Well... a while ago I was in the Amazon. Like over a month. Whoopsie. I am currently procrastinating on making my Myiarchus phylogeny by blogging about the Amazon.
January 23 2013
After the massive amount of rain the previous night, it was almost "cool" at Tiputini. It was still ridiculously humid outside, but tolerable. Because it was still raining, we weren't able to take a hike in the morning. Instead, we did some hypothetical sociological/anthropological work.
The Waorani people are one group of Native Ecuadorians. When the less populated areas of Ecuador were being "Westernized" by oil companies and christian missionaries around 1960, there were two different reactions from the Waorani. Some groups of Waorani are known as "Untouchables"--they don't want contact with the Western world and react violently to outside contact. The other groups have become partially Westernized. They use the roads from the oil companies to facilitate illegal meat trading. Because they live in permanent structures instead of semi-nomadically, they can consistently and more easily impact the same areas of wildlife. However, the Western Waorani can still invoke violence as leverage. If a truck from an oil company refuses to give one of them a ride, they may block the road with logs or something else to get their way.
As students, our goal was to try to combine the interests of the Waorani, oil companies, scientists, and Ecuadorian Government to come to a consensus on the illegal meat market and conservation of cultural values and biodiversity. This was a complicated issue and no group came up with a functional solution; they all had many positive factors, but overlooked certain aspects.
In the real world, there isn't much for a good answer to this problem. We all left our class period frustrated, hungry, and ready for another hike.
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