there will be fungus

I like the little tiger logo: ¨protege el medio ambiente!¨

THE DOMINATOR

Donald shows off the paperwork for the lawsuit against Texaco (about 1.4th of the bookshelf). Donald is one of the cool leaders of the Amazon Defense Front and the awesome lender of land for the mushroom project.

This was a cool find, mushrooms growing out of oil! Jess dug it out of a can. Unfortunately a dog was attacking me at the moment of this photo so it turned out blurry. We are excited about cloning this little fellas and seeing what kind of magic they can pop out.

Spills near people´s lands and houses. You never had to walk very hard to find one, really.

Donald digs under the ground in front of the Jaramillo family´s house, a site Texaco was contracted to clean up.

They didn´t do such a good job. Donald only had to dig 3 inches before hitting a layer of oily water. Her son or nephew came out shirtless and blinking and onto the front porch and in response to people´s questions said yeah, on hot days like this one the oil fumes definitely made you dizzy and your joints and head hurt.

This site was a recent spill we drove past in the bus. Oil was spurting out of the pipe and splattering all over the ground. Here the rate of the oil flow is being measured... about a liter every two minutes.

Mushrooms growing out of the substrate placed at the Charapa site (the 30-year-old spill).

Brian shows off the yummy gunk. This is basically the consistency of the stuff mixed in with the sawdust and the mycelium.

Our superheroes.

Some birds nest fungi growing along with the oysters as well. A good sign with other species of fungi start moving in?

Here you can get kind of an idea of the layout of the experiment site: a kind of giant chicken coop, with chicken coop wire laid on top of the sawdust-mycelium-petroleum bins.

Brian kneeling in front of experiment site number 2, where petroleum is treated in large pits of substrate.

At Donald´s house, we got to chew on some tasty cacao. We sucked the juicy white fruit (which tasted sort of like lemon ice cream) off the seeds, which were then laid out to dry on the concrete in the sun. Exciting to think my saliva will be making a trip to Switzerland and eventually into some little kid´s mouth.

Several things that need to be said: considering we were only being shuttled around for about a total 4.5 hours, I was genuinely surprised at how many people we ran into who, upon hearing our little mycotour introductory spiel, rolled up their sleeves and showed us their chemical burns and their skin fungus and told us about their mother´s skin cancer or their blood diseases that caused them to miss a lot of work and rack up a lot of bills. I know discussion this issue runs the danger of coming off as just the listing of numb statistics: a bigger oil spill than Exxon Valdez, a total site size equivalent to Rhode Island. I know a lot of this runs the risk of coming off as just another Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action sort of stories (minus the Hollywood justice ending and multiplied by 15 years of paperwork and delays until a maybe verdict in the ends of 2009?).

In the end, I agree with what Corey wrote earlier: what really ending up getting me in the end was thinking about how I (or any of my friends or family) would feel if someone came along and dumped a 3 meter pit of oil in my front or backyard or neighborhood river. Not to mention how ugly those pipes looked, by the roads and in front of people´s houses, like hard copper bones jutting out of the landscape.

If nothing else, now that the tour is over and it´s appropriate to make these kinds of sweeping generalizations and pronouncements, I hope that people return to the U.S. with a deeper awareness of what many people have to live with in order for a select few to be comfortable. Maybe there are some things we are going to have to learn to do without: our comfort, our laziness, the easy convenience of our lives. Heavens knows there are enough people, including in Lago Agrio, who have gone without enough already: their health, their lives, their dignity. It sucks to hear a woman´s story of walking down a street made of crude oil with her two kids (one of the ways la compania cut costs was not paving proper roads but pouring crude excess waste out so that it would turn into hot and sticky asphalt), losing their sandals in the goopy mess and having to walk the rest of the way barefoot. Umm yeah people should have some say in how their land and territory is used, but unfortunately stuff keeps getting in the way of that relatively simple premise. It´s a complicated issue, to say the least.

One of the cooler long-term plans for the project is implementing a community-education project, where people can learn how to use these mycoremediations techniques themselves and clean up the messes on their own land without having to wait for the outcome of a lawsuit... god knows when that will work out, not just in terms of a verdict, but in terms of when people are actually going to be given money (the current number now is 8-16 billion). One of the more vital aspects of this project is the use of local, inexpensive materials, such as sawdust from a local broomstick factory. Some vague plans for the community education element include a graphic novel explaining the mycoremediation technique and an instructional film. Ultimately, people will hopefully be able to grow the mushrooms themselves, clean up the contamination on their own land and thus become actively involved in the remediation (both literal and metaphorical) of their land, themselves and their community.