Just stop oil? In Ecuador we have the opportunity to do just that | Nemonte Nenquimo

My country could be the first to limit fossil fuel extraction through direct democracy

• Nemonte Nenquimo is a Waorani leader and winner of the Goldman environmental prize

On Sunday, the people of Ecuador will vote in a referendum to decide whether or not to destroy my home. I am not speaking of the house that my family and I built by hand, but of the land of my ancestors, the territory and its guardians: the trees, the rivers and jaguars, the people who live there, the soil where my grandmother is buried, the reservoirs of knowledge and medicine, our spirits and those of the forest.

Perhaps you have never heard of the Yasuni national park in the Ecuadorian Amazon. If you were to walk there with me, I could teach you to listen to the wind, to interpret the songs of birds and read the leaves and the bark of trees. But to give you an idea of the place in the language you understand, I'll tell you that Yasuni, an area of one million hectares, is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. There are more tree species in a single hectare of Yasuni than across Canada and the United States combined. Yasuni is also the home of the Tagaeri and Taromenane communities: the last two Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in Ecuador.