The Quiet Dispossession of Eden: Ecuador’s Sacred Territories at Risk

ECHOES OF THE AMAZON PINK DOLPHIN

30/6/2025

Editorial Opinion

This Is Not a Law. It Is an Alibi.

By Hummingbird

For SELVA – Vida Sin Fronteras June 2025

There are laws that protect. There are laws that guide. And there are laws that arrive dressed in good intentions, only to reveal—beneath their tailored titles—the sharp teeth of betrayal.

The Organic Law for the Recovery of Protected Areas and Promotion of Local Development, (ref. Noboa's law) presented by President Daniel Noboa as an “urgent economic measure,” does not speak the language of the forest. It does not speak the language of ancestral rights, of rivers, of climate, of future generations. It speaks the clipped, contractual idiom of those who would replace protection with speculation.

What this law proposes is not conservation. It is commercial custody. It opens the door to private governance of Ecuador’s most sacred reserves—Yasuní, Cuyabeno, Galápagos—while inviting military presence into territories where Indigenous peoples have already paid in blood to defend what the world now calls “biodiversity.”

It is a law that evades consultation, contradicts the Rights of Nature, violates ILO Convention 169, and undermines every treaty Ecuador signed when it still believed the future could not be monetised.

Let us name this moment clearly: this is not a legal reform. It is an alibi.

An alibi for extractivism disguised as urgency. For silence disguised as consent. For disappearance disguised as “development.”

If we allow this law to pass, it will not be because it was wise or just—it will be because we mistook delay for neutrality, and distraction for peace.

To the Ecuadorian National Assembly: reject this law before it becomes a stain on your legacy.

To the world: do not allow Galápagos to be auctioned, Yasuní to be militarised, or Cuyabeno to be managed by those who do not belong to its memory.

For in the end, laws will be forgotten. But the loss of sacred places cannot be reversed.

The Quiet Dispossession of Eden: Ecuador’s Sacred Territories at Risk

A Law Written in the Language of Absence

In the brittle pause between seasons, with the rain momentarily silenced and the birds listening for something unspoken, President Daniel Noboa introduced a law whose title promised salvation but whose content delivered abandonment. The Organic Law for the Recovery of Protected Areas and Promotion of Local Development arrived as an “urgent economic measure,” its pages heavy with bureaucratic urgency and thin on ecological soul.

It spoke of “revitalisation” and “community opportunity,” yet the forest, the river, the reef, and the ancestral land—those who cannot vote but can vanish—were never asked.

Where the Constitution Speaks, the Law Looks Away

In 2008, Ecuador enshrined in its Constitution a radical idea: that Nature itself has rights. Not simply resources to be exploited, nor scenery to be gazed at, but a legal subject—alive, autonomous, and sacred.

Noboa's law, however, sidesteps or contradicts multiple constitutional articles:

·       Article 71: guarantees Nature’s right to the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles. Noboa's law enables third-party actors to manage protected ecosystems for economic return, subordinating natural cycles to contractual terms.

·       Article 72: guarantees restoration when Nature is damaged.

In Noboa's law there are no safeguards ensuring remediation if private actors or security forces cause ecological harm.

·       Article 73: prohibits the introduction of substances or activities that might permanently alter ecosystems.

In Noboa's law, Commercialisation through tourism, infrastructure, or extractive corridors contradicts this precautionary mandate.

·       Article 74: states that environmental services may not be subject to appropriation, possession, or sale.

In Noboa's law, the framing of these services as market assets violates this prohibition.

This is not simply bad law. It is a constitutional regression that risks invalidation by Ecuador’s own Constitutional Court—if not by ethics, then by legal coherence.

Of Forests, Islands, and Forgotten Promises

The law’s true danger lies not in what it says, but in what it forgets to protect.

Yasuní

A world within a world—home to the Waorani and to more tree species in a single hectare than in all of North America. Oil has long circled beneath its soil like a predator. This law may offer that predator new teeth.

