond.

Eduardo Gudynas calls such arrangements a conflicto de mandato — when the referee also plays the game. Alberto Acosta warns it signals a return to colonial logic: nature viewed not as rights‑bearing but as raw resource.

Vida, who has hovered above oil‑blackened rivers and silent forests cut by chainsaws, recognises the weight of this shift. What appears to be administrative tidying conceals a profound reordering of priorities — one where Ecuador’s most sacred landscapes are negotiated not in communities or forests, but in export projections and fiscal ledgers.

The Costa Rica Mirage — and the Path Not Taken

Defending the merger of environment and energy, Noboa cites Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE) as precedent. At first glance, the comparison flatters: Costa Rica, praised worldwide for its green credentials, indeed unites these portfolios. Yet the resemblance is ceremonial rather than structural — feathers borrowed from another bird.

Costa Rica’s circumstances are singular. It has no oil industry; mining rents contribute virtually zero to its GDP. Its energy matrix is 95 percent renewable, drawn from rivers, wind, and geothermal sources. Over a quarter of its territory is protected, and ecotourism — supported by five percent of global biodiversity — contributes about six percent of GDP.

Ecuador, by contrast, harbours ten percent of the planet’s species in less than 0.2 percent of Earth’s landmass, yet remains fiscally dependent on oil and increasingly on mining. To place environmental protection under Energy and Mines is not to emulate Costa Rica but to unite guardian and trespasser in the same house, their quarrel measured not in blossoms or rivers but in barrels and tonnes.

The missed opportunity is stark. Had Ecuador followed Costa Rica’s ecological path — prioritising renewable energy, large‑scale forest protection, and biodiversity‑based tourism — its forests might today generate enduring wealth measured not in barrels but in living ecosystems. With twice Costa Rica’s biodiversity and a larger, more diverse geography, Ecuador’s potential earnings from ecotourism and ecosystem services could already surpass US $4–6 billion annually — exceeding current mining revenues while preserving its living wealth rather than extracting it.

This was the road not taken: a path toward true ecological sovereignty that still glimmers, faintly, in the unbroken canopy of Yasuní.

Biodiversity and Untapped Potential

Vida recalls drifting above the blackwater lagoons of Cuyabeno at dawn — mist rising like breath from the forest, the guttural roar of howler monkeys echoing across the canopy. A sudden pink arc breaks the stillness: river dolphins, cousins to the children born along these banks. Few beyond the Amazon realise this single reserve shelters 600 bird species, 200 mammals, and 150 amphibians.

In Yasuní National Park, a botanist once guided him through a single hectare of forest. Leaf by leaf, tree by tree, names were recited until the count reached 655 species of trees — more than the United States and Canada combined. Beneath that canopy live insects beyond counting, perhaps 100,000 species in one patch of soil. These forests store 4.1 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalents and regulate river systems — Napo, Pastaza, Aguarico — sustaining millions across South America. Their ecosystem services are conservatively valued at US $4–6 billion annually, exceeding projected revenues from extractive concessions.

This is Ecuador’s unclaimed inheritance: a biodiversity‑based economy that could rival extractive income without eroding the landscapes upon which survival depends. Ecotourism already contributes roughly six percent of Ecuador’s GDP; with vision, it could double or triple within a decade. More importantly, it could buffer the nation against oil price shocks and align Ecuador with emerging “nature‑positive” investment flows now reshaping global markets post‑COP15.

Yet this path is neglected. In Quito’s discourse, barrels and tonnes outvote tree counts and dolphin sightings. SELVA–Vida Sin Fronteras, monitoring these forests since 1992, documents how resource booms bring volatility and inequality rather than lasting prosperity. Scholars such as Acosta and Gudynas concur: extractivism is not synonymous with development. If Ecuador’s future is to be measured in unpoisoned rivers and forests intact, it must look elsewhere.

Modernisation: Myth or Doctrine?

