What Clemente Grefa remembers most about his childhood are the sounds of the Piatúa River: the hum of insects, the chatter of children playing, the women whistling as they clean clothes, and the burble of water trickling.
“Living here has always been magnificent,” says Clemente, a 67-year-old Kichwa man who lives off the land. “We’ve been blessed with all the enchantments of the river.” The Piatúa, a tributary of the Amazon located in the Pastaza region of Ecuador, is thought to be millions of years old. It is one of the most biodiverse areas of the world; scientists believe it is home to many flora and fauna yet to be cataloged by academia. For the Kichwa Indigenous people of Piatúa, the river is sacred. It is a living being, with its own temperament, mood swings, and pulse. It is revered and feared, loved and protected.
Early one morning in 2018, while Clemente and his family gathered around the fire to drink their daily tea, they heard a crash. Upstream, a hydropower-dam company was blasting dynamite to clear the way for a $60 million project that if built would generate some 30 MW of electricity—but would also threaten the river’s ecosystem, and the lifestyle and cosmologies of the people who inhabit the area. Since 2014, the Ecuadorean electricity company Genefran S.A. has been approved by the Ministry of the Environment, Water, and Ecological Transition to build a hydro dam along the Piatúa River. Though the project is part of the government’s larger strategy to shift away from fossil fuels toward
