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The Accidental Activist-Academic

Carlos Zorrilla

I am not an academic in the strict sense of the word, though Ive written extensively on the social

and environmental impacts of large-scale mining and given innumerable talks on the subject. Imalso not an activist by choice, even though thats what I have been the last two decades. I came intoboth out of a harsh necessity to do all I could to stop a mining project that would completely disruptthe social fiber of the larger community I live in, and devastate one of the most stunningly beautiful

and biodiverse corners of the Earth.

The last thing I expected when I moved to the Intag area of Ecuador to start a new life in farming and

away from the din of mainstream civilization was to have to spend an ungodly amount of hours tiedto the computer researching the social and environmental impacts of mining. 1978, when I moved

to this very rural part of Ecuador from the US still rich in primary cloud forests, clean rivers andstreams and small tight-knit farming communities, the dream was to live off the land. Destiny,however, had something else lined up for me.

The peaceful phase of living off the land lasted for about 17 years, until the din of civilization came

crashing in on me in a drastic way. Copper had been found fifteen kilometers as the parrot flies frommy home by a Mitsubishi subsidiary. A discovery which deeply and forever changed my, and manyother people s lives.

I suppose I could have chosen to remain a spectator, since the mining, if it ever were to go ahead,would not likely affect me personally. Or so I thought. That belief was soon shattered when theenvironmental impact study was released for a small copper mine, and when I started to research onlarge-scale mining impacts to communities and the environment in areas like Intag; a very wet,biodiverse, and extremely mountainous area.

By then, this was around 1995; I had helped found an environmental organization to challenge theproject. One of the first things DECOIN did was to gather as much information as possible on mining,and specifically, large-scale open pit copper mining, and then present it to the people and

communities most likely to be affected. It was quite the challenge to present the information in a

area where the educational level was, and continues to be, impressively low.

The site where the Japanese found the 318 million tons of copper ore is rich in pristine rivers andstreams and primary cloud forests harboring dozens of mammals and other plants and animalsfacing extinction. Being in northwest Ecuador, where most of the forest has been stripped, the site isalso part of the most biodiverse of the worlds 34 Biological Hotspots, the Tropical Andes. These lastremaining patches of green are, from a biological perspective, much more threatened and importantto conserve than the well-known Ecuadorian lowland Amazonian rainforest.

Faced with the prospect of wholesale environmental and social havoc, most of the people in Intag

put up a resistance that has lasted now for twenty years. It is one of the longest running and bestknown struggle against an extractive industry project that I am aware of.

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People often ask why I became involved in this struggle. As a citizen living in a communitythreatened by mining, it seemed perfectly natural to want to do everything possible to protect it.Not living in the area closest to the proposed mine, and given my short stint in the world ofacademia (two years of college in the US), I found I could be most useful researching and writing todraw attention to the threat, and helping to find funding for environmental education andsustainable alternatives to mining. In this context, my bilingualism has proven to be very useful.

Part of my writing entailed helping produce a short manual for communities, of which I am the leadauthor, titled Protecting Your Communities Against Mining and Other Extractive Industries . The

manual, which has landed me in some trouble with mining companies and the Ecuadoriangovernment*, was written to fill a deep void of information in order to help communities learnabout and better protect themselves from the impacts of extractive industries. The text, which isfree to download, has been translated into several languages.

Intags resistance , unfortunately, is still ongoing, even though in the past twenty years twotransnational corporations were forced to abandon the area. The third one, Chiles powerful state-owned Codelco- the worlds the largest copper producer - is now being supported directly byEcuadors government and its institutions, including the police and the courts. What this means,among other things, is that the playing field is much more skewed against communities.

In these past two decades I have learned many things about facing off powerful extractive interests.One of those lessons is that Academia should be playing a much more active role in helping to level

the field so communities can stand a better chance of succeeding in protecting their rights, and theenvironment they need to flourish.

* In late 2013 Ecuadors president publicly accused me of writing the manual to destabilize hisgovernment and presented extracts from other manuals and then attributing them to me.In 2011, a Canadian mining company paid for the production of a 45 minute long documentary

which included extracts from my manual taken out of context in order to discredit the countrysopposition to mining.