Reckoning with Harm: The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia

By Amelia M. Fiske

An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity.

Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways in which harm from oil is entangled with daily life and the tensions surrounding efforts to verify and redress it in practice. Attempts to address harm from the oil industry in Ecuador have been consistently confounded by narrow, technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators’ work to contest state and oil company insistence that harm is controlled and principally chemical in nature, Fiske shows that it is necessary to refigure harm as relational in order to reckon with unremediated contamination of the past while pushing for broad forms of accountability in the present. She theorizes that harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place, a contingent understanding that is needed to contemplate what comes next when living in a toxic world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781477327807

Book preview

RECKONING WITH HARM

The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia

Amelia M. Fiske

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

Support for this book comes from an endowment for environmental studies made possible by generous contributions from Richard C. Bartlett, Susan Aspinall Block, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2023

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Fiske, Amelia, author.

Title: Reckoning with harm : the toxic relations of oil in Amazonia / Amelia Fiske.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers:

LCCN 2023006021

ISBN 978-1-4773-2777-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2778-4 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2779-1 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2780-7 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Petroleum industry and trade—Environmental aspects—Amazon River Region. | Petroleum industry and trade—Social aspects—Amazon River Region. | Liability for oil pollution damages—Social aspects—Amazon River Region. | Petroleum law and legislation—Social aspects—Amazon River Region. | Environmental justice—Amazon River Region. | Social responsibility of business—Amazon River Region.

Classification: LCC TD195.P4 F575 2023 | DDC 338.2/72809811—dc23/eng/20230302

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006021

doi:10.7560/327777

DEDICATION

Para Donald, y todxs quienes luchan por un mundo post extractivista.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

A Note on Transcription

Oil: A Visual Glossary

INTRODUCTION: Encountering Harm

CHAPTER 1. Building a Life on the Aguarico

CHAPTER 2. Evidence

CHAPTER 3. Bounding Harm

CHAPTER 4. Toxic Exposures

CHAPTER 5. Touring Toxic Places

CONCLUSION. Relations of the Aguarico-4 Well

EPILOGUE: Una Masa Dura

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been traveling with this project for more than a decade now, and I am grateful for the time and generosity of the many people who made this book possible, whether through institutional support, collective thinking and theorizing, or individual encouragement and critique. This research was made possible by the support of the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, UNC Graduate School, UNC Institute for Study of the Americas (Mellon Dissertation Fellowship for Latin American Research, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, Tinker Pre-Dissertation Research Grant), and Mitchell Institute.

This work is grounded in my experiences living in Ecuador and would not have been possible without the kindness, generosity, and collective efforts of many people between Lago Agrio and Quito. Kati and Sebastián Álvarez took me under their roof and were my extended family during fieldwork. I am grateful to Kati for her continued friendship, as well as her support of this project and its many offshoots, which continue to bring our lives together. In Lago Agrio, I am greatly indebted to Donald Moncayo. Donald let me follow along as he did his work, and I hope that his unyielding compromiso to making his home a better place for Leonela and the generations to follow will be clear for all who read this book. Mitch Anderson’s acute vision helped me to find the myth in truth, and the truth in myth, in the histories of the Amazon. From listening to Silvio Rodriguez over winding jungle roads to enjoying maitos in the fading heat of the day, time spent with Mitch, Donald, and other collaborators marks some of my dearest memories of life in Lago. The love they put into Ceibo Alliance, Amazon Frontlines, and UDAPT to make the Amazon a better place has left an indelible mark on me. Jorge Mideros spent countless hours answering my questions about the industry and about the past; I thank him for sharing his work remediating contaminated places. Luis Arias delighted me with stories of earlier years and invited me to many an encebollado. Likewise, Shaila Carvajal’s nimble fingers and lovely voice allowed me to imagine life in Lago Agrio in years prior, in both song and image. Mariana Jiménez was patient with my inquiries and generous with her time; thank you for sharing parts of your life with me. Manuel Pallares inspired new branches of inquiry growing out of this research.

