Qualla: Yasuní National Park

Yasuní National Park: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In a single hectare of forest here, there are more species of insects than exist in all of North America. More trees than botanists have names for. More bats, more frogs, more vascular plants packed into ten thousand square kilometers than almost anywhere else on Earth. Yasuní sits at the improbable meeting point of the Equator, the Andes, and the Amazon - three climate systems colliding to produce what scientists describe as the most biodiverse spot on the planet. And buried beneath this living library lies 1.7 billion barrels of oil, which is why Yasuní has become something more than a park: a test case for what a nation is willing to protect when the world will not pay it to do so.

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Yasuní National Park: The Convergence

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Yasuní is roughly 10,000 square kilometers of rainforest between the Napo and Curaray rivers in Amazonian Ecuador, about 250 kilometers east of Quito. The park falls within the Napo moist forests ecoregion, and its position matters enormously. Few places on Earth lie where the Eq...

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Yasuní National Park: The People Who Live Here

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Yasuní is the ancestral territory of the Waorani people, whose name for themselves means "the people," and who came into sustained contact with the outside world only in the mid-twentieth century. The park also shelters two groups who have not: the Tagaeri and the Taromenane, unc...

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Yasuní National Park: A Forest of Clay Licks and Giant Otters

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Walk the riverbanks of the Tiputini or the Napo and the forest performs itself. Clay licks draw flocks of macaws and parrots at dawn - hundreds of birds descending for the minerals they cannot find in fruit. The park holds 596 documented bird species, roughly a third of all nativ...

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Yasuní National Park: The Ballot and the Oil

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha oil fields beneath the park hold about 40 percent of Ecuador's proven reserves. In 2007, President Rafael Correa proposed something unusual: the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, under which Ecuador would leave the oil untouched if the international communit...

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