Lessons from Fire: The Displaced Radiata Pine on Mapuche Homelands and the California Roots of Chile’s Climate Crisis

Abstract

Over the past century, vast swathes of Chile’s biologically diverse temperate rainforest have been replaced with radiata pine monoculture as a direct result of exchanges with California that began during the mid-1800s, when Chile experienced a boom in wheat exports to meet the demand of California gold rush populations. Chile’s “green rush” of radiata pine has hastened the displacement of people and plants and has created a flammable landscape that acts synergistically with climate change to create larger wildfires and longer fire seasons. The work presented here is premised on the understanding that land is a living, storied site that reveals lessons for correcting our behavior. I draw on theoretical contributions from Native American and Indigenous studies to understand the lessons from fire and the importance of traditional ecological knowledges from Mapuche and California Native homelands in response to climate change.

在过去一个世纪里, 拥有丰富生物多样性的大片智利温带雨林, 被单一的新西兰松所取代。这是自19世纪中期起与美国加利福尼亚州进行交换的直接后果–为了满足加利福尼亚淘金潮的需求, 当时的智利出现了繁荣的小麦出口。智利的新西兰松“绿潮”, 加速了人和植物的迁移, 创造了易燃的自然景观。这种景观与气候变化一起, 导致了更大的野火和更长的火灾季节。本研究基于这样一个理解：土地是有生命、有故事的, 它展示了能纠正人类行为的经验教训。基于美洲原住民和土著的理论研究, 本文理解了火灾的教训, 了解到马普切人（Mapuche）和加利福尼亚原住民的传统家园生态知识在应对气候变化上的重要性。

Durante el último siglo, extensas franjas del bosque templado lluvioso de Chile, de alta diversidad biológica, han sido remplazadas con monocultivos de pino radiata, como resultado directo de los intercambios con California, que comenzaron desde mediados de los años 1800, cuando las exportaciones chilenas de trigo se dispararon para atender la demanda de las poblaciones de la fiebre del oro de California. La “fiebre verde” del pino radiata de Chile ha acelerado el desplazamiento de pueblos y plantas nativas, y ha generado paisajes desolados de quemas que actúan en sinergia con el cambio climático para inducir incendios forestales más grandes y temporadas de incendios de mayor duración. El trabajo que aquí se presenta parte de la premisa de que la tierra es un lugar vivo y con su propio historial que revela lecciones con las cuales corregir nuestro comportamiento. Me baso en las contribuciones teóricas de los estudios indígenas y de los propios nativos americanos par a comprender las lecciones del fuego y la importancia de los conocimientos ecológicos tradicionales de los terruños natales de los mapuches y de los nativos de California, en respuesta al cambio climático.

Key Words:

• California
• Chile
• Mapuche
• radiata pine
• wildfires

关键词:

• 加利福尼亚
• 智利
• 马普切人
• 新西兰松
• 野火。

Palabras clave:

• California
• Chile
• incendios forestales
• mapuches
• pino radiata

Notes

1 The Chilean regions of Bío Bío, La Araucanía, Los Ríos, and Los Lagos are part of ancestral Mapuche homelands (Gulumapu in Mapudungun) and comprise significant areas of biodiversity. These regions also have the greatest concentration of exotic tree plantations, with a total of 1,559,185 ha. Bío Bío has 878,970 ha of plantations, and La Araucanía has the second highest coverage, with 589,000 ha (Millaman et al. 2016).

2 Mapuche (“people of this land” or “people of this place” is an umbrella term for various territorial identities such as pikumche (people of the north), lafkenche (people of the ocean), pewenche (people of the pehuen tree), and williche (people of the south). For background on the use of the term Mapuche, see Bengoa (2003) and Paillal (2006).

3 A study of plant content inside the adobe bricks of California mission buildings revealed that the Chilean club wheat was likely introduced by Franciscan missionaries in the 1700s (Hendry and Kelly 1925).

4 In his travel journal, he proclaimed, “To Sutter, then, belongs the glory of having established the first model colony to flourish in the western part of the American continent” (Pérez Rosales 2003).

5 In 1998, Law 19,561 modified DL 701 to include subsidies for owners of small to midsize plantations.

6 Accessed on 13 January 2014 from http://www.ohchr.org.

7 See https://www.eldinamo.cl/nacional/2017/04/28/kast-revive-teoria-de-la-tormenta-de-fuego-y-culpa-a-terroristas-de-incendios-forestales/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cinthya Ammerman

CINTHYA AMMERMAN received her PhD from the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include Indigenous land and water defense movements across the Americas.