Join the Amazon's resistance against oil expansion, ft. Mitch Anderson
Where do we center our webs of relations?
Over the last decade, I progressively moved from places considered more urban, then more suburban, then in the last few years, to a rural community. It’s an area that friends visiting would tell me feels “remote,” or “in the middle of nowhere.” Some say that it feels “far from everything” — and that they prefer cities that are much more “convenient.”
But let me to push back. These senses of “remoteness” and “convenience” are socially and bio-culturally shaped and informed.
For me, when I am in a big metropolis now, I feel distant from all the things that my soul feels nourished by. Big box stores that make so many mass-produced, colorfully packaged products readily available at my fingertips actually remind me of how remote I am from the earth and bodies that made them possible. Big cities known for their “convenience” make me feel “far from everything” — my networks of life and support that bring me the most social, spiritual, nutritional, and material enrichment.
At the foundations, I think this subjective experience is about relationships.
Our gauges of “convenience” and “remoteness” change when our relationality with the world around us changes.
The so-called “remote” villages that the Indigenous communities of the Amazon, and elsewhere, live in? They are not “far away” from things. They are actually… in the heart of their everything.
To me, this is not just about semantics. It's about our underlying worldviews, value systems, and how we relate to the world.
The heart of their everything
In my latest interview with Mitch Anderson, the co-founder of Amazon Frontlines and the co-author of We Will Not Be Saved, he tells me about Delfín, a Waorani Elder who recently passed away. “[Delfín] was able to identify over a thousand plants, roots, resins, vines, barks, with their names in his language, Paikoka and with their uses — not only the anthropomorphic uses, but also how the insects, animals and plants function in this ecosystem,” Mitch tells me.
However, when a Chinese oil company hired outside “experts” to conduct “ecological impact assessments” of the region to see how much they were willing to compensate the community for drilling there, they found only five plants of significance — and offered a laughable $20,000 payout.
Mitch goes on to share about how modern Indigenous life within the Amazon rainforest varies depending on how much a community’s forest relations have been decimated and pried open by colonial, extractive interests — oil drilling, cattle ranching, palm oil plantations, deforestation…
But those who still live in “intact rainforest ecosystems without roads” are still thriving with abundance, “where the forest provides everything that they need — from water to medicine, food, protein, fruits, clay licks, hardware stores… [for building] canoes, houses…”
The forest is their home, their supermarkets, pharmacies, playgrounds, places of worship, schools, craft supply, research centers, museums, media, and moral code. The forest is their convenience, their social security systems, and their insurance policies.
As Mitch shares, “[During the pandemic] Nemonte and I were living in the middle of the forest in Nemonpare before [our son] was born. And it was powerful because as the whole world seemed like it was collapsing and shutting down, we had everything in the heart of the forest.”
Towards community-centered “convenience”
At a time when so much focus is placed on what to dismantle, we have to remember to also look to, and stand in steadfast solidarity with, the communities who still have the richest, most deeply rooted networks of life — whose everything are most threatened by extractive interests today, but who have the most to teach us about what it means to heal our relationships with the earth… our what-could-be…
“It's been powerful for me to travel with Indigenous youth and Elders, both men and women, to Europe and the United States, and to try to see Western industrial civilization and Western society through their eyes… We've gone to fancy hotels, condos, and apartments in New York or London.
Indigenous Elders from the Amazon have 2.5 million acres of forest, their ancestral home, and where they have gardens, where they wake up in the morning and have firewood to make fire, go to the garden, harvest their food. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are all with them playing around, learning how to fish.
Every day, everybody comes back from the woods. Some go to the garden and bring back manioc (cassava) and plantain, and others are in the forest and find that a certain fruit tree is fruiting and have spent the day having an adventure climbing up the fruit tree and bringing back these delicious fruits that only fruit once a year for one week. Others have gone to the creek, bringing back a basket full of fish.
Everybody cooks up a meal together, and everybody tells stories… That's abundance. That's wealth. That's what it is to be rich, alive, and happy.”
Oh, how much my heart yearns to nurture more of this! More of this type of land-rooted, community-centered “convenience” — which, by the way, simply means “fitting in well with a person's needs, activities, and plans”!
Next time people default to presumptive ideas of “remote” and “convenience,” I’d like to invite us to dig deeper and question: Distant… from what? Convenient… for what needs, activities, and plans? What webs of life and relationships shape the underlying tapestry of context?
My full conversation with Mitch takes us through much more expansive ways of looking at abundance, and ultimately landing on timely calls-to-action as the Ecuadorian government begins to auction off 8.7 million acres of the Amazon rainforest.
Given all of the above, we know that what’s at stake is… well, everything.
I invite you to tune in to (or read) this interview here or via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any podcast app.
And if you are a supporting subscriber, you can also watch the raw, bonus video version of our interview here. Keep an eye out for some forest monkeys that pass by during our conversation if you do! :)
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“Now is our opportunity to shut down this oil auction before it starts and win an important climate victory...
This is a moment where we need the world to stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities on the front lines of the Ecuadorian Amazon.” —Mitch Anderson
About Mitch Anderson
Mitch is co-founder and executive director of Amazon Frontlines and the co-author of the acclaimed memoir We Will Be Jaguars (US) / We Will Not Be Saved (UK), written with his wife and Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo.
(If you haven’t yet, check out my previous episode with Nemonte Nenquimo here.)
Invitations into reflection & action:
How might your senses of convenience, or remoteness, shift based on your evolving personal interests, values, and relationships with your networks of life — human and more-than-human?
To learn more about how you can support Amazon Frontlines and their current campaign to defend the Ecuadorian Amazon from oil drilling, see here.
Coming soon…
My next interview features Abby Reyes, the author of Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice.
We talk through Abby’s journey of healing while fighting for truth and accountability for the tragic murders in 1999 of her partner, Terence Unity Freitas, and his fellow activists Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa (Menominee) and Laheʻenaʻe Gay (Kānaka Maoli) — while they were in Colombia supporting the Indigenous U’wa community.
Our conversation moves through the topics of grief, accountability, legal victories, and what it means to engage “the slow work” in the face of urgent crises.
More soon, and thank you for all the ways you show up for yourself and your beloveds! x
Such a privilege to hear about Delfin's knowledge of the ecosystem of which his people are a part and transport myself back to the time, not so very long ago relative to the whole human history, that would have been true for us all. So tragic all that skill and knowledge is not treasured. Thank you for all you are doing.
This piece beautifully reframes “convenience” as something rooted in connection, not consumption.
Thank you for reminding us that true abundance comes from relationship with land, community, and spirit.