Forays Through Fake Forest

NICK HARHALAKIS

I have recently embarked upon a bikepacking trip starting in Santiago, where I am currently studying, and finishing in Ushuaia. During my trip, I have had the opportunity to explore lesser-seen parts of the country, those free from the veneer of more common tourist destinations. I cycled for three days through the region of Maule, which lies a few hundred kilometres to the south of Santiago. This region is the second poorest in Chile, with its coastline devastated by the 2010 undersea earthquake – the 6th highest in recorded history – and subsequent tsunami. Maule’s small coastal villages are largely home to small-scale farmers and fishermen, as well as a few little-frequented tourist destinations. The small settlements which appeared sporadically on my cycle were rundown and somewhat murky in character in a way that non-touristy coastal destinations tend to be. Without the typical elements of the seaside, the picturesque beaches, blue sky, and blue ocean, they were infested with a wetness and a bleakness which drifted in from the choppy seas and seeped into their damp, wooden buildings. In between these villages were coastal roads, normally of good quality, populated almost exclusively with pine and eucalyptus trees. Their uniformity gave the surroundings an unsettling atmosphere. To me, the beauty of nature is in its chaos, its constant transformation and its diversity. To cycle past mile upon mile of pine and eucalyptus, to crest the peak of a hill and gaze over these unnatural forests which extend as far as the eye can see…it felt more disturbing than a smoke-belching factory or a monolithic Amazon warehouse, because of the subtle yet pernicious stench of mankind’s imposition of order over nature.

Pine and eucalyptus trees are not endemic to Chile. These trees were planted to be chopped down, sawn into planks or mashed into pulp before being reconfigured into office furniture or toilet paper. Maule’s forests, which line its roads for mile upon mile and extend as far as the eye case see, is comprised of trees whose days are numbered. Dead trees standing, and their moribund aroma added to the stench of orderliness and the industrialisation of nature. The environmental, economic and social impact of the pine and eucalyptus plantations is wide-reaching. Many stand upon land which was previously home to old-growth forests, sacred spaces for the indigenous Mapuche people. These plantations also have a devastating effect upon Maule’s already hard-pressed inhabitants. As their reach extends further and further over the region, its cultivable land decreases proportionally and small agricultural producers struggle to make ends meet. This creates a vicious cycle whereby Maule’s residents – particularly its youth – are forced to move away from their communities towards Chile’s bigger cities, further depriving the regional government of taxes to fund education and public works. A 2011 study by the Centre for International Forestry Research, CIFOR, which examined 180 Chilean municipalities, found a clear correlation between the expansion of plantations and a growth in poverty. Manuel Guariguata, co-author of the study, explained that “our data indicate that large plantations inevitably displace agricultural land…and because they require a more technically skilled workforce, they may not generate enough economic opportunities for local workers or development.”

Barbara Fraser, writing in Forests News, CIFOR’s journalistic arm, identifies the catalyst for the expansion of the forestry industry in Chile as the wave of privatisation and de-regulation enacted by the military junta headed by Augusto Pinochet, de facto dictator of the country from 1973-90. Fraser writes that from 1973-2013, plantation coverage in Chile grew from 300,000 hectares to 2.7 million. This is a pertinent example of the lasting impact of his regime on the country. However, what I would like to explore goes beyond Pinochet’s repressive governance and neoliberal economic policies. As destructive as these were, the origins of Chile’s environmental exploitation are found in a form of economic and political organization which dates back to the colonial period and its aftermath.

After escaping from the unsettling land of the unnatural forests, my trip took me further south where I stopped for a few days of rest in the lakeside town of Puerto Varas. Puerto Varas was founded in the 1850s by German immigrants as part of President Manuel Montt’s resettlement scheme, and their influence is palpable. Wooden, Bavarian-style houses line the lakeshore. I gorged myself on apple strudel in several of the town’s many bakeries, and in the evenings enjoyed local beers from breweries who still adhere to the German purity law. On my second night, I found myself one-third drunk and sitting on the lake shore, looking at the street vendors and their hand-made earrings and assortment of crystals collected in Chile’s mineral-rich northern territories. Starved of conversation, I got chatting with one of them and we spent the next hour or so smoking cigarettes and drinking, occasionally interrupted by a passerby interested in his fare. He invited me back to his campsite, a little way round the shoreline, where he and his friends were staying. We shared some more beers and lay on flattened cardboard with hiking rucksacks for a headrest. One of his friends, Elias, was from Maule, so I asked him about the army of pine and eucalyptus trees which seemed to have invaded the region. He explained to me that whilst the tree plantations certainly were oppressive and demonstrative of how industry was destroying Chile’s natural environments, a far more worrying threat was the impact of large-scale fruit and vegetable farming because of its grave effect on the water cycle. Whereas trees, even unnatural ones, return most of the water that they use back into the environment via transpiration, fruit and vegetables, composed as they are of mostly water, suck it all up and are then picked and pack and shipped off to (almost exclusively foreign) supermarkets. This deprivation of water from the environment is progressively drying out the country. Chile’s climate ranges from extreme dryness in the desiccate Atacama Desert in the north of the country, to the rain-soaked temperate rainforests of its southern reaches. Elias explained to me that each region was becoming progressively more similar to the hotter, dryer region to its north. “Chile is a productive country…we are literally exporting water.” What he said stuck with me because I think it is revelatory of the country’s economic organization, particularly its relationship with more economically developed countries. Chile produces and exports abroad, and that is the foundation of its economy.

