When a poor nation finds a massive oil reserve beneath a rainforest with more species per hectare than in all of North America, it makes for a nettlesome problem. When you add in a huge amount of debt to resource-hungry China, it makes for an environmental catastrophe.

President Rafael Correa worked with the United Nations to create a trust fund that would pay Ecuador not to drill. Otherwise, a country with a 27 percent poverty rate could ill-afford to turn down a bounty equal to about a tenth of its gross domestic product. He cancelled the project last week after global donors only put up $13 million in cash (and $167 million in pledges) out of the agreed-upon $3.6 billion, about half the revenues the country expects to generate by extracting the petroleum.

Oil companies, anticipating the decision, have already built roads and drilling infrastructure adjacent to the park, and expect drilling to begin within weeks; Correa says the development will affect about 1 percent of the park's land.

Besides a purely conservationist impulse, Ecuador hoped foreign governments and NGOs see climate change as a motivation to donate. Keeping the oil in the ground is a sure-fire way to avoid putting carbon in the air, and the rainforest itself plays an important role in capturing and storing carbon. The UN estimated that the trust fund would stop 400 million tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere by not burning the oil and another 800 million tons by stopping the removal of carbon-consuming plant life.