Oil company impacts indigenous tribes, wildlife in Ecuadorian Amazon

In Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park—comprising 982,000 hectares of what the researchers call “one of the most species diverse forests in the world”—the presence of an oil company has disrupted the lives of the Waorani and the Kichwa peoples, and the rich abundance of wildlife living within the forest. By building a 149 kilometer (92 mile) road through the protected forest and providing subsidies to the local tribes, the oil company Maxus Ecuador Inc. transformed some members of the tribes from semi-nomadic subsistence hunters into commercial poachers.
“We’ve found that a road in a forest can bring huge social changes to local groups and the ways in which they utilize wildlife resources,” said Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) researcher Esteban Su