This relationship has remained fundamentally unchanged since the colonial era. Chile declared independence in 1818 and the revolutionary army led by the country’s Founding Father, Bernardo O’Higgins, defeated the Spanish troops a few years later. What is often misunderstood about this war, however, is that it was not fuelled by the common people’s desire to throw off the yoke of their colonial oppressors. This was a war which was initiated, enacted and funded by Chile’s powerful criollo (naturalized South American descendants of settlers) landowners, who resented the interference of the Spanish authorities. Certainly, they felt themselves separate from the metropole and were inspired by revolutionary ideas, and in this sense Chile’s foundation was based, in part, on authentic national sentiment. However, it was catalysed by a series of tax reforms imposed by the Spanish Crown, who were seeking to assert their dominance over the colonies. After the war was won, a campaign of nation-building began on the part of the victors; this was partially an attempt to foster a sense of unity in the nascent nation, but its secondary intention was to obscure the fact that, despite all the high talk of republicanism and revolution, the economic and political foundations of the country remained virtually intact. In fact, the lives of average Chileans were to considerably worsen in the 100 years following independence.

There is a phenomenon in South America known as latifundismo: large estates owned by a latifundista, whose workforce consists of peasants who live on his land and are dependent on him for housing, food, healthcare…essentially all aspects of his life. In a word, feudalism. The post-independence period witnessed a grand expansion of the latifundio at the expense of small producers, who were absorbed in its tyrannical, hierarchical structure. This was largely due to the involvement of Europe – above all, Britain. British merchants enacted a two-pronged attack on Chile’s developing economy: the incorporation of its productive power into the global economy, and the suppression of its internal markets. They flooded the country with cheaply-manufactured British goods, destroying the livelihoods of small-scale artisans and craftsmen. At the same time, they built railways to move products from the agricultural heartlands to the coastal ports, as well as setting up banks and mutual funds to support the latifundistas. With the access to the global markets that the merchants provided, the political and economic power of the latifundistas increased exponentially. This came at the direct cost of small producers, who were unable to compete with their economic might. If this sounds eerily similar to Maule’s pine and eucalyptus plantations, it’s because it is. To bring things back to the present, all the pine and eucalyptus trees which I cycled past in Maule are owned by Celulosa Arauco, a paper and pulp company founded by the deceased Italian-Chilean billionaire Anacleto Angelini, and now controlled by his estate. Though Angelini’s descendants do not live on a latifundio, and their workforce are not dependent on them for their basic necessities, the economic organization which Celulosa Arauco embodies is merely latifundismo in a modern-day cloak. Their political and economic power is enormous. The company contributes significant annual sums to Maule’s regional government to fund economic regeneration, but critics argue that this is largely motivated by a desire to avoid regulation. This argument holds some merit: Celulosa Arauco has been mired with claims of environmental destruction for decades, but has been subject to little governmental control. In 2006, for example, Angelini was given permission to discharge pollutants from his timber mill into the sea near the city of Constitución, Maule’s fourth largest city.

Initially I had intended for the focus of this article to be Chile’s economic organization, with its environmental impacts acting as a segue into more profound structural ideas. However, recent events have incentivised me to give environmental concerns a more thorough exploration. The nexus between economic domination and environmental exploitation took a deadly turn during the recent forest fires which devastated the region around Viña del Mar, a coastal city to the north of Maule. The fires caused the death of more than 120 people and left 15000 without homes. Pine and eucalyptus forests surround Viña del Mar, and these trees are incredibly vulnerable to forest fires. Aníbal Pauchard, director of the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity at the University of Concepción, explained to the BBC that “Pine ignites, and eucalyptus burns, relatively rapidly,” in contrast to Chile’s native forests which are far more resilient to fire. Additionally, the article notes that a period of recent drought, “a prolonged deficit of rain,” further increased the plantation's vulnerability to fire. This is partially due to climate change, which has, of course, increased instances of extreme weather globally. However, the interruption to the water cycle caused by monoculture fruit and vegetable farming undoubtedly contributed to the drought, the rains instead lining the stomachs of consumers in the form of fresh berries. I cannot conceive of a better example of the harm caused by environmental exploitation and the economic system which undergirds it.

Thus, there is a clearly perceptible pattern which defines Chilean economic production. Large-scale plantations still dominate, as they have done since the era of the latifundistas and the colonial period before that. The holding companies who own the plantations export their raw goods abroad – China and the US being its two top export destinations – where they are used for manufacturing or consumption, sucking up the profits of Chile’s marvellously rich and bountiful ecosystem. In the process, small producers are swept aside, as are environmental concerns and regulations. Ultimately, this leaves Chile, despite its natural riches, as an inherently dependent country whose growth is still stunted by a system of economic organisation which has evolved from the colonial era only in appearance.