Some of these things are so cool I thought I would share this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63lgyeJnRJI

Stray dogs are depressing

A friend I used to have once said that he couldnt believe this smart American girl had gone to La Paz to work with stray dogs. She was designing a system to try to get them off the streets. In the middle of the all the poverty, he thought this was a waste of a wonderful mind.  I have mixed feelings about this; I dont really have an argument as to why work with street dogs rather than street kids except that that would be true of everything we do. Its evidence of our deep routed developmental mind set that you have to work on things that are clearly related to poverty and development. One thing I now have my mind set on is that stray dogs are really depressing. Its terrible to see all these dogs, so faithful, so still looking for an owner, living on the streets abandonned for doing nothing. Its so mean! (I sound like my niece)

Seeing like state of confusion

Really, why would you do this to people? Santiago has always rebelled against my excellent sense of direction (Im not kidding about my sense of direction). I finally realized why. It has nothing to do with some unconscious rebellion on my part, a deep and invisible rejection of the city. That may still be true but disorientation seems to be active state policy. The title of this blog entry, in reference to James Scott's book, is exactly what I'm driving at in my thesis. Take this as a visual summary! (hint: look at the cardinal points on each subway map). If you've seen this in other places please let me know!

One month

Little more than one month left away from San Francisco. My niece Sofia is here and Im playing mom, taking her to school early each day. Its very nice because she is amazing. Next week we are going together to Buenos Aires, wish us luck, the last visit with my mom was difficult.

Work is going great. My last case, Pascua Lama, is super interesting. This week Ive visited four different cities collecting information from a nice range of fanatics- a nun, an environmental activist, a german biologist, a stubborn environmental scientist, a 28 year-old who authored the most well put together book on glaciers in Chile so far. 

See most of you soon, here are some pictures from life here and some little insights I've reached.

Making ravioli at my cousin's house!

Last picture I took before my camera died. You can see the sand grains. Luckily its been fixed!!

This is a real statue, in a real boardwalk, in a real city, in Chile. Have you seen anything more ugly and in bad taste ever in your life?

In fact it is sooo bad taste the guy even sitting properly. He has one leg up behind the woman.  You get a sense here of the local flair for subtlety.

Full circle for now

I am back in Santiago, back to the future. The Chilean Patagonia is really beautiful- there are many different ecosystems all close together (cold rainforests, dry steppes, archipelagos, the Andes, glaciers, snow) all set among these steep mountains and flat valleys, lots of rainbows and waterfalls. All the presents I brought home are a little pile of sticks, stones and leaves, to try to convey to my family here what its like. Silly me forgot the water bottles I was going to bring to them, filled in waterfalls and rivers along our walks. In the Patagonia there are few banks, few television sets, internet is extremely slow and you live peacefully far away from the miseries of the market economy. But its changing, and its hard to position yourself between the romantic "all time past was better" discourses and the naive at best "development is inevitable and the best" discourse.
Anyway, some fotos. Im back in Santiago. Who knows what I'll do to entertain myself here. First off, it would be nice to hear from my friends?? and get back in touch after what for me was the summer! (now- Im off to my little niece's first birthday!!)

With my friend Rodrigo in a Lenga forest, in a truck owned by millionaire and deep-ecology radical Doug Thompkins, who is fighting the best of the Chilean elite with more elitism.

The Church at Amangual village, built in wood in Chilote style. Many of the "silent" colonizers of this region were forced labor from the large island of Chiloe, a little further north.

Tepa leaves. I am addicted to the smell of these!!!

Lenga forest. A large part of Chile's flora and fauna is only found here because Chile is a biogeographical island (ie., for biological purposes, an island between high mountains and a large ocean)

At the hanging glacier in national park Quelat

Large nalca leaves, used to cook underground, like the Hawaiians do

Details of the cold rainforest

Puerto Cisnes and fishing boats

Fishing the Chilean way with Nacho and his family. Nacho is from Spain and went to highschool with my ex-boyfriend! We met randomly in Coyhaique and they took me to visit Quelat my last weekend in Patagonia.

