University of California, Davis: Quito & Amazon Basin - Sustainable Ecuador From the Andes to the Amazon

This program examines the historical development and current situation of Ecuador’s indigenous peoples, with special emphasis on issues of environmental sustainability. Using lectures, seminar discussions, and fieldwork, the program underscores the impact that economic and political factors have on the process of indigenous cultural adaptation. Students will develop individual research/creative projects and will have the opportunity to interact with indigenous Andean and Amazonian people with whom they will share knowledge and the community lifestyle of different regions of Ecuador and the Amazonian tropical rain forest. The program will focus specially on the Huaorani people in the Yasuni reserve and their complex relation with the government and the private national and international community that are mostly interested in the oil, minerals, and natural resources located in the indigenous territory.

The Amazon tropical rainforest of Ecuador (selva amazónica in Spanish) is a humid evergreen forest that covers the largest portion of Ecuador’s four natural regions: the Andes, the Coast, the Galápagos Islands and the Amazon. For millennia dozens of indigenous peoples have settled these regions of the eastern slopes of the Ecuadorian Andes and their rivers developing extraordinary cultural adaptations to its diverse environments and creating a civilization that has been praised as a successful example of adaptive co-evolution of humans and all other species.