In the opening moments of Malcolm Rogge's unsettling and eye-opening Under Rich Earth, a group of small children point to some gun shells lying in the dirt at the edge of a rural road in Ecuador. Who put the shells there and why are matters of great contention and conflict. The former owners of the casings maintain that the incident resulting in their new roadside location never actually happened. But in the eyes of the people at whom the bullets were fired, the 2006 event is very real, representing the latest escalation of a decade-old fight over land, resources and environmental autonomy. In the mid-nineties, a Japanese mining company secured the rights to extract copper in the northwest part of Ecuador known as Intag, one of the world's most environmentally threatened regions.