The word modernisation drifts through presidential speeches and IMF communiqués with the ease of a refrain. To those flying above the forest, it suggests airports, balance sheets, the comfort of imported certainties. But on the forest floor, where Waorani women still whisper the names of medicinal trees and barefoot children drink from streams where pink dolphins rise, the word sounds different — less like progress, more like echo.

The Hungarian economist Thomas Szentes cautioned in Theories of Development and Underdevelopment (2005):

“Development cannot be reduced to the imitation of Western patterns; to do so is to perpetuate underdevelopment under the guise of modernity.”

From Africa, Archie Mafeje issued a parallel warning:

“The universalisation of Western experience as development denies the plurality of histories and arrogates to itself the authority to define progress.” — The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations (1991)

These critiques converge on Ecuador’s present course. Once, the nation startled the world with constitutional audacity: Buen Vivir, the Rights of Nature, plurinationalism — concepts that dared to imagine a different modernity. Today, these are dismantled in the name of modernisation, replaced by what Mafeje called epistemological colonisation: foreign blueprints imposed upon landscapes and peoples whose histories follow other rhythms.

The rhythms of the Amazon are different. They are kept not by fiscal quarters or IMF tranches, but by the flowering of guayacán, the migrations of oropendolas, the breathing of the forest itself. To subordinate such rhythms to borrowed doctrines is not modernisation; it is amnesia disguised as reform.

Domestic Consequences: The Weight of Subordination

The internal consequences of this shift extend far beyond administrative charts. By placing environmental oversight under extractive mandate, Ecuador risks undoing decades of slow progress in safeguarding its most fragile ecosystems and marginalised communities. Indigenous nations — guardians of the headwaters and forests — stand to lose the last institutional ally that recognised their ancestral role in territorial stewardship.

Water systems, already strained by hydrocarbon and mining activity, face renewed vulnerability: contamination events in the Napo and Pastaza have historically followed precisely such deregulated periods. The Galápagos, too, are imperilled by budget reallocations; funds once earmarked for island conservation are redirected toward debt service and energy infrastructure.

In this realignment, human rights protections risk quiet erosion. The merging of the Ministry of Women and Human Rights into Government dilutes accountability, leaving women, children, and Indigenous defenders with diminished recourse at a moment when extractive frontiers are expanding into contested territories.

Orthodoxy Revisited: The IMF’s Silent Hand

Unseen, Vida alights on a windowsill in Washington, where air‑conditioned rooms vibrate with quiet inevitability. In these rooms, Ecuador is less forest and river than line item: a debtor nation negotiating survival in exchange for compliance.

Three days after Noboa’s decrees, the International Monetary Fund approved a one‑billion‑dollar credit expansion, lifting Ecuador’s external debt near five billion and binding its economic future to the familiar choreography of structural adjustment.

This choreography is not new. It echoes the Washington Consensus of the 1980s and 1990s — austerity, privatisation, deregulation — tested on the soils of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia. Ecuador now joins that lineage: fuel and transport subsidies pared back, the value‑added tax raised to record levels (15 percent), state assets prepared for sale, and new mining and oil concessions opened as collateral for repayment. Social programmes are thinned; environmental safeguards softened; rivers and forests re‑entered into fiscal ledgers as guarantees for solvency. Simultaneously, a security budget of US $3.52 billion is announced — dwarfing allocations for conservation and social protection.

History shows that such measures rarely remain confined to balance sheets. The austerity packages of Latin America’s past were not only economic experiments but political gambles: they promised stability and instead ignited waves of protest, toppled governments, and left enduring scars on social trust. When structural reforms coincide with fragile democracies and widening inequalities, the risk is not merely economic failure but civic rupture — a pattern as visible in the streets as in the ledgers.

President Noboa now walks this same narrow bridge. By tethering Ecuador’s future to urgent fiscal targets and extractive pledges, while simultaneously constraining civic space, his government risks confronting the very unrest it seeks to contain.

At the heart of this approach lies an intellectual lineage. Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate and leading figure of the Chicago School, shaped the monetarist doctrines that would later guide international financial institutions. His theories — privileging price stability, fiscal restraint, and market liberalisation — became the blueprint for structural adjustment policies worldwide, from Latin America’s “shock therapies” of the 1980s to the IMF’s conditional lending frameworks today.

