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The canoes slip away from the dock, the morning mist still clinging to Anangucocha Lake in eastern Ecuador's Yasuni National Park. The water is the ink black of old tea, the paddles vanishing beneath the surface with every stroke. The Amazon rain forest has yet to fully awaken; the silence is broken only by the call of a distant troop of red howler monkeys. Then a single small squirrel monkey — easy to pick out with its black-and-white masked face — scurries along a branch arching over the river, followed by another and then another. Soon the trees are full of families of bounding squirrel monkeys, mixed with individual capuchin monkeys marked by their distinctive blond collars. This is wildlife — more vibrant than I've ever seen — treating the great Amazon forest like a playpen. "There are such wonders here," says Luis Garcia, a 46-year-old nature guide native to the region. "This is why Yasuni is a paradise."

Yasuni National Park — a 10,000-sq-km reserve on the western fringes of the Amazon basin — is indeed a paradise, considered by many scientists to be the single most biodiverse spot on the planet. But it's a paradise in danger of being lost. Oil companies have found rich deposits beneath the park's trees and rivers, nearly 900 million barrels of crude worth billions of dollars. That's money that Ecuador — a small South American country in which a third of the population lives below the poverty line and petroleum already accounts for more than half its export revenue — badly needs, money that oil companies and consumers will be only too happy to provide if drilling is allowed to go forward. If Ecuador follows the usual path of development, that's exactly what will happen — with disastrous consequences for the park. "Yasuni is a truly unique place in the world," says Gorky Villa, an Ecuadorian botanist who works with the conservation group Finding Species. "Our concern is that it will be ruined before we can even understand it."

But there may be another way. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has told the international community that his country would be willing to forgo drilling and leave Yasuni largely intact in exchange for donations equal to $3.6 billion over 13 years, or about half the expected market value of the park's oil deposits. The plan — known as the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, after the name of the reserve's oil field — would conserve Yasuni's unique biodiversity and prevent the emission of over 800 million tons of carbon dioxide, an amount equal to Germany's annual greenhouse-gas footprint. The Yasuni plan would be a first for global environmental policy: recognition that the international community has a financial responsibility to help developing nations preserve nature. "Oil is by far the most important part of Ecuador's economy," says Carlos Larrea, a professor at Andean University and a technical adviser on the Yasuni project. "But we are willing to keep that oil indefinitely unexploited if the international community contributes."

Of course, from another perspective, the Yasuni initiative might look like environmental blackmail by Ecuador: Pay us or the forest gets it. And since the proposal was first floated a few years ago, Ecuador has struggled to get international partners to sign on, in part because momentum on climate policy has ebbed in the face of the prolonged global economic crisis. Nor does it help that Correa himself has sent mixed signals on the project, simultaneously preparing for drilling even as he asks for donations.

There is, however, no ignoring the essential justice of the plan. If we all really do have a shared stake in the natural heritage represented by hot spots like Yasuni, then we have a shared responsibility in helping a poor country preserve it. "We need these resources to develop the country, but we're also responsible people who want to protect Yasuni," Correa said in New York recently. "If the poor don't receive direct benefits from conservation, conservation won't be sustainable."

In part because it is still relatively uninhabited and undeveloped — canoes are the only way in and out — it's rare to spend more than a few minutes on the creeks that crisscross Yasuni before you catch sight of a fat dragonfly, a rainbow boa or a golden lion tamarin. This is the Amazon untouched. But the rain forest really comes to life at night, when fruit bats glide through the air and insects and amphibians erupt in sound. Not everything is friendly, though: as our flashlights sweep the surface of the lake, the beams catch the single red eye of a black caiman. The crocodilian reptile — the largest predator of the Amazon basin — is easily over 3 m long, and its lingering presence explains why I was advised not to swim in the lake after dark. And there's almost certainly far more out there than I can see. "When you go to Yasuni, you will always find new species," says David Romo, an Ecuadorian biologist who has done field work in the park. "It would take us 400 years just to name all the insect species out there."

Indeed, even by the standards of the tropical rain forest — by far the richest belt of life on the globe — Yasuni stands out. There are estimated to be 100,000 insects per hectare, the highest concentration on earth. More woody tree species — 655 by one count — grow in a single hectare of rain forest in Yasuni than in all of North America. The park is home to 28 threatened or near threatened vertebrate species — including the white-bellied spider monkey and the giant river otter, which can grow to nearly 2 m — and 95 threatened or near threatened plant species. It is a bird watcher's paradise, with nearly 600 species, including white-throated toucans, the phoenixlike hoatzin and vast swarms of parrots. I've been to rain forests in Southeast Asia and Africa and Central America, but I've never seen the sheer amount of life that I glimpsed in a few days in Yasuni.

What's even more amazing is how much of that life is stuffed into such a small land area. Yasuni harbors nearly one-third of the Amazon basin's amphibian and reptile species, despite covering less than 0.15% of its total area. That's due in part to its unique location at the intersection of the Andes, the Amazon and the equator, which fosters high rainfall and a steady climate: the perfect formula to help life flourish.

