The Flight of the Harpy Eagle: the Crisis in the Ecuadorian Amazon

The following excerpt was provided by the Sinchi Sacha Foundation.

Unfortunately the unparalleled global heritage of the Amazon and the people who live there are suffering at the hands of the larger world community.

In many Amazonian cultures the harpy eagle is seen as the spirit protectorate of the forest and the forest’s children. Every year he makes his ritual return, rising above the horizon with its many shades of green, discovering each time more wounds, deeper and more painful, affecting the Cai Pacha, the land of forests, mountains, rivers, lagoons, and marshes, that land of union between the sacha runa, human beings and the natural world.

The Harpy Eagle remembers that with the passing of time he has seen his children disappear, the Arda, the Bolona, the Bracamoro, the Chirino, and not so long ago, the death of the last Tetete. Now he anxiously watches the situation of the Cofan, the Siona, the Secoya, the ancient Abijira, today called the Huaorani, and of the few Zaparo still alive. In his tireless flight, he watches over the future of the world’s of the Shuar, the Ashuar, the Shiwiar, and the Quichua.

He sees that the wounds are deep, thousands of bores and bits of diamond and steel poison and drain the most intimate dwelling places of the supai, those beings from the depths of the waters and mountains, beings who guide and bring harmony to all life.

With one eye he sees strange networks of veins and arteries like gigantic anacondas that twist and turn for hundreds of leagues, tracing a grotesque design on the face of Iwia, the forest. With the other eye he sees flames and gas, clay drenched with chemicals, boiling waters that shatter and destroy the integrity and genetic balance of millions of species never identified. The family garden plots, the lagoon, the river are contaminated, and the soil is washed away, enormous tracts deforested. Cities are created, highways built, plantations and haciendas established, and the forest dotted with military posts.

Within those veins of bolts and steel flows black gold, like a transfusion of life and riches for a thirsty consumeristic society. Plant and animal species are stolen, and, above all knowledge is stolen, and this worries the Harpy Eagle even more, and now he screams with pain…