BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Ecuador’s plans to offer dozens of blocks of land for oil exploration for more than $47 billion has prompted opposition from seven Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Those groups say 18 of the proposed blocks overlap their ancestral territories and that they were not consulted. Government officials say their plan is key to modernizing an oil sector that supplies Ecuador’s top export. The dispute comes amid a state of emergency and a national strike over fuel prices, extractive projects and the government’s failure to honor a referendum limiting drilling in Yasuní National Park. By: Steven Grattan, Associated Press Banner image: Waorani Indigenous people march to the Constitutional Court to protest for their right to consultation before the bidding for the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas on their territory in Quito, Ecuador, May 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa, File)This article was originally published on Mongabay

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Ecuador’s plans to offer dozens of blocks of land for oil exploration for more than $47 billion has prompted opposition from seven Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Those groups say 18 of the proposed blocks overlap their ancestral territories and that they were not consulted. Government officials say their plan is key to modernizing an oil sector that supplies Ecuador’s top export. The dispute comes amid a state of emergency and a national strike over fuel prices, extractive projects and the government’s failure to honor a referendum limiting drilling in Yasuní National Park. By: Steven Grattan, Associated Press Banner image: Waorani Indigenous people march to the Constitutional Court to protest for their right to consultation before the bidding for the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas on their territory in Quito, Ecuador, May 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa, File)This article was originally published on Mongabay

CASSOU, Burkina Faso — With her daba in hand, her back bent from decades in the fields, Maan — meaning “grandmother” in the local Nuni language of Burkina Faso’s Centre-Ouest region — isn’t ready to put down her hoe just yet. On this July afternoon, as the sun blazes overhead, the septuagenarian works cheerfully alongside her 8-year-old grandson, weeding her plot near Cassou, a rural commune of some 54,000 inhabitants where she was born. The 2-hectare (5-acre) plot, which Maan Alima Tagnan inherited from her late husband, sustains her small family. For years, she has cultivated a mix of crops here. What draws the eye, however, is the unusual layout: carefully spaced rows of young trees alternating with mature ones, thriving among cowpeas, millet and other crops now nearing harvest. Maan Alima Tagnan under one of the trees she has planted in her field. Image by Yvette Zongo for Mongabay. This is agroforestry polyculture using “fertilizer trees,” an ancestral technique that the Association for the Promotion of Fertilizer Trees, Agroforestry and Forestry (APAF) has revived and modernized by introducing new varieties of nitrogen-fixing trees. “We haven’t invented anything — it’s nothing new to plant trees in fields to enrich the soil,” Firmin Hien, deputy executive director of APAF-Burkina Faso, tells Mongabay. “Our parents used to do it too, but people abandoned the practice with the arrival of chemical fertilizers.” His remarks are echoed by Cheick Zouré, a specialist in the rehabilitation of degraded ecosystems at Joseph Ki-Zerbo University in Burkina…This article was originally published on Mongabay