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Natural Resources by Numbers
The Promise of “El uno por mil” in Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT Oil Operations
in Environment and Society
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ABSTRACT
In 2013, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa announced the end of the Yasuní-ITT initiative. The initiative had proposed to combat climate change by not exploiting oil reserves in one section of the Yasuní National Park. Anticipating outcry, Correa promised that operations would affect less than one thousandth of the park, or “menos del uno por mil.” This article examines the role of numerical calculations in the governance of subterranean resources. Numbers do a particular kind of labor to rationalize the shift contained in the Yasuní-ITT initiative that rhetoric alone does not. Metrics such as el uno por mil constitute and translate between diverse realms of value. Yet, contrary to the assumption that numbers are derived from strictly technical, expert processes, I show how such metrics are fundamental to translations between incalculable matters of nature, the future, and the “good” when deployed in contests over the effects of oil on life.
Contributor Notes
AMELIA FISKE is a cultural anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Biomedical Ethics at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, Germany. She is currently investigating the social, ethical, and regulatory aspects of citizen science in biomedicine. Her doctoral research addresses contests over harm resulting from oil operations in the Ecuadorian Amazon, exploring questions of toxicity, uncertainty, and inequality in relation to extraction. E-mail: amfiske@gmail.com