Later in the chapter, the author discusses debt-for-nature swaps, essentially, organizations will purchase a portion of a country's debt, which goes towards an environmental trust fund. But why is this important? In the 1970's, Ecuador was under a military government, which saw an oil boom. While there were some benefits, such as increased life expectancy and increased schooling, there were also negatives, such as increased oil extraction and increased debt, and lots of it.
The environmental movement really started in 1978, when some scientists and nature lovers (don't we call those hippies?) created an organization called Fundacion Natura (FN), which focused primarily on conservation of species and ecosystems. FN created educational shows and used reformist tactics in order to educate people and change the system internally. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) began funding FN within a few months of its creation. This lead to FN, essentially, becoming an ecodependent.
As explained in the previous chapter, ecodependents depend on the funding of ecoimperialists, and as such focus on issues that the ecoimperialists want fixed, which tend to be big picture. Ecoresisters, on the other hand, tend to focus more on human-environment interaction issues. A group known as Accion Ecologia (AE) was formed. AE is known to be a "radical green" group that focuses on human-side issues, but also environmental conflicts, such as mining and oil. FN and AE were different even when their approach to something was similar. For example, while FN was educating people in order to change and create environmental policy, AE was educating people on how to protect their environments.
1987 was an important year in that it marked the transition from environmental movements to recognizable development. Three things occurred: 1) a national environmental congress was held, 2) an environmental umbrella group was formed to be arbiter for the conflicting environmental groups, and 3) a large amount of international funds were secured for conservation due to the debt-for-nature swap discusses earlier.