Many people and organizations in the Amazon are working to make a better life despite ongoing extraction. I would like to acknowledge the people at the Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía and thank them for their inclusion of me in their work, in particular those involved in the Escuela de Líderes and environmental monitoring: Ermel Chavez, Alba Gonzaga, Liber Macias, Juan Espejo, Luis Yanza, Maximo Gonzaga, Wilmer Meneses, Manuel Zambrano, and many more. In particular, I would like to thank Pablo Fajardo for his support of this project early on and the time he took time to assist me in making connections necessary to conduct this research.

I am grateful for the friends who helped make Lago Agrio home, many of whom continue to make life lighter even from afar: Beatriz Romero, Alfredo López, Luz Arpi, Esteban Salazar, Elizabeth Bastidias, Diego Róman, Alfredo Quiroga, Arturo Quiroga, Nicoletta Roccabianca, and Andrea Cianferoni, as well as friends in Quito, in particular Alex Báez and Marie-Pierre Smets. Lindsay Ofrias has been a steady friend and colleague throughout this work, and I am grateful for her continued documentary and ethnographic interventions into extraction. Thanks to Robert Wasserstrom for his attention to historical specificity and help at many earlier points throughout this research.

This project began at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where my companions taught me to be accountable for the ways I see the world. Michele Rivkin-Fish’s attention to health and social justice shaped the direction of my studies early on. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld helped me to think extraction beyond Ecuador and pushed me methodologically in ways that I continue to reflect upon today. I thank Barry Saunders for his careful reading, gentle critique, and intellectual generosity. I am grateful for Peter Redfield’s vision and his pragmatism. His appreciation for scholarly lineages and keen insights as a reader has challenged my thinking while reminding me not to take anthropology too seriously. Margaret Wiener has shaped the direction of this project since the beginning. Her meticulous reading has pushed me to write more cleanly and concisely. I remain grateful for her careful interpretation of theory and intellectual encouragement, which have given me bearing over the years. Gabriela Valdivia and Laura Halperin each helped me to consider aspects of this book in a different light.

Through classes and writing groups, many colleagues and friends have made this passage a more enjoyable journey: Taylor Livingston, Kelly Houck, Laura Wagner, Caela O’Connell, Angus Lyall, Vincent Joos, Cassandra Hartblay, Diana Gómez, Marwa Yousif, Hyun-joo Mo, Mike Dimfl, Chris Courtheyn, Ben Rubin, Pavithra Vasudevan, Tomás Gallareta, Eloisa Berman, Ivan Vargas, Paul Schissel, and Dayuma Albán. In particular, Paolo Bocci suffered through many drafts, and Saydia Gulrukh shared the burden when writing became too heavy. Dragana Lassiter has been my companion and accomplice and continues to help me to find the breeze in life. I am grateful for the opportunities to learn from each of them.

Following Chapel Hill, life has taken me first to Berlin and later to Kiel. Many people have sustained me and this book as I worked to finish it while many other endeavors began apace. Alena Buyx has been an inspiring supervisor, helping me to navigate academia as a mother and supporting this book in direct and indirect ways over the past six years. I am grateful to her and to Barbara Prainsack for the care they put into supervision and examples they set in building supportive research environments. Workshops on toxicity held by Alice Mah at the University of Warwick and by Thomas Widger at Durham University in 2017 provided generative conversations, and I am grateful to Peter Little, Max Liboiron, Alex Zahara, Camilla Dewan, Emma Garnett, Ernesto Schwartz-Marin, and others at these events whose contributions sparked critical revisions of this project. The Rachel Carson Center at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich gave me the opportunity to exchange with other environmental humanities scholars, and I am particularly grateful for the feedback provided by Christof Mauch, Tony Weis, Roberta Biasillo, Ursula Münster, and Amy Moran-Thomas while I was there. Maron Greenleaf, Sayd Randle, and Colin Hoag all read chapters of this text and provided much-needed interventions on what didn’t make the cut. Elizabeth Roberts provided feedback on a portion of this book sent to her out of the blue. Ayo Wahlberg offered helpful advice for pursuing publishing, and Audra Wolfe and Beth Sherouse sharpened this text with their shrewd editorial skills. Gregory McNamee did the important work of editing the manuscript before publication. Finally, Casey Kitrell believed in the possibility of this book, and I am grateful for his patience with its development and for the anonymous reviewers who offered key interventions and direction for improvement.

