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)

Valdivia and the Cruces Nature Sanctuary

I finally made it to the real "field" - out of Santiago, down south, to Valdivia. Many people who live in Santiago are from the South, and they return for holidays to their family village in the South. Whereas in Spain anyone will tell you that they come from the village of Villanueva del Sarampión, between the river Chascón and the town of Macondo, and expect you to know where that is and remember it, in Santiago its only the South. An expanse of 2000 km down the Carretera Austral (highway), about 200 km wide, with forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, fjords, glaciers, rain, rain, rain and colder and colder and darker and darker. This generic South reflects decades of prejuidice against the huaso (cowboy) from the country, badly received in the city. The South also has a history of rebellion. The Mapuches are the only native people to not have capitulated to the Spanish, and these lands were not part of Spain or Chile until the 1890s. The encomiendas (hacienda) system here was weaker than in most other corners of the Spanish empire, so the social system was less rigidly stratified than in Central Chile. Chile's first federal constitution was born in Valdivia (later killed by the Santiago elites). By the 1570s the Spanish had a steady presence here (extremely early for Chile, which was a faraway and marginal colony), with a fort. Valdivia was a military enclave in Indian country, the first Pacific port after the Magellan Straights. The Spanish lost Valdivia several times, the Dutch reclaimed it, the Spanish returned, and much later it became Chile. The city has also been detroyed by 4 massive earthquakes, roughly 100 years apart, and a fire (the city was practically all made of wood). The 1960 earthquake is the strongest on record in the world (9.5 richter scale); it destroyed the city, flooded it in the following tsunami, and radically changed the surrounding countryside.

Valdivia is located at the confluence of two rivers, Cruces and Valdivia (also called Calle Calle), about 20 kilometers inland from the ocean. An island is created where these two rivers meet, and Valdivia straddles the island and land in front of it. North of this island is a wetland area formed by three big and three small rivers, plus a series of canals that connect them. The wetland is an estuary, where ocean tides control the height of the water in the system, the rate of outflow of water from the land into the ocean, and vice versa. Salt and sweet water mix, hot and cold water. The 1960 earthquake created the wetland proper because large expanses of land surrounding the rivers collapsed and became inundated. From neat winding rivers, a mass of shallow water, with small islands, and somewhat delimited rivers came to exist; the tops of the old fences of the inundated farms are still visible. The area was inundated by new flora and bird species, the most emblematic the black neck swan. This is the largest aquatic bird in Chile, and an average of 5,000 swans lived in the wetland and had it as their main nesting site. The site became a protected Ramsar Wetland Sanctuary in 1981, one of Chile's first international environmental obligations.

In 1995 the company Celulosa Arauco y Constitución (Celco), owned by one of Chile's richest families, the Angelini group, started publicly prospecting a site north of Valdivia on the Cruces river to locate its third celulose plant, approximately 25 km up-river from the wetland Sanctuary. Where and how to dispose of the toxic liquid efluents was a problem from the start. One alternative was to build a 40 km tube to dispose of them at sea, at the bay of Mehuín. Another (more expensive) option was to build a tertiary treatment plant and dispose of them into the river Cruces. The community of Mehuín opposed their plans and blocked - with some violence - the efforts of Celco and their scientists to take samples for the environmental impact assessment (EIA). They accused University Austral - a major icon of Valdivia and actor in the city's identity and affairs - of collaborating with Celco through the EIA process and evicted them from Mehuín, forcing them to abandon their ocean research station. They identified the EIA as the weakest part of the process of approving projects; while the process professes to be technical in the end the technical voice is reduced to just one vote of many. They lost all trust in the University when it announced that though it was a member of the community of Mehuín, as a scientific institution it could not refuse to collaborate with others and would be happy to contribute by monitoring the effluent and its impact on the bay.

