The Mirage of Gold and the Memory of Water
- Hummingbird
- Aug 20
- 10 min read
Updated: Aug 22
ECHOES OF THE AMAZON PINK DOLPHIN
19/8/2025
The Wealth of Nature Against the Illusion of Extraction
By
This article continues a conversation already begun in earlier writings. In Echoes of Eden, the forest appeared as a living garden, carrying into the present the fragrance of origins. Later, from the high ridges of the Andes, water revealed itself as guardian of memory, flowing between moss and stone. Those reflections deepened in Cuenca, where the shimmer of promised mineral wealth was weighed against the darker balance of risk. What follows is not an interruption of that current, but another passage along the same river — a current that must flow onward, like water itself, far beyond the noise of politics.
In the páramo of Quimsacocha, science speaks with a voice that cannot be silenced. These fragile paramos are living reservoirs, storing and releasing water that sustains hundreds of thousands of people downstream — farmers in Cuenca, Indigenous communities in the Amazon, families on the coast. To drive tunnels through them, to blast rock and drain aquifers, is to wound an organ that has no capacity for repair within human time. For a century’s worth of gold, one risks losing water for millennia. As Patricia Gualinga has said, “Water is not only a resource, it is the blood of the Earth — without it, we cease to exist” (Gualinga, 2018).
Governments defend extraction with promises of income, yet the arithmetic is clear when set side by side. Mining in this region might yield several hundred million dollars over its brief lifetime. By contrast, the environmental services of intact ecosystems — water regulation, carbon storage, oxygen production, soil fertility, pollination — can be calculated in monetary terms that exceed extraction several times over. These services may surpass one billion dollars when projected over the same horizon. And unlike the mine, their value does not expire: they regenerate, they compound, they endure. Added to this is the cost avoided — the billions that would otherwise be spent repairing poisoned rivers, replanting forests, and relocating communities. In that reckoning, mining does not compare in the slightest (Costanza et al., 1997).
This is SELVA’s alternative to extractivism: a framework built from decades of field work, long before the word “carbon credit” entered official language. We affirm that nature itself provides measurable services of planetary worth. To account for them fully — water, carbon, oxygen, biodiversity — is to discover that the Amazon, the Andes, the Galápagos, marine reserves, and the great Pacific Ocean are already the greatest economic asset Ecuador possesses. They are not obstacles to development; they are its foundation.
The valuation of the environmental services of intact ecosystems has been charted by science for nearly three decades, beginning with the pioneering work of Costanza et al. (1997, Nature), and since refined in several studies across disciplines. Water regulation, carbon storage, biodiversity, pollination, soils — all have been weighed and translated into numbers that speak the language of economics. The science, then, is not in doubt; it is robust, recognised, and enduring.
Where SELVA steps forward is in transforming this arithmetic into a living framework. Ours is not a laboratory abstraction but a construction born of rivers and forests, of decades of research in Amazonian and Andean lands and in the Galápagos Archipelago, of Indigenous knowledge carried in practice and presence. Unlike global mechanisms such as REDD+ or carbon credits, which fragment nature into negotiable units, SELVA has insisted on valuing ecosystems in their wholeness: the indivisible pulse of water, oxygen, soils, biodiversity, and renewal.
This is our creation and our contribution to the field: what we name the Economics of Intact Ecosystems — SELVA’s economics of permanence — declaring that the intact ecosystem itself is the true economy, and that its valuation is not only theoretically sound but the backbone of a viable alternative to extractive economics.
There are those who seek to silence this vision. The New York Times (2025) reminded the world of the pressures mounting in Ecuador: NGOs harassed, Indigenous leaders threatened, dissent equated with betrayal. These are not new wounds; they run back through decades of persecution.
The defence of rivers and forests has many voices. Among them are the late Aurelio of the Cofán, the late Cesario of the Secoya, and Delio of the Siona — all three shamans and governors, defenders of the Amazon Rainforest and nature, bearers of incomparable knowledge rooted in centuries of forest memory. Two of them lived beyond a hundred years, carrying ancestral time in their very breath, while Delio, at seventy-four, still carries chants and visions inseparable from the rivers he defends. Their paths, closely tied since 1980 to Mariana Almeida — founder and Executive President of SELVA — gave shape to a movement that grew from the forest itself.
This special movement, carried forward now for more than three decades, was never the appendage of a party nor the echo of an ideology. It rose instead from the sovereignty of nature itself, from the long patience of those who stood on the frontlines — confronting illegal mining in the rivers, oil contamination in the forest, toxic pools abandoned like open wounds, and the fleets that plundered the Galápagos as if the sea were endless. Out of those struggles grew not only acts of defence but also a school of thought — later named the Economics of Intact Ecosystems — SELVA’s own creation, born of ancestral vision and scientific clarity, placing permanence above extraction and declaring the intact forest and sea to be the true treasury of nations.
At its heart has been Mariana Almeida, who has given her life to this cause, uniting Andes, Amazon, and Galápagos, thought and action, into a single horizon of defence and renewal — a truly bi-oceanic vision.
Yet this current has never remained in words alone: it has taken root in reforestation of degraded lands, in the defence of rivers and marine sanctuaries, in the restoration of soils and in the creation of sustainable programmes in ecosystems of universal significance. Few organisations can claim such continuity of presence, where thought and action meet on the very edge of danger, leaving marks not written only on paper but inscribed upon the earth itself — forests renewed, waters guarded, communities sustained, and an economy of permanence that stands as both vision and proof.
