Lessons from 30 years of successfully fending off mines in an Ecuadorian cloud forest

Carlos Zorrilla has been living in an Ecuadorian cloud forest since the 1970s, and his last 30 years there have been spent fighting mining companies seeking to extract its large copper deposits. He and his community have successfully fought such proposals by multiple firms in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, but sometimes at great personal risk, he tells Mongabay's podcast.

While his organization, Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag (DECOIN), and allies in the local community notched a major victory against mining there in a 2023 court case, he explains they're still not out of the proverbial woods.

"Every day, I have to think about mining [and] I'm not exaggerating, my life now revolves around mining. Even though we won a case, I know they're going to come back because the copper's there, and there's a lot of demand for copper."

His advice to anyone who wants to protect their community from mining is to go on the offensive, early and aggressively, comparing the strategy to how one might view treating cancer.

"You have to think of it like a cancer, that you need to treat it immediately and you need to look for signs that your body, in this case, your community, is sick,” Zorrilla says.

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Banner image: Carlos Zorrilla in the DECOIN office in Apuela, Ecuador. Photo by Romi Castagnino.

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Timecodes

(00:00) A victory for Intag Valley

(07:19) The influence of ‘rights of nature’ laws

(09:57) The return of vulnerable fauna

(15:56) Reprieve is only temporary

(22:02) Mining companies omit important information

(25:07) ‘How to stop’ mining before it starts

(30:52) “Every day, I have to think about mining”