In 2020, I returned to Lago Agrio to share visual essays depicting the permutations of toxicity that emerged from a collaboration with graphic artist and illustrator Jonas Fischer. During this visit we held a workshop on the use of graphic art in environmental activism. I am grateful for the generative alliance with Lexie Groper and José Luis Muñoz of Amisacho resulting from this trip. Enrique Novas and the Humboldt Association in Quito hosted a public event showing our work, where Kati Álvarez, Santiago del Hierro, and Vanessita Roa offered public reflections on toxicity in daily life that have continued to shape my thinking as I reworked the material for this book. From my initial fieldwork in Lago Agrio to subsequent transformations of this ethnography and development of a graphic novel, Mike Cepek has been a central intellectual reference for me on oil development and the particularities of this corner of the Amazon. I am grateful to Mike for his insight and continued support, and the example he sets through his ethnographic commitments.

My family and friends have extended love and cared for me in the many years of researching, writing, and editing this book. I am grateful to the continued, capacious sisterhood of Dragana Lassiter, Lucy Sommo, Anna Sommo, Elizabeth Sommo, Brittany Peats, Mindy Newman, Katinka Hakuta, Becca Ely, Eliza Hutchinson, Marta dal Corso, and Silvia Balatti. Thanks go to my family for their consistent love and enthusiastic support in this and many other endeavors, in particular my parents, Patty Sheehan and Richard Fiske, my brother, Carson Fiske, and his family, Becky Colman, Zachary Fiske, and Ainsley Fiske. Andrea Ricci has given me his love and helped me to create the space to continue this project amid so many others. Most of all, I am happy to share the wonder with you for our giovanotte, Alba and Livia, who are the suns of my life.

ABBREVIATIONS

1040: Reglamento de Participación Social (Social Participation Regulation 1040)

1215: Reglamento Sustitutivo del Reglamento Ambiental para las Operaciones Hidrocarburíferas en el Ecuador (Regulation to Replace the Environmental Regulation for Hydrocarbon Operations, Decree No. 1215)

CBPR: community-based participatory health research

CEPE: Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (Ecuadorian State Petroleum Company)

CONFENIAE: Confederación de las Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon)

EIA: Estudio de Impacto Ambiental (Environmental Impact Assessment)

FDA: Frente de Defensa de la Amazonía (Amazon Defense Front)

MAE: Ministerio del Ambiente (Ministry of the Environment)

MEM: Ministerio de Energía y Minas (Ministry of Energy and Mines)

OPEC: Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

PAHs: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

PRAS: Programa de Reparación Ambiental y Social (Environmental and Social Remediation Program)

RAP: Remedial Action Plan

SIL: Summer Institute of Linguistics

SOTE: Sistema de Oleoducto de Transecuatoriano (Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System)

TPH: total petroleum hydrocarbons

UDAPT: Unión de Afectados y Afectadas por las Operaciones Petroleras de Texaco (Union of the People Affected by Texaco Oil Operations)

VOCs: volatile organic compounds

A NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION

Throughout the text, I use italics to convey spoken dialogue that I witnessed in situations where it was not possible or would have been inappropriate to use a handheld audio recorder. I have done my best to accurately reconstruct these conversations from detailed notes where I recorded conversations by hand and later translated them into English. However, it is important to me to distinguish these reconstructions from direct quotes that were digitally recorded. Recorded speech is denoted throughout the text with quotation marks. I appreciate the University of Texas Press’s accommodation in allowing me to explore this idiosyncratic use of italics in ethnographic writing.

OIL: A VISUAL GLOSSARY

Illustrations by Jonas Fischer

Oil is composed of decaying biomass that has been trapped between layers of sedimentary rock for millions of years. Petroleum forms in these underground pockets as a slurry of crude oil, natural gas, and formation waters. These three components are extracted, separated, and refined to produce diesel fuel, gasoline, jet fuel, asphalt, and thousands of other derivative products, such as plastics, medical supplies, pesticides, paint, and more.

