Up ahead, a fire was burning in the middle of the road. A restless crowd milled around the fire, vaguely threatening. They had cut a tree down, and blocked all traffic with the trunk, dragged across the road. On the other side of the blocked passage, a line of pickups had backed up. We had just come off the Rio Aguarico, after five days living in indigenous communities. For the last hour, we had driven through a vast plantation of African palm trees--cultivated for the palm oil. 40,000 acres of one palm tree after another. It was a dusty slow ride, under a baking sun.

Today, New Year's Eve, Quitenos have made old dummies, called "viejos," stuffing old clothing (pants, shirts) with paper and sawdust. They put masks on them, write complaints about the year past, wishes for the government for the year coming. They are all over town, everywhere, lining streets, in front of offices and homes. Today, they'll burn these "viejos" in the streets. It's street theater.

Rachel Esbjornsen, Kate Fontana, and I met yesterday in Quito. We're all here, ready to begin our explorations and study of oil, the environment, and public health. I've been living in Ecuador since the beginning of August--five months now. I've been a Fulbright Scholar at Universidad San Francisco. In that time, I've been fortunate to have some of the most outstanding research experiences of my life, developing many contacts, being blown away by the richness of life and nature in this country. It's exciting here, and we're very excited for our itinerary--through a part of Ecuadorian life that very few are privileged to see in the petroleum zone on South America.

During a visit to the Amazon two years ago, with my class on Environmental Literature, we met Alejandro Suarez. He lives in the “selva,” manages Jatun Sacha biological station, and has fought against oil companies in Ecuador for twenty years. He invited us to take a careful look around at the living conditions of people in Amazon of Ecuador. Big oil has been extracting oil in the area for thirty years, beginning with Texaco in the 1970s. Though billions of gallons of oil have been extracted from the vast tracts of wild jungle, people in the area are actually poorer than before the big oil companies arrived.