Another view of la "carretera" austral. Es muy fuerte!!

With Sandra and Barbara after walking through the enchanted forest to this glacial lake and its glacier.

La Patagonia chilena

I feel like I'm getting back in touch with everyone after travelling back in time. Three weeks ago I arrived here and have travelled around several different towns and places that would be affected by two of the five large dams the government and Spanish-Italian company Endesa want to build here. The chilean Patagonia has little internet or phone access, few television sets, and is connected by a single unpaved road, euphemistically called a "highway" (carretera). For hundreds of kilometers around there are no banks or electronic payment systems. There are few shops or markets. The majority of the population is second-generation colonizers ("colonos"), their parents having arrived here brought by the Chilean government, eager to re-affirm its territorial claims against Argentina.  In the decades before and just after 1950 millions of acres of forest were burnt to the ground to clear space for ranching, another million was given away to a few large companies and land owners, a few ports were built (which the ranchers were obliged to use, as opposed to shipping their goods through Argentina, much cheaper). Only in the 1970-80s, by Pinochet, was the road created, and only in 2000 was a section of it paved. It seems the Chilean government never realized that roads precede people and development, not the other way around. A pioneer, self-sufficient, hard working tradition is combined with strong dependence on the state. It is a society of 105,000 people with no experience with transnational corporations and with relations that are only weakly commodified (less than one person per square kilometer lives here). The dams, for the first time, bring large capital, foreign business interests that can overpower the state, technology and thousands of new people, to this section of the Chilean Patagonia (this is the region of Aysén, the heart of the Chilean Patagonia, which stretches a bit more north and south).
I spent the last two weeks in Cochrane and Tortel and moving up and down the Baker River. This river is social and economic column of the region; most people live all along it, it creates (relatively) fertile and flat valley for ranching, and provides amazing scenery and excellent rapids for rafting. Sailing along it is possible and is used by many to transport goods and people (there are 3 government-subsidized boats along the river). Endesa and the government want to build two large dams on the Baker, flooding the valley and the rapids, and making large stretches of the river unsailable (or raftable). The Baker is a short river - about 100 km - with a lot of water. The people I've met the last two weeks have been amazing, it was really sad to leave yesterday. With you all I can be honest: the people I have met have rallied me to their cause (anti-dams) because they spell the end of this society as it is and will destroy what is most beautiful here. At the same time, from a global or national point of view, it is far from clear these dams are that bad. The place is ideal for them and the dams are far better than nuclear power and carbon-powered thermoelectric plants (the Chilean government's other bright idea). I could summarize like this: under the current social, economic and infrastructure conditions of Aysén, the dams are terrible. Its the most retrograde thing imaginable; the most perfect repetition of all the past mistakes of development. But to understand this requires some pre- and post-modern sensibilities; a certain immuneness to quick, cash-fed development; things lacking in mainstream society.

I am here for just two more weeks. Time is flying by. Then back to Santiago, my least favorite place by far. Its taken me 3 hours to upload these fotos, I had several more I wanted to upload, but it will all have to wait until I return to Santiago. My patience has limits! I hope you are all well and that you email me!!

At Estancia Chacabuco, former ranch bought by US millionaire Thompkins for conservation

Shop window in Cochrane

La "carretera" austral

Event for the international day of free rivers (March 13th), at the proposed site of the one of the dams. It was an amazing collection of people: from young rappers to young folksingers, from neo-yuppy ecologists to hippies to gauchos.

From the bottom of the projected lake: the ranch of Lily and her family would be inundated by one of the projected dams.

