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Traveling by slow bus, dugout canoe and sometimes thrilling light aircraft to remote villages in the Ecuadoran headwaters of the Amazon, two Duke undergraduates spent much of last summer working with indigenous people whose lifestyles are under threat from oil and gas prospecting, logging and roads.

“Their whole way of life depends on the forest,” said Ciara Wirth, a junior from Sacramento, Calif. “And if that’s gone then their culture is gone.”

“What we did follows a philosophy that says when researchers work in indigenous communities they should take into account the knowledge those communities have,” added Varsha Vijay, a senior from Coralville, Iowa.

Inspired by a course with Stuart Pimm, the Nicholas School of the Environment’s Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Vijay and Wirth worked to secure contacts and funding for a trip to the jungle enclaves of the Waorani, the indigenous group living in and around Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park.

One-quarter of Ecuador’s untapped oil reserves lie in the Yasuni park, according to a recent report in the journal Public Library of Science coauthored by Pimm and a Duke research associate. The region has become a battleground for the indigenous groups.

Vijay and Wirth spent June and July interacting with three different Waorani communities. One community has opted for dialogue with outsiders but wants to preserve its rainforest ways. A second has been heavily influenced by contacts with Western missionaries. A third has already been strongly affected by nearby oil prospecting.

In each, the students involved the locals in a technique called “Participatory GIS.” The Waorani learned enough about geographical information system technology to make special maps. The goal is to help locals document their own sense of place in an environment under assault, including the location of resources each community deems important to its future.

Vijay is now working at Save America’s Forests in Washington, D.C. in preparation for a return to Ecuador, having pushed back her final academic year until 2009-10. Wirth, who is currently studying at the Duke Marine Laboratory, also hopes to rejoin the Waoranis.

“They are just stellar,” Pimm said. “For any women that young to go into very remote parts of the Amazon shows an amazing adventurous spirit.”

Blog: Daily Mail Online