Rumble in the Jungle, the Sani Lodge and the Isla Sani Community.

The Isla Sani community sits a few hours downriver from Coca, Ecuador. Its four hundred members have repeatedly rejected oil companies’ requests for permission to explore their land for oil. Instead of leasing this land, they created the Sani Lodge, a first class jungle eco-lodge run by its members and benefiting the community at large. The lodge is a success, showing those who look beyond the Galápagos and venture into the jungle the immense biodiversity and rarely seen animals that the Amazon contains.

Machinery, supply boats and fresh construction sites of the oil companies clutter the landscape of the Napo River snaking through the jungle. The indigenous people on its banks struggle to feed, educate and sustain themselves. The only way they meet these needs is through a core foundation of community that stretches up and down the Rio Napo.

Ecuador loses almost 200,000 hectares of forest each year and has the distinction of having the second highest rate of deforestation in South America. Historically, this can be traced alongside the scale of the oil boom during the past decades and has roots as far back as the rubber boom in 1894.

At the end of 2014, 558,000 barrels of oil a day flowed up from underneath the dense forest of the Oriente. Ecologically speaking this extraction constricts the natural migration of wildlife, many of which are on the IUCN red list for endangered species; by clearing forest to build platforms, wells, pits, roads and pipelines.

At its worst, the effects of oil blocks are devastating. The Ecuadorian Amazon basin has been poisoned to date by roughly an excess of 30 billion gallons of toxic waste from oil extraction. Drilling for oil is risky, with spills and accidents happening as a matter of course. Oil waste contaminates soil and water, making it impossible to grow food or sustain fish life in the rivers.

Changes have occurred in this situation during the current administrations tenure. Multinational oil companies have left after the government restructured their agreements with major players like Canadian Occidental Petroleum Company. In effect, the changes gave Ecuador the lion’s share of the profit and the companies a flat fee for extracting crude oil. Today, Petro Amazonas runs the concessions that twenty foreign companies including Chevron and Oxy started.

For indigenous people living within this climate one either works for oil companies or goes elsewhere to cities like Coca or Quito for employment. The work is temporary, and the pay traditionally has been a fraction of that than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

Don Orlando of the Isla Sani community is one of the people who managed to keep working after his first job finished. Laboring for twenty years, he worked for an oil company during a time when open pits separated crude oil from other toxins. The resulting waste water from this process was carelessly discarded directly back into the rivers or injected deep into the earth causing irreparable damage.

After leaving his job, Orlando turned the tables and lobbied the same oil companies mentioned earlier for a year, often being laughed at, to secure funds to build the initial structures that now are the Sani Lodge. His success led to a collection of thatched roof buildings sitting on a picturesque lagoon at the end of a Napo tributary only reached by a motorized boat from Coca and a canoe ride an hour up the inlet.

The lodge’s amenities and standards stand out. Guests are greeted after stepping out of the canoes with welcome cocktails, three course meals are served in the ample dining area, rooms are smartly appointed and the comfortable confines of the lounge overlooking the lagoon outshine the awkwardness of being deposited deep in the fierce jungle.

The guides are experts in their field and readily show guests the hidden highlights of their home. Deftly navigating the waters of its rivers to parrot licks and towering view points above the canopy; they enthusiastically point out monkeys, owls and sloths that are hidden in plain sight along the way.

Meeting Don Orlando and visiting the Isla Sani community leaves an impression. The lodge is an extension of the community and its strengths reflect their core values: education, conservation and sustainability. Don Orlando is a maverick who is their steward, a throwback to times past in the States but decidedly alive in Ecuador.

Traditionally, the majority of people of the Rio Napo have to find work instead of pursuing an education. Out of 76% that finish the first six years of school, only 10% of those along the river continue to high school. The few that graduate college normally find work elsewhere in Ecuador or the world as the jungle holds few opportunities comparatively.

The Sani Lodge's approach to changing the current state of things is three-fold. First, they offer members of the community employment at the lodge with the condition that they finish their education. Secondly, the lodge provides scholarships to facilitate this requirement. Thirdly, the administration gathers volunteers from abroad to teach English to its staff and the community members so they can be effective in their jobs.

The results of these initiatives are uplifting. The guides are in the process of finishing their education and possess an enthusiastic curiosity about the jungle and its creatures. They also have a keen awareness about the dangers the rain forest is facing and waste no time addressing them.

The jungle is dying, and without it, much vanishes. The community members rightly insist on showing guests what is at stake. Traversing down pristine waterways with monkeys rumbling in the distance and toucans flying overhead, it is easy to understand why.

One in six of the world's bird species live in the Ecuadorian jungle. One hectare of land there contains 655 species of trees, more than all of North America. To date, there are 40,000 kinds of plants recorded, and discoveries of new ones are frequent. Among the total species of plants that the US National Cancer Foundation finds useful in its research, 70% can only be found in the rain forest.

The lodge and the community coexist to support each other. The lodge buys food from the community’s raised vegetable beds and the Sani members take part in running the lodge. It is a system that works and provides a different standard of living than once was deemed possible.

These values make the Sani Lodge worth visiting. Guests are new friends, not visitors; there is a healthy, reverent respect for the environment and a rare pride in what is being accomplished despite exacting difficulties.

Unfortunately, the Sani lodge and the Isla Sani community still face new challenges. The lodge is still struggling to get a foothold in the tourism market in Ecuador, overshadowed by the popularity of the Galápagos Islands.

More than 1.5 million tourists landed in Ecuador in 2014, enough to populate its capital, Quito. Twenty percent of those travelled to eco- tourism destinations, with the majority headed for the Galápagos Islands.

If the Isla Sani people get their wish and their lands stay free of oil extraction, this could soon change. By keeping the doors open and showing guests the splendors of the jungle, they are setting an example for other communities to follow; providing a sustainable alternative to oil extraction where everyone wins.