Natural Climate Solutions, Indigenous Peoples, Mestizos, and the Legacies of Conflict Over Land in the Ecuadorian Amazon

ABSTRACT Over the past two decades as global alarm over disruptive climate change has grown, coalitions of high‐ranking government officials and prominent activists have launched campaigns to protect and restore greenhouse gas absorbing rain forests. The initial results from these campaigns have varied dramatically across racial and ethnic landholding groups. A case study of environmental initiatives in the Ecuadorian Amazon, presented here, begins to explain these patterns in the adoption of natural climate solutions. Indigenous peoples, practicing a kind of defensive environmentalism, have been effective at protecting the old growth tropical rain forests that they inhabit. Their ability to mobilize and defend forests stems from earlier conflicts with settler colonists in which indigenous groups defended their access to forests from incursions by settlers. When settlers occupied the land, they initially destroyed forests, only to later foster the regrowth of trees in actively managed pastures.