From this lineage a wider current of resistance begins. Patricia Gualinga, daughter of Sarayaku, has carried the dignity of her people far beyond Ecuador, reminding the world that life itself is inseparable from water, forest, and the right to live differently. Her voice, joined to those elder shamans, affirms that to defend water is to defend life itself, and that no society can endure when its springs are destroyed.
Beside her stood others with the same courage: Fernando Villavicencio, sheltered when persecution sought to extinguish his voice, and who, after his assassination, remains among those who defended truth at the cost of their lives. To remember them is to affirm that the defence of forests and waters is inseparable from the defence of dignity and truth.
The same spirit has travelled beyond Ecuador’s borders. In Costa Rica, a nation that built its international stature by choosing forests over mines, water over illusion, permanence over haste, the lesson is clear. By banning open-pit mining, taxing carbon, and investing in its forests as living capital (Evans, 1999), Costa Rica proved that true prosperity flows from protection rather than plunder.
Yet it is precisely this example that President Noboa now invokes, perversely, to justify subordinating the Ministry of Environment to Energy and Mines. To cite Costa Rica while dismantling Ecuador’s own protections is not statesmanship but its parody — a vision of courage reduced to convenience, a mediocrity dressed as policy, and a danger disguised as progress.
Ecuador, too, has long given voice to alternatives. Eduardo Gudynas spoke of post-extractivism (Gudynas, 2011), Alberto Acosta of Buen Vivir (Acosta, 2010), Maristella Svampa of the Commons (Svampa, 2019). Different names for a single truth: that life’s continuity is the only true wealth, and that to ignore it is to invite ruin, while to heed it is to open paths yet unseen.
And if memory alone were not enough, the scars of other countries and continents speak as witness. In Tsumeb, Namibia, the smelter once run by Dundee Precious Metals left a legacy of poison. Chronic exposure to arsenic and sulphur dioxide persisted among residents, with independent studies finding contamination up to twenty times above safe limits in soil and groundwater (Bankwatch, 2010). Children drank from water under permanent boil advisories; crops failed, lungs weakened, and the air itself became a slow toxin. The Namibian (2012) reported urgent calls for medical examinations, while Bankwatch (2010) documented arsenic-laden waste dumps and airborne plumes settling into fields. Yet full health audits never came. What lingered instead was silence — a silence heavy with gold, diamonds rust and memory.
That a government should now entrust Ecuador’s most vital water reservoirs to such a company is not only shortsighted — it borders on the absurd, a wager that trades living fountains of water for the same poisoned dust that once smothered Namibia, a tragedy now threatening to return in the mist of the Andes.
And so we return to the forest, where voices still rise with clarity.
In the Cuyabeno region, Shaman Delio reminds us that every healing chant is tied to the flow of unpolluted waters (Delio, 2022). Jaguars move through the forest shadows, dependent on those rivers. Birds carry seeds from the high páramos to the lowland canopy. Fish migrate downstream, linking mountains to sea. From condors over the Andes to dolphins in the Amazon’s tributaries, from the mangroves to the Galápagos, life is bound together by the same pulse of clean water that begins in moss and stone.
To defend it is not charity; it is sober economics, scientific evidence, and moral clarity bound together. And it was precisely this unity of vision that Alexander von Humboldt perceived when he crossed the Ecuadorian Andes in 1802, moving from Quito to Chimborazo and southward through the paramount heights of Azuay. On those austere ridges he breathed what he called the “fresh flowing air” of the mountains (Views of Nature, 1850, p. 46), a freedom that human madness could never corrupt.
And there, as he drank from the crystalline springs of Quimsacocha, he understood the páramo as more than landscape: a living reservoir, sovereign and universal, where “everything acts upon everything” (Essay on the Geography of Plants, 1807, p. 55). The páramo gathers fog, rain, and even the cold breath of glaciers, storing them in its sponge-like soils before releasing them drop by drop to feed the rivers below — a hydrological republic whose silent constitution sustains valleys, coasts, and forests far beyond what the human eye can see.
Yet what Humboldt envisioned as eternal, humans now threaten to gamble for a moment as fleeting as a shooting star — the mirage of gold, dissolving as soon as it is grasped, but leaving behind an emptiness that endures for centuries. The illusion passes; the wound remains.
Were Alexander von Humboldt to rise again from those Andean heights, his brilliant mind would surely turn sternly upon President Noboa. For it is people like Noboa who, as Gabriel García Márquez once warned, appear “too young and too naive to know the dangers of such illusions” — illusions of progress measured in gold, of wealth conjured from wounds, of power secured through the vanishing of rivers and the genocide of Indigenous communities.
They are the same illusions that once drove Pizarro, Benalcázar, and other conquistadors in their desperate search for El Dorado, leaving only blood and destruction in their wake, and they now sweep Noboa forward, dazzled by the glitter of a mirage that promises riches where only silence and water should reign, while he closes his ears to the older voices of science and memory.
With the same clarity he once inscribed in his great Naturgemälde of Chimborazo — a vision of the Earth as a living whole, where plants, climates, and altitudes form a single breathing system — Humboldt would remind Noboa that to sacrifice Ecuador’s páramos for a fleeting moment of extraction, a blink of an eye in history, is to imperil the nation’s living economy. It is to wound a memory older than the Republic itself, to desecrate Humboldt’s legacy, and to mutilate a chapter of history that once placed these mountains at the very frontiers of knowledge and imagination.
And Von Humbolt's voice, like the wind moving across Quimsacocha, would repeat an enduring truth: that a country which wounds its sources of water wounds itself — and that no prosperity rooted in extinction can endure.
In the end, no empire of gold outlasts the song of water.No illusion survives, yet water sings forever — unless we silence the song by destroying its source.
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All Title photographs of the Amazon Pink Dolphin by Kevin Schafer
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