Growing Impact: Indigenous communities and Amazon oil

26-minute listen/watch | 16-minute read | 1-minute teaser

The Amazon, home to rich biodiversity and vital carbon-storing ecosystems, is also the ancestral land of Indigenous communities who are grappling with the devastating effects of oil extraction across Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia. These communities live amid widespread pollution from oil spills, toxic chemicals, and industrial infrastructure, which threaten their way of life and the health of their environment. In response, they are working alongside researchers to map the environmental destruction and strengthen their efforts to hold oil companies accountable while fighting to protect their lands and preserve their cultural heritage.

Transcript

Belén Noroña

There's continuous oil spills and malfunctioning of oil infrastructure in the Amazon, and without checks and balances or like an independent organization to oversee what's going on, it goes unchecked.

Host

Welcome to Growing Impact, a podcast by the Institute of Energy and the Environment at Penn State. Each month, Growing Impact explores the projects of Penn State researchers who are solving some of the world's most challenging energy and environmental issues. Each project has been funded by the Institute's seed grant program that grows new research ideas into impactful energy and environmental solutions. I'm your host, Kevin Sliman.

The Amazon is teeming with vast biodiversity and carbon-collecting plant life. It also contains about 2% of the world's oil reserves. In an area spanning the countries of Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia is an enormous 521,000 square-mile area—about the size of Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, and California combined—that's designated for oil and gas drilling and extraction. However, this development has come at a significant cost. Oil spills, toxic chemicals, and the growing industrial infrastructure have left lasting scars on the land and waterways. At the heart of it all are the Indigenous communities who call the Amazon home, forced to navigate the pollution and defend their ancestral lands from the relentless expansion of oil companies.

To address these pressing challenges, a team of researchers is collaborating with Indigenous communities in the Amazon to strengthen their engagement with oil companies and to create a community-driven map documenting the environmental impacts of drilling. Belén, Rachel, Sofia, thank you so much for coming on Growing Impact and being here and talking with me. Can you introduce yourselves? Can you provide your name, a title, and a brief background on your research?

Belén Noroña

My name is Belén Noroña. I'm originally from Ecuador. I am an assistant professor in the Geography Department, and I'm a feminist political ecologist. I know that's difficult to understand that very specific jargon. But what I do basically, in my research, is to understand how place, space, and scale become spaces of power that are racialized and gendered within, you know, the mainstream hierarchical categories we have created.

And I applied my research in Indigenous communities in the Andes, so Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. But I particularly work, or recently, for the last five years, I've been collaborating with Indigenous people in the Amazon of Ecuador, particularly women. These communities I work with are embedded in larger struggles to either resist, contest, or adapt to the expansion of the mining frontier in the Amazon.

When I talk about the frontier, I'm talking about spaces that are off the grid. So it is like some areas are pristine natural rainforests. Other areas are... have some more intervention. And all these spaces that sometimes we imagine as disconnected or just out there, like a space of colonization out there in the Amazon is actually populated by Indigenous communities, rural folk, and even uncontacted tribes.

Rachel Brennan

My name is Rachel Brennan. I'm a professor and associate head of civil and environmental engineering, and my research historically has focused on bioremediation. So that means using microorganisms to clean up hazardous compounds. So things like hydrocarbons, like we'll be talking about today, and chlorinated solvents, explosives, emerging contaminants like pharmaceuticals, other things like that. But as my research evolved, I started finding that there was a lot of power in using not just microorganisms, but entire ecosystems to clean up the environment. And as I did that, I became really passionate about maintaining the biodiversity that we have remaining on our planet, which will also lead into our discussion today.

Sofia Hoffman

So my name is Sofia Hoffman. I'm originally from Argentina. At Penn State, I'm studying environmental systems engineering. I am a Schreyer and Millennium Scholar, and I'm in my junior year of my undergraduate degree. I've been involved with the Brennan Lab since my freshman year. I was in Dr. Brennan's office September of my first semester, so I was really excited about doing research.

My first two years, I kind of shadowed projects that were going on in the Brennan Lab, but this project really caught my attention. It's what I'm really interested in and what I want to pursue in the future. I'm really interested in community work and how environmental engineering can provide aid to communities.