Galápagos

The dream of Darwin, a memory of evolution itself. It is already under siege from over-tourism. Under the new law, “development” may be euphemism for deregulated expansion. UNESCO’s requirements for Outstanding Universal Value could be breached without recourse.

Cuyabeno

A liquid forest of blackwater, an ancestral realm for Siona, Secoya and Kichwa peoples. The law offers it no voice. No consent. Only management.

Together, these sites form the ecological axis of a planet trying to survive itself.

International Contradictions: A Legal House Built on Sand

Ecuador’s commitments under international law are unambiguous:

1. UNESCO World Heritage Convention

·       Requires States to preserve and not commodify World Heritage sites.

·       The Galápagos Islands and Yasuní Biosphere Reserve are at risk if private contracts override environmental standards. The Noboa law Violates Articles 4 and 5 (protection and legal mechanisms).

2. ILO Convention 169

·      

Mandates Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) before any measure affecting Indigenous lands is enacted. The Noboa law was drafted and tabled with no formal consultation—violating Articles 6 and 15.

3. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)

·       Requires Parties to implement conservation strategies respectful of Indigenous knowledge and ecosystem integrity. The Noboa law weakens national conservation tools and allows market mechanisms over participatory planning. Specifically it contravenes Articles 8 and 10.

4. UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)

·       Recognises the right to control lands and ecosystems traditionally used.

Military enforcement and third-party governance of reserves violate Articles 26 and 29.

Ecuador risks not only reputational harm, but formal proceedings and international scrutiny, particularly if protected sites lose UNESCO status or Indigenous groups submit claims to the Inter-American system.

What the World Stands to Lose

This is not an Ecuadorian story alone. It is a planetary parable.

·       Yasuní holds more biodiversity per square kilometre than nearly any place on Earth.

·       Galápagos regulates marine currents and genetic flows vital to Pacific ecosystems.

·       Cuyabeno is a living archive of medicinal plants and cultural memory.

These are not merely national treasures. They are part of the world’s climate regulation system, biodiversity reservoir, and spiritual commons. Their degradation is a loss for humanity—and a blow to the hope that we might yet govern with humility.

Additional Observations

1.     Legal Ambiguity as Political Weapon.

The law’s terminology—“local development”, “ecosystem services”, “public-private partnerships”—is deliberately vague. It invites corporate interpretation while leaving Indigenous and environmental defenders legally exposed.

2.     Militarisation of Conservation

Authorising armed forces in ecological zones undercuts both trust and legality. Ecuador’s environmental movement has already suffered repression. This provision could escalate conflict under the guise of order.

3.     Undemocratic Legislative Process

The Noboa law was submitted as “urgent”, bypassing long-standing constitutional and civic checks. Should the National Assembly fail to act within 30 days, it would automatically be enacted by decree—a mechanism that belongs to crises, not to constitutional governance.

4.     Potential Precedent for Other Laws

If passed, the Noboa law could serve as a template for similar legal frameworks across Latin America—where other governments may adopt the language of urgency to disguise extractivist reform.

5.     Financialisation of Nature

The law could enable speculative markets around biodiversity offsets, ecosystem credits, or “green” investment portfolios—turning nature into a speculative commodity in the name of “sustainability”.

The Custodians Who Blinked: When Guardians Forget Their Watch

There are treaties that bind, and those that dissolve—imperceptibly, like salt in warm water—until only the taste of betrayal remains.

Yasuní is drilled. Galápagos is trawled. Cuyabeno is charted like a speculative basin, its essence translated not into reverence but revenue. And yet the seals remain intact, the signatures ceremonious, the protests hushed by administrative fog. No whistle. No knock on the table. Not even a pause in the agenda.

Ecuador, by declaring Yasuní a Biosphere Reserve and Galápagos a World Heritage Site, entered into covenants not only with its own conscience, but with the shared imagination of humankind. These were not promotional slogans. They were ratified commitments, their signatures etched in ceremony—and, with time, in duplicity.

And what, then, of the guardians?