Illustration of oil extraction.

Oil is not the only product of extraction. Formation water and additional chemicals added to the slurry during the drilling process must be discarded. In earlier decades, mixtures of formation and production waters were dumped into holding ponds or directly into the surrounding environment. Today, these waters are generally injected deep underground through oil wells that have been converted into reinjection wells.

Illustration of the relationships between people’s homes, farms, and water wells and the infrastructure of oil extraction, in particular waste pits and gas flares.

In Ecuador, the combustible vapors generated in extraction are burned in gas flares. This generally occurs near production stations or wells. The areas surrounding the flares are covered in fine toxic particulate matter, with the ground speckled with drops of oil and the leaves of trees coated in a black slick. Residents living near flares report problems with toxic rain. When gas flares are not operating properly, they emit methane and volatile organic compounds such as sulfur dioxide. Aromatic hydrocarbons, such as benzene, toluene, and xylene (BTX), are also emitted.

Map of Ecuador illustrating the oil concessions in the Amazon region, including the Sucumbíos and Orellana provinces, where the majority of fieldwork for this book took place.

During consortium operations, approximately three waste pits were constructed with every new well. Of the 880 pits verified in the Aguinda lawsuit, waste pits were approximately sixty by forty meters (200 × 130 ft) in size and two meters (6.5 ft) deep, dug out of the ground like large swimming pools (Zambrano Lozada 2011, 125). Over time, new waste pits were dug, sometimes resulting in six or seven pits for a given well. Waste pits were not lined with any kind of impermeable membrane, resulting in considerable risk to groundwater.

Cross section of a waste pit with a gooseneck pipe draining into a nearby stream.

The gooseneck (cuello de ganso) pipe was routinely used in consortium operations. One end of the pipe sat in the pit above the level of oil, and the other end of the pipe protruded from the outer bank of the pit. The purported design was to prevent the contents of the pits from overflowing their banks by allowing only rainwater to escape. However, in practice, the gooseneck pipe allowed the contents of the waste pits, including rainwater mixed with toxic chemicals, to drain without any treatment into the surrounding environment. Waste pits with gooseneck pipes were in place for decades and are still found throughout the region today.

INTRODUCTION

ENCOUNTERING HARM

On the border where the platform receded into jungle, a flare lurched in the wind, burning the excess gas produced during extraction. A towering orange and black drill revolved up and down in the middle of the dirt platform. Luz Maria leaned against the doorframe of her home, some fifty meters (164 ft) away from the well Texaco had drilled in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1967, now operated by the Ecuadorian state company. Her father had staked out this land when he arrived with a group of settlers from Loja Province in the late 1960s to colonize the Amazon. After clearing and cultivating different sections of the land, her father divided it into plots and gave one to each of his four adult children. This was the part of the property that Luz Maria wound up with—que me tocó—a total of two hectares (ca. 5 acres) and three waste pits. This land, says her husband, Wilmer, gesturing around him, is her inheritance.

Luz Maria and Wilmer describe the boundaries of their property, indicating the locations of old waste pits from Texaco’s and PetroEcuador’s operations, where spills have occurred, and which parts the companies have since remediated and which they have not. She recalls her father’s disputes with different operating and subcontracting companies over areas of his property that they contaminated. Some of the pits on their property, she notes, were just junk pits, where workers disposed of old tires and other industrial trash, while others held crude and oil products from production tests and normal operations. Luz Maria’s description of her property is a genealogy not so much of accidents or moments of crisis but of everyday industrial practice.

One morning, Luz Maria led me behind her house, and we headed down the side of the bank. Some fifteen meters (50 ft) below, the land turned swampy, giving way in a saturated squish beneath my boots. This part of their property is uncultivated and requires a machete to navigate. As we arrived at a small clearing about a hundred meters (ca. 330 ft) from the back side of her home, she told me that this was their fifth attempt to dig a water well. I peered over the side. The well is not deep, she noted, but at least the water is relatively clear.

