The introduction takes the reader into the history of oil in the Ecuadorean Amazon in the twentieth century. Zooming out from the testimony of a former oil worker, a historical overview sheds light on the dynamics of oil extraction in the region by national and international companies. This history is analyzed from the interdisciplinary perspective of the Environmental Humanities, combining archival and oral sources, sociological and anthropological concepts, and a mixed-methods approach. From this vantage point, the changes in the rainforest brought by the oil industry can be narrated as a fundamental metamorphosis of the landscape, its ecology, and its inhabitants. Drawing from Amazonian and European notions of metamorphosis, four dimensions of this process are particularly relevant for the historical analysis: conceptual, material, toxic, and social. The metamorphosis as metaphor offers a perspective on historical change in the Amazon as a process driven by the conflictive interaction between the rainforest ecosystem and the narrative and material manifestations of the oil industry.

Chapter 5 inquires how the rainforests of Ecuador turned into a profoundly contaminated landscape between the 1970s and 1990s. Recurrent oil spills, discharges of toxic water into rivers, the burning of crude oil and of natural gas, and the use of simple earthen waste pits all contributed to a toxic metamorphosis of the Amazon region. An analysis of Texaco’s internal communication about environmental contamination from 1972 to 1980 gives insights into the intentionality of the company’s handling of hazardous waste. The toxic metamorphosis was the result of practices of externalization in the production and disposal of hazardous waste in the Ecuadorean oil industry. This chapter develops the concept of the toxic ghost acre as a mechanism of the externalization of costs onto the environment and the public health of local populations. The notion of toxic ghost acreage is useful to uncover the transnational and socio-ecological dynamics that turned the Amazon into a cheap sink for hazardous waste. The chapter ends by shedding light on the perpetuation of the toxic ghost acres in Ecuador through Texaco’s insufficient remediation programs in the 1990s.

Chapter 3 argues that the metamorphosis of the Ecuadorean Amazon started with the successful exploration activities by Texaco between the 1960s and 1980s. Starting from the assumption that oil as a resource does not simply exist out there awaiting its extraction but is the result of a process of social construction, the chapter explores how discourses, policies, technologies, and material infrastructures intersected to transform the Amazon into a “resource environment.” This involved a process of making sense of, systematizing, and appropriating nature – both physically and mentally. The combination of exploration technologies with geophysical knowledge and indigenous guides enabled Texaco to locate oil reserves in its concession area. Exploration changed forever how the region was perceived: the Amazon was reduced to the prospect of oil through different processes of abstraction, such as the issuing of concessions. These early confrontations of the oil business with the rainforest also caused temporary and long-term environmental impacts beyond the conceptual metamorphosis of the Amazon.

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.

Chapter 4 retraces how oil infrastructural projects, technology transfers, and the social relations underpinning them turned the Ecuadorean Amazon into an agro-industrial landscape: The ecology of the forest became enmeshed with the economy of oil due to the large-scale extraction since the 1970s. The oil companies’ interest to develop the region converged with the national governments’ aspiration to incorporate the Amazon into the national territory through agricultural colonization. To realize these goals, Texaco set up an extensive network of transportation infrastructure in the rainforest. A multitude of subcontracting firms, however, did the actual work of constructing platforms, roads, pipelines, and camps. Far from being a linear success story, the technological conquest of the Amazon suffered constant setbacks caused by the geological, geographical, and tropical climatic conditions of the rainforest. The progress of technology and colonization also faced opposition from local communities. One such story of resistance against an access road built in the territory of the A’i Kofán is woven into a broader story of how the region underwent a profound material metamorphosis.

In the early 1990s, when Texaco left its operation in Ecuador behind, the metamorphosis of the Ecuadorean Amazon into a polluted resource environment came to light, attracting the interest of national and international NGOs and causing global and tedious legal aftermath: In the famous case Aguinda v. Texaco, a group of affected indigenous people and settlers sued the oil corporation to compensate for the environmental and social damage done in the Amazon – with mixed results. The final section of the book is structured in a loosely juridical fashion: starting with the discussion of the evidence – a summary of the recent history of the region and how human–nature relationships changed in the twentieth century – the conclusion problematizes the unfolding of the global legal battle and the contradicting judgments it produced. As the legal pathway appears to not offer justice to the affected people, a closing statement calls for alternative solutions to the plight of the Amazon, locally and globally.

Chapter 6 scrutinizes how the corporate structures set up by Texaco shaped social dynamics and daily life in the oil fields. Texaco’s facilities constituted fenced-off and almost independent spatial enclaves in the rainforest that ensured an unobstructed resource extraction based on imported labor and a “masculine” work ethic. The discriminatory hierarchies established within the oil industry shaped the experiences of the Ecuadorean and international oilmen. The workers’ position within the hierarchy of power also predisposed their relationship with nature: While the executive level was able to keep as much physical and emotional distance as possible, most oilmen were exposed to the hardships brought on by working in a tropical environment. While state institutions showed little presence in the region, national policies and military forces protected the oil companies’ interests, subdued protests by oilmen and the public, and contributed to solidify the new social order. This chapter explores for the first time the oilmen’s experiences from their own perspective, offering insights into the social dimension of the metamorphosis of the Amazon.