UNESCO, which once hailed Galápagos as the scattered origin of wonder, now observes from a diplomatic distance while sharks are finned by the millions, their bodies tossed back like ballast. Sea cucumbers vanish. Starfish are scraped from volcanic rocks. And dolphins—self-aware, familial, precise—are processed in steel-bellied factory ships shadowing Chinese fleets.

This slaughter is not incidental. It is systemic.It defies CITES, UNCLOS, the Convention on Migratory Species—treaties designed not as metaphors but as shields. The world loses up to 100 million sharks each year, a figure swollen by the Chinese trade. When apex predators collapse, the oceans tilt. Coral reefs degrade. Fish populations spiral. Even the forests suffer, as nutrient cycles fed by marine life unravel like neglected myths.

Mass tourism, meanwhile, arrives not with machetes but with manicured intentions. Fragile reefs become curated experiences, endemic creatures transformed into thumbnails and mascot logos.

The Outstanding Universal Value once defended is now listed among package inclusions.

In Yasuní, beneath the stillness where fungi encode unspoken knowledge, oil has long found its entrance. The ITT initiative—once a beacon of planetary restraint—was aborted, and the drills came swiftly. Gold miners and timber crews follow, their intrusion subtler now, but just as absolute.

The Rights of Nature, once engraved in the Constitution, are now redacted in practice.

Cuyabeno, fluid and luminous, is bypassed entirely—its Indigenous custodians left unconsulted, its silences treated as blank space rather than sacred complexity.

And yet the agencies—those tasked with protection—hesitate.

The ILO, under Convention 169, holds the authority to intervene: through compliance reviews, direct contact procedures, and formal complaints. But it stalls, as if Free, Prior and Informed Consent were an optional courtesy, not a legal pillar.

The United Nations, proud of its declarations and platforms, could send Rapporteurs, trigger emergency inquiries, or act under the Convention on Biological Diversity. It does not. The urgency, so audible at summits, quiets when profit sharpens its knives.

These institutions are not malevolent. But they are willfully dormant—and dormancy, too, is a position.

Their inaction is not neutrality—it is collaboration by omission.

For when the great trees fall not to axes, but to ledgers, and the dolphin’s final breath is vented into a refrigerated hull, and the sea’s top predators vanish into black-market soup, we must ask not only what Ecuador has done—but what the world has tolerated with every procedural deferral.

There is no clause in the World Heritage Convention that reads: “unless geopolitics complicates enforcement.”No subparagraph in ILO 169 exempts consultation when oil is discovered.No postscript in the Rights of Nature that says: “valid until further notice.”

If international law still breathes, it must do so not only to chastise the weak, but to defend what remains sacred.

So to the custodians—UNESCO, ILO, and those who once witnessed these declarations with fanfare and champagne—we ask:

What is your threshold for intervention? If not now, when?

Do not tell us the translation is pending.Do not say the matter awaits further review.

The mother tree does not wait for clarification.The dolphin does not submit an appeal.

The tide does not pause for deliberation.

The rainforest, the Galápagos, and the sea do not need defenders.

They need Peaceful disobedience.

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr.“It is never the law that tells us who we are—it is the conscience that refuses to look away,” said Nelson Mandela.

In the face of legalised plunder, vanished species, and sacred lands mortgaged for marginal gains:

Peaceful Civil Disobedience and Resistance are not an act. They are a duty.

A Final Plea to the World

To UNESCO, to the CBD Secretariat, to ILO, to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and to all who claim to defend Earth’s inheritance:

This Noboa law is not mere legislation. It is the thin end of a wedge against rights hard-won—by forest, by fire, by those who do not speak in policy but in memory.

Do not be deceived by proceduralism.

Watch closely. Speak loudly. Act now. Let the Earth Not Be Decreed Away

Laws may pass in chambers. But they do not pass in the sacred darkness of the ceibo. They do not pass in the memory of rivers. They do not pass in the eyes of children yet unborn, who will one day ask why we made sacred places submit to balance sheets.

Let it be said we tried. Let it be said we remembered.

Let it not be said we were silent.