Our last night at the lodge, as we watched tarantulas meander slowly across the thatched ceiling, Miltón and the other guides joined us, and the talk turned to the jungle and the dangers facing it. Since the discovery of vast oil reserves under Ecuador’s Amazon in the 1970s, foreign investors seeking to extract the country’s riches have caused displacement and conflict among the jungle’s inhabitants.

Red Flower, by Sarah Hamilton

While the oil industry has hired many indigenous people, few have found long-term employment there, as the companies tend to fire workers with longer tenure to circumvent laws requiring higher pay and benefits for loyal employees. At the same time, oil drilling and its resulting waste have so damaged the rainforest in some areas that traditional ways of life are no longer feasible. This has led to a growing crisis of poverty, disease, and unemployment that is forcing more people out of the jungles and into the cities.

Miltón, for one, sees ecotourism as an attractive alternative, both for the jungle and for his career. Twenty-one years old, with a newborn daughter in a village nearby, he knows he needs to plan ahead if he wants to avoid the oil business, and asked us for English lessons to help him talk to his clients. He requested translations of his most frequently needed phrases and studiously copied down our words: “I would like to show you this tree,” “Let’s go to the boats,” “Be careful, please.” The pages of his little notebook filled, and we laughingly complied with his more daring requests for translations: “You have beautiful eyes.” “I would like to give you this flower.”

We spent our last morning in the jungle perched on a platform in the tree canopy, forty meters above the ground, watching the sunrise through the mist and listening to toucans and tamarinds hailing the new day. The sense of calm I had first found in the resort-like setting of the lodge itself was part of the jungle as well.

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