Toxic Ghost Acres, or the dynamics of disposing oil production wastes in the Ecuadorean Amazon, 1970s-1990s

Abstract

The Amazon rainforest in Ecuador and its inhabitants have been exposed to a large-scale contamination since the inception of the region's oil industry in the 1960s. This paper investigates waste management practices of the Texaco Petroleum Company that dominated oil exploration and extraction until the 1990s. The industrial resource extraction and the resulting chronic pollution by waste disposal practices indicate the systematic creation of patterns of externalization. This paper proposes to study such externalizing practices as toxic ghost acres, examining waste pits as their most tangible materialization in the Amazon. This contribution on Texaco's waste management practices extrapolates toxic ghost acres as a mechanism of trans-regional externalization of economic and socioecological costs that work through transferring a hazard to a place unable or unwilling to prevent the effects of that externalization. Texaco has been involved in establishing a waste management system based on toxic ghost acres throughout the region.