ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) document and concerned with the function of the EIA in the oil industry in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The chapter has juxtaposed the ways that discrete, local effects are made manageable through their calculation as Impacts in the EIA, while the benefits of drilling are expansively invoked through future, national promise in the document and in political discourse. The EIA presentation has increasingly become a forum for negotiation between communities and companies that it was not intended to be. In order for genuine consideration and debate of the benefits and consequences of oil production to take place, impacts and benefits must be evaluated symmetrically in official, public forums. And alternatives — such as not proceeding with drilling — must be viable possibilities rather than perfunctory checkmarks in the EIA. The chapter sought to call attention to the violence produced by categorization determines the environmental harm and the knowledge practices such categories imply and exclude.