That location also made Yasuni a jungle refuge during the recurring ice ages of the Pleistocene era 2.6 million to 12,000 years ago, a place where tropical species could escape the effects of glaciation. Scientists believe that geography could also help Yasuni better weather the coming effects of climate change, remaining wet and hospitable even as warming threatens to dry out much of the rest of the Amazon basin. "The world created a piggy bank of life in Yasuni," says Romo. "The park represents a chance for saving biodiversity in the future — and we have to protect it."

While Yasuni endured the ice age, it may not survive the oil age. Conservationists fear the effect of oil drilling in and around Yasuni because they've seen the damage that energy exploration can do to nature, and no one knows that better than Ecuadorians. The oil giant Texaco has been accused of polluting vast stretches of the Ecuadorian Amazon during its operations there in the 1970s and '80s, and the company, now owned by Chevron, is involved in a long-running $27 billion lawsuit over the damages — the world's biggest environmental case ever.

But it doesn't take spills and corporate negligence for drilling to disrupt an intact forest. Exploration requires pipelines, camps and roads, which would cut through the park and lead to direct deforestation. And those roads would bring colonization, which would lead to secondary deforestation, fragmentation of habitats and intensified hunting and fishing. A 2006 study showed that the Via Maxus, a road on the northeastern border of Yasuni, had 40% lower mammal abundance compared with an intact area in the forest interior.

If Yasuni is what it is largely because people are absent — with the exception of a few indigenous tribes that live deep within the forest — the amount of industrialization and human activity required to pump 846 million barrels of oil out of the ground would change the park irrevocably. "God gave us the gift of this rich place," says Jiovanny Rivadeneira, general manager of the Napo Wildlife Center, an eco-lodge on the edge of Yasuni. "If there's any oil exploration, we'll feel it first."

If the Yasuni-ITT Initiative moves forward, all that might be prevented. The plan would require Ecuador to refrain from extracting the oil contained in Yasuni indefinitely in exchange for at least $3.6 billion — half the value of the crude as of 2010 — which would go into a capital fund to be administered chiefly by the U.N. Development Programme. That money would be earmarked for investment in renewable-energy projects in Ecuador and social development for indigenous communities in and around Yasuni. As a guarantee, should a future Ecuadorian government decide to go ahead and drill for oil despite the deal, donors would essentially get their money back. "This is the only complete initiative that is out there that is a concrete proposal on how to govern global public goods," says María Fernanda Espinosa, Ecuador's Minister of Coordination of Heritage. "The international trust fund is the mechanism for it."

Although Ecuador has so far managed to gather $53 million in commitments from a number of countries and even some individuals, the international community seems unconvinced for the most part. Norway — which has used its oil money to fund anti-deforestation programs in Brazil and Indonesia — has so far passed on the plan. Hopes were high that Germany would come through with a major contribution, but so far there's little indication that an increasingly donation-fatigued Berlin is interested. The U.S. failure to pass cap-and-trade legislation largely dashed hopes that American money would play a major role in the Yasuni initiative. At this point, the plan seems to be on life support: Correa has given the world until the end of the year to come up with at least $100 million as a show of good faith, lest the project likely be scrapped. "We're renouncing an immense sum of money," Correa said in September. "For us, the most financially lucrative option is to extract the gasoline."

Beyond the fact that the ongoing financial crisis has tapped out creditor nations like Germany, there are reasons for the international community to be leery of the Yasuni initiative. The proposal doesn't fit into standard greenhouse-gas emissions-reduction schemes through the U.N. climate system, which means that donors wouldn't get carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol. There's the worry of leakage as well. If Ecuador reduces oil production by preserving Yasuni, another producer in South America or the Middle East might pump more oil to make up for the shortfall, eroding the climate benefits.

And then there's Ecuador itself. The country had seven Presidents and two constitutions from 1996 to 2006, and in '08, Correa declared Ecuador's national debt illegitimate. Last year, Correa was nearly ejected from power in a violent coup, and he has fired many of the ministers who first championed the Yasuni project and has cracked down on the media and the opposition. None of this makes Ecuador seem like an ideal partner for a complex deal like the Yasuni initiative. "We haven't been the most stable country politically," says Natalia Greene, program coordinator for the Pachamama Foundation, an NGO that focuses on indigenous communities. "We need to send the world a message of trust for this to work."

In reality, the chance of success seems to lessen by the day, but the issues raised by the Yasuni project won't go away. South America is becoming an increasingly important oil producer — the continent holds 20% of the world's proven oil reserves — and much of that crude is buried in and around the Amazon basin. That puts the rain forest in mortal peril: as the global need for oil grows, we're like drug addicts willing to pawn our valuables to pay for the next fix. Yet the financial burden of protecting our most biodiverse forests — nearly all found in developing nations — can't fall only on poor nations like Ecuador. Each of us benefits from the existence of forest reserves like Yasuni, and each of us should share in the cost of preserving them. If we can't protect the rain forest in Yasuni from the drive for oil, we may not be able to protect it anywhere else.

• Bryan Walsh / Yasuni National Park
• Ecuador's demand: Pay us or we'll drill for oil in the Amazon. Should the world say yes?