Residents of this indigenous Achuar village in the Peruvian Amazon used to fetch water from Little Trompeterillo Creek. A look at the creek today, black and scummy as it flows into the nearby Corrientes River, reveals why they no longer do. Because of extensive water pollution here, San Cristóbal residents have given up on most every local stream. Instead, they climb down the steep bank of the Corrientes to fill their jugs. But even that water is suspect: about a mile upstream, steam rises from pipes that discharge oil-well wastewater into the river. All along the Corrientes northward to the Ecuadorian border, three decades of oil drilling have fouled tributaries of the river and the rainforest with oil and production water—the saline, metals... [Log in to read more]