Alfredo Palacio, Presidente
Republica del Ecuador
Palacio de Gobierno
Calle Garcia Moreno y Espejo
Quito, Ecuador

RE: Yasuni National Park

Dear President Palacio,

I join millions of concerned citizens in Ecuador and around the world, along with Ecuadorian and international scientists, in urging you to reject Petrobras’ new Environmental Impact Study (EIS) to build oil production facilities in Ecuador’s world-renowned Yasuní National Park. Although I applaud the Environment Ministry’s decision to prohibit Petrobras from building an access road into the heart of the Park, I very strongly urge you to cancel this entire project immediately and ensure that protected areas throughout your great nation are no longer considered for oil production, which can never be compatible with effective protected area status.

Yasuní National Park and adjacent Waorani Ethnic Reserve, located in the Western Amazon near its intersection with the Equator and Andes Mountains, is one the most bio-diverse parts of the entire Amazon basin. A 2004 report prepared by fifty of the Park’s scientists concluded that Yasuní may well be the single most bio-diverse forest on Earth. In addition, the Park and Ethnic Reserve are the last refuge for not only the Waorani, but also the Tagaeri and Taromenane, the last two known groups of people living in voluntary isolation in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Yasuní is of global conservation importance since it is the only national park in the region—there isn’t another Amazonian park for hundreds of kilometers to the south and east. Already, much of the western section of Yasuní National Park and Waorani Ethnic Reserve has been directly impacted by oil extraction, along with the secondary impacts that accompany oil roads such as illegal logging, colonization, and overhunting. Petrobras’ plans to extract oil from the intact northeast section of Yasuní National Park greatly threaten the Park and its indigenous inhabitants. Construction and operation of the processing facility, drilling platforms, flow lines, and pipeline will all have extreme negative social and environmental impacts.

For the sake of your people and your nation’s future, please instruct your Environment Ministry to reject the new study and to NOT grant the environmental license for this project. I also urge you to support the Waorani call for a moratorium on new oil projects on their ancestral territory.

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