Since 2021, I’ve been collaborating with E-Tech International on a project to support monitoring of oil contamination by indigenous communities in the northern Peruvian Amazon, and another project to evaluate the threats and ongoing environmental impacts of the Chinese-owned Mirador mine in the Cordillera del Condor region of the upper Amazon in Ecuador.
I gave a remote presentation in late 2021 to the indigenous federations for communities in Peru affected by the oil contamination on the use of web mapping technology to communicate among indigenous environmental monitors and with their environmental justice allies (see Cuaderno Octubre 2021, pages 56-58).
In 2022, I assisted with mapping of known downstream communities endangered by a possible tailings dam failure at the Mirador mine, and of changes to tailings management at the mine visible through historical satellite imagery from Planet Labs. These maps were used in the technical report supporting a legal case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (see Report August 2022 / Informe Agosto 2022).
Not long after the reports were submitted, the Ecuadorian government approved a planned expansion of the mine to 2 1/2 times its production capacity. Then in early 2023, E-Tech initiated an effort to model the downstream impacts of a potential or highly probable, collapse of one or both of the mine tailings dams, such as those that occurred in Brazil in 2015 and 2019.
In October of this year, a group of us from E-Tech convened with engineers and environmental specialists in Quito to conduct 3 days of training in the use of the modeling software and to inform the press and public about the imminent endangerment and consequences of a dam collapse (see this article from Mongabay in English, article on the public event in Spanish, and another on the E-Tech website about the activities in October).
In addition, I spent about a year and a half redesigning and migrating the E-Tech website from the Squarespace to the WordPress content management system. The new website was launched in January 2024.
