Paying Amazon's bounty for beauty, life and hope

　　LUIS Garcia is close to tears. For three days, he has guided eight international journalists through a tract of Amazon so thick with wildlife that experts are yet to fully catalogue its riches. At a small Ecuadorean airport, Garcia gives a final, wet-eyed pitch on the threatened Yasuni National Park. Then, as he speaks, they appear: the flashy watches, slick sneakers and logo-stitched chambray shirts of the oil industry.

In Coca, an industrial smudge of a town on the Amazon's western edge, two types of passengers use the airport. One is oil executives - Spanish, Chinese, American and South American corporates extracting, or eager to extract, the heavy crude beneath the emerald forest. The other is eco-tourists: birdwatchers and backpackers sporting expensive waterproofs and zip-off trousers, headed to the biodiversity haven of the Yasuni. Two industries feeding from the Amazon; but only one is likely to prevail.

Ecuador, and the wider international community, faces a quandary in the Yasuni. It is, scientists believe, the most species-rich spot in the western hemisphere. But an almost irresistible resource lies untapped in the park's underbelly: one-fifth of Ecuador's oil. To solve this dilemma, this poor South American nation has come up with a unique idea that, if successful, could change the way the world deals with its most precious places and provide a concrete way to reduce carbon pollution in developing nations.