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1 results

  • 2 - Hidden Treasures

  • Maximilian Fritz Feichtner, Independent Scholar
  • Book:
    The Metamorphosis of the Amazon
    Published online:
    13 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023, pp 27-53

  • Summary

    Chapter 2 explores the Ecuadorean rainforest landscape, its inhabitants, and their first interactions with the oil industry before large-scale oil extraction started in the late 1960s. It starts by looking back at the millennia of gradual changes when the history of crude oil and the tropical rainforest environment started to intersect. An exploration of the geographical properties of the Amazon landscapes, as well as their flora and fauna including human inhabitants, visualizes the lively environment encountered by the first oilmen visiting the area in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s. Two multinational oil companies, the Leonard Exploration Company and Shell, undertook major efforts to discover petroleum reserves in the Ecuadorean Amazon. Even though their exploration programs failed in the end, their pioneering work of mapping and surveying the rainforest and its subsoil laid the foundation for large-scale petroleum extraction decades later.