Host

So let's talk about the team and even maybe a bit about the background of how you came together. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Rachel Brennan

Sure. So I'll start on that. This collaboration started last year after I read a New York Times article about how Ecuador was trying to avoid drilling for oil in one of their most biodiverse places in the Amazon rainforest. And it's one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. And the way the story goes, the true story goes, is that the president of Ecuador in 2007, he appealed to the world to help Ecuador raise enough money that they could basically conserve this pristine place and not drill for oil.

And their goal was to raise $3.6 billion, and some countries contributed, but not enough. And they only got about $13 million out of the $3.6 billion. And the idea behind asking for it was that they recognized that the value of what was above ground, the biodiversity of the forest, the Indigenous land, the capacity of the forest to absorb carbon and store carbon to resist climate change, all of that was worth infinitely more than the oil beneath it. And so the idea was very compelling. It was a wonderful idea, but it failed. And the article goes on to explain how Ecuador had to go ahead and drill in these places, and that led to contamination. It led to health effects. It led to fragmentation and biodiversity loss.

Belén Noroña

Initially, the idea was to put together an interdisciplinary group of people from Penn State to do something about the expansion of the oil frontier in the Yasuni National Park in Ecuador. This is Oil Block 43, best known as the ITT (Ishpingo, Tambococha, Tiputini) field site. And so then, you know, like my work in the Amazon, I’ve been working in the Amazon probably for 15 years now.

So I know this area very well. I hadn't worked within this oil block, but nearby, nearby this oil block. So I was explaining to Rachel, you know, it is very difficult to undo the damage. It's already drilled. We have three fields. You know, there's like all this infrastructure already in Yasuni that separates the crude from formation water and all the impurities we get out of, like, extraction.

And, you know, the damage is done. We can’t undo it. But anyway, so from this conversation, I think we decided that maybe some more local effort was needed before, you know, trying to put an interdisciplinary group of people that we thought, you know, could help the communities living in and around this national park resist expansion or the furthering of the extractive frontier, which I personally thought it was very little what we could do to aid these communities.

Rachel Brennan

And I said, no, like, there are people who want to help. We just need to all get together and we can do something, you know? And so maybe that's naive of me, but, you know, I'm this eternal optimist and I thought, there's people I know that want to do the right thing and that want to help. So we started trying to form a team, and the IEE seed grant opportunity came up, and we thought, well, this is it. 
This is the first way we can start working together.

Belén Noroña

I suggested we needed to depart from Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous needs and even Indigenous ways of understanding the world, which I call Indigenous epistemology. So we needed to depart from those frameworks in order to come up with an idea and why it is necessary to bring Indigenous voices. It's because the only way to protect these forests, these pristine forests and these biodiversity in the Amazon is by empowering local communities to continue to do stewardship of the land, because the reason the Amazon hasn't disappeared is because the people that live in the Amazon are highly dependent from those resources.

They drink straight from the streams, they fish, they hunt. So it is in their interest that these ecosystems are healthy and when there's any threat they would organize. You know, they have been resisting extraction since colonial times. So that was the idea for this grant. We agreed to build a methodology to assess environmental contamination by hydrocarbons and PFAS near sites where there has been oil spills or water formation spills. But we were going to depart from either Indigenous traditional knowledge of the territory and, if possible, include Indigenous epistemology or non-Western ways of thinking about these problems.

Host

Can we walk through the project and the overall goal of the project? What are you working on with your team?

Rachel Brennan

The goal was to combine Belén’s work with the people there and her knowledge of the geography of the region, with my expertise in chemical contamination and to link what the Indigenous understand about what's happening to their environment and to their bodies with chemical data that we would collect and have run in a lab. So the sum of those two bodies of knowledge, the Indigenous and the Western knowledge together, might be able to give us more information than either of them individually.

And so that was the main goal of the project with ultimately being able to provide a way that the local communities can monitor their environment using Western techniques that could be used in a court of law to defend for the protection of their lands.

Belén Noroña

It is important to note that this knowledge, like, for example, this project, was focused on doing an independent study of water and soil in the territory of El Edén and assess hydrocarbon presence on both, but also to bring soil samples back to the university in order to conduct a PFAS study. PFAS are forever chemicals. And probably Sofie or Rachel can explain more about these later.

