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Long abstract:

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to give constitutional rights to nature. This radical shift in the conceptualization of nature was followed by a 2023 democratic referendum blocking oil drilling in the Yasuní National Park and restricting mineral extraction from the Chocó Andino Biosphere Reserve. In this context, my paper problematizes how a newly formed Ecuadorian space expert community works in collaboration with Indigenous activists, environmental lawyers, and multimodal artists to produce satellite visualizations about the dismantlement of petroleum infrastructures and the withdrawal of mining activities in Amazonian-Andean forests. My ethnography depicts the development of an Earth observation program with a strong commitment to advancing the rights of nature by remotely sensing environmental liabilities and monitoring the expansion of agricultural frontiers. This program operated out of a satellite tracking station originally built by NASA in the late 1950s at the foothills of the Cotopaxi volcano and gained prominence during the early years of New Space, a term used to characterize a highly financialized and unregulated space industry.