The other wells, all closer to their home, also quickly filled with water, but with a coating of oil on the top. When they pulled up the plastic bucket, the water carried the definitive smell of hydrocarbons. Luz Maria and Wilmer scouted new locations in search of clean water. She hoped they were lucky with this last spot; while potential well sites were plentiful, there is no divining rod for clean water.

The pair has lived in this location for about five years after moving from the center of Lago Agrio. Luz Maria likes it. The air is fresco, and life is not as loud and chaotic as it is in the city. On the other hand, We are living closer to danger, and everything here is contaminated. She recalled the time a few years earlier when she was pregnant with their young son, who was strapped to her back as we walked. Suffering from ongoing headaches and stomach pain, she sent Wilmer to talk to the PetroEcuador workmen who maintained the well and the gas flare directly in front of their house. Wilmer asked them to stop running the gas flare temporarily, at least during the remainder of her pregnancy. Nonetheless, the company continued its operations. The gas was biting, she recalled, just flowing out of the flare. Wilmer interjected, describing how some days the flare would go out on its own and the gas would leak, hanging low over the platform and saturating the air. Instead of waiting for the company workers to arrive, he had improvised a method to reignite it with a lit stick. The fumes of a functioning flare were preferable to the slow intoxication of leaking gas.

Circling our way around the property, we came to the opposite slope behind their home. Wilmer hacked through the brush, searching for the gooseneck pipe, shaped like a slanted capital letter S. As at other sites, one end of the pipe sat inside the pit, and the other protruded through the bank, which allowed rainwater to drain and prevented the pit contents from overflowing. Once full, the pit on their property was covered over, but the open end of the pipe still emerged from the mound of soil and gravel heaped on top. Locating the pipe, Wilmer cut the grass to expose the surrounding area, just twenty-odd meters (ca. 65 ft) downhill from their home. Sludge slowly trickled out of the pipe’s open end, discoloring the matted vegetation beneath. Wilmer stuck the tip of the machete into the earth beneath the pipe and held up a clump of soil tinged with the black traces of oil for my inspection. This, he said with a flick of the wrist, is a slow but certain death.

How do people such as Luz Maria, Wilmer, and their small son encounter harm? At times harm occurs in the nausea that overwhelms Luz Maria as she steps onto the well platform or in their protracted search for clean water to drink, cook, and bathe in. In other moments, harm appears in the telltale rainbow gleam of old oil hovering on the edges of riverbanks or in the indignity of cows, birds, or beloved dogs found floundering in waste pits. For some it lingers in the memories of physical suffering, such as when Luz Maria was pregnant, or in the layers of accumulated resentment toward the companies that operate without regard for the many lives in their midst. Each of these encounters with harm, at once singular and charged with its own significance, is deeply entangled with the history of settlement and oil extraction in this place. Harm is multiple, shaping daily life in ways that are acute and cumulative, personal and shared, past and present.

HARM IS A RELATIONSHIP

Ecuador began commercial oil production in 1972 under a joint venture with Texaco, Gulf, and the newly formed state oil company, the Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (Ecuadorian State Petroleum Company, or CEPE, which later became PetroEcuador). In 1977 Gulf left the venture, and the consortium consisted of Texaco, which owned a 37.5 percent share, and CEPE, which owned a 62.5 percent share. Throughout twenty years of extraction, Texaco drilled 339 wells and built eighteen production stations, unearthing an estimated 1.5 billion barrels of crude (Kimerling 2006a, 449–450). The companies’ unchecked disposal of crude oil and production waters into waste pits and local waterways and their regular burning of crude byproducts resulted in extensive environmental contamination and serious health problems for Indigenous and largely mestizo settler communities (San Sebastián 2000; San Sebastián et al. 2001; San Sebastián and Hurtig 2004b; Kimerling 1991; Beristain, Páez Rovira, and Fernández 2009). In 1993, following the expiration of a twenty-year contract, a class of thirty thousand Ecuadorians brought a lawsuit against Texaco, Aguinda v. Texaco, for extensive damages to the environment and human health. Since Texaco’s exit, oil operations have proceeded and expanded under other companies, including PetroEcuador. In 2011, the Provincial Court of Sucumbíos fined Chevron (which purchased Texaco in 2001) $9.5 billion for gross negligence and extensive contamination (Zambrano Lozada 2011).

