‘The rivers are crying’ and the evidence was undisputed, as the trans-continental water flees to the far off Atlantic. Welcomed back to the red city of Quito by the falling ash of the invasive Eucalyptus trees from forgotten plantations, I was reminded of snow in an eternal spring. Orange over Pichincha glows at night; valley as firebelt.
I immediately recognized the smell of fallen bodies, even before my partner, who just assumed that burning trash was the source of the air quality alert. It’s a scent burned into my deepest memories, and as if an oracle in the sky, the setting sun glowed red of prophecy. It’s not a knowledge I’m proud of, but the experience of losing a community beneath fire is the sort of thing that sticks with you always. Who knew that here, halfway across the world on a whole new hemisphere that I would find similar visions of destruction, this time beneath the Páramo.
Severity of destruction looms large in the land where Ecuadorians “sleep peacefully amid smoking volcanoes.” I imagine life inside the cities inside of craters, burrows in lava tubes one day awaiting excavation.
“Is this normal?”
I proceed inquisitively yet hesitantly. It’s the driest season I’ve seen yet, was the sentiment I heard over and over, that fire season arrived in Ecuador only in recent memory. With the disappearance of El Niño, the lifeblood of the rainforest has little left to give. I remember these canyons, these grassy sponges so abundant in water that they spilled over in random and frequent falls. Dangerously so, the memories of old highways have been washed away. Subsisting on volcanic ash, bearing witness; A valley of Polylepis, paper trees, evolves into a tinder box.
Following the traces of empty waterways with grounded canoes, the familiar outline of the village in the palm oil plantations emerges. This is my fourth visit on the Aguarico, yet no one had ever described to me the meaning of a remolino - a vortex that at high tide sways and pulls violently in opposing directions. It seemed like an obvious metaphor for the valiant split between the community and their cousins who sold their land for oily food vouchers. It’s always been a territory constructed by waterways, a venice deep in the heart of Abya Yala, an endless archipelago. In fact, I sometimes describe the rainforest like one massive floodplain, a mangrove of sorts inhibited by atmosphere. Terrestrial life underwater is no simple feat, and those adaptations of a millennia are now increasingly hypoxic.
Overshadowing the visits of various NGOs, a mildly performative convention of sorts as proof-of-concept of indigenous investment, the women entrepreneurs have the few hard conversations that most modernizing communities define as taboo. Beneath the arms of the ceibo I see dichotomies; Lethargic barbecues and Instagram, birthdays and exams in far away Quito, sovereignty and technologization, Toyota and alien freshwater tilapia, Starlink and dying achiote. These conglomerates, they say, they’re extracting in the same way that the oil privateers are. Environmental progress, but with little interest in the dying arts of an already bifurcated nation.
“Where is the biodiversity?”
I ask with a tinge of disappointment, my juicy legs unbitten by insects that might otherwise be hungry. The absent sounds of robots embodied by perching birds of prey coo a deafening silence. It’s the dry season, they reassure me. But also, the dryest they’ve ever seen. Climate change has always been an abstract concept in the volatile land of abundance, but for the first time, the conversations have context. And well, the imagined days of our childhood have finally arrived, yet no one knows what to do. It’s not some grandiose moment of apocalypse, instead climate disaster is like an heirloom; a slow descent into disrepair.