In 1998 Celco got approval for its EIA and began construction of the celulose plant. President Frei attended the inauguration where the first stone was laid; significantly, this happened before the EIA had been approved, underscoring the degree of political support for the project. The plant began operating in February 2004, after several irregularities and two weeks before it was authorized to do so. By October 2004, the main aquatic plant of the wetland - luchecillo or egeria densa - had disappeared and with it the black neck swan. The next year saw Chile's largest social movement and first environmental disaster; the city of Valdivia went into rage at the destruction of the wetland. From a monthly average of 5,000 swans in the sanctuary, there were less than 300 by February 2005, and the stench from the plant filled the air of the whole area, making children sick. The only thing to have changed in 2004 was the coming into operation of the plant. For Valdivians it is "common sense" that the plant caused the damage. For Celco, solid proof that they are solely responsible is required. Scientists were called on by the government and Celco to find the necessary proof.

Government authorities hired U. Austral scientists, private consultants and later University of Chile scientists to study the issue. Celco hired scientists from the Catholic University, EULA center at the University of Concepción, and private consultants from abroad, to produce a counter-narrative. Austral scientists produced a report blaming Celco; pollutants from the plant caused heavy metals in the water to coagulate and deposit themselves on the luchecillo plant, hindering its capacity to photosynthesize. As the luchecillo died, iron was released from the sediments in the river, further killing the luchecillo and making the water brown and turpid. All the other scientific groups to study the issue did not find Celco to be responsible. The Catholic U. didn't propose any alternative hypothesis but conducted experiments in which they conclude the luchecillo actually grows better in polluted water. EULA and the consultants produced reports saying that although Celco had polluted the water, and on occassion violated the norms that applied to it, the quantities were not enough to have an effect on local life. The U. of Chile hypothesized that the level of the river had been particularly low in 2004 due to a unique combination of cold temperatures, little rainfall and increased erosion from large scale forestry (also the responsibility of Celco), that increased sediments and reduced water. The luchecillo, exposed out of the water, froze. Another scientist - from the original Austral group - argued that increased UV radiation killed the luchecillo in the sanctuary and in other lakes in the region. Austral argued no; there is plenty of luchecillo in areas of the sanctuary out of the reach of Celco's pollution; UV radiation would affect everything not just luchecillo; and there were no exceptional weather patterns in 2004. Only their hypothesis explains 'everything': the disappearance of luchecillo, the changed chemical composition of the water, the changed color, the disappeared swans and other birds.

I have spent the last two weeks interviewing some of the scientists involved in the case, some of the citizens who continue to fight against Celco and reading the 5,000 page transcript of the civil suit against Celco, led by the State, for reparations for environmental damage. I obviously don't know what happened and am in no position to judge. I'm struggling to summarize what happened in a way that is faithful to the scale and acrimony of the conflict and it not stuck on the technical details that have overwhelmed the larger picture. Celco pursued a strategy of "confuse and conquer" supported by the traditions of Chilean science and environmental laws. It is easy to confuse and conquer when laws are arbitrarily expressed in different units of measurement (miligrams per liter, tons per day); when scienitsts can't agree if they are talking about a river, a wetland or an estuary, each with very different implications for how sediments settle, how much water there is a in a river and how it flows (or doesn't) out to sea; when environmental values are weak and tolerate discussions about the ecological value of a non-native, invasive, plague plant like the luchecillo, that supported an amazing population of birds; when there are no agreed-upon experts and the adequate role of science has to be constantly reaffirmed. No one I have asked can name to me the national experts on wetlands, estuaries or pollution; they do agree that experts need to have relevant experience. Experience that seems hard to get in Chile, where so little science has been done for so long, evidenced by the constant lack of data on evolutions and trends. So Celco called as witnesses a huge array of different "experts" and this can not be contested; so they proceed to question experts on topics outside their area of expertise and expose them as "not knowing". So the scientist-witnesses constantly defend the "scientific method" but have no arguments against Celco's arguments that science can not prove anything, it can merely provide approximations until further information is available. Some scientists argue no objectivity is possible (a view echoed by some government agencies), and fall into a trap where they "know" something to have happened out of common sense - Celco polluted - and propose a "scientific mechanism" to show causality - the pollution changed water quality and luchecillo's capacity to photosynthesize -  but also argue they can never prove this because science is always correcting itself. Nevertheless, they claim, the scientific method can help you understand "anything, even if you are not an expert".

