The infrastructure of fire

by Mário Gomes

Wild volcanic landscapes, deep blue lakes, millennia-old araucaria forests, vast unspoilt wilderness—Chile is considered by many to be a natural paradise. However, regions once rich in flora and fauna now resemble a "green desert": pine and eucalyptus monocultures as far as the eye can see. The state policy that favours these monocultures goes back to Decree 701 from the Pinochet era, which promoted the commercialisation of nature. This has not only led to ecological degradation and increased forest fires, but also to social impacts such as the intensification of conflicts with the indigenous Mapuche people.

Figures like these are evidently too abstract to quantify anything, especially when it comes to blurry concepts such as social costs, i. e. the costs of the "loss of human lives and serious injuries, forced displacement,
environmental contamination, impact on mental health, and loss of natural capital", as a report from the Ministry of finance tries to analyse. It turns out to be surprisingly simple though to calculate these costs, at least in the report of the Chilean Ministry of Economy. Here, this calculation is done by assigning a value of 32.5 USD per ton of CO2 emitted by the fires. A carbon-based logic in a carbon-based economy. What matters is to find a countervalue that can then be converted into any currency, in this case it is CO2 that is converted into US dollars. Evidently, whoever wrote this report and whoever came up with this formula are aware of the fact that certain damages, such as the impact on mental health, cannot be represented by these figures. Again, the solution is simple: They are left out of the equation.

This line of reasoning is not problematic, because it is arbitrary; it is problematic above all because it reduces the range of socio-ecological issues to economy. Nature, at any rate, is not even regarded as nature, but commodified and labeled as natural capital. It gains relevance only once it can be converted into figures. This way of reasoning reflects deeply rooted economical beliefs, according to which the benefits of so-called natural services are only taken into consideration once they outweigh the profits of exploiting natural resources.

Despite the magnitude of fire catastrophes in recent years in Chile, the advantages of a working forestal ecosystem when compared to the risks of monocultures remain too abstract. The revenue of planting fast growing trees is much more palpable. It happens, however, that the trees that grow fast and sell are also the ones that burn best. Eucalyptus trees in particular are known to contribute to the intensity and spread of wildfires, as they not only contain highly combustible oils, but also shed bark and leaves regularly, creating a build-up of easily ignitable fuel on the ground. After a fire, eucalyptus trees, with their fire-adaptive traits, are the first ones to recover. They live in symbiosis with fire. The green tufts that can be seen here and there in the brown landscapes along the Ruta de la Madera are eucalyptus.

The proliferation of tree monocultures in Chile has not merely economical reasons. It is the consequence of state policies, in particular of the famous decree law 701, one of the longest-running afforestation subsidies in the world and a legacy of the Pinochet regime. This decree from 1974 entailed substantial subsidies, covering up to 75% to 90% of plantation expenses, coupled with tax exemptions for plantation activities. These favorable conditions facilitated the rapid expansion of companies like Arauco and CMPC and transformed vast stretches of land, especially in the regions of Biobío and Araucanía, into areas of monocultures. Although decree law 701 was conceived to incentivize afforestation on lands that either lacked tree cover or were heavily eroded, it quickly lead to the deforestation of native forests and their replacement by tree monocultures. This was seen – and is still widely seen – as a contribution to ecology, and it is often argued that monocultures, in particular pine trees, perform better in carbon storage than native forests. This is at least questionable, as additional storage from subsidy driven plantation expansion is "outweighed by losses in storage in native forests and shrublands", according to Robert Heilmayr, professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California. But even if this were not so: That man-made nature, apart from being an oxymoron, should be able to enhance natural services at such a large scale is at best wishful thinking. The advantages of monocultures in any case are not on the side of ecology. On the contrary, what is lost by the massive plantations, i. e. the loss of biodiversity, is something that can be seen with the naked eye.

What cannot be seen, at least not at first glance, are the social consequences that law decree 701 has certainly not contributed to resolve, especially conflicts around the ownership of land, a historical problem in the regions of Biobío and Araucanía, a territory historically populated by the Mapuche who, as is known, lead quite a different relationship towards nature and towards the woods in particular. During the military incursions of the Spanish in Southern Chile, the forests generally served as a retreat area for the Mapuche, posing a complex strategic problem and nurturing what Rafael Elizalde Mac-Clure, an environmental activist, has called the silvophobia of the Spaniards, i. e. their fear of forests in his visionary essay La sobrevivencia de Chile from 1958. The best they could come up with in order to cope with this fear was cutting down – or yet easier: burning down – the retreat of the enemy, a century-old strategy that had already led to the deforestation of vast parts of the Iberian Peninsula. Along historical sources from the sixteenth century onwards, Mac-Clure traces the history of Chile as a history of deforestation. It becomes clear that the Spanish settlement and later the implementation of a Chilean national state went hand in hand with the devastation of native flora. Whatever incentives could be found to replace forests by monocultures did not only assure economical profit on the short run; it was also a nation building strategy that devastated not only an ecosystem in which the natives were at home, but also disrupted a whole world of signifying practices. What may be valid for humans in general, is certainly valid for the Mapuche communities, whose territory is not just equivalent to physical land, but to a set of signifying practices, encompassing a broader concept of the cosmos, in which humans are integrated in an environment in which land, water, forests, riverbanks, natural resources or sacred sites are regarded as intertwined elements at the same level.

The so-called Mapuche conflict, that apart from the Araucanía region affects parts of the Biobío, is also a conflict of territorial resignification. As in any conflict, there is a symbolic dimension, in which a tree, more than just being a plant, entails symbolic value. In a very semiotic way then, the nationalist and economical plan that has shaped the landscape of Center and Southern Chile is readable. It is a landscape crossed by arteries that, rather than serving the purpose of transporting people, were built to accelerate the extractivist practice of monocultures. One of these arteries is the Ruta de la Madera. Not only its name carries meaning; the road itself states its purpose: It was built for the transportation not of humans, but of timber. It is an infrastructure for the circulation of goods, and an accelerator for the devastation of the landscape.