And why? The reason is because there's like continuous oil spills and malfunctioning of the oil infrastructure in the Amazon, and without checks and balances or like an independent organization to oversee what's going on, it goes unchecked. There's very little accountability on, you know, like minimal industrial standards as related to environmental practices. And Indigenous communities who have been completely disconnected, are partially disconnected from the centers of power, have little access to Western education, very political, very little political power, have really very limited chances to participate in discussions that will define the quality of their environment and obviously their own survival.

So when they understand better, you know, what is extraction? What does the extraction process entail? What kind of chemicals are present during destructive processes? They feel they have more power and they have a better understanding of what is going on in their own ancestral home. So when they have to sit down with the oil company in order to negotiate or renegotiate whatever, they are supposed to discuss, they are better informed.

Rachel Brennan

People listening may not understand why we were checking for PFAS. You know, this is about oil extraction, which, so it makes sense we're going to check for a total petroleum hydrocarbons, which indicates how much oil spill damage there has been. But hydrocarbons degrade very quickly in the environment. They cause damage, but they also degrade. And so there was a chance, especially in such a place as the rainforest in this equatorial region, that the hydrocarbons will have degraded significantly and inhibit our ability to see where contamination may have been spilled in the past.

But PFAS is commonly used in drilling fluids and drilling fluids are a mixture of many, many chemicals. And often those chemicals are more toxic than the hydrocarbons that are present in the oil. And so we had some evidence that in, you know, Native American lands here in the United States that have heavily been drilled for oil, that they also have extensive PFAS contamination. So it's almost like a marker for where contamination has been in the past. So that's why we chose to also check for PFAS.

Host

So a key facet of the project is working with Indigenous people in the Amazon. You've talked a bit about it. Can you talk about the connections that you have in the Amazon and the importance of having Indigenous partnerships in the project, why it's so crucial?

Belén Noroña

Well, I'm Ecuadorian, and I am from the Highlands. Actually, I was born in the capital city, but I have Indigenous ancestry and as many other Ecuadorians and Latinos in general in Latin America, we are not very far away from our Indigenous ancestry. I am two generations removed, and so people like me have a very clear understanding of the processes that lead into the alienation of our identities, but also of the a very, I would say, violent histories that have removed our ancestors from the land and have basically destroyed the Indigenous community fabric.

Right. And it basically through those processes that are state-led you can get rid of Indigenous communities. So when thinking about the Amazon, I can see that those same practices to alienate Indigenous people and force them into productive schemes and make them force them to be more reliant on the markets rather than their forest, is a really good strategy to eliminate Indigeneity, to eliminate communities, to get rid of, the people that are stewards of the land so they can access natural resources in an easier way.

You know, this idea that the West can save nature, that can save Mother Earth, I think it's very misguided, because what is missing in these Western understanding of nature is that our bodies are an extension of the territory, that we are part of this fabric that is made out of interdependencies of everything in the ecosystem.

So it's not that we can save the Amazon rainforest. We can save ourselves if we figure out a way, to make sure those forests are not going to die. There's no way, we are going to save the Amazon rainforest unless we see our own bodies being threatened, but by these threats. So if we don't make those connections that emerge out of Indigenous knowledge, we... I think there's no battle to win.

So this all leads me into this explanation that Indigenous knowledge, traditional knowledge of the territory, and also Indigenous epistemology should be at the center of decision making or policy and decision making processes because they are the ones that know what is needed to keep these ecosystems alive.

Sofia Hoffman

One thing I really learned and like resonated with was just the destruction of culture. How this like slow genocide that's happening. One of the struggles I had was like trying to communicate with these other Indigenous communities. People 40 and over still speak Kichwa. There's still some like in touch with their culture and in touch to the forest, I guess, where kids like my age, who I was around, can understand, but can't really speak, and there's really a lack of like there's no way to communicate.

And this lack of communication reflects in all ways, in everything. Like it's when they're working with the companies, when they're having just, disagreements within the community. It's if you can't think critically, I guess think deeper beyond a surface level, it really creates a lot of issues. So I think I do I do resonate a lot, and it is hard to have a hope.

After I went into a very like starry eyed, a very excited to create a change and I left very, very frustrated. It's upsetting.

Host

Can you share about the Indigenous concept of body territory?