As oil extraction began, thousands of colonos (settlers) from Ecuador’s southern and highland regions poured into the ancestral territories of the Cofán, Waorani, Siekopai, Siona, and Shuar Indigenous nationalities.¹ Settlers followed the oil access roads in search of land to claim, staking out plots and turning forests into farms. As settlers branched out across the region, they built houses and farms next to roads, pipelines, and well platforms while operations expanded apace. Today many residents cross pipelines just to reach their homes. Others dry their laundry on pipelines or tie animals to them to graze. In some cases, settlers arriving after companies had covered over waste pits, including Luz Maria and her family, built houses directly on top of old crude, industrial trash, and drilling muds. Most pits were not lined, frequently overflowed, and slowly leached chemicals into the surroundings over decades.

Harm is manifest in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It is evident, persistent, and unrelenting for those living alongside the oil industry. At the same time, harm is often slippery, its presence difficult to confirm or discern. How do we know harm when we see it? Is it enough to bring our nose to a bucket of well water or squish oily mud between our fingers? What of corporeal memories, when a pang in the gut or a tightening of the lungs reminds us of moments of sickness and loss registered only in the flesh? Is harm’s origin in the inheritance of contaminated property? Or is it in the arrival of the first settlers, such as Luz Maria’s parents, searching for a better life for their families but at the same time participating in state-sponsored colonization that displaced Indigenous nationalities from their ancestral territories? Maybe harm began when the Ecuadorian government ceded land to oil companies, granting permission to drill decades before, or in the very definition of land as resource and its subterranean contents as potential profit.

Harm from oil has been, and continues to be, the subject of great dispute, in part because of the decades-long Aguinda lawsuit, but not only because of that.² There is neither expert nor public consensus about the nature or extent of damage that results when hydrocarbons and the chemicals used in oil production enter bodies and the surrounding environment, or about the ways in which oil operations change and intersect with political, social, and community dynamics. While scientists and regulators have established that particular chemicals are toxic to humans and other life forms in surrounding ecosystems, oil operations bring a complex array of political, economic, social, and environmental changes that affect how populations encounter toxic substances and how oil companies and state regulatory agencies address polluted sites. As a result, in a place such as the Ecuadorian Amazon, questions of accountability for harm in legal cases, scientific studies, and public assessments of extraction often hinge on parsing which changes are reverberations from oil operations and which result from other processes, such as settlement or a lack of adequate healthcare infrastructure. In the process, the very nature of harm from oil repeatedly comes into question.

Throughout this book, I follow the ways that different actors reckoned with harm. These range from the rhetorical means lawyers used to argue that pollution was evident (chapter 2) to expert practices involved in environmental regulation (chapter 3) and techniques for digging up buried crude for visitors on Toxic Tours (chapter 5). Some of these practices speak directly to past operations under the CEPE-Texaco consortium, while others deal with ongoing oil operations by the Ecuadorian state and other companies. All are significant interventions into the consequences of extraction: lending harm weight, making it visible, legible, or countable in different forums. These practices turn samples of soil into objects that can speak for contamination across two provinces or delimit what does not count as damage—including on contentious issues such as deforestation or human health. These interventions determine past accountability and influence debates over the manner in which companies should exploit oil in the future.

My intention in exploring these practices is not to bound or define harm as one thing or another but rather to show how the relationality of harm from oil extraction emerges through these interventions. Harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place. Since oil seeps beyond bounded events, bodies, and environments, I trace the relations that appear through different efforts to make harm manifest. In the process, I illustrate how drawing clean lines or cutting the relations between processes such as colonization and oil development, past and present experiences of pollution, or corporeal and scientific registers of toxicity can have the perverse effect of obscuring the wide-ranging, aggregate effects of extractive violence. Cutting relations results in truncated, technocratic understandings of harm that fail to encompass the pervasive, intergenerational transformations that oil has wrought on lives and land throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, an argument I develop further by considering the communities around one well, the Aguarico-4. When the relations of oil extraction are minimized as impacts or as isolated effects of industry, government experts, lawyers, and scientists can mobilize such narrow understandings of harm to justify the continuation of extraction, because the benefits of sustaining the status quo, they argue, outweigh the (seemingly limited) costs of oil.

