High in the Ecuadorean Andes is a cloud forest that is home to hundreds of endangered, extraordinary creatures, many of which seem to have wandered straight out of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch — among them the spiny pocket mouse, the Dracula orchid, the glass frog and the tourmaline sunangel hummingbird. Numerous clear-running rivers rise in this mist-wreathed region, their flows nourished by the process of condensation and runoff called continuous fog drop. Walking through the humid, glowing greens of this cloud forest — known as Los Cedros — is what walking through damp moss might feel like if you had been miniaturized.
Four years ago, Los Cedros was nearly destroyed by gold and copper mining projects. But in November 2021, something remarkable happened to avert this catastrophe — something that could, in fact, only have occurred in Ecuador.
The country’s Constitutional Court issued a landmark judgment that recognized Los Cedros as both a legal person and a rights-bearing entity — and ruled that the proposed mining projects would violate those rights. The court’s judgment was both philosophically radical and legally powerful. The mining companies were required to remedy the damage they had caused and then quit the area. They were gone within 10 days.
That groundbreaking decision is just one of the ways in which Ecuador has played an outsize role in the global politics of nature. For almost two decades this small country has pioneered new ways of imagining and legislating the human relationship with other life on Earth — and inspired similar innovations around the world.
Now, however, that ecological progress is under severe threat from a series of reforms steamrolled by Ecuador’s young populist president, Daniel Noboa. Mr. Noboa is the heir to an agribusiness empire, and came to power with the promise of combating organized crime. His reforms will throw Ecuador’s stunning landscapes open to mining and drilling, dismantle government agencies in the name of “efficiency,” target public officials and civic organizations that he claims obstruct his agenda and concentrate broad emergency powers in his own hands.
Together these measures amount to the most serious assault on environmental protection and constitutional integrity in Ecuador’s recent history. They also come at a perilous moment for a country where murder rates increased sixfold between 2020 and 2023, and where violence toward environmental activists is now also rising.
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