The final intervening variable is the money. Financing gives and takes away prestige and legitimacy. In Mehuín, the Austral U. was Goliath, a local actor that seemed capable of helping the town defend itself from the effluent tube but decided not to because it was in their self-interest to have long-term contracts with Celco for monitoring. Nationally, the Austral U. was David, a local actor defending its wetland from Celco's greed and power to buy Santiago-based universities and scientists, heroically resisting Celco's money against the current set by all the other universities. In court they said: if you want to know what happened, we have to look at the sediment records, and for that we need another US$250,000. Science won't tell us what happened, money will. Finally in 2011, the day I arrived in Valdivia, Austral U. joined the current and signed a collaboration agreement with Celco. Scientists are not sanguine on the issue; they have to participate to not become marginal outsiders, but know their credibility will suffer. One scientist who has been monitoring the luchecillo plant over the past few years was preparing to publish a report about it in March; the plant seems to be recovering and swans are returning. But now that Celco pays the university, who will believe him?

Finally, the conflict continues. A few months ago the environmental authorities approved Celco's EIA to build the effluent tube to Mehuín. The community again opposed the scientific measurements but was destroyed by Celco who bought out families and different unions (large one time payments plus 10 year salaries at the minimum wage level), and took measurements by stealth (at night, during the national holiday). But the terms of approval make the tube uneconomical and Celco still doesn't have all the necessary permits and seems unlikely to get them for some time. They need the tube to increase their production. Now, effluent undergoes tertiary treatment and is dumped into the river. The civil case continues in court. My birthday present this year is the final "expert report" requested by the Civil Court of Valdivia to make a final decision on whether Celco is guilty and must pay the government reparations for the damage to the wetland (Jan. 27th). So I have two more weeks in Valdivia and plenty of reading and digesting to do...

Valdivia's fish market. Fishing and shellfish collection are the main economic activity for the local population. But they are not the main economic activity: that is forestry, controlled by Celco.

The city of Valdivia by the river Calle Calle

Graffiti about the death of the black neck swans. Emaciated swans fell from the sky into people's backyards  and on highways, trying to escape the wetland where no more food was available. They couldn't fly or hold their heads out of the water they were so weak (and had iron poisoning).

Children became major actors in the movement to protect the swans and the wetland from Celco's pollution.

The bay of Mehuín. This small fishing and shellfish collecing village lives off the sea; only the ocean gives life and value to the area. It is everything they see and all economic an social life revolves around the bay and the ocean. The effluent tube would come out straight through the middle of the beach.

The Mehuín radicals that opposed the EIA tests. Ines' family moved to the top of the hill (only accessible on foot) after the 1960 earthquake and tsunami destroyed their house and carried away 8 relatives. She still is terrified of the sea but has worked hard to defend it from pollution for the past 14 years.

Exploring the sanctuary on kayak. This small tour agency was taking off when the disaster struck. They had to find new routes and reinvent themselves. They visit the sanctualy only when German and American tourists show up wanting to visit the sanctuary to see the destruction.

Entering the Cruces River Wetland Sanctuary. Before the crisis, in addition to these junco reeds, there was tons of luchecillo, an aquatic plant that looks like an algae.

The wetland with some swans. They are returning. In our three hour trip we saw several mothers with baby swans. They climb on top of their mothers and the whole family swims along (swans are monogamous partners for life, hence human's fascination with them??- that's another dissertation)

The wetland sanctuary. Before the earthquake only the water area at the back of the photo was river. 

It rains ALL the time, so the flowers are really beautiful, especially the hydrangeas. Remember, its summer here. This is their summer! rainy and cloudy and pretty cold.

If you have read all this and have comments please tell me- is it interesting, boring, duh so what, confusing? gracias amigos!