Harm emerges through associations that bring chemicals and bodies into relation, linking industrial operations to the rhythms of daily life within the particular context of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Harm from oil operations is about the sticky materiality of crude and the vulnerability of human and nonhuman bodies as much as it is about the political and economic relations that make and sustain life—in Ecuador and beyond—in the present moment. Efforts to address harm have been consistently confounded by narrow, often technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators’ attempts to contest state and oil company insistence that the harm in question is controlled and principally chemical in nature, I show that refiguring harm as relational is necessary in order to grapple with the possibilities for life alongside extractive toxicity in the present. A relational approach to harm calls for a reckoning with past unremediated contamination while pushing for broad forms of accountability that extend beyond legal and regulatory understandings of where harm begins and ends. Relations show us why other ways of understanding harm matter and why we need to think about harm differently in order to contemplate what comes next when living in a toxic world (Nading 2020).

WHY HARM?

The words we choose to describe what has occurred in the Amazon are significant. Farmers and residents of the region spoke often of "daño" (harm) while environmental officials and oil workers tended toward value-neutral, technical terms such as impact or environmental liability. I have chosen to enter these conversations through the term harm because it reveals the strongest sense of relationality between those who pollute and those who are harmed by pollution; the relationality of harm is a means of rejecting the normalization of pollution as simply part of the extractive status quo.³

Officials working for the Ministry of the Environment and oil companies spoke principally of hazards or dangers (peligros), risks (riesgos), and liabilities (pasivos). The former two terms were usually spoken of in the conditional—for example, If the pipeline bursts, it would be a hazard to the cattle in the area. Importantly, hazards and risks can be categorized and mobilized in official documents and policies to address potential incidents, such as in the extensive binders the director of a toxic waste–incineration facility once showed me. A familiar scale of colors ascending from red to green predicted the degree of relative safety or danger for those handling toxic materials. Implicit in such guidelines is that if everything goes as planned—if the pipeline does not burst, the well functions as expected, and the waste combusts at the proper temperature—the presence of the hazard is not a problem. Yet, irrespective of whether things go as planned, and they rarely do, as a massive fire at this very incineration facility the following year would demonstrate, the very presence of toxic substances is a problem. Environmental protection written in the conditional ignores the extent of the harm of that has occurred in this region since the 1960s.

Some officials used environmental liabilities to describe harm that had occurred in the past and was still unresolved. Pasivos ambientales are an economic technique of evaluating harm from oil and mining operations (Russi and Martinez-Alier 2003). According to a government program dedicated to environmental and social reparation in oil producing areas, pasivos are the result of the combination of damage and the time in which it remains in the environment or the society without being fully repaired (Programa de Reparación Ambiental y Social 2011, 4). As Pati, an environmental consultant, explained to me during an audit of an old oil field, pasivos are old forms of environmental harm that exist on a site. Defined with a specific legal, bureaucratic sense of accountability for damages, pasivos operate within the assumption that once an oil company has paid for the farm animals lost or cleaned a spill site, the liability for that harm is over. A pasivo has a clearly delimited beginning (e.g., the day a truck carrying toxic water tipped over) and end (the point at which officials determine that the spill in the forest is sufficiently cleaned up, the surrounding area remediated, and any compensatory damages paid). After that point it is no longer a pasivo. The term leaves no room for memories of what it was like for families in the area who lived without water for that period of time or who still believe the soil to be contaminated. It also restricts conversation to the terms defined by the Ministry of the Environment regarding what constitutes damage and corresponding remediation and compensation.

Politicians, environmental consultants, and oil company workers alike frequently used the word impact. At times, they were making specific reference to objects of Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), while at other times they used impact to refer to the consequences of oil production more generally. Impacts, as mobilized in the EIA, are discrete, value-free, measurable descriptors that allow for an ostensibly neutral evaluation of a potential project. Impacts are a predefined