Chaihuín

I spent three days with a few friends at Chaihuín, a protected area of coastal Valdivian rainforest (http://www.reservacosteravaldiviana.cl/). Somewhat less than 500 families live in this area, just 50 km south of the city of Valdivia. It's an amazingly beautiful place, with all sorts of ecosystems built in. The most spectacular are the "twin lagoons" - two long lagoons separated from each other by a hill (covered in temperate rainforest) and again separated from the beach by a hill covered in temperate rainforest. In an incredibly short space you have ocean and sweet water systems, sand and lush rainforest, and you get to watch as the dunes advance into the forest, killing it. We also visited a 3000 year old Alerce tree; the Alerces are the equivalent of California's redwoods. They grow incredibly slowly, have excellent wood, and grow to enormous proportions. In colonial Chiloé (an island close by) Alerce shingles were used as currency because the wood is water-proof, so they were vital for roofing in this extremely rainy region. It is also the largest tree species in South America, found only in southern Chile and Argentina. In Chile the Alerce was heavily logged in the 19th and 20th Centurty and only two major groves are left. Conservation efforts in Chile began in the 1990s, compared to 1890s in California; tally the number of sequoias and redwoods (huge) and the number of alerces (minimal) and you can come to a quick conclusion about the importance of conservation and its compatibility with economic exploitation. 

Traditionally Chaihuín families lived off small-scale ranching, fishing and diving (for seafood). In 1974 a law was approved that created incentives for substituting native forest with plantations of eucalyptus and pine trees, to produce pulp, chips and wood for export. One guy we met, Iván (photo on the look out point), told us he was about 10 when, while he was diving for mussels with his father, three pick-up trucks pulled up and the "forestales" showed up. Before they knew what was happening, the forest was being cut down, burnt and re-planted with monoculture eucaplyptus. The company however went bankrupt and The Nature Conservancy - a very well connected NGO - offered to pay the bank the debt in exchange for the property. Several years of conflict followed as TNC tried to impose a very preservationist management practice, until it finally was persuaded by WWF and other groups to embrace sustainable management (ie., ecotourism, sustainable use of native forest products). Now, most people in Chaihuín in addition to their traditional livelyhood make additional cash by working in tourism. They have organized into cooperatives to sell forest products, to make arts and crafts, and to apply to state funds for micro and small businesses. There is still a strong tension between the economic gains to be made with eucalyptus monoculture versus the seasonality of tourism. And cooperatives are difficult animals to set up and make work. But they are trying and the place is just amazing.

The dunes eating the forest...

With the boys at the lagoon, the beach is like 30 steps away, the water was unbelievable, never swam in such fresh and crystaline water.

With Jaime who makes bonsai trees from native Chilean trees. Its amazing work and he has a fantastic farm with three greenhouses and lots of produce.

At the oldest Alerce, 3000 years old. It was raining a lot, but thats why its a rainforest...

A Loberia, or place where lots of sea lions go. Its full of them and they are mean little things. Its a good thing they sleep so much because otherwise they would kill each other completely!

Chaihuíners, Pepe and Javier. Pepe works for TNC administrating and promoting the protected area. Javier is a local fisherman. In 10 minutes he caught 6 fish.

Ranching on the beach. As everywhere the cows destroy everything they step on.

Approaching the lagoons from the beach

Iván at the back. Hanging out on a look out point over the lagoons and sniffing Meli tree leaves which are so sweet and delicious we were intoxicated.

The trip was amazing, for days after we continued to be in a cloud of happiness from our days in Chaihuín. We hung out, ate lots of mussels, walked, swam in the ocean and the lagoon, learnt and lived the forest. The only bad news: I dropped my camera in the sand and until further notice it is broken (and I want to cry every time I remember). My blogs will end if I cant fix the camera because they will be super boring otherwise.

I return to Santiago on Wednesday after one month in Valdivia. Its been amazing to be here, I met fantastic people and had so much fun. Next week we are on family holiday!! And the week after, the 24th of Feb., I fly to Coyhaique, where I'll stay until March 28th. Next blog (camera permitting) from Coyhaique. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coihaique)