Belén Noroña

So body territory is cartographic attempt of making sense of Indigenous worldviews that argue that the nature, you know, there's no separation between culture and nature. And Indigenous people, particularly women, would describe, or we would assess, like, for example, contamination in a parallel way in which they can if they observe contamination in their territory, in their ancestral land, they knew for sure there was a parallel in their own bodies, because they are deeply, they have a deep understanding of how their bodies are dependent on these natural resources.

Host

So to talk a little more about mapping, one of the project’s products will be a detailed map of the pollution from oil extraction. Is there any more to add or any more to talk about this map and its value?

Sofia Hoffman

It was really incredible to watch this community come together and build this map. I know Belén mentioned it, like the thinking and the it's not very linear. So it was really interesting to try and find like dates of or months or like different things that had happened in people's lives and connect them to oil spills and connect them to locations.

So it was, you have like a group of people, and they were all putting in random little bits of information from the last 20 years, and we were able to put together a whole map of locations, what kind of spills, what platform they came from, and it was very much like the community. It's led by the community. So it's very empowering to see, like the community come together.

Belén Noroña

And it's important to know these are oral communities. It's not like they have documents or like they keep track of what's going on. So when you want to gather all this information, you need to have people that have been interested in, you know, like tracking down all these events and that are interested in, you know, like documenting these.

Yeah. They don't keep track of like, timelines as we do. Right. So when we are trying to put together like a timeline or like the oil spills, it is very difficult. And maybe you and Sofia can give them some examples of why this so difficult.

Sofia Hoffman

So we will do a two-day workshop. And the first day was kind of just this is what pollution is. They live it every day. They’re suffering the effects of that directly. But if you ask them to define what is pollution, it's a completely different story. So I had something the next day when we went like reviewed it. They could kind of say like, okay, PFAS is forever. Total hydrocarbons are not forever. And like that basic understanding I think really just changes the way they can see pollution, the way they can see their rights and the way they can proceed, in the future.

Belén Noroña

So they are not tracking the years as we usually track, they track everything else, which to me is way more complex, if you can remember, like all these details that these multitude of details of life that happen when, let's say, the 2016 oil spill took place, right? Like it is so complex. But yeah, to for us to pin down a date, a location and an area that could have been exposed to the contamination, we will have to go over all this other information.

Sofia Hoffman

And we both come from a very Western perspective, obviously. So like my Western brain thinks linearly and I, I it's so hard of like, oh, just give me the year or just give me. But they were families were talking about what they, what they would might have purchased the year like down to purchases and down to like very little things.

And I remember Belén had showed me this video of a different tribe, the Waorani, and they were talking about how, like us as Western people are "cowodi,” we are blind and we don't understand the world as they see it, and all the knowledge they have and how we can choose to be "cowodi,” we can choose to be blind and not appreciate the world, the jungle or the forest that they know. Or we can allow them to show us. So I think that kind of... it's just a different way of thinking. And though it's more difficult, it just shows like their vast understanding.

Rachel Brennan

And ultimately for to explain to our Western listeners the purpose of the map is to be able to eventually hold the oil companies accountable because they are able to do horrendous things in the jungle when they think no one is looking. But there are people who remember, and we can figure out where these spills happened so that in the future maybe we can get them to stop.

Sofia Hoffman

Putting faces to the people that are going to be impacted by this research just makes it so much more important. And I think if more students could meet these people and understand their struggles and just talk with them and understand who they are, they would feel the same way. So I hope more undergraduates get involved. I'm very... I love research. I think it's just an incredible way to get involved on campus, but also just kind of figure out who you are and where you want to go. And I have great mentors, so it's been easy.

Host

Thank you so much for spending time with me and talking through this. Sofia, Belén, and Rachel, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time.

Rachel Brennan

Thanks, Kevin.

Sofia Hoffman

Thank you.

Host

This has been season five, episode eight of Growing Impact. Thanks again to Belén Noroña, Rachel Brennan, and Sofia Hoffman for speaking with me about their project.

To watch a video version of this episode and to learn more about the research team, visit iee.psu.edu/podcast. Once you're there, you'll find previous episodes, transcripts, related graphics, and so much more. 

Our creative director is Chris Komlenic, with graphic design and video production by Brenna Buck, marketing and social media by Tori Indivero, and web support by John Stabinger. Join us again next month as we continue our exploration of Penn State research and its growing impact. Thanks for listening.