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

Each year since 2021, Pia Reveco and her husband have set sail from Puerto Montt to spend the Chilean summers navigating Patagonia aboard their sailboat. Last year, they traveled along the fjords and mountains of the Golfo de Penas; three years ago, they reached Laguna San Rafael National Park, where a glacier resembling an ice tongue meets the sea. This summer, they opted instead for a shorter trip to the Guaitecas archipelago, a group of sparse islands in the Aysén region known for its rich biodiversity. During these journeys, they report frequently coming across fish farms, mostly salmoneras, Spanish for salmon farms. On their most recent expedition, which ran from December to March, Reveco posted on X about at least 23 sites that appeared to her abandoned or in bad condition, with corroded, broken or sinking infrastructure and teeming with birds, she told Mongabay. A 2021 study published in the science journal Marine Pollution Bulletin identified mussel and salmon aquaculture as primary sources of floating marine debris in northern Chilean Patagonia, especially buoys and other plastic floating devices. Daniel Caniullán, a fishing vessel owner, shellfish gatherer and Indigenous community leader involved in campaigns against the salmon industry, has often documented buoys, sections of rusting platforms and plastic pipes washing ashore on the pristine beaches of the Guaitecas, where he lives. “We, the Indigenous seafaring fishers of this territory, have seen this type of salmon farming pollution in the area for more than 40 years,” Caniullán texted Mongabay. In such remote…This article was originally published on Mongabay