Friedman’s own warning is telling: “Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change.” Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, argued that this observation evolved into strategy: crises became the crucible through which unpopular reforms could be enacted swiftly, sidestepping democratic deliberation. Mark Blyth traces the same trajectory, noting that austerity’s history shows it is most easily imposed where authority is centralised and public opposition muted. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, writing from his experience within the World Bank, warns that when such conditionalities — subsidy cuts, privatisation, accelerated extraction — are applied without social safeguards, the result is not stability but deeper inequality and democratic erosion

.

These warnings converge uncannily with Ecuador’s present hour. On 28 July 2025, and headlined in every major newspaper today, the government announced an “urgent” draft law to regulate and potentially dissolve civil society organisations. Its declared purpose is to combat illegal mining and ensure financial transparency. The government’s rhetoric goes further, conflating certain NGOs with “subversive activities” allegedly tied to illegal mining — yet no legal or substantive evidence has been presented to support such claims.

This absence of proof is striking: it risks criminalising watchdog organisations precisely because they monitor extractive projects and challenge state narratives, creating a chilling effect on the very voices most essential for environmental and Indigenous defence.

This critique does not imply nostalgia for previous administrations; earlier governments also pursued extractive agendas and faced their own conflicts with civil society. The present concern lies in the acceleration and consolidation of such measures under the current reforms.

Political theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Dahl and Amartya Sen remind us that liberal democracy rests on minimal yet inviolable principles: freedom of association, plural oversight of power, and the right of citizens to contest decisions that shape their lives. To weaken these safeguards — whether in the name of modernisation, security, or fiscal stability — is to hollow out democracy itself, leaving accountability diminished and dissent precarious.

Archie Mafeje cautioned that when external frameworks claim exclusive authority to define progress, they inevitably delegitimise and suppress alternative voices — a dynamic as evident in the repression of civil society as in the homogenising logic of extractivist modernisation.

This is not merely a question of legal architecture but of political risk. By playing this card — pursuing urgent austerity while constraining civic space — President Noboa risks igniting the very unrest his reforms are intended to quell. The echoes of past crises across Latin America serve as quiet warnings: when voices are silenced, pressure builds elsewhere, in ways no balance sheet can predict.

Vida, hovering unseen between the forest assemblies and the halls of power, perceives the pattern unfolding: debt pledged in distant capitals, extractive frontiers reopened, and now the narrowing of the very spaces where guardians might still speak. What begins as an administrative reform risks ending as silence — not only of NGOs, but of the democratic promise inscribed in Ecuador’s own Constitution.

Alternatives Silenced

Ecuador was once celebrated for its constitutional innovations. The 2008 Constitution enshrined Buen Vivir — living well — and, in a global first, recognised Nature as a rights-bearing subject. These principles challenged extractive orthodoxy and offered a blueprint for development rooted in reciprocity rather than exploitation.

Yet today, these frameworks are quietly sidelined. References to Buen Vivir vanish from policy discourse; the Rights of Nature are honoured more in rhetoric than enforcement. Courts that once entertained lawsuits on behalf of rivers and forests are now preoccupied with balancing fiscal emergency measures against investor claims.

This silencing is not merely symbolic. By relegating these ideas to history, the government signals a retreat from the pluriversal vision that once distinguished Ecuador on the world stage — a vision in which Indigenous epistemologies and ecological integrity stood as coequal foundations of national life.

Echo of the Forest

Vida, no larger than a heartbeat in flight, hovers at the threshold of this decision. His wings beat faster than thought; his memory is older than the Republic itself.

From above, he witnesses two paths unfolding: one where forests are measured in barrels and tonnes, and another where life is valued for its own sake — rivers unpoisoned, voices unshackled, horizons left open for those yet to come. Silent, persistent, unblinking, he circles once more above the blackwater lagoons and the palaces alike, bearing witness as the prophecy of Eden nears its reckoning.

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