to international oil companies in the Ecuadorian Amazon, opening an additional five million acres of forest to oil development. One of these oil blocks, Block 11 awarded to the US-based Santa Fe Energy, lies within Cofan territory and will directly affect at least three communities. In order to protect the remaining intact rainforest areas of their homeland and the adjacent ecological reserves, the Cofan are seeking $5,000 to purchase an outboard motor and a video camera, in order to coordinate between disperse communities and document the destruction caused by oil development. Cofan leaders plan to work with their communities and document the destruction caused by oil development. Also they planned to work with their communities to organize against further environmental destruction by the oil companies. This grant will also cover for legal costs to demarcate the Cofan community lands. In the next section of this term paper, I will be discussing a subject relating to the rainforest called habitat fragmentation. Fragmentation of a habitat, by its very nature, reduces the total amount of area of the original habitat type. Two researchers, Ann Keller and John Anderson suggest that the absolute habitat loss of pristine habitat and the reduced density of resources associated with fragmentation potentially impacts the biota (the plant and animal life of a region) more than any single factor. Habitat fragmentation affects the flora and fauna (plants and animals) of a given ecosystem by replacing a naturally occurring ecosystem with a human-dominated landscape which may be inhospitable to a certain number of the original species. However, in direct contrast to the ocean as a geographic barrier, the human landscape matrix is typically accessible to plants and animals, in that they are able to easily disperse across it, if not reside in it. On the other hand, the human landscape may directly contribute to the extinction of sp...
