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Featured video: celebrities speak out for Yasuni

A group of celebrities, including recent Academy Award winner Jared Leto, Law and Order‘s Benjamin Bratt, and Kill Bill‘s Daryl Hannah, have lent their voices to a new Public Service Announcement (see below) to raise signatures to protect Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park from oil drilling.


Considered among the most—and quite possibly the most—biodiverse ecosystem on the planet, Yasuni National Park is also home to several indigenous groups, including some who have chosen to live in isolation from the modern world. However, the Ecuadorean government has recently decided to open up the most remote portions of the park to oil exploitation.


“Yasuni is home to Ecuador’s last indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation,” said actress Michelle Monaghan from True Detective in the announcement. “Their survival is worth more than a few days’ oil.”


Activists are working to gather 600,000 signatures from Ecuadoreans to put oil drilling in Yasuni National Park up to a national referendum.


The video was produced by Amazon Watch and Yasunidos.












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(08/26/2013) When Ecuadorean President, Rafael Correa, announced on August 15th that he was abandoning an innovative program to spare three blocs of Yasuni National Park from oil drilling, it seemed like the world had tossed away its most biodiverse ecosystem. However, environmental groups and activists quickly responded that there may be another way to keep oil companies out of Yasuni’s Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) blocs: a national referendum.

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